Jennie Johnson was an African Canadian Baptist preacher, by all accounts the first ordained woman in Canada called as a full-time minister, settling in her own church twenty-seven years before Lydia Gruchy of the United Church of Canada became the first woman ordained by a Canadian denomination. This book is about Johnson's life. Because the materials about Johnson that survive do not tell us the things we would most like to know about her, and because she avoided the spotlight, the work that follows cannot be called a full biography. Nonetheless, this study of a life known only through fragments, each connected to a deep history, gives cause to rethink North American black history and historiography. The story of Jennie Johnson calls us to reconsider the familiar terms in which we often cast the history of nineteenth-century black migration and settlement in Canada. It encourages us to recognize the bond between the culture of abolition in the nineteenth century and the movement for racial justice in the twentieth. It invites us to reorient a women's history of black Christianity in Canada to face both its conservative tendencies and its transformative power. In her own time, Johnson's ordination to the Christian ministry was a revolution nurtured in the straitlaced heart of Baptist orthodoxy; in our time, her ordination still holds the potential to overturn long-accepted assumptions about women, Christianity, and race in North American history.