Exodus: Conjuring Retaliation in Marrant's Narrative

This chapter analyzes John Marrant’s use of structural elements from the Exodus story to illustrate supernatural resistance to enslavers. The Exodus motif was also espoused by David Margrette, a fellow minister in the Huntingdon Connexion, who preached in Savannah, Georgia. Marrant’s redeployment of the Exodus story utilizes symbols, blood, and wilderness to depict retaliation. This symbolic pattern is also identified in the narratives of Nat Turner and Fredrick Douglass. Though Turner and Douglass explicitly disavow conjure, their narratives utilize biblical symbols to allegorize supernatural retribution for slavery. Marrant also deployed the same biblical imagery to depict confrontation and to condemn American slavery. In each narration, wilderness signifies ritual initiation while blood signifies direct confrontation with oppressive rulers. Read within narrative structures derived from traditional Africana storytelling cultures, these symbols reveal retribution tales for injuries suffered at the hands of enslavers.