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13 The Black Women’s Spiritual Narrative as Sermon C R Y S T A L J . L U C K Y In 1836, itinerant preacher Jarena Lee offered her Philadelphia readership a brief spiritual autobiography to teach them of salvation and to give an account of her call to preach the gospel. She employed the prophetic words from the biblical book of Joel—‘‘and it shall come to pass . . . that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons, and your daughters shall prophecy [sic]’’1 —as the epigraph to the first autobiography written by a black woman in the United States, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, A Coloured Lady, Giving An Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel.2 In 1846, as a parting gift to her friends and colleagues and in preparation for her return to the United States after a five-year stay in London, Mrs. Zilpha Elaw referred on the title page of her autobiography to the Apostle Paul’s words to the Corinthians—‘‘Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God’’3 —indicating her unwillingness to make authorial claims without divine sanction. In 1879, Mrs. Julia A. J. Foote, to ‘‘testify more extensively to the sufficiency of the blood of Jesus Christ to save from all sin,’’ followed suit by asking of herself the same question as the prophet Zechariah, ‘‘is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?’’4 And finally, at the close of the nineteenth century, Amanda Berry Smith, known also as ‘‘the Colored Evangelist,’’ borrowed the prophet Samuel’s declaration after Israel’s military victory over the Philistines—‘‘Hitherto the Lord hath helped me.’’5 She offered her 173 ‘‘little’’ book (of 506 pages) ‘‘that many of my own people will be led to a more full consecration, and that the Spirit of the Lord may come upon some of the younger women who have talent, and who have had better opportunities than I have ever had, and so must do better work for the Master.’’ By using the Bible as the foundation for their self-authorization to tell their life’s stories, to claim their own spiritual birthrights, and to expand their participation in evangelical ministry , these black women used autobiography to enter the public sphere in an effort to add their powerful voices to those of the men already crying in a religious, social, and political wilderness. Taken together, these works, along with others, comprise a genre I have termed the black preaching women’s spiritual narrative of the nineteenth century. Like the Protestant spiritual narrative, it demonstrates the narrator’s quest for spiritual perfection in an imperfect world, witnesses her conversion in an effort to influence an unredeemed readership, and records her trials, temptations, and final triumph .6 Initiated by an itinerant woman preacher in 1836, the black preaching women’s spiritual narrative accomplishes these narrative tasks and includes the spiritual experiences of black women who believed themselves called to preach the gospel and endeavored to enter formal ministry. The narrator calls both a black and white readership to moral reform and urges male church leadership to recognize the validity of women’s evangelical ministry. Specifically, they are authored by black women officially or loosely associated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E.) and engaged in itinerant preaching careers. Their act of life writing enabled them to chronicle significant details of their lives and to reflect on the presence of God in their lived experiences, the existence of which many male church leaders simply denied. This essay offers a reading of Julia Foote’s A Brand Plucked From the Fire to illustrate one of the distinct characteristics of this narrative form, the way that orality functions on the printed page. Orality is a key component in the study of African American literature and culture , as evidenced by the emphasis placed on the role of religious and secular song, political and public speech, and the preached word in contemporary literature and culture. For nineteenth-century black women preachers turned autobiographical narrators, the characteristics associated with oral preaching were part and parcel of their written work. As I argue, they created written sermons in the form of autobiography in order to claim the right to preach the gospel in a Western society that privileged both print and men. 174...

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