Before They Could Vote: American Women's Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919

3. The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee (1836)

3 The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee (1836) Jarena Lee jarena lee (1783–?) was born in Cape May, New Jersey, to free parents of modest means. At seven she was hired out as a servant. In 1811 she married Joseph Lee, a pastor at a black church in a town called Snow Hill, outside Philadelphia. In the next six years, Lee suffered five family deaths, including that of her husband. Not much is known of Jarena Lee’s childhood or her life after 1849. Lee attests that her life truly began at the age of 21 in 1804 with a dramatic conversion to Christianity as she was listening to a sermon at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, of which she had been a member for three weeks. Although Lee’s conversion was sudden, she struggled with periods of doubt and anguish, some suicidal, for the next four years. William Scott, another African American believer, became her mentor, teaching her about Methodist founder John Wesley’s doctrine of sanctification and persuading her that her conversion was not yet complete. Years later, married and living in Snow Hill, Lee felt a call to begin preaching and consulted her pastor, Richard Allen, founder of the Bethel Church. Allen refused her request, insisting that Methodism did not allow female ministers. 124 In 1818 Lee returned to Philadelphia with her two remaining children. There,Allen, who since Lee’s departure had become bishop of theAfrican Methodist Episcopal Church, the firstAfricanAmerican denomination in the United States, granted her permission to hold prayer meetings in her home. A year later Lee convinced Allen of her calling when she spontaneously interrupted a sermon and began preaching on the theme and passage that the minister had been exploring. Astonished, Allen authorized her to continue. With the unprecedented approval of the church, Lee traveled in the northern states and as far west as Dayton, Ohio, to preach to white and black audiences, giving almost seven hundred sermons in 1835, and traveling at least as many miles, mostly on foot. In 1833 she contacted an editor about publishing her journal of religious activities to inspire others with the publication of her conversion story and her selfdepiction as an early female preacher of the first African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1836 Lee paid thirty-eight dollars for one thousand copies of The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Colored Lady, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel, which she distributed at church meetings. In western Pennsylvania in 1839, Lee met African American evangelist, Zilpha Elaw, who had been born and raised on the outskirts of Philadelphia. The two women spent several months preaching together. During this time she also distributed another thousand copies of her narrative. Convinced that abolition might spread Christianity, Lee became a member of the American Antislavery Society in 1840. Four years later Lee’s request to the African Episcopal Church’s Book Committee to publish her newly extended autobiography was denied; in 1849, however, she published a second, much longer edition containing the original 1836 narrative and new journal entries up to 1843. Little else is known about Lee’s activities. She may have participated in a spontaneous gathering of female preachers at the 1850 Philadelphia Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. There women proclaimed that they had been ordained by God to preach despite the church’s refusal to authorize them, sparking continuing debates about women’s rights to work as evangelists. Lee’s narrative has received considerable critical attention in both its original and expanded versions. The introduction to it by William L. Andrews is indispensable, as is his discussion in To Tell a Free Story (69–70) of Lee’s “radical challenge to systems of naming” in moving from “lady” to androgynous preacher. Sue E. Houchins The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee 125 contrasts the scope of the two editions of Lee’s narrative in Spiritual Narratives (1988). More recent inquiries include Richard J. DouglassChin ’s 2001 work on autobiographies by nineteenth-century African American women evangelists, and Chanta M. Haywood’s Prophesying Daughters: Black Women Preachers and the Word, 1823–1913 (2003). Revised and corrected from the Original Mss., written by herself. Second Edition. Cincinnati: Printed and Published for the Author. 1839. The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Colored Lady, Giving an Account of Her Call...