jarena lee (1783–18??)

Jarena Lee (1783–18??)Author(s): Phebe DavidsonSource: Legacy, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1993), pp. 135-141Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25684476 .

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LEGACY PROFILE

Jarena Lee (1783-18??)

Phebe Davidson

University of South Carolina?Aiken

J[arena Lee, known today for her I work as an autobiographer, was the

rst recognized female preacher in the

African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Although her religious work cleared the way for later female evangelists, she was never officially ordained. Con

sequently, her public life was that of a

revival preacher and not a minister of

the church. In connection with her

work as a preacher, she became the

author of a religious autobiography, The Life and Religious Experience of

Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady, Giving an account of her call to preach the

Gospel, published at her own expense in 1836, and a later version enlarged

with material from her journals Reli

gious Experience and Journal of Mrs.

Jarena Lee, Giving an account . . .

published in 1849 also at her own ex

pense.1 These autobiographical texts

articulate a cultural and literary space between the Puritan conversion narra

tives and the later evangelical narratives

by African-American women, a space shared with the narratives of American

Indian captivity and of slavery.

w. . ?

Jarena Lee portrait courtesy of Oxford Univer

sity Press, from Spiritual Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

When, around 1833, Lee set out to

write her spiritual autobiography, she

undertook a task which, though in

some ways more complex than it had

been for seventeenth-century Puritan

Anne Bradstreet or eighteenth-century Quaker Elizabeth Ashbridge, was the

LEGACY, Vol. 10, No. 2 Copyright ? 1993 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

135



Legacy

same in crucial ways. Like those earlier

writers, she was shaping a mode of

self-disclosure that might prove ac

ceptable to her society without abso

lutely endorsing its structures; like

them she embraced an urgent commit

ment to her spiritual life.

As- an autobiographer, Lee inherited

the tradition of spiritual autobiography as it was practiced in the Puritan con

version narratives of early New En

gland, and as it was later practiced by

Ashbridge and others who shared Lee's

dedication to the call to preach. Unlike

these earlier women, however, Jarena Lee was a black American writing in an

atmosphere of what must have been

tremendous tension. Living most of

her life in the Philadelphia area, where

abolitionist and feminist concerns

were highly visible, Lee could hardly have been unaware of the political cur

rents surrounding her, anymore than

she could have been ignorant of her race and gender, those two visible as

pects of her identity that most ines

capably defined her position. In practi cal terms, this means that Lee, characterized by Frances Smith Foster as "a free, northern, urban woman who

had no personal knowledge of south ern rural life or slavery" (128),2 occu

pies a unique position in the history of

American letters. Lee's autobiographi cal texts, which connect women's reli

gious narratives of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries with those of the

later nineteenth century, also point up the distance between the captivity nar

ratives of the seventeenth and eigh teenth centuries and the slave narra

tives of the nineteenth. If there is little

of the slave narrative in Lee's story, there is nonetheless an awareness of

the necessity to address slavery as it

relates to her life in service of the gos

pel. While Lee employs conventional

chronology in her narrative, she cre

ates a text full of significant omissions

and silences. The names of her parents, unmentioned in the two autobio

graphical texts, remain unknown. In

deed, she writes little of her child

hood, framing that period in two sen

tences:

I was born February 11th, 1783, at

Cape May, state of NJ. At the age of seven years I was parted from my parents and went to live as a ser vant maid, with a Mr. Sharp, at the distance of about sixty miles from the place of my birth. (Life and Re

ligious Experience 13)

Although her journals reveal that as an

adult she was reunited with her par ents, visiting them a number of times, she implies that as a child she felt the lack of religious instruction they might have supplied, describing them as

"wholly ignorant of God" (Life and Re

ligious Experience 13). Thus she be gins her spiritual journey with greater

ignorance than she would have liked.

According to Lee's narrative, it was as a child in domestic service that she felt

the working of God upon her for the first time. There she had lied about

work she was supposed to have com

pleted, and as a result suffered terrible

pangs of conscience that she attributed to God's agency. At this point, the girl promised herself that she would

amend her ways. Not surprisingly, she

found that promise easier made than

kept.

136



Phebe Davidson

But notwithstanding this promise my heart grew harder after a while;

yet the spirit of the Lord never en

tirely forsook me, but continued

mercifully striving with me until his

gracious power converted my soul.

(Life and Religious Experience 3)

In 1804, at the age of twenty-one, she experienced a religious awakening

during a Presbyterian service. By 1805, she was living and working as a domes

tic in Philadelphia, and had begun at

tending the Bethel Church, where she

heard a sermon by a leader in the

black Methodist movement, the Rever

end Richard Allen, and was moved to

become a Methodist. Shortly thereaf

ter, she had a vivid conversion experi ence that changed her life. At some

point subsequent to her baptism, which probably occurred in 1807, Lee

was taught by black Methodist layman William Scott that there were three

stages to the spiritual journey: convic

tion, which was the recognition of the

presence of one's sinfulness; justifica tion, which was the faith that one

was saved by Christ; and sanctification, which was the surety that one's soul was dedicated entirely to God. At this

point, Lee began actively to seek sanc

tification, of which she was later to

write:

There is no language that can de scribe it, except that which was

heard by St. Paul when he was

caught up in the third heave, and heard words which it was not law ful to utter. (Religious Experience and Journal 10)

Despite the Methodist restrictions on

women preaching, both women and

men were expected to testify in public of their conversion, exhorting others to repent and be saved. Consequently, the idea of public speech was not a

surprising one for Lee to entertain.

By 1811 or so she had turned her

thoughts, if not her actions, to preach

ing, although this calling was not to re

ceive clerical endorsement until some

time after 1816.

She received the call to preach the

gospel when, some four or five years

subsequent to her sanctification and

before her marriage, a voice com

manded her, "'Preach the Gospel; I will

put words in your mouth, and will

turn your enemies to become your friends," (Religious Experience and

Journal 10). In 1811, she married Jo

seph Lee (or Lea), with whom she moved from Philadelphia to Snow Hill3

(now Lawnside, N.J.) where he was

pastor of a small flock. Perhaps be cause she had been denied the privi

lege of preaching by her own pastor, Richard Allen, who instead gave her

permission to exhort and to hold pray er meetings, the role of pastor's wife

seemed a reasonable one to adopt. By her account, however, she was unhap py at Snow Hill and unsuccessful in

her efforts to persuade her husband to

remove to Philadelphia. Further, the

marriage was followed by a period of

great misery and considerable physical illness from which she did not expect to recover. By 1817 or 1818, her fami

ly had been ravaged by death: "... five

in the course of about six years, fell by his hand; my husband being one of the number, which was the greatest afflic

tion of all" (Life and Religious Experi ence 43). Left with two surviving chil

dren, one aged two years and the

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Legacy

other six months, Lee for a time se

cured their livelihood by teaching school. Yet her desire to preach did

not abate.

It was 1821 before she was allowed

to hold prayer meetings in a house she

rented. During this period of her life,

eight years after her initial petition to

Richard Allen, Lee was overcome by the spirit during a service at Bethel

Church and rose to her feet to exhort

the congregation without invitation.

Her exhortation, which included much

about her call to preach, moved Rich

ard Allen, who was now a bishop, to

endorse her call, saying that she was

"called to that work, as any of the

preachers present" (Life and Religious

Experience 17). At last, Lee was able to embark on

the evangelical career described in her

two autobiographies, a career that car

ried her thousands of miles from her

home in the Philadelphia/Camden re

gion. Her travels extended north to

Canada, west to the frontier settlement

of Cincinnati, and south into Maryland. Life as an itinerant revival preacher

was strenuous and often financially

precarious. Frequently, Lee would find

herself preaching several times in one

day, as she moved from place to place. Foot journeys of more than ten

miles were not uncommon. Essentially, wherever people would gather to hear

her, she would preach. The Life and Religious Experience

of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady, Giv

ing an account of her call to preach the Gospel was published at the au

thor's expense in 1836. The book con

tains an account of her personal spiri tual journey to sanctification, her call

to preach, and the early phases of her

preaching career. Religious Experi ence and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an account of her call to

preach the Gospel, published in 1849, also at the author's expense, amplifies that account considerably by the addi

tion of seventy-seven pages culled

from her personal journals, and offers some more personal insights into Lee's

life. The journal entries reveal, for in

stance, that for awhile her mother

cared for her ailing son, and that she was able to combine preaching mis

sions with visits to her parents. Thus

far no records have been found of her

life after 1849, and the place and date

of death remain unknown. The only clue to her burial site is that "accord

ing to local legend, Lee and her

husband, Joseph, were buried in un

marked graves near the present Mt.

Pisgah AME Church at Lawnside" (Es cher and Gilford 78).

Lee's successful pursuit of her quest first for sanctification and later for vin

dication of her call to preach is pre sented to the reader in such a way that

it is inextricably and subtly bound up with two other issues central to her

life and time?gender and, somewhat

less obviously, race. Although race to

some extent determined the context

in which she worked, it is not an issue

overtly addressed by the 1836 text. In

stead, Lee offers many occasions of her own insistence that she be considered as an individual regardless of her sex

or race, although her awareness of ra

cial tensions is revealed by the journal entries added to the text for the 1849 edition. Her concerns with race and

sex, moreover, are enmeshed in her

power to use language?the Word and

words alike?to move her audience.

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Phebe Davidson

Lee's coupling of the belief of the heart

with the action of the tongue, of con

version with the power to exhort sin

ners, is a potent revelation of what it is

that lifts her above her fellows?the

power of her own voice, unleashed by faith.

As Lee describes her spiritual quest in terms of her own active pursuit of

God, she also reminds her readers of

her own station in life as a black and as

a woman, giving greater glory to God

that he had raised her up to speak from her station as a "poor coloured

woman" (Religious Experience and

Journal 18). She further emphasizes both her own effectiveness and the

power of God when she describes the

response to her preaching of an aged slaveholder, who "now seemed to ad

mit that coloured people had souls"

(Religious Experience and Journal 19).

By constructing her religious narra

tive, Jarena Lee secured a place for

herself in the developing tradition

of American women's spiritual auto

biography. Structurally, her text ech oes the conversion narrative of Puri

tans such as Anne Bradstreet. In re

counting the struggles of a woman

who was initially denied the right to preach, largely because there was no

precedent in her church for such a

practice, she also echoes the account

of Elizabeth Ashbridge, who became

recognized as a Quaker minister only after a long and difficult struggle,

though in her case the struggle was

with her husband. Lee is also, perhaps less visibly, an inheritor of the spiritu

ally weighted captivity narrative as it was written by Mary White Row

landson, in which captivity and release

were equated with the religious terms

of trial and redemption. Like Row

landson, Lee uses geography to mark

her spiritual journey, and like Row

landson she is the actor in her text in a

far more overt fashion than was true of

the earlier narratives by Puritan wom

en, finding in her own conscience the motive to religious judgment. Al

though Lee's texts do not utilize the

conventions of the slave narrative to

any great extent, perhaps because the

author would not have been comfort

able with the change in focus that

those conventions would entail, the writer was not able to completely dis

engage herself from the questions of

slavery and abolition.

The 1849 Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. J arena Lee, Giving an

account of her call to preach the Gos

pel offers some evidence of this con

cern. Although Lee did not directly ad

dress the issues of slavery in the 1836

text, she speaks more directly to the

point in the portions of her journal in

serted in the 1849 text. Lee writes of

her stay in Cincinnati:

The evening previous to my landing I saw some of the American afflic tion towards the people of color, such as mobbing and theft and destruction. Wo unto the in habitants of the earth and the sea, for the Devil is come down unto ye. (71)

The logical inference that her station in life as a free northern black and her

position within the church had in some measure insulated her from the racial tensions building in the nation is

brought into question by an 1839 or 1840 entry that asserts:

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Legacy

. . . [N]o one is justified in holding slaves. I felt that the spirit of God

was in the work, and also felt it my

duty to unite with this [Abolition ist] Society. Doubtless the cause is

good, and I pray God to forward on

the work of abolition until it fills

the world, and then the gospel will have free course to every nation and in every clime. (90)

Jarena Lee believed her true work

was to carry the gospel to congrega tions of all races. The journal entries

of the 1849 text reveal an intelligent woman aware of the issues of her time

as she pursues a successful evangelical career that carries her thousands of

difficult miles from home. Significantly, Lee for the most part avoids the vocab

ulary and techniques of the sentimen

tal fiction of her day, having as a young woman rejected a novel for the Bible.

Apparently, she equates the novel and

its conventions with the frivolous and

false, although many descriptions in

her texts (of the deaths of believers, for instance) suggest an acute aware

ness of the power of image to move

the popular mind. If the problem of

slavery was, for Jarena Lee, subordi

nate to the problem of creating an ef

fective evangelical ministry, it none

theless concerned her. Because her life

and writings were dedicated to her

spiritual journey, however, it remained

for other writers to absorb the tradi

tions of spiritual autobiography as they

grappled with the issues of slavery and abolition, and the autobiographical form of the slave narrative itself.

Notes

1. To date, these are the only extant writings of Jarena Lee.

2. The importance of Lee's autobiographical

writing has also been recognized by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who edited the Schomburg Li

brary edition of Spiritual Narratives, and Wil

liam L. Andrews in Sisters of the Spirit, both of whom have reprinted her text.

3. Snow Hill, also known as Free Haven, was

an entirely black settlement that had been orig

inally established as a slave refuge in Camden

County, NJ.

Works Cited

Andrews, William L., ed. Sisters of the Spir it: Three Black Women's Autobiogra

phies of the Nineteenth Century. Bloom

ington: Indiana UP, 1986.

Escher, Constance Killian and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford. "Jarena Lee." Past and Promise: Lives of New Jersey Women. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1990.

Foster, Frances Smith. "Neither Auction Block nor Pedestal: 'The Life and Reli

gious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Col oured Lady.'" In The Female Autograph. Ed. Domna C. Stanton. Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 1987. 126-51.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Series introduction. The Autobiography of Amanda Smith, the Coloured Evangelist. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Lee, Jarena. The Life and Religious Experi ence of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady, Giving an account of her call to preach the Gospel. Revised and corrected from the original manuscript, Written by herself. Philadelphia: printed and pub lished for the author, 1836. In The Fe

male Autograph. Ed. Domna C. Stanton.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. 131-51. -. Religious Experience and Journal

of Mrs Jarena Lee, Giving an account

of her call to preach the Gospel, Revised and corrected from the Original Manu

script, written by herself. Philadelphia: printed and published for the Author, 1849. Rpt. in Spiritual Narratives. Ed.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford

UP, 1988.

140



Phebe Davidson

Primary Works

See complete works by Jarena Lee

listed above in Works Cited;

From Religious Experience and Journal ... (1849)

But here I feel constrained to give over, as from the smallness of this

pamphlet I cannot go through with the whole of my journal, as it would prob

ably make a volume of two hundred

pages; which, if the Lord be willing, may at some future date be published. But for the satisfaction of such as may follow after me, when I am no more, I

have recorded how the Lord called me

to his work, and how he has kept me

from falling from grace, as I feared I

should. In all things he has proved himself a God of truth to me; and in

his service I am now as much deter

mined to spend and be spent, as at the

very first. My ardour for the progress of his cause abates not a whit, so far as

I am able to judge, though I am now

something more than fifty years of age. As to the nature of uncommon im

pressions, which the reader cannot but

have noticed, and possibly sneered at

in the course of these pages, they may be accounted for in this way: It is

known that the blind have the sense of

hearing in a manner much more acute

than those who can see: also their sense of feeling is exceedingly fine, and is found to detect any roughness

on the smoothest surface, where those

who can see find none. So it may be

with such as I am, who has never had more than three months schooling; and wishing to know much of the way and law of God, have therefore

watched the more closely, the opera tions of the Spirit, and have in conse

quence been led thereby. But let it be

remarked that I have never found that

Spirit lead me contrary to the Scrip tures of truth, as I understand them.

"For as many as are led by tha [sic]

Spirit of God are the sons of God."?

Rom. viii. 14.

I have now only to say, May the

blessing of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, accompany the

reading of this poor effort to speak well of his name, wherever it may be

read. AMEN.

P.S. Please to pardon errors, and ex

cuse all imperfections, as I have been

deprived of the advantages of educa

tion (which I hope all will appreciate) as I am measurably a self-taught per son. I hope the contents of this work

may be instrumental in leaving a last

ing impression upon the minds of the

impenitent; may it prove to be encour

aging to the justified soul, and a com

fort to the sanctified.

Though much opposed, it is cer

tainly essential in life, as Mr. Wesley

wisely observes, Thus ends the Nar

rative of Jarena Lee, the first female

preacher of the First African Methodist

Episcopal Church.

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jarena lee (1783–18??)

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