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Citation: Chan, Xenia Ling-Yee.” “How Should We Ever Learn to Walk Alone” : 
The Witness of Eliza Suggs.” April 26, 2022, Toronto, Ontario: MPEG-4, 23.31 min.

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Well, good afternoon everyone. It's good to be with you. My name is India, as Doctor Robertson so eloquently introduced me earlier. 
Thank you for that, Jane. I was a bit of a dork and I forgot to acknowledge Shirk, so I'm going to do that now. I'm going to publicly 
acknowledge that this paper is supported in part by funding from the social sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada, and I will 
not repeat that in French. Umm. So today I might here's here's our presentation. How should we ever learn to walk along the witness of a 
life? OK, I'm going to start with a quote and it's going to show up behind me as soon as we get some. And so Eliza Subs writes in her 
book Shadow and Sunshine. The Lord is so good to me, he often comes to my heart. With such refreshing peace he melts my heart so that 
it is easy to pray. I say, oh Lord, just help me to pray and prevail for thee. This world is full of suffering humanity. There are many 
in distress, running after the world seeking peace and finding that the Lord helps me to pray. For such cannot help longing to be in the 
active work of the Lord, helping to rescue 4 Lost Souls and those who are blinded in sin. But perhaps. God can get more glory out of me 
as an invalid than he could if I were well. He can help me pray for those who are strong and able to work in his vineyard. I know that 
there is nothing accomplished for God without earnest prayer, so I'm content to fill my little corner and be what God wants me to be. 
I say from my heart thy will be done in Earth as it is in heaven. Should. OK, so I'm just going to start off by providing a brief 
overview over the black women intellectual traditions and activism that I move into, who Eliza Suggs was and why I think she's a disruptive 
force. And then we'll move into an invitation to collective witness from her work before finally concluding with some learnings from her life. 
So I just want to say that there are very few. Stories of free Methodist African American women. We heard about 1:00 today. I'm a ray and 
Eliza Suggs is the other one. I don't actually know if there are any more. Feel free to correct me if I'm. If I've missed someone, I'd love 
to hear their stories. And I'm going to say that sucks actually stands in the broader tradition of black women intellectual history and 
tradition and black women activism. Her work speaks of as much as speaks to her time. It's an ongoing theological practice and reflection, 
with ideas produced in dialogue with her lived experience and then reflected by social facts of race, class, and gender. So. Black women 
intellectual traditions in North America span almost 4 centuries, having been transmitted orally as well as via text and along with their 
everyday activities. These range from SA political tracts, journals, newspapers and then also intimate settings like impellers and in highly 
public podiums. What's interesting about these traditions is that they really connect. Front to the binaries of understanding that intellectual 
labor is divorced from the everyday setting and the oral expressions of ideas are often mixed with the material demands of their communities. So 
given so I. Get a couple of these women here who stand in the black women intellectual traditions. So we've brought Phillis Wheatley and Maria 
Stewart Sojourner Truth, Ida be wells, and there's just so many more. So given recent scholarships. Explanation of the centrality of black women 
to the construction of freedom, democracy and citizenship through the intersectionality of their activism and thoughts. The ongoing work of 
recovery and recognition remains important, particularly because this tradition has a knack for reviewing. The artificiality of the many analytic 
categories. So they just kind of knock down the binaries and say who are we as embodied people? Their contribution to history, then, is not 
understood as passive observers or mere witnesses to history. Rather, we have to understand them as people who acted with agency, advocating 
for change and reform to great effect and art in their own rights, credible thinkers and producers of ideas. I want to differentiate the Black 
woman's intellectual traditions from the men's. So if you would bear with me. And they there were different not because they weren't both 
challenging racial uplift, but because they were separated or limited by gender private public dichotomy rooted in patriarchal paradigms. Of 
course, like this gender dichotomy often led black women to seek out support from white women LED organizations, but unfortunately female anti 
slavery societies, suffrage organizations, and temperance clubs frequently excluded black members. Um, so. The rights and reforms that white 
feminists thought only Anglo-Saxon women in mind. So going back to the black woman and and black men in terms of how they dealt with rhetoric 
of racial uplift, black men were often grossed in debates over the relative merits of the races of man, full quote and targeted by antebellum 
racial science and accounts of inferiority stemming from a reading of Scripture that condemned African Americans as sons of Ham, as well as 
polygenetic challenges to scripture that questioned whether race descended from Adam. Whereas black women in the antebellum era found themselves 
confronted with the idea of true womanhood that was basically wrapped up in the domesticity. So for a black woman then just step out to public 
while not even fully recognized as human was actually. An experience that was often marred with public disapprobation prospects, they found all 
the more painful because there were men played, was already so contested. Now, women's activities, in contrast to men, also tended to be rooted 
in the church. I think that's true all time, space, maybe from the colonial era. For present, most members of Black American congregations have 
been limited, and so they were primarily responsible for creating new ties and meetings of kinship, and often served as the conduits of knowledge 
and authority from Africa upon landing in the so-called New World. Their spiritual labor rights scholar John Sandbach represented a form of. 
Embodied knowledge that, in its intertwining with political and the prophetic, helped enslaved people convert movement dispossession and lost 
into reimagining of captive spaces as new religious communities. So towards the end of the gilded Ages, Gilded Age sorry, we began speaking out 
against racial prejudice, particularly with a new kind of quotes, racist invective that singled them out as the primary cause of racial inferiority, 
UN quote. This was due in part to the rise of social Darwinism, with black women specifically claimed she feared to black men and that black women 
were actually responsible for corrupting the entire race, while black women have never truly fits into the ideology of this so-called. Your womanhood. 
They increasingly abandoned that cult of Filistin city for in favor of racial self-defense. The other reason for speaking out against racial prejudice? 
Land affect the middle class. Black women increasingly witnessed that a fellow black Americans moved from enslavement to a new former socioeconomic 
and political ******* and formally enslaved people compromised by their struggle to address pressing social, economic and political inequalities. Uh, 
which were derived from proper or popular pro slavery arguments we weaponized for the post Reconstruction Era. These arguments were buffered by the 
appropriation of social Darwinism. And it really did inspire particularly African American men to prove that by by metrics of. Independence and so on 
and so forth. They were more than capable of full citizenship. So, for instance, because we're talking about Eliza Sex today, I'm going to talk a 
little bit about disability. So disability, for instance, was recruited, quote, as a medicalized biopolitical sign, the legal childlike dependence 
status of African Americans, and quote the public figure of sick disabled black Americans. Quote operated simultaneously as material evidence for 
exclusion and a symbol of their place in society. Racist politicians endeavored to prove that disability occurred at a higher rate post emancipation 
than in slavery. This inspired particularly a few black American men to try to prove that they didn't need to fulfill the criteria for citizenship, 
which are self-sufficiency, competence, productivity, rationality, and respectability. So in this way, the myth of the self-made man also made its 
way into rhetoric of racial uplift in the work of figures like Booker T Washington. And which end up tying worth with ability, self-sufficiency, and 
radical individualism. In contrast, black women so argues Hazel Carby in her critique of WEB Dubois. Gendered ideology and the soul of black folk were 
reduced by their male counterparts to silent domestic objects hidden from the public. In some instances, woman's virtues was closely linked to sedimental 
rhetoric of virtue. So while black men quote fashion public narratives that veil disability to some extent women. Even while addressing medical disparities 
in the community, black women were often the primary agents of black public health and network and outreach and, quote, seeing their involvement as an 
extension of their maternal. Responsibilities for the physical and moral health of their families. So in some by the gilded and progressive eras, black 
men and women continue to advocate for racial uplift there despite their discourses and their activism varied. So here we go, our protagonist for today. 
So I'm going to argue that she was this disruptive force in this cultural moment just given. Who she was, as well as her fiery activism, she didn't fit 
all of the mold for self-sufficiency or the supposed domestic virtues of the day, such as only ever at most 33 inches tall. Let's see your photo behind 
me. Because of an extreme case of childhood rickets and she couldn't walk and instead relied on a makeshift baby carriage and eventually a wheelchair 
donated by close family friends. She was often mistaken for her baby. I'm going to leave that quote for you to go search in her book when you go read it. 
Um, but it was very demeaning and diminishing for her. So according to the logic of the cultural miliar, Suggs exemplified inferiority to be discarded 
another but beneath the bluster of public rhetoric, Subs, along with other black women, partly played a vital part in public health work and outreach, 
as evidenced by her involvement in the temperance movement. Such was also an advocate supporter of world missions and was said to have been politically 
on the subject as well as other reform issues. Everyone. And some she demonstrated that she had agency with full participant in her community. I'll show 
you why. It was not merely an object of pity or a recipient of charity. So our book Shadow and sunshine combined the literary forms of biography and 
autobiography, and she was most likely the first African American woman in Nebraska to publish a book. While her work is elements of the traditional 
Wesleyan conversion narrative, it wasn't simply concerned with the individual, but instead of folds. It's sort of a family album, the 1st 2/3 of our work. 
The Council stories of her father and mother slave narratives and then turns to sex on story in context of her family. The book ends with some of the 
sexiest poetry that are fused the scriptural references and are marked by their temperance stories themes as well as anecdotes regarding the cruelty 
and hardships of slavery. These latter stories were told to suggest by her mother and Subs were printed them as a testament to the horrors of slavery 
inflicted, perhaps to remind the reader that such story is not separate from that for those she herself was Born Free. So turning to the book itself. 
The emphasis is really curious here. It's actually on collective identity that's deeply rooted in her life and her family and church, woman's clubs in 
her community. And it's especially striking this emphasis on collective by dandy alongside her refusal to quote play on her audiences, metaphoric linking 
of disability of ******* and quote refuted the narratives of able bodied healthy self-sufficiency and the idea is that the self-made percent. Further, 
this collective emphasis both arose from our faith and motivated her activism, which I'm going to call her witness. So both our parents were born slaves. 
Her father was an ordained minister, among the earliest in the Free Methodist movement. She was credited with founding the Free Methodist Churches, and 
he was credited with founding Methodist churches in Kansas. He often took his family to camp meetings, first in Kansas and then later moved his entire 
family to Nebraska so that his daughters could go to seminary, which I find really encouraging. Her mother separated from her husband when he went off 
to fight for the union and died suffering at the hand of her mistress in the face she gained her conversion moments sustained her. Through the trials. 
So tomorrow you notes that her mother's faith bore witness to Lord to her children. Such book also carries the preparatory testimonials with two pastors 
who attest to the authenticity of retail. Such ministry included secretarial work for missions organizations assisting with the ritualistic work, 
presiding over public meetings and, of course, writing. The book itself is believed to have been sold through church subscription and it wasn't worked, 
really contemplated, done without the empowerment support of our community. Now her activism, I believe, is out of a desire to invite others to a 
wholehearted pursuit of holiness and to God. It out of this desire included a critique of the White Church and apologetic for the Black Church. Her book 
liberally approached you, wasn't Wesley and language of holiness and entire sanctification in order to bring to light the most pressing issues of the 
black community of the day, abolition, temperance, and abject poverty. Using language familiar to the White Church, Suggs calls the church at large to 
pay attention, to attend. To work towards amending for the sufferings of the black community. This is likely because the sexes were the only black 
members of their foundation, it said in a newspaper article that I found her father had enjoyed respect from the white majority in Orleans NE. So in a 
section incidents of slavery Sherman to reader, that those have been enslaved were human beings even before the Emancipation Project Proclamation, 
albeit under ******* and supply all human rights. She does however note Riley at the close of her opening paragraph that at quote one stroke of the 
Emancipation Park Proclamation, these millions of lowly creatures were now human beings of reality as well as name. This paragraph being the opening 
is notable. Such then proceeds through account from other slave stories given to her. Following these accounts is the real depiction of the consequences 
of slavery playing out in the community. Generational trauma as exemplified and alcoholism, broken families and poverty. However, such rights of our people 
and they're suffering that quote many of them were God fearing that took every advantage of every chance they had to meet together to serve the Lord, even 
meeting in secret to worship and proclaim faith and hope for deliverance. This story, though, is juxtaposed by the presentation of white people who did not 
always attend church or ejected slaves from church services. If quote, white people came in sufficient numbers to fill the church by framing her mother's 
stories and reminding her readers of black humanity. The horrors eliminate at worst white atrocity and evil and enslaving their brothers and sisters. And 
that best white apathy to worshipping God. And contrary to our first remarks that the Emancipation Proclamation freedom for. Slavery is privately thought 
arriving and showing his powerful, which allows it quotes desire to give God all the glory. And doing so, such proclaims, the certainty that God has rescued 
his people from slavery will continue to save his people both spiritually and physically, and that her people's identity, salvation and future arises from 
God himself. The way her book is trained also recalls the reader to African American discourse. I'm going to skip this paragraph because I noticed I think 
I'm running out of time. You can ask me about that paragraph later. But what I want to talk about here is that she expands this frame of the African-American 
discourse to include those with disabilities as fundamental to kinfolk and to identity. So in his introduction, the Reverend CM Damon recounts the story of 
such testifying, shouting, and testifying, often serving historically as the way in which black women could express their feelings and pain without within the 
larger patriarchal and white supremacist culture, such testifying is shaped as a collaborative praise song, incorporating both Eliza and her sister Katie's 
advocacy of her so quote. When Eliza, hidden in church behind the seats in front, would testify, she rises with her in arms and she speaks clearly and 
forcibly. Notice the ambiguous she who is speaking Eliza Arkadie. Eliza probably. Well, certainly this scene displays history. Affection were pertinent 
is how substory overcast the web of interdependent relationships and networks as essential to the created and fulfilled individuals. She is who she is 
because of her participation. Community and our communities welcome of her participation. In other words, the worth of an individual lies not in preformed 
traits of ability, independence, or self-sufficiency, but rather as grounded in relationship and interdependence. Further, she insists on the inclusion of 
the disabled and the race. As well as quote the usefulness of those pathologic pathologized bodies to the civic community, and quote sucks insists consistently 
that she is not helpless in her activism or her work in the context within the black woman's discourse of racial uplift. While she does acknowledge that her 
readers may question whether she has a diminished quality of life, sucks rarely mentions any obstacles or inconveniences. Instead, she chooses to give thanks 
to God and to mention what she can do. Work, earn a living doing needlework which supports family or activism, work which provides liberation to others. 
As scholar Stephen Nadler also suggests that this latter work, particularly her missions work, performs a double move quote overturning stereotypes of the 
disabled as two dysfunctional to work and as a sign of racial regression, and 2nd invoking a broader appeal to human rights that reaches beyond the nation 
bound struggle for civil rights. Such an appeal to international human rights of freedom and equality function does familiar parts of an earlier black 
abolitionist discourse, the black woman activist at the end of the century recovered to imagine their duties. Is going to transnational framework. 
Finally, Subs refuses to bend to the African American disability narratives for time like those are circus prodigies, she writes. There have been people 
who said to my mother, why don't you take her to the shower museum? Others would say there's Fortune night girl. But dear reader, God did not create me 
for this purpose. He created me for his glory. And if I could be of help to anyone, and if I can get the glory to his name out of my life, Amen. So 
rather than consenting to being objectified or fetishized, such insists that she is worth in her community and thus renounces this particular type of 
personal agency and its monetary profits. I've seen her mother understands that to consent to such objectification would undermine everything that she 
stood for. Racial uplift, responsibility to her community, compassion for those and beyond American borders, and their own self worth and understanding 
for purposes bestowed by God. Such demonstrates her identity is tied up in her family, church and community as much as they are with her. Ultimately, 
this web of interdependence leads that testimony, the collaborative praise on I just mentioned. But her life we see the work of a family, church, and 
community, and action that actively disentangles from the pervasive norms of the day, that excluded, demeaned, and debased those seen as lesser. Instead, 
they actively embraced the gifts that Suggs had and allowed her to lead them to a greater witness of what God had for the community as a whole, which is a 
gospel of uplift, inclusion, salvation, and liberation. On my my over. You've got about 3 minutes, OK? Conclude with. 2 paragraphs. So both sucks. Work in 
her life redefines what it means to be competent, economically sufficient and mobile. It is pure fantasy. She suggests understand permanent, able buyer 
independence as the criteria for worth, value and personhood. This is most poignantly illustrated at the end of her sketch of her father and her 
limitation of his passing Subs rights. But none knew his worth so well as his own family. He was a strong staff upon which mother and all of us had learned. 
How should we ever learn to walk? Alone, she speaks metaphorically, given that she spends most of her life in a wheelchair. But notice it, this quote isn't 
actually in first person singular, but in first person plural. The Senate the myth of Independence and self-sufficiency sex suggests that no one ever really 
wants alone is only those with disability. It is not only those with disabilities who need others. For all the flourishes embodied by her in her community, 
Mutual Mutual interdependence is essential to the individual and their efficiency, whether they are able bodied. Moreover, it isn't father's facing God that 
continues to sustain her family and her and her and their continued work. So her legacy might very well be that she challenged notions of what it is good 
society entails, what a good church entails. She expanded the witness of the African American discourse and defied the prevailing ideas and worth and 
personhood in the face of violent ideologies, discrimination, inequality, and the spirit of the age. But in so doing, Subs also reminds us that it was 
done together alongside her family, her church, and her community. Taking the already established norms of her community, she expands Kinbote. Those who 
belong to include those excluded on the basis of the ability and challenges what responsibility to our Community looks like. Our life invites us to consider 
the diversity of ways in which everyone contributes to the Community and that each individual's worth is not based in utilitarian value. Finally, should 
prompt us to remember that God is following. God is not accomplished by self-sufficient or independent needs, but a mutual interdependence and obligation 
that recognizes the image of God and one another, which ultimately works all in her words for the glory of God. Thank you, happy to hear.


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