Kimberly Blockett was a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin when her thesis director, Nellie McKay, encouraged her to read a spiritual narrative from 1846 written by Zilpha Elaw, a free black woman who travelled up and down the East Coast of the U.S., even into slave states like Virginia, as an itinerant preacher from the early 1820s through 1840.
Blockett had other priorities. She was focused instead on reading fiction related to the Harlem Renaissance as she explored black female subjectivity through movement. But McKay, herself a former WSRP Research Associate as well as Harvard graduate, was unrelenting.
“So I read Elaw’s narrative,” Blockett explains, “and then I had to do the thing that no dissertator wants to do, which is to sit in your director’s office and admit that she is right.”
Blockett left behind the fiction of the Harlem Renaissance and centered Elaw’s text as the foundation for her future academic scholarship.
Since that time, Blockett has become the leading expert on Zilpha Elaw. She taught a class in the fall on “Black Women, Movement, and Spirituality,” where HDS students had the opportunity to examine the narratives of black female evangelists. In the class, she told her students that in order to conduct recovery work on people for whom records were not kept, they need to “research around a person.”
“If you don’t have a woman’s maiden name, how do you find her? How do you find out where she was born?” Blockett asks. Since the birth dates and marriages of people of color were not recorded in Elaw’s place of birth—Bucks County, Pennsylvania—it took Blockett five years to discover Elaw’s maiden name.
Blockett’s research has also been made more difficult by Elaw’s choice to limit information about her own life in her narrative. Blockett adds that this decision was typical for writers of spiritual narratives since “The point of the narrative is to talk about the souls that you’ve saved. The only information about you was about how you were converted.”
What Blockett does know is that Elaw was born around 1793. It is unclear whether Elaw’s parents had been slaves, and though Elaw was never enslaved, she was a member of the “slave class.” Elaw was still “yoked,” says Blockett, referring to the socio-economic consequences of enslavement for the nation.
After her mother’s death, Elaw was raised by a white Quaker family. Like most youth in Bucks County, she benefited from the existing informal free education system and thus received a quality Quaker education, learning how to read and write. Elaw grew up, married, and had a daughter. Following her husband’s death, Elaw began her ministry as an itinerant preacher, identifying as a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, a predominantly white faith community.
Elaw was unconventional in other ways, too. She travelled up and down the East Coast preaching constantly. The longest time she spent in any one place was the nearly three years that she spent on Nantucket. Blockett speculates that Elaw stayed on the island from 1830-1832 because of a cholera epidemic on the mainland. On two separate occasions, Elaw travelled into Virginia where slavery was still legal to preach to slave owners and other white people. “She preached to anybody,” says Blockett.
In doing so, Elaw faced extreme risks as a preacher.
“The backlash against black religiosity was fierce. People were in some ways rightly connecting racial rebellion—black rebellion—with black religiosity because they were identifying black churches as the seat of black social, intellectual thought and activism, which they were. And it didn’t help that many slave insurrections in the South were being led by black preachers, such as Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, and Denmark Vesey.”
Elaw was committed to racial equity, but she conveyed these commitments to different audiences in different ways. Besides Elaw’s spiritual narrative, which is now housed in the British Library, with a second copy in Philadelphia, Blockett has been able to locate one letter that Elaw wrote to a member of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.
“The story that you get in the narrative is very different than the story of what appears in the letter.” Blockett is interested in exploring how Elaw represents herself in these two different mediums, and seeks to find more letters. “I would love to get my hands on some letters of hers so that I knew more about her thinking and her personality,” Blockett adds.
Blockett has recovered much of Elaw’s ministry in England from 1840 into the 1860s. At HDS, she’s writing a monograph about Elaw’s life to further examine the social history at the intersection of the rise of independent black churches, the second great awakening, and women’s leadership in churches.
Blockett is also annotating Elaw’s narrative to provide greater context to Elaw’s incredible story. Since Elaw is probably one of the first African American Methodist Episcopal Church evangelists, Blockett says that she needs to be studied on her own, separate from the lives of the women that she is usually associated with, such as Julia Foote and Jarena Lee from the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
During her presentation at HDS on April 25, Blockett will draw connections between Elaw’s ministry and state violence today.
“It’s not much of a leap to trace the archival absences and the willful non-recording and non-recognition of black lives. If you say a life is not worth documentation, it’s not much of a leap to say then that a life is not worth living...If that life wasn’t worth recording in the first place, and if those lives and those historical moments and movements and these groups aren’t worth documentation, then we shouldn’t be shocked that it is not worth taking up those lives in the courtrooms.
“What I am trying to do, to move to, is to get people in general, not just students, to begin to understand and value paying attention to history, to historical knowledge. And not just from the usual sources, the usual suspects … It’s imperative to have an understanding of what happened before in order to properly assess what is happening now.”
—Bridget Power, HDS correspondent