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Patriarch Granville Williams and the Barbados Spiritual Baptists

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Patriarch Granville Williams and the Barbados Spiritual Baptists Book Reviews 251 Ye Shall Dream: Patriarch Granville Williams and the Barbados Spiritual Baptists. Ezra E.H. Griffith. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2010. xiv + 207 pp. (Paper US$ 25.00) The Spiritual Baptist religion, which began to take its current form during the latter part of the nineteenth century in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, later appeared in Trinidad and Tobago sometime during the first decades of the twentieth century. More recently, the religion was brought to Barbados from Trinidad by Granville Williams in 1957, and this is the primary subject of Ye Shall Dream by Ezra E.H. Griffith. Griffith’s fine work is both ethnographic and biographical, an approach that, as he writes, “has resulted in a melding of biographical portraiture of Williams and psycho-cultural observations of the religious movement he founded” (p. 11). It is this very approach that, in my mind, makes his ethno- graphy an invaluable contribution to the literature on this religion. His focus on Williams allows him to explore the complex dynamic of leadership and authority, which is ordinarily a significant issue in this somewhat decentral- ized religion comprised of largely autonomous churches, but which, in this case, takes on an added significance given the fact that Williams is himself the founder of the church in Barbados. Griffith’s background in psychiatry is evident in his expert exploration of the psycho-therapeutic aspects of the Spiritual Baptist religion, a subject that he turns to time and again. In Chapter 1, “Framing the Narrative,” Griffith discusses his research on Caribbean religions, which has focused primarily on their therapeutic aspects. Chapter 2, “Cultural Context,” begins with a discussion of the reli- gious landscape of Barbados, a landscape that has been dominated by colo- nialism in the form of the Anglican Church although other Protestant faiths are popular as well. There is a brief discussion of “obeah,” which Griffith describes as “African-based religious beliefs including sorcery” (p. 16), and it is implied that this somewhat unwelcome ideology nevertheless thrived within the more “proper” religious context of the island. Griffith notes that discrimination against blacks has been a palpable part of the social fabric in Barbados. It was in this general context, then, that Williams, a native Barba- dian living in Trinidad where he was a leader in the Spiritual Baptist faith, would move to Barbados in 1957 and attempt to establish a church there. Chapter 3, “Granville Williams: The Early Years,” covers Williams’s early life in Barbados, his migration to Trinidad in 1944, and the next thirteen © 2013 James Houk DOI: 10.1163/22134360-12340050 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ 252 Book Reviews years of his life, which he spent on that island. Griffith notes that it was dur- ing this time in Trinidad that Williams became involved with the Spiritual Baptist Church and eventually established himself as a knowledgeable and charismatic leader in his own right. In Chapter 4, “The Return to Barba- dos,” we learn that, Williams’s charisma and abilities as a religious leader notwithstanding, he had to overcome Barbadian biases against the trans- planted Trinidadian Spiritual Baptist faith. Griffith notes that Williams was able to attract worshipers by preaching a black/African pride gospel, if you will. This resonated with black Barbadians who had endured a second-tier social status for generations. Chapter 5, “On Faith and Ritual,” provides readers with a detailed description of the various rites and rituals conducted by the Spiritual Bap- tist Church, including baptism, a typical worship service, and “mourning” (a sensory deprivation ritual where the worshiper goes on a succession of “spiritual travels”). The important role of dreams and visions in the religion are discussed as well. In Chapter 6, “On Visions, Possession and Symbols,” Griffith further explores dreams and visions, using the two terms synony- mously since it is difficult to make any kind of distinction between them given the way his contacts used the terms. He makes no attempt to critique the veracity of claims regarding visions and dreams and, in fact, notes that “Indeed, much of the time, it seems pointless to worry about trying to verify [their] authenticity” (pp. 31-32). In regard to possession, he points out that Barbadians do not use that term, no doubt because of its association with Orisha worship in Trinidad. Chapter 7, “On Spiritual Garments,” focuses on the distinct religious garb that marks Spiritual Baptist practitioners. Generally speaking, the dress indi- viduals adopt indicates their position in the hierarchy of the Church which, in turn, is related to their spiritual growth and progress in the Church. The complex Church hierarchy, which includes a number of ministerial and non-ministerial positions, is discussed in Chapter 8, “Organizational Struc- ture.” Chapter 9, “Further Reflections on the Leader,” consists primarily of a discussion of Williams and the way he exercised his authority, which was absolute, in Church affairs. Here Griffith suggests that Williams’s efforts to establish a black-oriented and black-themed Spiritual Baptist Church in Barbados could be viewed more generally as an exercise in ethnic and cultural “resistance.” Finally, the last chapter, “Ye Shall Dream,” revisits the notion of “church as therapy” and also questions whether Williams might .
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