Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God pairs stark woodcuts with harsh irony and fierce agnosticism. This text, whose critique of major religions caused enough outcry to sponsor five reprints, offers unprecedented texture to religious critique, race relations and feminism. Jessie Carter details in The Negro Journal of 1935,

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“Picture if you can a Negro woman, heroine of a religious work, sans Mumbo-Jumbo, sans Jesus, sans tom-tom, sans spirituals, sans nose rings, sans tribal superstition, sans animal skins; in fact, divested of all those peculiar racial and religious worship impedimenta, and you have the unusual personality around which Shaw builds an African religious fable.” (Carter, Jessie. The Journal of Negro History 20.4 (1935): 491-93. Web.).

 

Indeed, a narrative centered around such a character from the mind of a cynical Irishman is not without its problematic and complex context. For the 1930s, Bernard Shaw and John Farleigh as a pairing are worth talking about. While Shaw’s character meets with diverse gods, rejecting “all inadequate deities” with a knobkerry, as the gods become “less and less harsh, younger and younger in physical appearance developing from a savage idolatry and bloodlusty divinity into a metaphysical comprehension,” her image as constructed by Farleigh remains strong, whole, and consistent (Shaw and Farliegh, 3). She anchors each image, but is most central on the cover itself.