Failed Moses 3/14

Cover for “Failed Moses” depicting St. Patrick banishing snakes (symbolizing slavery) from Ireland, only for them to land in US and enslave Black Moses.

Harriet Tubman wasn’t the first or only black Moses…

From the plantation records of Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, to the crystals buried beneath his mansion in Annapolis, to the men named Moses who ran away and were sold at auction, to Harriet Tubman, to Tupac Shakur dying in the arms of a man named Carroll, this book traces a single unbroken thread: the conjure tradition that enslaved Africans used to survive, resist, and outlast the most powerful slaveholding dynasty in American history. This is the story of the Carroll enslaved people's naming rituals, told by a descendant who has inherited them.

Jonathan Carroll spent two years in Baltimore and one year at Princeton researching and a lifetime living the spiritual practices of his ancestors. Jonathan is a 2022 Princeton graduate in Religion and African American studies and a JD candidate at Syracuse College of Law.

Frederick Douglass told you what slavery looked like from the inside. Failed Moses tells you what it looked like from underneath, the spiritual technology the enslaved built in secret, the names they weaponized, the rituals hiding in plain sight that academia still cannot read.

The Exodus is only partially spatial. The temporal aspect of our Exodus is still ongoing.