{"product_id":"mysterious-life-and-calling-from-slavery-to-ministry-in-south-carolina-9780299306748","title":"Mysterious Life and Calling: From Slavery to Ministry in South Carolina","description":"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.\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eA Mysterious Life and Calling\u003c\/i\u003e in the context of other spiritual autobiographies and slave narratives.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Wisconsin Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 04\/01\/1999\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780299306748\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 152\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.40lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.60d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eReview Citations: \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e 11\/09\/2015\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Charlotte S. Riley","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":36635470987420,"sku":"9780299306748","price":21.21,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0473\/0804\/6492\/products\/img_4c95a770-c23a-470a-8a7d-22ef25dbbc4c.jpg?v=1603839645","url":"https:\/\/pastforward.org\/products\/mysterious-life-and-calling-from-slavery-to-ministry-in-south-carolina-9780299306748","provider":"Past Forward","version":"1.0","type":"link"}