Sister Gertrude Morgan Everlasting:
Breaking Free of the confines of Race and Gender

By Kymberly N. Pinder, Ph.D.
The Outsider, Volume 10/ issue 1/Winter 2005

Born the seventh child on the seventh day of April in 1900 in Lafayette, Alabama, Gertrude Morgan lived in Alabama and Georgia before settling in New Orleans in 1939. While she worked as a servant and nursemaid in her teens and twenties, she began preaching and playing music. She started a mission and an orphanage with two other women in New Orleans soon after moving there’ Morgan ran her own Everlasting Gospel Mission from 1965 until her death. In the 50s, Morgan began to make visual aids for her traveling ministry. By the 60s her artwork had gained national attention through the dealer Larry Borenstein and appeared in numerous folk art exhibitions, and private and public collections. In 1974, six years before her death, Morgan received a revelation to stop painting and to exclusively write poetry in the serve of God.

When Sister Gertrude Morgan heard the calling to be the bride of Christ and start her own mission, the Everlasting Gospel Mission in New Orleans circa 1956, she wore only white from that day forward and her vocation to preach the gospel now had the sanctity and fervor of a wife’s devotion. The Lord also told her to paint, and she painted herself and Jesus Christ as a happily married couple, presenting her permanent alliance with her Savior. A number of images even show her in a bridal gown with a large bouquet and her groom in a formal tuxedo, as in Lamb and His Bride. They stand closely, arms around each other or holding hands as two newlyweds might. In New Jerusalem from the Prayer Room. They both wave from a swing as in a family photo.

In Catholicism, priests, nuns, monks, wed Christ in the service of their faith. Being the bride of Christ comes directly from the scriptures, most notably from the “Song of Songs,” which devout women and men alike have cited for centuries as the guiding text for this holy bond that makes the carnal sacred. Such lines as “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for they love is better than wine.” Or “but I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me” have enabled men and women to retain the sensuality of love within the spiritual space of devotion.

Morgan’s images of marital bliss between her dark brown self, highlighted by her omnipresent white dress and hat, and her fair-skinned, auburn-haired Jesus can strike one as arresting even today. Dressing Jesus more frequently in a white shirt and black or brown pants, rather than the traditional white, long, prophet’s robe, made the couple appear even more contemporary than ethereal and symbolic.

The sheer visual power of their coupling cannot be overlooked here, especially, when one considers that these pictures were painted between circa 1956 and 1979, the major decades of the Civil Rights movement. Throughout American visual history, the representation of racial mixing sparked fears of racially ambiguous offspring who would weaken an economic and cultural hierarchy based upon race. Interracial wedding pictures would have been extremely inflammatory when Morgan was preaching beside her images on the streets of New Orleans and in her church. However, Morgan’s religious convictions allow her to subvert cultural visual taboos.

Her ministry also circumvented gender restrictions. Presenting herself as “the lord’s wife Prophetess Morgan missionary” enabled Morgan to be the mediary between God and man. Recording her deeds as musician, healer, and evangelist also placed her, if not in front and center in many compositions, at least as the most active figure.

Her works-be they the paintings or the stunning hand-made megaphones, speaking tubes, or fans-are testaments to the sheer vitality and presence of her own agency as a black woman preacher. Taking her ministry to the streets allowed her, like many female evangelists, to break free of the institutional confines of the gender hierarchy of the Baptist church.

In line with their European American counterparts, all African American church denominations, from AME to Pentecostal, serve predominantly female congregations; yet female clergy have always been rare. Historic examples, such as Jarena Lee, Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary McCleod Bethune, present a common story of pursuing their calling outside of the church. Gender divisions have been persistently rigid: the pulpit is the man’s space and the pew the woman’s.

Given these conditions, women have carved out their own power bases within the pew and church offices. According to the historians C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, “the women’s conventions are among the largest organized groups of black women in the United States. Women serve in myriad roles in black churches as evangelists, missionaries, stewardesses, deaconesses, lay readers, writers on religious subjects, Sunday school teachers, musicians, choir members and directors, ushers, nurses, custodians, caterers…”

Lincoln and others have also noted the revered status of “church mother,” the older women who are the wives of the oldest and most respected male members of the church. The political role of such women has been linked to the centrality of women in religions in many parts of Africa in which matrilineal power is integral to all aspects of community life.

In many Western and Central African religions, women are the spiritual practitioners and there are many female deities. This active role continued on this side of the Atlantic during slavery but was severely curtailed during the formation of institutionalized, African American Christianity. As Lincoln so clearly outlined, “the road blocks to preaching for black women were further compounded by the complex problem of black male identity in a racist society. If the ministry was the only route to even a shadow of masculinity, the inclusion of women seemed very much like a gratuitous defeat for everybody.

Morgan often referred to “Mother Gertrude Dada Jesus.” She was a church mother sanctioned by her husband Christ to preach and be his active disciple. When she paints herself in a church interior, the men are often seated or on the periphery. Again, the self-assuredness of her calling made her subvert real and visualized norms.

Her music also addresses this gender issue. Music was probably more integral to Morgan’s life than her painting. She played the piano, guitar, and tambourine and sang all her life. As a soloist in her evangelizing, she was the embodiment of the gospel blues singer and that independent streak is consistent with her life: “The blues soloist was a figure in traditional Afro-American culture, responsible for emoting and otherwise expressing feeling to the group through music. Another individual, the preacher, was likewise responsible to a group, but he communicated thorough speech. The bluesman and the preacher were analogues for one another. Gospel singing presented the important and inevitable fusion of sermons. It began to really take hold in both rural and urban areas in the late 1920s and into the 1930s with musicians like Thomas A. Dorsey bringing blues soloists such as Mahalia Jackson and Bessie Smith into churches.

The female musician or choir member did not challenge male authority, but the female gospel singer sometimes did, and soon was re-integrated into the choral structure of the church. Morgan’s sung sermons exploited this budding tradition and maintained it outside of the church.

Her songs attest to her belief in her own personal agency in her salvation and that of others. She is an active agent in her songs and in her paintings, often appearing caught in mid-sentence or refrain. She must be answered and will not be ignored: photographs of Morgan feature an unwavering gaze and forceful body language, and her self-portraits reflect the intensity of her presence.

As in the musical and religious traditions that influenced her, repetition is central to her work. In her inscriptions and songs, phrases like “repeat three times” appear as a form of call and response. Her work is all about presence as she is usually looking out at the viewer and is sometimes appearing more than once in a single painting. Her written text layers her voice and hand over and around her figures. She is a witness to herself and her faith as her audience is also.

The doubling, tripling and quadrupling of self-representation within her paintings testify her black, female body is an incarnation of divine spirit and practice that operates free of most societal restrictions normally placed upon that very body. Like so many divinely-inspired women in history from Joan of Arc to Sojourner Truth, Morgan’s faith sanctioned an autonomous space for her. Her visible black female agency was in the service of Jesus Christ. As Morgan would add to her poems and sermons: “Tell ‘em God’s wife told you that."

Kymberly N. Pinder is the Associate Professor and Graduate Program Head of Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.