A Mysterious Life and Calling: From Slavery to Ministry in South Carolina by Reverend Mrs. Charlotte S. Riley (review)

What is mysterious about Reverend Mrs. Charlotte S. Riley is not her life or her calling, which her memoir presents as organic, irrevocable, and tremendous in their soul-shaking impact. Sadly, what should be mysterious is that such a compelling, idiosyncratic manuscript fell into obscurity for so long. The factors that left Riley’s work forgotten in the Wilberforce University archives are no mystery to scholars working at a time when literary historians are unearthing and shepherding back into the public sphere so many often disregarded or little-known texts by African American women and men. Thus, while Joycelyn K. Moody’s enormously helpful foreword to this newly issued volume of Riley’s life claims that “[o]ne of the most exhilarating aspects of Riley’s autobiography is its displacement of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as the lone autobiographical account of an enslaved antebellum black (or rather black and white) woman’s life ‘Written by Herself’” (ix), I argue that this exhilaration will be short-lived. Discoveries are continuing apace, and while Riley may now join Jacobs as the only known formerly enslaved author of an independent life narrative who wrote “while slavery still ruled as the law of the land” (ix), it seems almost certain that other documents will similarly emerge. Indeed, one of this volume’s great contributions to the field is its fortuitous reminder that such discoveries are still to be made, that librarians have carefully cataloged and sorted materials for new generations of readers, and that mysterious and rich testaments and stories are out there just waiting for us to see and listen to them.

As noted above, this slim volume benefits greatly from Moody’s foreword, which goes beyond facile encomiums to sketch out a historiographical context that not only frames Riley’s life but also places her achievements within a broader context. The foreword is followed by a useful introduction by Crystal Lucky, who advises readers not to approach this text with assumptions about “American Slavery, its aftermath or millions of victims, through a lens of homogeneity” (26). This caution is well placed; Riley’s choice to chronicle her revelations results in a work more akin to an eighteenth-century memoir than a freedom narrative. Lucky rightly cites Riley’s text within the tradition of Jarena Lee, the first female preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and akin to the writing of Sojourner Truth, who understood her bondage under the laws of man as not unrelated to her bondage under the burden of sin.

Perhaps the best understanding of this memoir’s mysteries is how historical presence defies expectations. That Riley does not fully explain the circumstances of her emancipation may be surprising in an antebellum narrative, but her omission only underscores the mission of her memoir: it is her calling more than her life that she sought to chronicle. For the modern reader, however, that calling is perhaps not the most compelling aspect of the book. Riley’s spiritual revelations and experiences are important and moving, and it is astounding that she became a licensed female minister in a patriarchal church culture, but the details about her life slipped in between her discussions of her church relationships are equally remarkable and often reveal a hard-nosed, playful chronicler of a seemingly quiet life of mission, played out against the antebellum South Carolina landscape.

Many aspects of Riley’s life remain confusing despite Lucky’s responsible footnoting and creative researching. For example, Riley’s enslaved status and the circumstances of her liberation are confounding. She was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1839 to enslaved parents who were able to hire themselves out and maintain some degree of independent family life by living in their...