Preacher, teacher, and postmistress, Charlotte Levy Riley was born into
slavery but became a popular evangelist after emancipation. Although
several nineteenth-century accounts by black preaching women in the
northern states are known, this is the first discovery of such a memoir
in the South.
Born in 1839 in Charleston, South Carolina, Riley was taught to read,
write, and sew despite laws forbidding black literacy. Raised a
Presbyterian, she writes of her conversion at age fourteen to the
African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, embracing its ecstatic worship
and led by her own spiritual visions. Her memoir is revelatory on many
counts, including life in urban Charleston before and after
emancipation, her work as a preacher at multiracial revivals, the rise
of African American civil servants in the Reconstruction era, and her
education and development as a licensed female minister in a patriarchal
church.
Crystal J. Lucky, who discovered Riley s forgotten book in the library
archives at Wilberforce University in Ohio, provides an introduction and
notes on events, society, and religious practice in the antebellum era
and during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and places A Mysterious
Life and Calling in the context of other spiritual autobiographies and
slave narratives."
