My Spiritual Sister, Zilpha Elaw
About ten years ago, I discovered a book edited by William L. Andrews, Sisters of the Spirits: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century . All of the autobiographies here are fascinating, but Zilpha Elaw's captured my interest most deeply. Zilpha Elaw, an African-American woman and itinerant preacher during the early nineteenth century, published her memoir, Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels, and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, an American Female of Colour , in England in 1846. Elaw's autobiography is one of three republished in Andrews' collection. Mrs. Elaw, a free woman and native of Pennsylvania, traveled throughout the mid-Atlantic slaveholding states, preaching to large, sometimes racially mixed, audiences despite the threat of capture and enslavement. Elaw went abroad to continue preaching in England. It is believed she planned to return to the States in the late 1840s, but no records of her activities after 1846 are a...