Universidade Do Estado Do Rio De Janeiro Centro De Educação E Humanidades Instituto De Letras
Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro Centro de Educação e Humanidades Instituto de Letras
Cristiane Vieira da Graça Cardaretti
Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline E. Hopkins: the uplifting of black women through literature
Rio de Janeiro 2013
Cristiane Vieira da Graça Cardaretti
Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline E. Hopkins: the uplifting of black women through literature
Dissertação apresentada, como requisito parcial para obtenção do título de Mestre, ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Área de concentração: Literaturas de Língua Inglesa.
Orientadora: Profª. Dra. Maria Aparecida F. de Andrade Salgueiro
Rio de Janeiro 2013
CATALOGAÇÃO NA FONTE UERJ/REDE SIRIUS/CEHB
C266 Cardaretti, Cristiane Vieira da Graça. Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline E. Hopkins: the uplifting of black women through literature / Cristiane Vieira da Graça Cardaretti. – 2013. 106 f.: il.
Orientadora: Maria Aparecida F. de Andrade Salgueiro. Dissertação (mestrado) – Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Instituto de Letras.
1. Mulheres afro-americanas – Teses. 2. Mulheres na literatura - Teses. 3. Literatura e sociedade – Teses. 4. Literatura norte-americana – História e crítica – Teses. 5. Poder (Ciências sociais) na literatura - Teses. 6. Literatura e história – Estados Unidos – Teses. 7. Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 1825-1911 – Crítica e interpretação – Teses. 8. Hopkins, Pauline E. (Pauline Elizabeth) – Crítica e interpretação – Teses. 9. Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 1825-1911. Iola Leroy, or, Shadows uplifted – Teses. 10. Hopkins, Pauline E. (Pauline Elizabeth). Contending forces: a romance illustrative of negro life north and south – Teses. I. Salgueiro, Maria Aparecida Andrade. II. Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Instituto de Letras. III. Título.
CDU 820(73)-95
Autorizo, apenas para fins acadêmicos e científicos, a reprodução total ou parcial desta dissertação desde que citada a fonte.
______Assinatura Data
Cristiane Vieira da Graça Cardaretti
Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline E. Hopkins: the uplifting of black women through literature
Dissertação apresentada, como requisito parcial para obtenção do título de Mestre, ao Programa de Pós-Graduação Letras, da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Área de concentração: Literaturas de Língua Inglesa.
Aprovada em 18 de abril de 2013.
Banca Examinadora:
______Profª. Dra. Maria Aparecida F. de Andrade Salgueiro (Orientadora) Instituto de Letras - UERJ
______Profª. Dra. Maria Conceição Monteiro Instituto de Letras - UERJ
______
Prof. Dr. Antonio Dwayne Tillis Dartmouth College – Estados Unidos
Rio de Janeiro 2013
To my beloved boys, Artur and Enrico, who made me believe in miracles, in plenitude, in me. Thank you for making me believe in brighter coming days. Love you!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my advisor Maria Aparecida Andrade Salgueiro, who, with a blend of generosity, patience, encouraging words and guidance, helped me achieving my goals. Thank you for believing in me and for your friendship. I would like to thank Prof. Maria Conceição Monteiro and Antonio Tillis for the kindness and generosity for having accepted to take part in my commitee. I would like to express my gratitude to all Professors in the Master’s Program in Literatures in English at UERJ, who, with a combination of kindness, generosity and patience made me believe I was on the right track. I would like to express my gratitude for Professor Julio França for all the support, for his encouraging words and for his friendship. I would like to thank all my dear classmates: Adriana Merly, Diego Ferreira, Mariana Miranda, Pedro Vieira, Priscilla Figueiredo and Thiago Sardenberg for yourr support and friendship. I would also like to thank Alice Perini, Juliana Salles for encouraging me during the whole process, for rooting for me and for your friendship. Thank you for the jokes, confessions and love. Blended Forever! I would like to express my gratitude and love for Ana Luiza Sardenberg, Jorge Luiz Monteiro, Lana Araujo and Vansan Gonçalves, who with a blend of kindness, generosity, patience and friendship made my road a little easier to be followed. Blended Forever! I would like to thank my friends, mainly my close friends: Ana Paula Perrin, Edinei Furtado, Érica Polycarpo, Ernesto Novaes, Gabriella Freitas, Indira Gandhi, Ingrid Meirelles, Ines Matos, Patricia Freitas, Renata Matheus, Tatiana Miura for understanding my “disappearences” during the process and for rooting for me. Love you all! I would like to thank my special friend Cláudia M. Franco,who, was always listening to me, praying for me, laughing and also crying with me. Thank you for your support and for your friendship. Love you! I would like to thank my dear friend Carlos Monte, who, with his patience, friendship, kindness and support made my life better, and my technological life too much easier. Love you!
I would like to thank Edilcea “Célia” Pereira for helping me with my kids, my health and for your friendship and support. Thank you for the special cup of coffees during the whole process. I would like to thank my whole family for the love and support.I would like to thank my mom Maria “Didi” Ediege. My brothers, my sisters, my nephews, my nieces. I would like to express all my love and gratitude for those who made me believe in me since the very beginning of my life journey: my father Antonio Moreira and my mother Vera Lúcia Moreira. Thank you for the unconditional love and support! You are deeply special in my life! Love you! I would like to thank my sisters Patricia Moreira and Bruna Moreira for your friendship, for your support and, mainly for your love. Love you! I would like to thank my little boys for all the love, for all the smiles, for all the happiness you two bring into my life everyday. Thank you for the patience, maturity and comprehension during my “disappearences.”Artur and Enrico, I do Love you! Last, but not least, I would like to express my deepest gratitude and love for Michel Cardaretti, who was always there for me, encouraging me, supporting me and rooting for me. Thank you from the deepest part of my soul! Thank you for believing me when I was not able to do so. You are really special. I do Love you!
STILL I RISE
You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? 'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise.
Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops. Weakened by my soulful cries.
Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard 'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines Diggin' in my own back yard.
You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I'll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history's shame - I rise Up from a past that's rooted in pain - I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear - I rise Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear - I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.
Maya Angelou
RESUMO
CARDARETTI, Cristiane Vieira da Graça. Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline E. Hopkins: the uplifting of black women through literature. 2013. 106 f. Dissertação (Mestrado em Literaturas de Língua Inglesa) – Instituto de Letras, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2013.
A presente dissertação tem como objetivo apresentar duas influentes autoras afro- americanas do século XIX, Frances E. W. Harper e Pauline E. Hopkins. Ambas as autoras, através de seus romances Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) e Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900) respectivamente, entrelaçam ficção e história com o propósito de criar novas alternativas de discurso, afastando-se, portanto, do oficial. Ademais, o presente trabalho propõe demonstrar como Frances Harper e Pauline Hopkins fazem uso do espaço literário com a finalidade de escrever a história do oprimido, permitindo, principalmente, que as mulheres afro-americanas dessem voz as suas experiências e as suas próprias histórias. Assim sendo, a literatura produzida por Frances e Harper e Pauline Hopkins será analisada como forma de empoderamento da comunidade afro- americana, principalmente como forma de aquisição de poder para as Mulheres Afro- Americanas.
Palavras-chave: Mulheres Afro-Americanas. Literatura. Aquisição de Poder.
ABSTRACT
The present thesis aims at presenting two influential nineteenth-century African American writers, Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline E. Hopkins. Both authors, throughout their novels Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) and Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900) respectively, interweave fiction and history in order to create new alternative discourses, thereby, diverging from the official one. Moreover, the present work also aims at demonstrating how Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins made use of the literary space as a way to inscribe the history of the oppressed, allowing mainly black women to voice their experiences and their own hi(her)stories. Likewise, the literature produced by Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins will be analyzed as a means of empowerment for African-American Women.
Keywords: African-American Women. Literature. Empowerment.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...... 12
1 FRANCES HARPER’S IOLA LEROY AND PAULINE HOPKINS’S CONTENDING FORCES: HISTORICAL CONTEXTUAL AND RACIAL ISSUES …………………………………………………………... 17 2 FRANCES HARPER’S IOLA LEROY : GIVING BIRTH TO AFRICANAMERICAN WOMANHOOD…………………………………... 34 3 PAULINE HOPKINS’S CONTENDING FORCES: LYNCHING AND THE UPLIFT OF AFRICAN AMERICAN PEOPLE…………………… 51 4 LITERARY REPRESENTATION IN IOLA LEROY AND IN CONTENDING FORCES: GIVING BIRTH TO NEW DISCOURSES IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE…..……………………………… 70
5 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………… 86
REFERENCES………………...……………………………………………… 90
ANNEX A - Frances E. W. Harper …...... 98
ANNEX B - Mrs. F. E. W. Harper ...... 99
ANNEX C – Cover of Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted ...... 100
ANNEX D - Pauline E. Hopkins ...... 101
ANNEX E - Pauline E. Hopkins’s picture and signature in Contending Forces: a
Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South…………...... ……………… 102 ANNEX F – Cover of Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces: a Romance
Illustrative of Negro Life North and South…………………………………….. 103
ANNEX G – Safe Houses’s Picture...... 104
ANNEX H – Routes used by nineteenth-century black slaves in order to set
themselves free ………………………………………………………………… 105
ANNEX I – Poem by Frances E. W. Harper...... 106
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INTRODUCTION
The present thesis is the result of my natural and eternal inquietude in relation to issues concerning Black people’s stories and on Black people’s histories, which were not written, heard, spoken and/or revealed throughout my Undergraduate course. As a student of Letters at UFRJ, I had the privilege to read only relevant authors of the literary tradition – essentially from the Western canon – such as William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Charlotte Brontë, Geoffrey Chaucer, James Joyce, Jane Austen, among others. Being a black woman, what I am fully proud of, made me think about the absence and/or erasure of Black heroes as well as of Black heroines of the pages of Literature and of History books. Keeping in mind the necessity of filling up the blanks with histories, stories written by Black people and/or for Black people, I took part in the I Seminar on African Literatures sponsored by UFRJ in 1996, having as its coordinator Professor Carmen Lúcia Tindó Secco. At this seminar, being introduced to a “new” literature, the literature of the “Other”, I realized there was something deeper in the silence around such literature. Yet, at that specific moment of my life, I was not able to understand its real reasons. At the abovementioned event, I presented a work entitled “A recusa do Eu no Universo Ficcional de Honwana”, which is currently catalogued at “Portal das Memórias de África e do Oriente” (GRAÇA, 2006, Pp. 113-14). For the period of a sequential break of 10 years from the Undergraduate course to the Master’s course, I took some translation courses and taught at some private schools. Teaching at a private school in Tijuca, I reencountered Professor Maria Aparecida Andrade Salgueiro, my high school teacher, whom I was honored to study with at Colégio Pedro II in 1991. At that time (2006), Professor Maria Aparecida Salgueiro invited me to sit in some classes at the Master’s course in Literatures in English at UERJ, in order to start going back to academic studies and thinking about the possibility of applying for that course. Unfortunately at that moment I was not still ready to go on with such an important step in my academic life. Four years later (2010), I decided to accept the invitation and I was accepted to sit in as an audit student at Professor Leila Harris’s classes on Postcolonialism. Along with Leila’s classes, a new “world” was being opened before my eyes, an entire new range of critics, theorists, writers, allowing me to broaden my academic perspectives, as well as my literary knowledge. When, the second term of that year came, I attended Professor Maria Aparecida Salgueiro’s classes. Finally, I encountered the “treasure” that I had spent part of my life looking for: I found Black people talking about Black issues in Literature, in History, in 13
articles, in all kinds of interesting written texts. Within this course, part of my anxieties were “uncovered”, revealed by such magnificent writers and critics such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Henry Louis Gates Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, Anna Julia Cooper, Lorraine Hansberry, Frances E.W. Harper, Pauline E. Hopkins, among others. Bearing in mind my intention to bring a kind of literature produced by Black people, mainly Black women writers, in order to advocate dignity, equality, respect and uplift for women, my original project to apply for the Master’s program of Literatures in English at UERJ had focused on Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and on Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Nevertheless, researching about them and about their works, I realized there were hundreds of papers on both authors and on both works. Thus, following my advisor’s long research track to bring to light to the Brazilian reader a wide range of different African- American women writers, I decided to open space to other relevant and prominent authors in order to broaden the scope of African American women writers, mainly to students in Brazil. Needless to say, I changed the authors and the works. In addition to the aforementioned aim, I began searching for writers who made use of literature as a hopeful space, interweaving fiction and fact, history and literature as they remember the black people sufferings, providing us with alternative discourses, in order to enable us with new readings of the past. It is then, that I decided on two influential writers, from a quite significant period in the United States – “the Women’s Era”: the African Americans, Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline E. Hopkins. Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins were some of the female voices who joined the chorus of those advocating dignity, equality, respect and uplift for African Americans during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. Having presented my own personal trajectory during the Master’s Course, now, first of all, I would like to present a brief summary of the two novels I will investigate throughout my work. Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) brings us the story of a white Mississippi planter, Eugene Leroy, who falls in love with his own slave – Marie – who, “in the North, no one would suspect that she has one drop of negro blood in her veins, but here, where I am known, to marry her is to lose caste.” They have three children: Gracie (who dies soon after her father), Harry, and Iola Leroy. While Iola and Harry were in the North in order to be educated, Eugene dies of yellow fever. After his death, Iola returns to the South. Eugene’s cousin, Alfred Lorraine, sells Marie and her children into slavery. Harry Leroy enlists in a black Union army. At this point in the narrative, Harper brings us the unfair life of blacks in the United States, as she portrays the anger of an officer who says Harry, “you are 14
the d–d’st fool I ever saw–a man as white as you are turning his back upon his chances of promotion! But you can take your choice” (HARPER, 2010, p. 105). Rescued by the Union army, Iola nurses wounded soldiers for the Union army camp, with her “gentle ministrations” (HARPER, 2010, p.40), becoming an indispensable helper for the soldiers. When the war is over, Iola and Harry eventually reunite with their family. Both Leroy children embody the characteristics of ideal citizenships: Harry is a “manly and self-respecting” man and Iola, a “useful and self-reliant” woman. Much of the novel is concerned with family members searching for and finding each other, establishing happy homes, and helping raise strong future leaders and citizenships. The second novel to be investigated, throughout my work, is Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900). The plot of Contending Forces is divided into the antebellum and postbellum periods, which means the periods before and after the Civil War respectively. The former, set in the 1780s, brings Charles Montfort, his “dream of a beauty” wife- Grace and his two sons: Charles, Jr. and Jesse. They are on their way from Bermuda to America. As soon as they get to the new land, Anson Pollack and his slaves, Hank Davis and Bill Sampson, suspect Grace contains black blood, “Thar’s too much cream color in the face and too little blud seen under the skin fer a genooine white ‘ooman” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 41). Fearing that Charles will emancipate his slaves and driven by a fiery jealousy for the Montfort fortune, Pollack and Davis kill Charles and place Grace and the kids into slavery. Grace is put on the whipping post and, unwilling to submit to Pollack, she commits suicide, while her children, Charles and Jesse, later escape to England and New England respectively. Jesse’s descendants take place in the narrative. His grandchildren, Will and Dora, live with their Ma Smith, who runs a Boston boarding house. Then, we are introduced to the “beautiful, mysterious, and very light-skinned” Sappho Clark and the “unscrupulous” John Langley, Dora’s fiancé. Sappho runs away after John threatens to reveal she was raped by her white uncle and bore a child as a result, Alphonse. In order to take her as a mistress, Langley blackmails her, just as his granduncle Pollack had sought to “win” Grace Montfort. Will, who is in love with Sappho, tries to find her and after three years they manage to be together again. The present thesis was developed into four chapters. In the first chapter, “Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces: Historical Contextual and Racial Issues,” I will cover some of the degrading systems against black people, that denied African Americans’ humanity. Throughout Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and 15
South, writing on slavery, its abolition and its aftermath of violence in their contemporary period, both authors, to our contemporary eyes and using contemporary theoretical basis demonstrate their readers how the revision of history through writing is able to generate a revolution, allowing black women inscribe their histories, enabling them to voice their experiences; thus, enabling them able to play the main role of their own hi(her)stories. This understanding leads us to the perception of the power of their words at their time. Moreover, I will deal with some authors who have been trying to work around possible definitions of what it means to be black in the United States of America as a crucial issue of empowerment for African Americans. “Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, Or, Shadows Uplifted: Giving Birth to African- American Womanhood” is the title of the second chapter, in which in order to guide my discussion on Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, Or, Shadows Uplifted, I have selected three major themes for the development of the work: Frances E. W. Harper’s life and her literary legacy; the use of the theme of motherhood for the advancement of black community, mainly of black women; showing maternity as an expression of freedom from white racist beliefs about black women, which were spread during the slavery period; and the importance of literature as a means of building strong female character to advance the notion of womanhood among African American women. In the third chapter, “Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces: Lynching and the Uplift of African American People,” I have elected three main themes to work on: Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s life and her legacy; analysis of the use of the literary space in order to denounce the major act of violence spread after the Civil War against black people – lynching, therefore I will aspire to portray the act of writing as an act of resistance as well as an uplifting act; and the role of black women as the responsible for the uplift of the black community as a whole. “Literary Representation in Iola and in Contending Forces: Bringing New Discourses in African American Literature” is the title of the fourth chapter, in which I will discuss Literary Representation as a means to enable Black people, mainly women, to create alternative discourses in which they might raise their voices, the fighting against the stereotypes spread in order to control black people under slavery and Civil War periods; and a comparative reading through the female protagonists of Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, Or, Shadows Uplifted and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. While researching for the present thesis I could “hear” W.E.B. Du Bois “saying”: “the slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved again toward slavery” (Du 16
BOIS, 1992, p. 30). Therefore, as a black woman after having read “my two authors”, I committed myself to bring visibility to these black women who fought against invisibility. Frances Harper’s and Pauline Hopkins’s works for brighter coming days undoubtedly had special impact on subsequent times in African American history as well as on American present days. Thus, I may say that, though I did not fight in the field for freedom, I am now writing for their freedom in order to free the brave history of such brave people, the Black people, and such brilliant authors: Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins. My thesis has a special call… For those who work for brighter coming days.
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1 FRANCES HARPER’S IOLA LEROY AND PAULINE HOPKINS’S CONTENDING FORCES: HISTORICAL CONTEXTUAL AND RACIAL ISSUES
[F]or the civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded Pauline Hopkins
‘[S]lavery is a sword that cut both ways. If it wrongs the negro, it also curses the white man. But we are in it, and what can we do?’ ‘Get out of it as quickly as possible’ Frances Harper
The two authors chosen in the present thesis bring to the pages of their narratives the atrocious system, which left deep wounds in black society – the slavery system. Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900) can be read as a site of claiming voice to the oppressed as well as a site of fighting against historical oblivion. The historical account presented in both novels might be associated with the relation between representation and imaginary discourse, as argued by Hayden White in his Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory:
One can produce an imaginary discourse about real events that may not be less “true” for being imaginary. It all depends upon how one construes the function of the faculty of imagination in human nature. The same is true with respect to narrative representations of reality, especially when, as historical discourses, these representations are of the “human past” (WHITE, 1992, p. 57).
Frances Harper’s and Pauline Hopkins’s novels bring a new reading of history, giving voice to Blacks, enabling them breaking up with pre-established history. Taking into consideration the importance of giving voice to the oppressed people in order to denounce the atrocities of slavery, Pauline Hopkins in Contending Forces as well as Frances Harper in Iola Leroy made use of their novels as a tool to criticize the dominants and pointed out that: Every day the terrible things done to slaves were becoming public talk, until the best England humanitarians, searching for light upon the subject, became sick at heart over the discoveries that they made and were led to declare the principle: “The air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 17).
Tales of cruelties practiced upon the helpless chattels were continually reaching the ears of the British public […] For instance: causing a child to whip his mother until the blood ran; if a slave looked his master in the face, his limbs were broken; women in the first stages of their accouchement, upon refusing to work, were placed in the treadmill, where terrible things happened, too dreadful to relate (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 19).
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‘They eat the meat and give us the bones, Eat the cherries and give us the stones’ (HARPER, 2010, p. 23).
I could never understand how a cultured white man could have his own children enslaved. […] it has been a puzzle to me how a civilized man could drag his own children, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, down to the position of social outcasts, abject slaves, and political pariahs (HARPER, 2010, p. 67-8).
The concept of black man as inferior was attuned with nearly every proposal of causality within scientific and religious spheres in the eighteenth century. This notion had as its main purpose the disenfranchisement and controlling of black people. Making use of irony, the African American writer Pauline Hopkins in her novel Contending Forces, illustrates this notion when she states that:
Apologists tell us as an excuse for the barbarous practice of slavery, that it was a god- like institution for the spread of the gospel of the meek and lowly carpenter’s son, and that the African savage brought to these shores in chains was a most favored being (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 41-2).
Harper concerned about the relevance of transforming the idea of inferiority into an optimistic discourse, in chapter XXIV (“Northern Experience”), in a conversation between Iola and her uncle Robert, the author states that:
After the store was closed, the girls had an animated discussion, which resulted in the information being sent to Mr. Cohen that Iola was a colored girl, and that they protested against her being continued in his employ. Mr. Cohen yielded to the pressure, and informed Iola that her services were no longer needed. […] ‘Well, uncle,’ [Iola said], ‘I feel out of heart. It seems as if the prejudice pursues us through every avenue of life, and assigns us the lowest places.’ ‘That is so,’ replied Robert, thoughtfully. ‘And yet I am determined, […] ‘to win for myself a place in the fields of labor. I have heard a place in New England, and I mean to try for it, even if I only stay a few months.’ ‘Well, if you will go, say nothing about your color.’ ‘Uncle Robert, I see no necessity for proclaiming that the fact on the house-top. Yet I am resolved that nothing shall tempt me to deny it. The best blood in my veins is African blood, and I am not ashamed of it’1 (HARPER, 2010, p. 162).
To a certain extent, the stereotypes about Africans and the African continent that prevailed during this period were unquestioned truths which were created to justify the unjustifiable. Concerning this attitude, critics such as Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall and Edward Said discuss in their works the influence of such stereotypes and their consequences to the American society, mainly the effects among African American people. Moreover, according to the prominent literary critic and activist Said, these unquestioned truths were “widely accepted notions and they helped fuel the imperial acquisition of territories in Africa throughout the nineteenth century” (SAID, 1994, p. xiv). Said goes even deeper and argues that:
1 My highlighting. 19
Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination: the vocabulary of classic nineteenth-century imperial culture is plentiful with words and concepts like ‘inferior’ or ‘subject races’, ‘subordinate peoples,’ ‘dependency,’ ‘expansion,’ and ‘authority’(SAID, 1994, p. 9).
In addition, reinforcing the idea of race, as an apparatus of power, created to place people under control, Gates observes that:
The sense of difference defined in popular usages of the term race has been used both to describe and inscribe differences of language, belief system, artistic tradition, ‘gene pool’, and all sorts of supposedly ‘natural’ attributes […] The relation between ‘racial character’ and these sorts of ‘characteristics’ has been inscribed as through tropes of race, lending to even supposedly ‘innocent’ descriptions of cultural tendencies and differences the sanction of God, biology, or the natural order. ‘Race consciousness’, Zora Neale Hurston wrote, ‘is a deadly explosive on the tongues of men’ (GATES, 1993, p. 49).
Another relevant instrument adopted by the dominants in order to control people was the categorization of people into races. Professor, and cultural critic Henry Louis Gates Jr., in the introduction of his ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference in Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes, reveals how race has been "written" into existence as a means of keeping racially marked populations in subordinate positions. Moreover, Gates, in his Loose Canons, argues that:
When we speak of the “white race” or the “black race”, the “Jewish race” or the “Aryan race,” we speak in misnomers, biologically, and in metaphors, more generally. Nevertheless, our conversations are replete with usages of race which have their sources in the dubious pseudo-science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (GATES, 1993, p. 48).
Discussing about the necessity of sharing and defining people into race, the philosopher and critic Charles W. Mills demonstrates concern with the matter of race. Since race has been recognized to be fiction, which might serve to reinforce systems of subordination and inequity fixed by the white people, in his Blackness Visible, Mills claims that: […] race has correlated strongly with civic standing, culture, citizenship, privilege or subordination, and even designations of personhood. One’s racial category has been taken as saying a great deal about what and who one is, more fundamentally (MILLS, 1998, p. 45).
Furthermore, according to Mills, the idea that there are biological differences among races reinforces racism worldwide. He asserts that: For the past few hundred years, realism has been the dominant position on race; that is, people have believed that there are natural biological differences among races and that these differences run deeper than mere phenotypical traits (MILLS, 1998, p. 46).
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Representations of race in literature had throughout the nineteenth century (and debatably, throughout the present days) required to "naturalize" and therefore legitimate the racially marked body as essentially or irreducibly inferior. "Race, in these usages," Gates writes, "pretends to be an objective term of classification, when in fact it is a dangerous trope" (GATES, 1998, p.5). Concerning the relevance on the issue, Mills assumes that, “Race has not traditionally been seen as an interesting or worthy subject of investigation for white Western philosophers, though it has, of course, been the central preoccupation of black intellectuals in the West” (MILLS, 1998, p.41). The degrading slavery system, which aimed to deny Black people humanity and to deprive them of basic rights in the United States of America, has its initial period in 1619 when a Dutch ship landed in Jamestown (Virginia) bringing inside of it approximately twenty black men, including at least three women, thus, starting up the system that flourished for more than 250 years in the United States. The Indians were on their own land, the whites were in their own European culture and the blacks had been torn from their land and culture, forced into a situation where the heritage of language, dress, custom, family relations, was bit by bit obliterated except for remnants that blacks could hold on to by total, odd persistence. Thus, according to Howard Zinn, in his A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, the vulnerability of black people made enslavement easier (ZINN, 2010, p. 23-39). Although the United States of America was a nation conceived in liberty, as Eric Foner points out in his The Story of American Freedom (FONER, 1999, p. 3), its slave population experienced the institutions of politics and the law quite differently from white Americans. Before the law, slaves were property who had virtually no legal rights. The essence of slavery was that the slave was legally a chattel, in other words, they could be bought, sold, leased and seized to satisfy an owner's debt, their family ties had no legal standing, and they could not leave the plantation or hold meetings without the permission of their owner. Therefore, slavery constituted the most impenetrable boundary of citizenship. Since the Americans worshipped liberty while they profited from slavery, we may state that contradiction, as well as racism, permeates the history of the United States. Frances Harper, fully aware of this incongruous behavior, demonstrates through Iola’s father her concern on the subject, as she highlights that,
We Americans boast of freedom, and yet here is a woman whom I love as I never loved any other human being, but both law and public opinion debar me from 21
following the inclination of my heart. She is beautiful, faithful, and pure, and yet all that society will tolerate is what I would scorn to do (HARPER, 2010, p. 60).
In a more ironic tone, Hopkins criticizes this paradoxical behavior, as she puts that: The masses of the Negro race find for employment only the most laborious work at the scantiest remuneration. A man, though a skilled mechanic, has the door of the shop closed in his face here among the descendants of the liberty-loving Puritans.2 The foreign element who come to the shore of America soon learn that there is a class which is called its inferior, and will not work in this or that business[…] (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 83).
Slavery was intimately related to the major trends as well as to the developments that we associate with American history in the first half of the nineteenth century. The country was founded on the promise of political freedom and economic wealth. Yet, as W.E. Du Bois asserts on his work Black Reconstruction in America:
From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation (Du BOIS, 1992, p. 3).
While the holding of slaves in the North decreased in the aftermath of the American Revolution3, the American South became a more entrenched, full-blown slave society. In two states, Georgia and South Carolina, slaves made up the majority of the population. In total, by the onset of the war, there were more than four million enslaved African Americans in the United States. Regarding the importance of discussing the practice and the necessity of its end, Hopkins, through her character, highlights that, “The sin of slavery was the sin of the nation, and that sin stands before us today full of menace, full of peril to the whole people” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 247). As well as Hopkins, Harper concerned about the harm of slavery for African Americans, through her character, states that:
‘Captain,’ said Robert, with a tone of bitterness in his voice, ‘what had we to be grateful for? For ages of poverty, ignorance, and slavery? I think if anybody should be grateful, it is the people who have enslaved us and lived off our labor for generations (HARPER, 2010, p. 48).
The slaves were responsible for the wealth of the dominant class in the South – the planters. Their grueling labor on the South’s plantations produced millions of pounds of cotton, rice, and tobacco, resulting in billions of dollars in profits; profits that
2 My highlighting. 3 The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America (ALLISON, Robert J. The American Revolution: A Concise History. Oxford University Press: New York, 2011). 22
ensured that the system of slavery was not going to simply cease because of the developing wage labor system in the North. Regarding the impact of slaves in the American society, Du Bois states that: […] black workers of America bent at the bottom of a growing pyramid of commerce and industry, and they not only could not be spared, if this new economic organization was to expand, but rather they became the cause of new political demands and alignments, of new dreams of power and visions of empire (Du BOIS, 1992, p. 5).
In the South, Du Bois explains that slavery shaped the entire society so that even whites who did not own slaves were dependent on the slave system for their living. Whites were employed as overseers, slave drivers, and members of the slave patrol – whose job was to catch runaway slaves. These were the conditions under which the racism of poor whites developed against black slaves. In the North, the situation was not completely different, black workers and white workers were in direct competition with one another, and this issue became an element in the drive toward Civil War. Taking into account this unfair competition, Du Bois argues that:
The Negroes worked cheaply, partly from custom, partly as their only defense against competition. The white laborers realized that Negroes were part of a group of millions of workers who were slaves by law, and whose competition kept white labor out of the work of the South and threatened its wages and stability in the North (Du BOIS, 1992, p. 19).
As soon as Abraham Lincoln of the Republican Party – the party of “free labor, free soil” as well as the party of the radical abolitionists – became president, southerners knew their ideals of turning most of the U.S. into a huge plantation would never happen. The South preempted any formal debate on the question of slavery by launching the secession crisis in 1861 – and the Civil War broke out. President Lincoln had expected a short war and had called for three-month volunteers. In July 1861, the Union army marched toward Bull Run, south of Washington, D.C., where 3,000 soldiers died; starting up what Walt Whitman called “the red business”. In April 1862, 23,000 soldiers fell near Shiloh Church in Mississippi. Two months after it, in the Seven Days’ Battles, 16,000 Yankees and 20,000 Rebels joined the casualty lists. In July, a second meeting at Bull Run resulted in 25,000 victims. At Antietam, the following month, 21,000 more were killed or wounded. In December, the Battle of Fredericksburg left 15,000 additional victims. By 1865, 618,000 American men had died, and hundreds of thousands more had been scarred and maimed (CARROLL; NOBLE, 1985, p. 213). 23
As the casualty figures mounted and the Union army seemed incapable of achieving a decisive victory, dissatisfaction with the war spread through the North. Lincoln was condemned by the Democrats for waging an unconstitutional war against political self-determination, more radical Republicans chafed at the President’s restrain. When General John C. Frémont, once the Republican candidate for the Presidency, ordered the emancipation of slaves owned by Missouri rebels, Lincoln, fearing that the border states might be inflamed to desert the Union, countermanded the order, thus, reflecting Lincoln’s pre-eminent interest in preserving the Union. By 1862, however, the inadequacy of the military effort, together with Republicans threats to create a more radical third party, would lead Lincoln to move in a bold direction. Then, in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln announced that “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” Lincoln, following the Union victory at Antietam, issued a preliminary proclamation announcing his intention to free all the slaves in the areas of rebellion on January 1, 1863, arguing that this policy would accelerate a military victory. “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed”, he maintained; “without slavery it could not continue” (CARROLL; NOBLE, 1985, p. 216-17). Bearing in mind the importance of this event, Frances Harper, through her fictionalized character, points out:
[...] one of the officers told me yesterday that the President had set us free, and that as many wanted to join the army could come along to the camp […] Now, you can take your bag and baggage, and get out of here as soon as you choose (HARPER, 2010, p. 38).
The decision to allow black soldiers, like emancipation itself, constituted an irreversible alteration of the war effort. Despite their enthusiasm and proven bravery in the field, however, black troops remained distrusted and unwelcome allies who received the worst details and the riskiest assignments. Still, the enlistment of black soldiers and, more relevant, their competence with arms provided a powerful argument to accept black citizenship in the years after emancipation (CARROLL; NOBLE, 1985, p. 218). Or rather, as Harper states, “Captain, these battles put them on their mettle. They have been so long taught that they are nothing and nobody, that they seem glad to prove they are something and somebody” (HARPER, 2010, p. 43). The departure of a black regiment from New York City in March 1864 represented the transformation. In the summer of the previous year, a predominantly 24
Irish mob had protested federal conscription laws by attacking the black population, lasting four days of looting, burning and lynching indiscriminately. The order of the city was restored by the arrival of seasoned Union troops. Less than a year later, the New York Times reported the farewell parade of black soldiers:
everywhere saluted with waving handkerchiefs, with descending flowers, and with acclamations… of countless beholders […] It is only by such occasions that we can at all realize the prodigious revolution which the public mind everywhere is experiencing. Such developments are infallible tokens of a new epoch (CARROLL; NOBLE, 1985, p. 219-20).
According to Foner, in his The Story of American Freedom, the enlistment of 200,000 black men in the Union army during the second half of the war placed black citizenship on the postwar agenda (FONER, 1999, p. 97). Moreover, the enlistment in the Union Army was the only possible route to freedom. Francis Harper enables us to verify part of the aforementioned argument inside her narrative, “verbalizing” it through one of her characters, “‘Well, boys” […] how many of you are ready to join the army and fight for your freedom”’ (HARPER, 2010, p. 38). Rather as Frederick Douglass – a former slave and at that point one of the most prominent black leaders in America – regarding the importance of black men in the Union armed forces, declared that:
Every consideration of justice, humanity and sound policy confirms the wisdom of calling upon black men […] to take up arms in behalf of their country […] “We are ready and would go, counting ourselves happy in being permitted to serve and suffer for the cause of freedom and free institutions (DOUGLASS apud CARROLL; NOBLE, 1985, p. 218).
The fact of Black people being allowed to take part into the Civil War is so fascinating and relevant to African Americans history that in 1989, the film director Edward Zwick, launched to the world the heroic movie, Glory. The film recounts the history of the US Civil War’s first all-black volunteer company, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, and their white leader Robert Gould Shaw, fighting prejudices of both his own Union army and the Confederates. Glory is winner of three 1989 Film Academy Awards, having on its cast: Denzel Washington (best supporting actor), Morgan Freeman, and Matthew Broderick among others. Frances Harper also mentions the relevant event in her Iola Leroy: […] Oh, I heard a soldier,’ said Captain Sybil, ‘say, when the colored men were being enlisted, that he would break his sword and resign. But he didn’t do either. After Colonel Shaw led his charge at Fort Wagner, and died in the conflict, he got bravely over his prejudices. The conduct of the colored troops there and elsewhere has done much to turn public opinion in their favor. I suppose any white soldier would rather have his black substitute receive the bullets rather than himself’ (HARPER, 2010, p. 46).
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To a certain extent, the enlistment of Black soldiers in the Army became the watershed event into the American Civil War, mainly into African American history. Moreover, the military service of black men altered the clash between North and South from a war for the Union into a war for freedom. The Civil War, which in the words of Charles Frances Adams, Jr. – colonel in the Union Army – symbolized to all its participants, “the Carnival of Death”, lasted from 1861 until 1865 (CARROL; NOBLE, 1985, p. 213). It was the deadliest war of the nineteenth century with more than 650,000 men killed in a revolutionary effort to uproot a backward, stagnant, and dreadful system based on the forced labor of four million black people. The slaves themselves played a decisive role, turning the militarily and politically drifting North into a force of liberation. From the Civil War emerged the principle of a national citizenship whose members enjoyed the equal protection of the laws, regardless of race. Professor Eric Foner in his Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 states that “The slaves saw the war as a heralding the long awaited end of bondage” (FONER, 2002, p. 3). Moreover, many former slaves saw freedom as “an end to the separation of families, the abolition of punishment by lash, and the opportunity to educate their children” (FONER, 2002, p. 78). According to Foner, above all, there was the desire for independence of white control, for autonomy both as individuals and as members of a community itself being transformed as a result of emancipation. Before the war, free blacks had created a network of churches, schools and mutual benefit societies, while slaves had forged a semiautonomous culture centered on the family and church. With the end of the war, these institutions were consolidated, expanded, and liberated from white supervision (FONER, 2002, p. 78). It is relevant to bring to the center of the story in this thesis the fact that, during the Civil War, women literally fought for freedom. In 1849, after escaping slavery into which she had been born, Harriet Tubman returned to Maryland to rescue her family. Slowly one group at a time, she brought relatives out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of slaves to freedom. In 1850, when the Southern dominated, the Congress passed the Fugitive Law, requiring law officials in free states to aid efforts to recapture slaves, Tubman guided fugitives farther north into Canada, where slavery was prohibited. When the American Civil War started up, she began working for the Union as a cook and a nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. Tubman led as many as 800 soldiers in military raids, while other women disguised as men fought alongside the 26
soldiers. Still others worked as army nurses, cooks, and laundresses (BEAULIEU, 2006, p. 554). Following the period immediately after the Civil War, there is the time known as Reconstruction (1865-1877). According to Eric Foner, Reconstruction witnessed the rise of a new, segregated urban geography: the main town, containing the finest structures, was populated by whites, while the “free town”, consisting chiefly of wretched log cabins. On that account, the urban migration slowed dramatically after 1870 and the proportion of Southern blacks living on the cities remained at around 9 percent. Above all the motivations for black mobility, none was more poignant than the effort to gather families that had been separated during slavery (FONER, 2002, p. 82). During Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act (1866) enfranchised African- Americans. They made remarkably political progress, gaining the right to vote and to become governors, senators and judges. In addition, many important African-American institutions, such as churches, colleges, business and organizations were established. Taking into account the importance of the role of these churches, for instance, Hopkins says that, “The Sisters of the Holy Family always have representatives at the various railroad stations in New Orleans. These Sisters not only solicit alms, but look out for friendless or unfortunate colored women” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 348). Between 1870 and 1880, 23 Black colleges were founded, even though few black people could afford to attend them. Since racism and political deals restored anti-Black forces to power, this period did not last. Black freedom was met white violence in the form of race riots and individual attacks on black population; therefore freedom for many blacks remained elusive. Black women, as hard-won freedoms disappeared, organized clubs and associations, which included caring associations, mutual aid societies, local literary societies and several church organizations in order to benefit the race and offer themselves as ambassadors of the black community to white America. These women identified education and literacy as the keys to achieving success and to maintaining their freedom. Regarding the importance of education as well as literacy as a means of uplift, Harper) claims through Marie that, “when I see what other women are doing in the fields of literature and art, I cannot help thinking an amount of brain power has been held in check among us” (HARPER, 2010, p. 58). Like Harper, Hopkins through her character, Mrs. Willis, points out the importance of the formation of the above 27
mentioned institutions as a key to the benefit of black women, as we might conclude in the following passage:
The advancement of the colored woman should be the new problem in the woman question that should float her upon its tide into the prosperity she desired. […] they yet bore glorious fruit in the formation of clubs of colored women banded together for charity, for study, for every reason under God’s glorious heavens that can better the condition of mankind (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 147).
Reconstruction ended in 1877, and the federal government and Freedman’s Bureau withdrew from the South, leaving black people with no protection or resources to defeat the rising tide of white racism. In 1865, a violent anti black organization – the Ku Klux Klan was formed in order to make the black population give up their rights and live in a state of fear, oppression and submission. The Klan made lynching as much a part of its organization as the hoods and burning crosses. Women and children were not excluded from Ku Klux Klan violence, as they were also lynched (BEAULIEU, 2006, p. 554). Regarding the importance of bringing to the center of history the practice of lynching against African Americans, Hopkins points out that, “Lynching does not stop crime; it is but a subterfuge for killing men. It is a good excuse, to use a rough expression, to ‘go a-guning for niggers.’ Lynching was instituted to crush the manhood of the enfranchised black (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 270). At the World’s Congress of Representative Women in 1893, Frances Harper, fully aware about the importance of dealing with lynching, during her speech “Woman’s Political Future,” claimed that:
What we need to-day is not simply more voters, but better voters. To-day there are red-handed men in our Republic, who walk unwhipped of justice, who richly deserve to exchange the ballot of the freeman for the wristlets of the felon; brutal and cowardly men, who torture, burn and lynch their fellow-men, men who defenseless should be their best defense and their weakness an ensign of protection (LOGAN, 1995, p. 44).
The reflection of the long and brutal experience with slavery, with the violence established by vigilante groups, such as Klu Klux Klan; and later with the powerful segregation system, which arose following the collapse of slavery, known as Jim Crow4, produced the peculiar definition of being black in the United States. In other words, if one’s model of discrimination is slavery and Jim Crow, this “one” will find it more difficult to “see” the American Dream come true. Furthermore, as Pauline Hopkins puts it, “The fruit of slavery was poisonous and bitter” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 42). The social scientist F. James Davis, in the epilogue to the tenth anniversary edition of his Who is
4 Jim Crow segregation was a systematic disenfranchisement of blacks, thousands of unpunished lynchings, inferior houses and education, pervasive job discrimination, and a color line running through most everyday transactions (separate and inferior dining, traveling, and entertainment facilities) and extending into death (MILLS, 1998, p. 69-70). 28
Black?, goes even further when he emphasizes that, “A social construction created to support slavery and solidified to enforce Jim Crow segregation is incongruous in a nation dedicated to liberty and equal opportunity for all” (DAVIS, 2005, p. 200). The nation’s definition of being black is inextricably woven into the history of the United States and emerged in the American South. The so important and relevant definition is the “one-drop rule”, which means that a single drop of “black blood” or black ancestry makes a person a black (DAVIS, 2005, p. 5). Frances Harper in her Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted, through a conversation between her characters – Eugene Leroy and Alfred Lorraine – respectively, comments about it: ‘“Oh, come now; she isn’t much of a negro.”’/ ‘“It doesn’t matter, however. One drop of negro blood in her veins curses all the rest”’ (HARPER, 2010, p. 60). It is pertinent to say that no other ethnic group in the North American nation, including those with evidently non-caucasoid features, is defined and counted according to one-drop rule. As Davis asserts in his work, “Americans in general, however, while finding other ways to discriminate against immigrant groups, have rejected the application of the drastic one-drop rule to all groups but blacks” (DAVIS, 2005, p. 13). According to Charles W. Mills in his Blackness Visible, the stimulus for using the one- drop rule in order to establish black racial membership is to uphold the subordination of the products of “miscegenation” – the mulattoes/ browns – maintaining them through constant boundary against their contestation in order to “seek inclusion in the privilege race” (MILLS, 1998, p. 48; 77). In the seventeenth century, there was a great wave of miscegenation, which took place in the Chesapeake area of the colonies of Maryland and Virginia, between white indentured servants and slave and free blacks (WILLIAMSON, 1980, p. 6-14). White females and males were both involved in the mixing, and both whites and blacks, females and males alike, were castigated by whipping or public humiliation when interracial sexual contacts were perceived. Yet public condemnation failed to prevent illicit contacts from becoming widespread, and in some cases intermarriage occurred. Thus, most of the white parents of the first mulattoes born in the United States were from the underclass. Despite the fact that many of the resulting mulattoes were free, especially those born to white mothers, they were generally despised and treated as blacks. Regarding the importance of portraying the interracial contact and the way society dealt with it, the writers I have chosen to work with, the African Americans 29
Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins, throughout their novels, bring us some instances which clearly clarify it:
“Have you heard the rumors about my wife being of African descent?” Monfort asked, coming very close to Pollock, as though afraid the very air would hear him. There are threats, too, against my life because of my desire to free my slaves. “Nonsense!” exclaimed Pollock. “I have heard the rumors about Mrs. Monfort, but that is nothing – nothing but the malice of some malicious, jealous woman (HOPKINS, 1991, p.52).
Frances Harper, in a more ironic way, through one of her characters, criticizes the society and their incompatible reaction in relation to the fact of miscegenation, as she puts, ‘“Isn’t funny,” said Robert, “how these white folks look down on colored people, an’ then mix up with them?”’ (HARPER, 2010, p. 30). At this period, mainly in New Orleans and the Charleston areas, mulattoes/ browns had an in-between status, in opposition to those of unmixed blacks. Southern Louisiana and South Carolina became major exceptions to the one - drop rule as miscegenation came to be accepted and free mulattoes developed an alliance with whites. Later, during the height of the plantation era (after 1720), sexual intercourses became frequent and commonly involved white male exploitation of black females, recurrently under threats of violence or other punishments. In general, the master-slave etiquette allowed white males to have interracial sexual intercourses in order to remain in total control of the slaves. On the other hand, intimacy between white women and black men was not tolerated, since a mixed child in a white family threatened the slave system. Therefore, long before slavery ended, miscegenation had been occurring in mulatto- African black and mulatto-mulatto unions, and often American Indian ancestry was also involved; as a result, genes from white and black populations were mixed. By the end of slavery, the visible traits of the population defined by the one-drop rule as American blacks demonstrated a very wide and continuous variation from unmixed black to white (DAVIS, 2005, p. 47-8). Although strong forces motivated Black Belt plantation whites to classify a racially mixed child as a black slave, many white owners and other white relatives of the mixed child were apt to grant special treatment when they could do so with impunity. The principal competition to the one-drop rule remained in New Orleans and in the Charleston areas. At the height of the plantation era, most of the mulattoes remained slaves blending with the African blacks and then “whitening” the slave population. In the 1850s, there was the great watershed in the United Sates, the fears of abolition and 30
slave insurrections resulted in growing hostility toward miscegenation, mulattoes, concubinage, passing, manumission, and of the implicit rule allowing free mulattoes a special in-between status in the lower South. In brief, that is the main reason to explain the powerful support of the one-drop rule in order to defend slavery in the South (DAVIS, 2005, p.49). As a result of the growing rejection by whites of the tie with mulattoes, an alteration was created concerning the identity of free mulattoes, who initiated to be after coalitions with Blacks in general. The Civil War had a decisive role; the war accelerated the alienation of mulattoes from whites and made Southern whites to see all Blacks as enemies. After the end of the war, during the period known as Reconstruction, mulattoes emerged as leaders of blacks in the South, and notably as teachers, missionaries, relief administrators, and legislators. Thus, having no actual option, the mulattoes themselves were progressively accepting the one-drop rule. Moreover, despite the temporary abolition of the anti-miscegenation laws, black and white sexual intercourse apparently declined reaching a low point during this period. Some intimate contacts between white males and black females continued, but in the midst of all the chaos provoked by Klu Klux Klan and other vigilante groups; there was far more mulatto-mulatto and mulatto- unmixed black miscegenation than that involving whites. In the decades following the Civil War, the one-drop rule was strongly supported in the North and in the South by blacks and whites, as well as by the mulattoes (DAVIS, 2005, p. 49-50). During the first decades of the twentieth, the one-drop rule became solidified in the United States. Concerning the relevance of narrating these events, Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins, fully aware of absences, especially the absence of the black experience, throughout their novels, both authors inscribe in their narratives prominent passages in order to advocate uplift and respect for African Americans and, to a certain extent to bring us part of the unwritten history and stories, as we may clearly observe: ‘Johnson,’ said a young officer, Captain Sybil, of Maine, who had become attached to Robert, ‘what is the use of your saying you’re a colored man, when you are as white as I am, and as brave a man as there is among us. Why not quit this company, and take your place in the army just the same as a white man? I know your chances for promotion would be better’ ‘Captain, you may doubt my word, but to-day I would rather be a lieutenant in my company than a captain in yours’ ‘I don’t understand you.’ ‘Well, Captain, when a man’s been colored all his life it comes a little hard for him to get white all at once. Were I to try it, I would feel like a cat in a strange garret. Captain, I think my place is where I am most needed. You do not need me in your ranks, and my company does. They are excellent fighters, but they need a leader […] ‘Yes, I have often wondered at their bravery’ (HARPER, 2010, p. 42).
‘Agitation will do much’ […] 31
‘It gave us freedom; it will give us manhood. The peace, dignity and honor of this nation rises or falls with the Negro. Frederic Douglas once said: ‘Ultimately this nation will be composite. There is a strong demand – a growing demand – for a government capable of protecting all its citizenships – rich and poor, white and black – alike’ The causes for such a government still exist. It remains to be seen if the prophecy will be fulfilled (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 300).
Since the history of the United States was documented in pages written by white historians, early-nineteenth-century African-American writers, mainly women writers, faced the difficult task of moving away from official discourse, therefore moving toward a history that would present the necessity of as well as the means for the liberation of the oppressed and the silenced – the Black people. Regarding the importance of creating a counter history, Frances Harper in her novel debates that:
Miss Leroy, out of the race must come its own thinkers and writers. Authors belonging to the white race have written good racial books, for which I am deeply grateful, but it seems to be almost impossible for a white man to put himself completely in our place. No man can feel the iron which enters another man’s soul (HARPER, 2010, p. 203).
Bearing in mind the relevant importance of the creation of a counter history produced by women, the feminist professor and, writer Adrienne Rich discusses, in her article entitled “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision”, the importance of writing as well of knowing the past in order “not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (RICH, 1972, p. 19). In addition, Rich discussing the importance of revision writing, mainly for women, claims that, “Re-vision–the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction–is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival’ (RICH, 1972, p. 18). Furthermore, the literary production of African-American writers cannot be excluded from the historical events and traumas experienced throughout their history. On the account of historical learning process and its relation to present as well as to past, Edward Hallett Carr in his History, Science, and Morality argues that: Learning from history is never simply a one-way process. To learn about the present in the light of the past means also to learn about the past in the light of the present. The function of history is to promote a profounder understanding of both past and present through the interrelation between them (CARR, 1961, p. 86).
Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted and Hopkins’s Contending Forces may be read as a site of claiming voice to the experience of the “Other.” Moreover, it is clear to notice Harper’s and Hopkins’s attempt in order to fight against historical oblivion. The Argentinean professor, and critic Beatriz Sarlo, taking into consideration the importance of literature in order to bring us new readings of the past, new possibilities, 32
believes that she has found in literature deeper “truths” than real life has presented her. As Sarlo expresses it in her Tiempo pasado: cultura de la memoria e giro subjetivo:Una Discusión:
If I had to tell for myself, I would tell that I found in literature [...] the most accurate images of horror of the current past and its texture of ideas and experience [...] Literature, certainly, does not dissolve all the problems, nor can explain them, but in literature a narrator always reflects from the outside of the experience, as if the human beings might take over the nightmare and not only experience it5 (SARLO, 2005, p. 163, 166).
Although women, whether African, American, European, or Asian share an identity with their male fellow citizens, they also differ from them, since they have an identity of their own. Women, like men, act in response to the surges of history, but their responses are unique. Rather as Bert J. Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin, in their Black Women in Nineteenth Century American Life, elucidate: “Omission of woman’s role and woman’s story shrivels the evidence at hand for analysis and dilutes the full validity of the segments presently available. “Neglect of the history of black women […] is a crucial instance of distortion” (LOEWENBERG; BOGIN, 1996, p.3-4). It is relevant to mention that taken together, Harper and Hopkins go deep inside the wounds of the North American society; both authors retell the stories in an attempt of redefining history. Beyond, both of them, bravely and relevantly, “uncover” (hi)stories which were kept “in silence” in an attempt of hiding what was shameful into a society that deals, in a incompatible way, with liberty and racism. As the theorist
Hannah Arendt asserts that: We can no longer afford to take that which was good and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain (ARENDT, p. ix, 1994).
Indeed, throughout their novels, since Frances Harper and Hopkins interweave history and fiction as they remember the black people sufferings under slavery time, Civil War and Reconstruction attempts, they are producing alternative discourses, in order to enable us new readings of the nineteenth century, bringing us the African- American discourse. Moreover, their engagement with the past indicates they were fully aware that the past is “not something to be escaped, avoided, or controlled […] The past is something with which you must come to the terms and such a confrontation involves
5 My translation. 33
an acknowledgement of limitation as well as power” (HUTCHEON, 2002, p.55). Reinforcing the idea defended by Stuart Hall, in his essay Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities, that the past is always retold, reinvented; moreover, it has to be “narrativized.” And since we go to it through history, memory, desire, past is not a literal fact (HALL, 1997, p. 58). The following chapter presents the African American writer, Frances E. W. Harper, and her literary legacy. Throughout the chapter, the reader verifies an analysis of Harper’s novel Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted, in which motherhood and womanhood are the major themes presented and explored.
34
2 FRANCES HARPER’S IOLA LEROY, OR, SHADOWS UPLIFTED: GIVING BIRTH TO AFRICAN - AMERICAN WOMANHOOD
If I saw young girls from their mothers’ arms Bartered and sold for their youthful charms, My eye would flash with a mournful flame, My death-paled cheek grow (sic) red with shame […] I ask no monument, proud and high, To arrest the gaze of the passers-by; All that my yearning spirit craves, Is bury me not in a land of slaves. 6 Frances E. W. Harper
In the previous chapter, the reader was presented to a bunch of oppressive systems elaborated by the dominants as a means to control African American people. Therefore, the reader could “witness” the brutal experiences faced by the black people during antebellum and postbellum periods in the United States. The present chapter aims at demonstrating how Frances E. W. Harper, throughout Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted, made use of the theme of Black Motherhood in order to move away from the white racist beliefs about black women, which were wickedly defined within the context of slavery. Moreover, the current chapter aspires to demonstrate how Harper’s narrative is an attempt to portray motherhood as a crucial tool for the uplift of the black community, mainly of the Black women. According to Professor Carla L. Peterson, a considerable number of black women, throughout the nineteenth century, traveled in the mid-Atlantic, midwestern, and northeastern states, claiming for their rights to lecture, to preach the gospel, to write on issues as religious evangelicism, moral reform, abolitionism, temperance, and women’s rights. These women thought of themselves as “doers of the word”. Accordingly, Peterson declares that: In invoking themselves as such, these women recognized the extent to which their efforts to ‘elevate the race’ and achieve ‘racial uplift’ lay not only in their engagement in specific political and social activities but also in their faith in performative power of the word – both spoken and written (PETERSON, 1998, p. 3).
Furthermore, Peterson asserts that activists such as Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, Nancy Prince, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Forten, among others, “speaking and writing constituted a form of doing, of social action continuous with their social, political, and cultural work” (PETERSON, 1998, p. 3).
6 The quotation chosen was taken from Frances E. W. Harper’s poem entitled “Bury Me In A Free Land”, which will be full presented in the appendix of the present work. 35
Discussing the nineteenth century in the United Sates also means talking about the African American writer, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who was the “foremost intellectual who both preceded and shaped this period” (WALLINGER, 2011, p. 193). Harper spoke to North America about North America – its problems, its evils and its urgencies; and against a background of oppressive legislation throughout the country; she took part in nearly every aspect of democratic reform, such as black rights, women’s rights and human rights. As we may verify in Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, “Just as nineteenth-century America shaped the life and works of Frances Watkins Harper, she helped to shape it as a nation” (HILL, 1997, p. 345). Furthermore, Harper’s vast quantity prose includes essays, letters, short stories and novels, in which she emphasized her major subject concerns, which were race, religion, and reform. Frances Harper’s works became “the most valuable, single poetic record of the African-American race during the turbulent antebellum period” (HILL, 1997, p. 345). Since Frances Harper had been born into an eloquent and well-respected free black family, she could have chosen to evade many of distressing realities that restricted the lives of the less fortunate members of her race, the African-Americans. However, the author chose not to do so. Harper had in mind that her personal survival and interests were inextricably linked with the survival and well-being of the larger society and that “confrontation, not silence, was the way to mental, if not physical, health”, so she gave up “her small but real claim to a life of relative leisure and privacy” and became “not only the most popular African-American writer of the nineteenth century, but also one of the most important women in the United Sates history” (FOSTER, 1990, p.3-4). Frances E. Watkins Harper, an only child of free parents, was born in September 24, 1825, in Maryland. The information about Frances Harper’s first twenty-five years is particularly sparse. One of the most notable omissions concerns Harper’s parents, since there are no records of their names. Throughout the list of books in which the research about Harper’s life was based on – A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E.W. Harper 1825- 1911, Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life, among others – most of these sources report that her mother died when Harper was three years old and that she was raised until she was thirteen by her aunt Henrietta and her inspirational uncle, the Reverend William Watkins, who was a self-educated man involved in the abolitionist movement, an habitual contributor to papers, and who ran a school for free black children. 36
The William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth was very well known for its emphasis upon the classics, biblical studies and elocution. Moreover, the academy was so regarded that slave owners enrolled their favored children, and among its students were numerous of the most outstanding public servants and speakers in the United States (FOSTER, 1990, p. 7). Needless to say, the possible explanation for Harper’s engagement with abolitionism and other social welfare crusades, her intimacy with classical and Christian mythology, and her reputation for oratory was the result of the crucial influence of her uncle Watkins. The influential abolitionist, writer, and businessman William Still edited and included much of Frances Harper’s correspondence in his broad and substantial historical account called The Underground Rail Road (1872). Still quotes a letter from Harper which suggests that, despite the fact she was raised by relatives, she felt deprived of familial consoles, as she puts: Have I yearned for a mother’s love? The grave was my robber. Before three years had scattered their blight around my pat, death had won my mother from me. Would the strong arm of a brother have been welcome? I was my mother’s only child (HARPER apud FOSTER, 1990, p.6).
Moreover William Still documented that when Harper was fourteen, she wrote an article that “attracted the attention of the lady” in whose family she was hired to sew and to care for children. Her employers, the Armstrongs, owned a bookstore of which Harper made use as a great opportunity (STILL apud FOSTER, 1990, p. 7-8). Frances Harper kept writing and published her works in diverse periodicals, and by 1845, her first collection of poetry and prose entitled Forest Leaves, of which no copies have survived, was composed. As Frances Harper grew into adulthood, the racial situation in the United Sates was becoming progressively more unsafe for nineteenth-century African Americans. By 1850, certainly because of the increasingly hostile environment, local officials forced William Watkins to sell his house and his school. Watkins and other members of his family decided to join the African American exodus to Canada; however, Harper, for unknown reasons, decided to go to Ohio, where she became the first female teacher at Union Seminary, a school founded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, also known as A.M.E. Church (FOSTER, 1990, p.8-9). Her passage at Union Seminary was brief, mainly because the school “was not receiving the support it had been led to expect, and its valiant faculty was struggling to educate 217 students despite the active opposition of the surrounding community” (FOSTER, 1990, p. 9). Moving on, by 1852, Harper accepted a teaching position in Little York, 37
Pennsylvania, which was considered by her, the worst experience in teaching. She was frustrated by her failure to motivate her students (FOSTER, 1990, p. 9). In 1853, a destructive law passed in Maryland, which made free blacks enter the state prone to be sold as slaves. By 1854, Harper had to move to Philadelphia, and since she lived at an Underground Railroad Station, she was able to experience the comings and goings of fugitive slaves. This occurrence became the watershed into Frances Harper’s life, since this situation encouraged her to commit herself full-time to the antislavery cause. In 1854, Frances Harper published Poems in Miscellaneous Subjects, which sold more than 10,000 copies and was reissued and reprinted several times. Besides, in September 1854, the author was engaged in the Antislavery Society of Maine as a traveling lecturer. She began to travel around a circuit that was scheduled to take her throughout the eastern states into Ohio and Canada. Lecturing was the beginning of Harper’s career and, according to Hazel V. Carby that was “a career she was to follow for the major portion of her life” (CARBY, 1989, p. 65). In addition, Frances Harper and other activists, such as William Still, worked for and financially supported the Underground Railroad, which was a network of secret routes and safe houses used by nineteenth black-slaves in the United States in order to escape to free states and also Canada. As we may verify in Writing African American Women, the Underground Railroad was “an occasionally organized, frequently serendipitous, network of assistance that enabled individuals to escape from slavery, most often traveling from the American South to the North” (BEAULIEU, 2006, p. 864). The aforementioned routes and the safe houses will be shown in the appendix of the present dissertation. In 1859, Frances Harper wrote ‘Two Offers”, which is believed to be the first short story by a black woman. On November 22, 1860, Frances Watkins after marrying Fenton Harper, then decided to retire temporarily from public life until the death of her husband four years after, on May 23, 1864. Harper gave birth to Mary Fenton about “whom there is little biographical information except that she died while still young”, as Hazel Carby states in Reconstructing Womanhood (CARBY, 1989, p. 66). Soon after her husband’s death, Frances Harper returned to full-time lecturing as an activist in the struggle to gain and maintain education and equality before the law for the freedmen. In 1871, she based herself in Philadelphia where she used to lecture at schools, churches, courthouses, and legislative halls. The year 1871 also represented the beginning of Harper’s increased literary activities, especially her poetical productions. The writer published nine volumes of verse, counting with the extended versions of Poems (1871, 1898, 1900), in which three prose essays were presented – “Christianity”, “The Colored People in America”, and “Breathing the Air of 38
Freedom”; Sketches of Southern Life (1872) and a second edition of Moses: A Story of the Nile (1889). Besides, in 1895, three smaller collections of verse (Light Beyond Darkness, The Sparrows Fall and Other Poems and The Martyr of Alabama) appeared in a larger volume entitled Offering Poems). And, in 1901, Harper published Idylls of the Bible, which was her last collection of poems (HILL, 1997, p. 347). Moreover, beyond her poetry and essays, Harper published three serialized novels, which were rediscovered in the early 1990s and all of them were published in the African Methodist Episcopal Church periodical called Christian Recorder: Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869), Sowing and Reaping: A Temperance Story (1876-1877) and Trial and Triumph (1888-1889) (GATES; HIGGINBOTHAM, 2004, p. 375). The writer’s legacy brings attention to the black female experience through the individual experience of a black woman author. Harper was fully engaged in the essential issues of her time and foreseeing the concerns of the future. Moreover, as Melba Joyce Boyd asserts in her Discarded Legacy, “What distinguishes Harper’s poetic voice is her capacity to demonstrate how racism, sexism, and classism are intricately intertwined in American culture” (BOYD, 1994, p. 14). In 1892, at sixty-seven, Frances Harper published the novel “of lasting service for the Race”, Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted, which reached a wide audience and was well received when it first appeared. According to Gerda Lerner Iola Leroy is considered the first work by a black writer dealing with the Reconstruction period (LERNER, 1992, p. 244). Moreover, William Still, at the introduction of Iola Leroy (2010), while commenting on Harper as well as on her narrative, declares that, “The grand and ennobling sentiments which have characterized all her utterances in laboring for the elevation of the oppressed will not be found missing in this book”; he goes deeper and wonders that, “this last effort which will, in all probability, be the crowning effort of her long and valuable services in the cause of humanity” (STILL, 2010, p. 2). By 1892, the year of the publication of Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, the outstanding African American journalist, newspaper editor, activist, and early leader of civil rights, Ida B. Wells’s “Iola” was a recognized name not only in Black communities across the country but also in many white areas. As Harriet Jacobs became “Linda” to abolitionists, in the media world Ida B. Wells was known by her pen name “Iola.” Readers were delighted by her editorials. Supporting that blacks were sent to prison for stealing five cents while whites were honored for stealing thousands of dollars, for instance, she retaliated, “let Blacks steal big.” “Iola” was the name by which the editor of the New York Age, T. Thomas, referred to her; it 39
was the name the masses knew: Iola was a fiery journalist, “the princess of the press” (WELLS apud FOREMAN, 2009, p. 92). In 1892, Thomas Moss, who was Ida Wells’s friend, was murdered by a white mob. Wells published an article in the Black Memphis newspaper, Free Speech, in which she expresses all her indignity, declaring that: Nobody in this section believes that old thread-bare lie that Negro men assault white women. If Southern white men are not carefully they will overreach themselves and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women (WELLS apud FOREMAN, 2009, p. 93).
As Wells was a wise woman, she promptly left Memphis and went to New York City and Philadelphia, where she encountered the “most popular African American poet of the era,” Frances Harper. While Wells was gone, choleric whites destroyed her newspaper office and threatened to hang her if she dared to return to the South. “Iola” reacted vigorously both to white threats and to terrorism, she thereby published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) and advanced to become a leading anti-lynching activist. A Northern group made up of black women, encouraged and motivated by “Iola”, organized an event that filled New York’s Lyric Hall and raised a collection in order to sponsor the publication of “Iola’s Southern Horror. Those women did not come just to protect “Iola”; moreover, they were there to celebrate “Iola” and her obstinate writings. To a great extent, the publication of Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted in the same year as her younger friend, “Iola”, visited her, demonstrated the feminist solidarity among the influential black women writers and activists of the nineteenth century. In sum, we may say that taken together, both “Iolas”, Harper’s and Wells’s, were able to intervene in and to influence the African American society, mainly black women. In addition, Professor Hazel Carby, in her Reconstructing Womanhood, claims that:
It is important to recognize that black women like Frances Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells were not isolated figures of intellectual genius; they were shaped by and helped to shape a wider movement of Afro-American women. This is not to claim they were representative of all black women; they and their counterparts formed an educated, intellectual elite, but an elite that tried to develop a cultural and historical perspective that was organic to the wider condition of black womanhood (CARBY, 1989, p. 115).
Furthermore, concerning Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted, Carby states that the novel was rooted in the “authority of Harper’s experience as abolitionist, lecturer, poet, teacher, feminist, and black woman” (CARBY, 1989, p. 63). Besides, Hazel Carby has argued that, she sought to “promote social change”, “aid in the uplifting of the race”, and “intervene in and influence political, social, and cultural debate” about black life during the Civil War and Reconstruction (CARBY, 1989, p. 63-4). Throughout the novel, traversing the antebellum 40
period, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and even beyond that, Harper explores the effects of the oppression of race, gender and class on black women. Since Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born “colored”, female and poor, it is pertinent to say that she experienced the complexity of American oppression and thus, to a certain extent, her act of resistance was the development of a political perspective that realized the multifaceted dynamics of social and cultural oppression. As Frances Harper’s works consider political subject, a “narrowness in critical perception has confused literary memory” and thereby rejected “not only the validity of her work, but also the beauty of it” (BOYD, 1994, p. 18). Moreover, early discussions of Harper’s poetry and prose labeled her as an abolitionist poet, or as a “protest poet,” critical misreadings that did not consider her literary talent. The first relevant generation of African American critics, deeply influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, was restless to develop an African American aesthetic that was mostly a reaction against the predominant intellectual and literary production of the 1890s, which focused on the moral and politics code of uplift. It is essential to bear in mind that women were less represented than men in literature, thereby not only limiting the possibilities of a female character, but also confining them in a unique situation of opposition and in relation to the interests of the male characters. It is also very important to accentuate the importance of the role of literature in the discussion and in the exposition of the experiences and the problems endured by African American women. The feminist Barbara Smith, in her essay “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” (1977), observes and declares that a comment by the African American writer, Alice Walker, explains the problems faced by black women writers and the reasons for the damaging criticism about them. In response to her interviewer’s question “Why do you think that black women writer has been so ignored in America? Does she have even more difficulty than the black male writer, who perhaps has just began to gain recognition?”, the prominent writer Alice Walker claims that:
There are two reasons why the black woman writer is not taken as seriously as the black male writer. One is that she’s a woman. Critics seem unusually ill-equipped to intelligently discuss and analyze the works of black women. Generally, they do not even make the attempt; they prefer, rather, to talk about the lives of black women writers, not about what they write. And, since black women writers are not – it would seem – very likable – until recently they were the least willing worshipers of male supremacy – comments about them tend to be cruel (WALKER apud SMITH, 1994, p. 416).
The black women intellectuals had been active organizers within the black community since emancipation. Rather, as Carby puts, “The intellectuals who became the elite of the 41
National Association of Colored Women used the pen as an important strategy in the movement to organize” (HARPER, 1987, p. xv). The prominent philosopher and writer Frantz Fanon, in his The Wretched of the Earth, expresses his concern on the necessity of a “revolutionary élites7 who have come up from the people” (FANON, 2001, p. 161) and believes that political education was a way to educate the masses, “opening their minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of intelligence; as Césaire said, it is ‘to invent souls’” (CÉSAIRE apud FANON, 2001, p. 159). Therefore, the use of political events throughout Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted is a way to “invent souls”, to uplift the “shadows” existing in African American society. Nevertheless, fortunately, recent developments in women’s examinations of black women writers have provided “revelations and resurrections” (BOYD, 1994, p.23). Interests in Frances Harper’s life and works were aroused during the 1970s and 1980s mainly as a result of the efforts of black aesthetics and feminist critics. The movement to preserve, retrace, and reconfigure Harper’s legacy has built a network of scholars and poets, who demonstrate efforts on Harper and the emerging canon developing around her works. Hazel Carby clearly demonstrates her effort and engagement with nineteenth-century women writers, and she supports that: To understand the first novels which were written at the end of nineteenth century, one has to understand not only the discourse and context in which they were produced, but also the intellectual forms and practices of black women that preceded them (CARBY, 1989, p. 7).
Professor Hazel Carby, at the introduction of Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (1987), highlights the importance of comprehending and of considering the context in which the activist writer developed her narrative, mainly the discourse of black women intellectuals of the 1890s, which was a decade of strong political activity for black women. As Carby explains:
In Chicago in 1893 at the World’s Congress of Representative Women, which was part of the Columbian Exposition, six black women – Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Jackson Coppin, Sarah J. Early, Hallie Quinn Brown, and Frances Harper – accused the international gathering of indifference to the history of black women, whose crucial struggle was to attain sexual autonomy (CARBY, 1987, p. xiv).
In other words, we may not dissociate the writer from the period in which he/she is inserted; our readings might take in consideration the period, and mainly the necessity of their time. As the theorist Terry Eagleton, in his Literary Theory, defines: “All interpretation is situational, shaped and constrained by the historically relative criteria of a particular culture” (EAGLETON, 2008, p. 62).
7 The word was faithfully typed as in its original. 42
Carby, completely aware of Frances Harper’s relevant literary production as well as of her legacy, mentions that Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted was “rooted in the authority of Harper’s experience as abolitionist, lecturer, poet, teacher, feminist, and black woman” (CARBY, 1989, p. 63). Beyond, she asserts that we must regard Harper’s narrative as “integral to and a very important part of both the wider context of the black women’s movement and of Harper’s intellectual project” (HARPER, 1987, p. xv). It is applicable to say that Harper wrote Iola Leroy as an attempt of intervention. Hence, she made use of literature as a call for the black community, mainly for black women. Literature for black women writers in the nineteenth century was a hopeful space, in which they were able to voice their perspectives, their denouncing and their fighting against all the injustice spread into African American society. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted can be read as a site of claiming voice to the oppressed as well as a site of fighting against racism. Iola Leroy discloses the slaves’ perspectives and their brave and splendid participation in the Civil War. Moreover, the novel makes available political dialogue that encompasses the ideological dilemmas the black intelligentsia confronted during and after the
Reconstruction. Since Frances Harper wrote her novel after Reconstruction, it is thereby appropriate to say that she was deeply influenced by the legacy of slavery. Despite the efforts to rescue the dignity of black women from the cruel and devilish stereotypes spread during slavery time, myths of the illicit sexuality of black women persisted. Expressing concern about the issue, Venetria Patton affirms that:
Although the end of the Civil War brought the end of slavery, it did not eradicate a racist mindset. Technically the slaves were freed, but emancipation did not guarantee gender prerogatives; many whites continued to deny African American males and females the status associated with the titles ‘men’ and ‘women’ (PATTON, 2000, p.94)
It is necessary to keep in mind that the slave system classified black people as chattel. Angela Davis in her Women, Race and Class, explains that the ideology of femininity spread in the nineteenth century highlighted women’s roles as nurturing mothers and kind companions and housekeepers for their husbands, thus, black women were almost “anomalies” (DAVIS, 1983, p. 5). Therefore, the ideological exaltation of motherhood, which was extremely popular in the nineteenth century, did not extend to slaves. Rather, Davis declares that:
In fact in the eyes of the slaveholders, slave women were not mothers at all; they were simply instruments guaranteeing, the growth of the slave labor force. They were ‘breeders’ – animals whose monetary value could be precisely calculated in terms of their ability to multiply their numbers. 43
Since slave women were classified as ‘breeders’ as opposed to ‘mothers,’ their infant children could be sold away from them like calves from cows (DAVIS, 1983, p. 7).
Frances Harper inscribed the importance of motherhood in her narrative, in order to subvert this ideology, breaking up with the already established images, stereotypes, created by white society about black women mothers under slavery. It is important to point out that with the abolition of slavery, the theme of motherhood became an important key used by African American women writers in an attempt to change their fate. To a great extent, African American writers made use of maternity as an expression of freedom from white racist beliefs about black women. In the Encyclopedia edited by Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu (2006), it is highlighted that:
Slavery fractured and dissipated the very condition of motherhood for African American women, reducing and then defining black motherhood as merely breeding for profit, a commodification of their bodies as well as a commodification of their ability to reproduce (BEAULIEU, 2006, p. 647).
In the work Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History, Erika Baldt, discussing Jessie Fauset’s Comedy: American Style, brings an assertive statement by Anne Stavney: “Special feminine qualities suited black women for motherhood, and by becoming good mothers and creating a good home life, they advance the race. As woman uplifts herself, she uplifts her people” (STAVNEY apud BALDT, 2009, p. 93). Therefore, women were seen as the responsible for the advancement of the African American society. Besides, motherhood in Harper’s novel can be read as a tool in order to fight against the dehumanization of slavery as well as the dehumanization of racism. Bearing in mind the statement “Mother Africa: the birthplace of humanity,” it is thereby pertinent to say that images of motherhood in African American feminist literature are entrenched in the foundations of African culture. Furthermore, it is remarkable to say that the relationship between mother and child represents the foundational key to a vigorous kinship group. African mothers build deep and lifelong bonds with their children. For women, their mothers teach them all of the domestic arts and also the feminine ones. Men must honor their mothers and provide for their comfort and security. Not only are mothers the ones who play an important role in African society, but grandmothers also hold a singular place in their society as the owners of family history, folklore and other traditions, in addition, they are perceived as occupying a special place within the bounds of the earth between family and the ancestors. Since there was the possibility of the destruction of the African family, most 44
particularly, the maternal relationship, rape was one of the greatest threats of the African families caused by white societies’ slave traders (BEAULIEU, 2006, p. 645-46). Frances Harper, bravely, breaks with the cruel idea, which diminished and disenfranchised African American women and goes deeper into her experience, and through her novel, and then she inscribes strong female characters. In her novel, the author brings us Marie, Iola’s mother who is a “happy wife and mother” (HARPER, 2010, p. 71). In chapter X (“Shadows in the Home”), Eugene Leroy and Marie are having a conversation on the danger of slavery and the laws which allow free black people to be sent back to slavery. Marie is deeply worried about the situation, but Leroy calms her down, and Harper states that, “The love and devotion of her husband brightened every avenue of her life, while her children filled her home with music, mirth, and sunshine” (HARPER, 2010, p. 71-2). It is clear that Harper wants to build powerful female characters in order to advance her people, mainly black women. To a great extent, the resistance of the changing of white people’s mind was an extra stimulus for some African American writers to address the issue in their works. Some scholars have elucidated African American writers’ engagement with issues of sexual immaculacy as a key to challenging white standards, a key of survival. The author Catherine Clinton in her remarkable essay entitled “Reconstructing Freedwomen” asserts that:
Freedwomen struggled to avoid the daily harassments imposed by white men before slavery ended. […] Black women wanted respectability and the public image of virtue first for survival 8 and then as a foundation for building their own, but more likely, their children’s success (SILBER, 1992, p. 318).
Frances Harper, throughout Iola Leroy, brings the concern with the demonstration of the limited relationship between black mothers and their offspring, reinforcing the cruel idea that under the bounds of slavery, the slave mother's child does not belong to her and vice versa. Harper’s intention is clearly relevant from the moment her protagonist, Iola, and her brother, Harry, were set apart from their mother. At the eleventh chapter (“The Plague and the Law”), Eugene Leroy, Iola’s father, was contaminated by the yellow fever, and soon after he died. His cousin Alfred Lorraine, having in mind Leroy’s goods, immediately began to investigate ways to divide the inheritance among Leroy’s white relatives only. He then found a flaw in the marriage of Eugene Leroy and Marie, and announces Marie that, “Judge Starkins has decided that your manumission is unlawful; your marriage a bad precedent, and inimical
8 My highlighting. 45
to the welfare of society; and that you and your children are remanded to slavery” (HARPER, 2010, p. 81-2). Another relevant passage is presented in chapter X (“Shadows in the Home”), when Marie demonstrates a deep concern about the issue of being taken away from her children since she has black blood ancestry in her veins. Marie, to a certain extent, predicts her future, and she states that, “I sometimes lie awake at night thinking of how there might be a screw loose somewhere, and, after all, the children, and I might be reduced to slavery” (HARPER, 2010, p. 70). Throughout her novel, Harper also highlights the necessity of the rescuing of the broken ties between mother and her offspring provoked by the cruel institution of slavery. Moreover, the writer reveals the agonizing truth of the extent of the relationship between slave mother and her child/ children. As we may observe in the fourth chapter (“Arrival of the Union Army”), in which two slaves, Tom and Robert, are talking about their decisions about their engagement within the army: ‘My ole Miss knows I can read the papers, an’ she never tries to scare me with big whoppers ’bout the Yankees. She knows she can’t catch ole birds with chaff, so she is just as sweet as a peach to her Bobby. But as soon as I get a chance I will play her a trick the devil never did.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘I’ll leave her. I ain’t forgot how she sold my mother from me. Many a night I have cried myself to sleep, thinking about her, and when I get free I mean to hunt her up’ (HARPER, 2010, p. 35-6).
Taking into consideration the way Iola is presented throughout the novel, we may say that Harper employs a maternal awareness to engender her female protagonist. Harper’s narrative reacts to the exclusion of black women “from the cult of womanhood”, and the writer seeks to include black women within the idea of motherhood. Iola is portrayed not as a mother, but as a mother figure, who by virtue of maternal consciousness might be considered a true woman (PATTON, 2000, p. 93-4). Iola, “beautiful”, with a “girlish face”, “full of tender earnestness,” owner of a “fresh, young voice,” “as if some great sorrow had bound her heart in loving compassion to every sufferer who needed her gentle ministrations” is the embodiment of the mother figure in two distinct times of the narrative (HARPER, 2010, P. 40). Although Frances Harper will be discussing the importance of the mother in society, she opts for a female protagonist, who does not have her body associated with illicit sexuality. It is important to register that the decision taken by Harper in relation to Iola’s chastity was not naïve. It was a choice which enabled Harper to rewrite precious portrayals of black women. Discussing the idea, Patton believes that Harper 46
[…] attempts to persuade the white reader that her black characters represent the true characteristics of blacks. She also wants the reader to sympathize with her characters and realize that they should not be subjected to injustice (PATTON, 2000, p. 97).
It is relevant to say that, Iola, even as a slave, refused to accept the sexual overtures of her masters. As we may read in the following passage presented at chapter V (“The Release of Iola”), in which two slaves are talking about Iola, “Tom was very anxious to get word to the beautiful but intractable girl who was held in durance vile by her reckless and selfish master, who had tried in vain to drag her down to his own low level of sin and shame” (HARPER, 2010, p. 39). The first moment the female protagonist is depicted as a mother figure is soon after Iola was taken from her family and not only her, but all the members taken together and sold as slaves; Iola was then “released from the hands of her tormentors” (HARPER, 2010, p. 40), and placed as a nurse at an Army camp. At the camp, Iola, with “tender devotion”, takes care of the injured slaves, writes them letters to be sent to their friends, she was fully admired and loved by them; she perfectly represents the embodiment of a mother. The presence of a nurse is not by chance. In a narrative that connects mothering with wartime, the figure of a nurse works as a hinge between the two realms. Furthermore, to a certain extent, it is possible to say that Iola feminizes the war. Venetria Patton goes deeper in the issue of Harper’s use of the nurse figure and other aspects of her maternal ideology. Patton compares Harper’s narrative with the texts produced by white women writers who also portrayed the war, and she supports that: “Harper not only feminizes the war by providing a woman’s perspective; she also expands the definition of womanhood by portraying a black nurse-mother” (PATTON, 2000, p. 99). In chapter VII (“Tom Anderson’s Death”), as Harper announces her readers, the slave Tom Anderson, who is Iola’s best friend, is going to pass away because he received “seven or eight bullets” of the Rebels. Captain Sybill, aware of Anderson’s situation, declares: “put him in one of the best wards. Give him into Miss Leroy’s care” (HARPER, 2010, p. 49). Anderson is then taken to the hospital, and Iola, “with tender devotion,” took care of her friend, who after recognizing her, “smiled faintly, took her hand in his, stroked it tenderly, looked wistfully her face, and said, ‘Miss Iola, I ain’t long fer dis! I’se’ most home!’” (HARPER, 2010, p. 49). Iola, tenderly, as mothers are used to being, expresses that: “‘O, Mr. Tom, […] ‘do not talk of leaving me. You are the best friend I have had since I was torn from my mother. I should be so lonely without you’” (HARPER, 2010, p. 50). Harper, then, presents a second moment in which Iola will be portrayed as a mother figure; it is when she decided to take her place in a Sunday-school as a teacher, and in the 47
church as a helper. Iola is completely engaged with helping and supporting the black community, mainly the black women, since she “planned meetings for the especial benefit of mothers and children” (HARPER, 2010, p. 216). Although Harper’s female protagonist is not a mother, the narrative is very concerned with the maternal values as the tool to uplift the black community. It is important to register that the decision taken by Harper in relation to Iola’s chastity was not naïve. It was a choice that enabled Harper to rewrite precious portrayals of black women. Discussing on the idea, Patton believes that Harper “attempts to persuade the white reader that her black characters represent the true characteristics of blacks. She also wants the reader to sympathize with her characters and realize that they should not be subjected to injustice” (PATTON, 2000, p. 97). It is relevant to say that, Iola even as a slave she refused to accept the sexual overtures of her masters. As we may read in the following passage presented in chapter V (“The Release of Iola”), in which two slaves are talking about Iola, “Tom was very anxious to get word to the beautiful but intractable girl who was held in durance vile by her reckless and selfish master, who had tried in vain to drag her down to his own low level of sin and shame” (HARPER, 2010, p. 39). In chapter XXX (“Friends in Council”), Iola is at a meeting with people of high education discussing about the future of black people in their land, and in a very maternal discourse, Iola states that: ‘We did not,’ […] ‘place the bounds of our habitation. And I believe we are to be the fixtures in this country. But beyond the shadows I see the coruscation of a brighter day; and we can help usher it in, not by answering hate with hate, or giving scorn for scorn, but by striving to be more generous, noble, and just. It seems as if all creation travels to respond to the song of the Herald angels, ‘Peace on earth, good-will toward men’ (HARPER, 2010, p. 193).
In the same chapter (XXX), Harper goes deeper into the importance of motherhood and elaborates a conversation between Reverend Eustace, Miss Delany and Iola, in which they express the full importance of motherhood in order to uplift the black community in the United States. As we may verify in the following passage: The next paper was by Miss Iola Leroy, on the ‘Education of Mothers9.’ ‘I agree’, said Rev. Eustace, of St. Mary’s parish, ‘with the paper. The great need of the race is enlightened mothers.’ ‘And enlightened fathers, too,’ added Miss Delany quickly. ‘If there is anything I chafe to see it is a strong, hearty man shirking his burdens, putting them on the shoulders of his wife, and taking life easy for himself.’ […] ‘You know’, said Mrs. Leroy, ‘that after the war we were thrown upon the nation a homeless race to be gathered into homes, and a legally unmarried race to be taught the sacredness of the marriage relation (HARPER, 2010, p. 196-7).
9 My highlighting. 48
The highlighted term in the abovementioned passage is a way to express Frances Harper’s awareness on the importance of the women’s role in racial uplift. The perspectives expressed in Iola’s paper, “Education of Mothers,” seem to reverberate an essay by Harper, entitled “Enlightened Motherhood”, which she addressed to the Brooklyn Literary Society on November 15, 1892. This beautiful and powerful essay demonstrates the consistency of Harper’s campaign against sexism. As we may verify in the following passage: Mothers who can teach their sons not to love pleasure or fear death; mothers who can teach their children to embrace every opportunity, employ every power, and use every means to build up a future to contrast with the old sad past. […] The work of the mothers of our race is grandly constructive. It is for us to build above the wretch and ruin of the past more stately temples of thought and action (HARPER apud FOSTER, 1990, p. 292).
Harper does not limit the importance of motherhood among the female characters. In the third chapter of Iola Leroy (“Uncle Daniel’s Story”), during a conversation among male slaves about the possibility of enlisting themselves into the Army, it is clear that Harper intends to bring the relevance of the motherhood within black people as a whole, since through her character, she states that: ‘My mother’, he replied, in a low, firm voice. ‘That is the only thing that keeps me from going. If it had not been for her, I would have gone long ago. She’s all I’ve got, an’ I’m all she’s got’ (HARPER, 2010, p. 32).
Moreover, in chapter XXII (“Further Lifting of the Veil”), Harper brings us the joy of Harry (Iola’s brother) when he encounters his mother, Marie. Harry, in a conflict, was “severely wounded and forced to leave his place in the ranks for a bed hospital” (HARPER, 2010, p. 150). Harry was in his bed. When he awoke, his eyes met a woman’s eyes, and “with a thrill of gladness”, they recognized each other” (HARPER, 2010, p. 150). In chapter XXIV (“Northern Experience”), Harper makes clear her intention of presenting the anomalous position of black people. The writer presents her readers the problems suffered by black people not only in South but also in the North, while they search for a job. Iola decided to apply for a job that is required the nursing of an “invalid daughter,” who was fifteen and ill with low fever. Iola made the application, which was “readily accepted.” Iola nursed the frail girl, and soon as she was restored to health. Mr. Clotel, the father’s girl, decided to give Iola employment in his store “when her services were not longer needed in the house” (HARPER, 2010, p. 164). The awkward moment is when in the morning Iola arrived at work, Mr. Clotel called his employees together and told them that “Miss Iola had colored blood in her veins”, but even aware of that “curse”, he was going to employ her. And then he adds, “If any one objected to working with her, he or she could step to the cashier’s desk and receive what is due” (HARPER, 2010, p. 165). 49
Frances Harper joins the chorus of the female African descendant writers, who encompass in their narratives the ones who have been historically silenced and oppressed for ages on account of racial, social and/or gender discrimination. Regarding the importance of the acquisition of voice by these oppressed women, Professor Maria Aparecida Salgueiro in her work Escritoras Negras Contemporâneas, states that:
Writing in a perspective of “woman” and “black”, the African-American writers observe the individuality and the personal relations as a form of comprehension of complex social issues. When analyzing data such as racism as well as sexism, institutionalized not only in the society but also in the family and in the intimate relations, the mentioned authors focused on dilemmas that touch everyone regardless of ethnicity or sex. However, through pain and anger, they valorized, above all, the difference, many times expressed in optimism, in which it appears as an element of construction and growth. (SALGUEIRO, 2004, p. 15)10
Beyond, the critic and professor Carole Boyce Davies, in her “Hearing Black Women’s Voices: Transgressing Imposed Boundaries”, declares that “we need to foreground the need to HEAR WOMEN’S VOICE as well as MAKING WOMEN’S VOICE HEARD and therefore activate a conceptual challenge to selective hearing or mis-hearings11 (DAVIES,
1995, p. 3). Taking into consideration the maternal search shared among the characters of the novel, it is significant to say that Frances Harper makes use of the family unit as an antithetical to the American slavery system, which sought to devastate familial bonds. Throughout Harper’s Iola Leroy, the slaves were presented in an anomalous position: they were in America, but they were not from it, they wished to be part of the “American family,” but they were “torn between the claims of their genetic family, the slave community, and the master’s family” (PATTON, 2000, p. 99). Yet, as in an act of resistance, in chapter XXXII, we may witness Harper’s attempt to portray, through her narrative, a discourse that moves away from the official one. In the final chapter (“Conclusion”), the author presents her readers the destiny of almost all characters. An interesting moment is the reencounter of Grandmother Johnson, who was separated and who was living in the North. In this passage, it is clear Harper’s concern with reinforcing the relevance of familial bonds, as we may understand through the reading of the following passage: Grandmother Johnson was glad to return South, and spend the remnant of her days with the remaining friends of her early life. Although feeble, she is in full sympathy with her children for the uplifting of the race. Marie and her mother are enjoying their aftermath of life […] (HARPER, 2010, p. 217).
In sum, we may see the black community uplifting. It is interesting to perceive that Harper fully believed in women’s capacity to shape the future. After this passage, we may
10 My translation. 11 The passage was faithfully typed as in its original. 50
realize that new “brighter” days will shine for black people, as Harper declares at the end of the final chapter, as soon as Marie reencounters her mother: “The shadows have been lifted from all lives; and peace, like bright dew, has descended upon their paths. Blessed themselves, their lives are a blessing to others” (HARPER, 2010, p. 217). The notion defended throughout this chapter that Harper saw African American women as the salvation for the future generations may be verified in almost every literary work composed by Harper. In 1893, a year after Iola’s publication, Harper, in her speech entitled “Woman’s Political Future,” claims that, O women of America! Into your hands God has pressed one of the sublimest opportunities that ever came into the hands of the women of any race or people. It is yours to create a healthy public sentiment; to demand justice, simple justice, as the right of every race; to brand with everlasting infamy the lawless and brutal cowardice that lynches, burns, and tortures your own countrymen (HARPER apud LOGAN, 1995, p. 46).
Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted is permeated by the motherhood idea. It is definitely a way Harper found to protest and to promote social change. Frances Harper used maternity as a key of freedom for black women in order to escape from the trick created by the white people, having as its main purpose the diminishing and the disenfranchisement of African American women. Likewise, the novel is a calling to black people to commit themselves to the fighting back of institution-building and racial uplift in the face of white supremacist cruelty at the of the end of the nineteenth century and at the turn of the twentieth century. At the age of 85, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper died of heart failure on February 22, 1911. Yet, she remains alive throughout her definitive works. The following chapter presents the African American writer, Pauline E. Hopkins, and her efforts in order to empower Black society. In her novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, the reader verifies her concern with the racial uplift and the cruel practices, mainly lynching, made in the name of the white oppressive system against black people.
51
3 PAULINE HOPKINS’S CONTENDING FORCES: LYNCHING AND THE UPLIFT OF AFRICAN AMERICAN PEOPLE
Only the BLACK WOMAN can say “where and when I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me” Anna Julia Cooper
To justify their own barbarism they assume a chivalry which they do not possess. True chivalry respects all womanhood Ida B. Wells
A number of Black female voices compounded the chorus of those promoting equality, dignity and uplift for African American. This movement took place during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. In the previous chapter, we were introduced to one of these relevant women, Frances E. W. Harper. The present chapter has as its main objective introducing another outstanding writer, who made part of these so important voices, the African American Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, whose works were deeply relevant within African American society. The current section also aims at highlighting how throughout her Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, Pauline Hopkins made use of literature as a powerful weapon in order to denounce the atrocities committed against African Americans, mainly the ones against African American women. Moreover, the researcher intends to depict Hopkins’s narrative as an attempt of portraying womanhood as a crucial tool for the uplift of the whole black community. Between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century, there were around two generations of women writers who devoted their lives to the duty of presenting the adversities, the injustices and the wrongs committed not only against their race but also against their gender. Yet, in general, the writings of nineteenth-century African American women have remained buried in obscurity. In the foreword of Contending Forces, entitled “In Her Own Write”, Henry Louis Gates Jr. declares that these writings have been: accessible only in research libraries or in overpriced and poorly edited reprints. Many of these books have never been reprinted at all; in some instances only one or two copies are extant. In these works of fiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, essay, and journalism resides the mind of nineteenth century Afro-American woman (GATES, 1991, p. xvi-xvii).
Fortunately, in the 1970s, literary critics began to examine the writings produced by African American women during the nineteenth century. A small but impressive group of scholars, including Claudia Tate, Hazel Carby, Jane Campbell, Elizabeth Ammons, and 52
Richard Yarborough, have focused critical attention on Pauline Hopkins and her significant works, which include over thirty articles, three serialized novels, one monograph, several speeches, and the novel Contending Forces (BROWN, 2008, p. 3). These above mentioned critics have rescued not only Pauline Hopkins, but also many other nineteenth-century African American women writers from oblivion, “discovering them to be exceptional, extraordinary, and noteworthy, but also lonely and isolated voices in the white dominated movements of realism, naturalism, and local color writing,” as Hanna Wallinger states in her essay African American women writers, 1865-1910 (WALLINGER, 2011, p. 193). The “rediscovery” is indebted to the Oxford University Press, which in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, is publishing thirty volumes of these fascinating works, each of which includes an introduction by an expert in the field. Furthermore, Gates declares the relevance of this “rebirth”: In addition to resurrecting the works of black women authors, it is our hope that this set will facilitate the resurrection of the Afro-American woman’s literary tradition itself by unearthing its nineteenth-century roots (GATES, 1991, p. xvii).
According to Hanna Wallinger, the “rebirth” brought by the research unites an admirable group of African American writers and intellectuals made up by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Gertrude Mossell, Anna Julia Cooper, Victoria Earle Mathews, Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman, Amelia E. Johnson, Gertrude Dorsey Brown, Ruth E. Todd, and Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, who were activist intellectuals and pursued careers as club women, orators, race leaders, editors, teachers, society leaders, and professional women (WALLINGER, 2011, p. 195). The main issues developed throughout their stories and their novels were race, gender, and class. Taken together, these writers contributed to discuss about the content of race literature, they dealt with the delicate topics of their time from the slave past to the future of the race, and they produced memorable heroines and heroes, and thus subverting the standard boundaries of fiction. The epigraph chosen to the present chapter fully elucidates the spirit of the Black female writers between the decades from the 1880s to the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance (1920). The generation of women writers, activists, clubwomen, and intellectuals belonging to this period comprehended that their voices would have to be heard and that only they would be able to shape and interpret their own experiences. As the prominent African American feminist educator, activist, orator Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) declares in her masterpiece A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South: “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘where and when I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence 53
and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me’” (COOPER apud LEMERT; BHAN, 1998, p. 63). Taken together, all of these relevant writers rejected to be silenced, demanding that their lives and careers need to be taken seriously today. Moreover, according to Wallinger, regarding the importance of these brilliant women, she postulates that: They contribute significantly to the discourse about race; they reinterpreted the slave past with revisionist accounts of either the superior endurance and suffering or the heroism and rebellion of former slaves; they help to build up an audience in sympathy with the cause of African Americans and are united in their rejection of lynching and other forms of violence; they further the feeling of loyalty among their people; they demonstrate the values of familial love, labor, education, and community work, […] they serve as inspiration for future generations of female artists; and they pioneer black feminist studies12 (WALLINGER, 2011, p. 203).
Pauline E. Hopkins, through her works, makes clear that she was completely engaged with the idea of a particular literature and other works made by Black women to Black women concerned on Black issues. In 1902, Hopkins, regarding the importance of Black women’s role within the African American society and considering that the element of race set an additional stress on women, and she hopefully claims that: ‘Why is the present bright? Because, for the first time, we stand face to face, as a race, with life as it is. Because we are at the parting of the ways and must choose true morality, true spirituality and the firm basis of all prosperity in races or nations – honest toil in field and shop, doing away with all superficial assumptions in education and business’ (HOPKINS apud WALLINGER, 2005, p. 137-8).
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was born in Portland, Maine, in an unknown month in 1859. The early life of Pauline E. Hopkins was marked by the marital distress of her parents, Sarah E. Allen and Benjamin Northup, and the turmoil produced by their divorce. Yet, since her mother married the veteran of the Civil War, William A. Hopkins, who was a “kindly man who was protective and indulgent of both Sarah and her daughter”, Pauline Hopkins thereby regained stability in her life (BROWN, 2008, p. 46). At a young age, Hopkins moved to Boston and lived in Massachusetts for almost her whole life. According to Lois Brown in her Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution, Hopkins’s family was a “loving and large extended family” that was able to connect her to “freedom in the colonial North and to the bondage in the antebellum South” (BROWN, 2008, p. 1). According to Nellie McKay, Hopkins’s engagement with her race did not develop by accident or even by chance. Hopkins was the great-grandniece of the New Hampshire black poet and political activist James Whitfield, and familial ties linked her to the nineteenth- century black activist abolitionists, churchmen, and educators, Nathaniel and Thomas Paul
12 My highlighting. 54
(McKAY, 1996, p. 2). To a great extent, these leading figures recognized and nurtured her creative genius and flair for performance. Pauline Hopkins attended public schools and graduated from Girls High School. In 1874, at the age of 15, Hopkins entered an essay contest supported by former slave novelist and dramatist, William Wells Brown; with her essay “Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedy.” Hopkins won the first prize, ten dollars in gold and, said by the judges, gained favor on the merits of the writer’s skill (WELLS apud McKAY, 1996, p. 2). In 1879, Hopkins, at her early twenties, broke new ground as an African American playwright; she completed her first play, which was entitled Slaves’ Escape; or, The Underground Railroad. A year later, the drama was renamed, Peculiar Sam; or, The Underground Railroad, which had a run at Boston’s Oakland Garden. The play was produced and performed by the Hopkins Colored Trobadours, a group that included Pauline Hopkins, who was the singer and who played the main role. As a result, Hopkins became the first black woman to write and star in her own dramatic work. For the next twelve years, Pauline Hopkins, from time to time was called “Boston’s Favorite Soprano.” Moreover, Hopkins gave concerts and recitals in Boston and lectured on Black history while she and her family traveled as a performing group. To a certain extent, all these activities transformed her into a minor celebrity. A second play, which was a dramatization of Daniel in the lion’s den, was written during this period, One Scene from the Drama of Early Days (McKAY, 1996, p. 3). In the 1890s, in her early thirties, in order to have financial stability, Pauline Hopkins decided to leave the entertainment world. She thereby studied stenography and gained expertise to pass the civil service exam, which served her well up to 1930, when she, at the age of seventy-one, died. Yet, the stability gained through her work did not put an end to Hopkins’s aims to engage in more creative expression. Writing was the major purpose of Hopkins’s aspirations and she never gave up on the idea of becoming a writer; through the 1890s she kept nurturing her aim and she also lectured brilliantly on Black history in the Boston area (McKAY, 1996, p. 3). It is relevant to say that the 1890s marked Pauline Hopkins’s change from a performance career to a writing life; and this transition was inextricably connected to her participation in antilynching debates and protests during this period. Moreover, Lois Brown claims that Hopkins became a leading literary figure and cultural critical in Boston “confronting the unpalatable and often unspeakable histories of concubinage, enslavement, and lynching” (BROWN, 2008, p. 2). The definite change into Pauline Hopkins’s life came through a new journal, the Colored American Magazine, which was the first remarkable twentieth-century African 55
American journal owned and published by black people. Hopkins, fascinated by the prospects of a powerful new public black voice, rapidly became a member on the board of directors, shareholder, and creditor of the new journal. She was the only woman on the staff when the magazine started. Her writings compounded a considerable portion of the literary and historical issues promoted by the magazine over the next four years. The Colored American Magazine’s founders expected to produce a popular periodical that would appeal not only to a northern black elite but that “would encourage the flowering of any black talent that had been suppressed by a lack of encouragement and opportunity to be published”, as Hazel Carby states in the introduction of The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (CARBY, 1988, p. xxxiii). Hopkins had her short story, “The Misery within Us” published in the first issue of the magazine. Soon after, more two short stories, written by the admirable writer, were in the pages of the magazine: “Talma Gordon” and “George Washington, A Christmas Story.” It is interesting to say that Hopkins did not always sign her name to her work in the Colored American Magazine; several of her works were credited to Sarah A. Allen, who was her mother’s maiden name (McKAY, 1996, p. 4). In 1900, Pauline Hopkins published her first novel, Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. Within the next four years, Hopkins published, in the Magazine, four extra stories and serialized three novels: Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice (1901-2), Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902-3), and Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902-3). Regarding Hopkins’s publications between 1900 and 1905, Professor Richard Yarborough, in the introduction of Contending Forces (1988), compares Hopkins works to such brilliant African American writers of her time, such as Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Sutton Griggs. Moreover, Yarborough, discussing on women’s publications, declares that Pauline Hopkins was “the single most productive black woman writer at the turn of the century” (YARBOROUGH, 1988, p. xxviii). Since History was the main priority in Hopkins’s writings, essays about events and people, and items of interest to the Black community were considerable fractions of the fare CAM13offered. Hopkins’s political and philosophical positions were vital for the African American history, and her contributions for CAM were crucial for a black revisionist history. Before the black revolution in the twentieth century, Hopkins was fully aware of the necessity
13 CAM is the shortened name adopted for Colored American Magazine. 56
of the revision of the traditional American history. Moreover, as Nellie McKay points out that Hopkins was: adamant that African Americans themselves had to take responsibility for the making of new histories that included the lives and deeds of black people. For, she claimed, history was less about great events than the actions of individuals, an idea that makes biography an important element of history (McKAY, 1996, p. 6).
In order to support her own claiming, from November 1900 through October 1902, the writer produced a sum of twenty-three abundantly textured and absorbing articles. Hopkins published two series of biographical sketches, twelve in each group, profiles of “Famous Women of the Negro Race” and of “Famous Men of the Negro Race” for CAM. In November 1901 was the time in which Hopkins decided to make the smooth transition from profiles of famous men to famous women of the race, highlighting on women who had differentiated themselves in arts, club movement, and racial activism and uplift movements of the antebellum and postbellum periods (BROWN, 2008, p. 285). She became the first African American woman to publish a serialized historical biography series. To a great extent, her work represented a noteworthy model for public history narratives and inspired contemporaries, most remarkably W. E. B. Du Bois, who was editor of the Crisis magazine, “who would imitate her to great benefit.”14 Pauline Hopkins, as editor of the journal, was in a position that only a few black women had ever reached, and her influence on the magazine’s political editorial was very powerful. Yet, Hopkins’s major objective was not her personal power; she was interested in advancing a publication that she felt would make a difference in the lives of African American people. Concerning her goals, McKay declares that:
One of her primary goals for CAM (Colored American Magazine) was that it should inspire the creation of an African American art and literature that would demonstrate the talents and skills of the group and prove to the rest of the world that black people, only recently released from slavery, were already as culturally advanced as others groups (McKAY, 1996, p. 5).
Journalism was considered as a means of uplift for the black community as a whole. Journals written by blacks and for blacks were a powerful weapon used by black people, mainly by black women, in order to fight against the racism of white people. Regarding the importance of journalism for black people, Melina Abdullah in her essay The Emergence of Black Feminist Leadership Model, brings an important idea argued by Professor Gloria Wade- Gayles. Wade-Gayles, in her Black Women Journalists in the South, 1880-1905, considers
14 ‘Du Bois’s “Men of Mark” series in the Crisis focused primarily on contemporary figures, and the articles were much more brief than those that Hopkins published in the Colored American Magazine or in the New Era Magazine’ (BROWN, 2008, p. 600). 57
that journalism was used by black women as a process of social and political empowerment for black people, and for black women in particular. Moreover, Wade-Gayles mentions three important reasons for considering journalism as a relevant tool for black women: 1) exposure and access to writing opportunities, 2) the relatively high political and social impact of written words, and 3) the relatively minimal risk that accompanied this form of activism (WADE- GAYLES apud ABDULLAH, 2007, p. 333). Besides, according to Hazel Carby, Hopkins’s point of view of the cultural meaning of the Colored American Magazine enabled to produce an atmosphere for “a black renaissance in Boston” (CARBY, 1988, p. xxxi). Hopkins’s visions regarding the magazine are compared with the highly important turn-of-the-century black intellectual, the prominent and influential W. E. B. Du Bois. Hopkins as well as Du Bois belonged to a new generation of educated radical freedom fighters whose distance from slavery made them intolerant and reluctant to accommodate to white racism. But, unfortunately, by 1920 Hopkins disappeared while Du Bois’s influence in the black community had risen so progressively that he “became one of the ‘godfathers’ of the Harlem Renaissance of the later decade. She was forgotten; he was revered” (McKAY, 1996, p. 5). Pauline Hopkins traveled and lectured across the country, in order to divulge the word about the magazine. Under her editorship, the CAM’s circulation grew to fifteen thousand; however, Hopkins had her name appear on the masthead as editor-in-chief of the magazine only once, in March 1904. Unfortunately, even with all her efforts, the magazine was not adequately financially grounded. In 1904, the magazine experienced severe financial pressures that the author, educator, and advisor to Republican presidents Booker T. Washington secretly gained control over it. Although the sale of the journal and the change in its location removed Hopkins’s power, she was preserved temporarily as assistant editor. Although, to no one’s shock, in November of the same year, CAM notified its readers with a notice that Pauline Hopkins was leaving the journal for reasons connected to her ill health. Yet, some critics, as Du Bois, did not believe that her health was the crucial point in Hopkins’s departure, they did believe that she was forced out in a conflict of political ideologies between herself and the new owners (McKAY, 1996, p. 7). Nellie McKay argues that in the years that followed, the journal distanced itself from the criticism of race issues; it became a “mouthpiece for the ideologies” of Booker T. Washington (McKAY, 1996, p.7). It is relevant to say that the financial problems faced by CAM were not solved with Hopkins’s departure; “it never became fiscally viable although it altered its focus” (McKAY, 1996, p. 7). The last issue of the Colored American Magazine was published in November 1909. 58
In 1904, despite her leaving of the CAM, Hopkins did not disappear from the world print media. In 1905, she published a six-month survey, entitled “The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century”, and an essay, “The New York Subway” in the Voice of the Negro, which was the South’s first black magazine. The editor announced her alliance with the journal by declaring that: “Miss Pauline E. Hopkins is a well-known literary star among the Boston magazine writers. By any amount of coaxing and begging and paying we have been able to secure her services as one of our regular contributors” (CAM’s editor apud WALLINGER, 2005, p. 111). Moreover, Hopkins herself published thirty-one-page booklet, entitled A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by its Descendants – with Epilogue. Nevertheless, after these publications, Hopkins was silent until 1916, when she broke her silence publishing a novella entitled “Topsy Templeton”, in a Boston publication that she founded, or helped to found, the New Era Magazine. Her aims of this new project were not different from the ones developed while she had been working for the CAM. Hopkins followed the protest tradition and developed literature, music, science, and other areas of study associated with black cultural life in America society. In the New Era Magazine, CAM’s “Famous Men of the Race” returned as “Men of Vision,” and “Famous Women of the Race” reappeared as “Sacrificing Women,” which included entries on Frances E. W. Hopkins, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth. Yet, the New Era Magazine, for unknown reasons, lasted only two months, and its end was unremarkable by other journals of the time (McKAY, 1996, p. 7-8). Pauline Hopkins, in her late fifties, perhaps disheartened by little recognition she received “in spite of her achievements and/or failing health,” following the disintegration of her venture, the New Era Magazine, seemed to have withdrawn from the literary world. Little is known about Hopkins over the following fourteen years, but records confirm she worked as a stenographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the time of her accidental death, which was a consequence from a fire at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1930. Hopkins condemned racism and other forms of human oppression wherever she saw it. We may declare that she was driven by the search for justice for all African Americans, mainly for women. Although she was talented and creative, she was a black woman, and then her good intentions were given less credit and often used against her. As it has been already mentioned, brief commentaries on the writings of Pauline Hopkins emerged as early as 1940s, but the serious efforts in order to recover her life and her work did not begin until the late 59
1970s. Yet, it has not been pointed out yet some other relevant people in the rescuing of this precious writer and of her writings; credit for igniting early interest in Pauline Hopkins goes to the African American poet Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks, responsible for writing the afterword to the first contemporary reprint of Contending Forces (1978), to the curator, historian and librarian Dorothy B. Porter, to the bibliographer and librarian Ann Allen Shockley, and to the writer Mary Ellen Washington. To a great extent, Hopkins was ostracized because she was not a gentlewoman, mainly in her use of language, a quality that was not admirable in women. As a single woman and journalist, she was fully attentive to the importance of engaging in politics, as she puts it: “We know that it is not ‘popular’ for a woman to speak or write in plain terms against political brutalities, that a woman should confine her efforts to woman’s work in the home and church” (HOPKINS apud WALLINGER, 2005, p. 105). Moreover, as Hopkins admired Frances E. W. Harper and considered her as a model, it is understandable Hopkins’s commitment with the uplift of her race, mainly of black African American women. Throughout her essay “Some Literary Women”, Hopkins emphasized Harper’s lifelong struggle for equality in education, in civil rights, and in the rights of women (WALLINGER, 2005, p. 137). Therefore, like Harper, Pauline Hopkins employs in her remarkable novel, Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, the struggle for racial uplift, and as well as Harper, Hopkins made use of the literary space in order to denounce the major atrocity spread after the Civil War against black people – Lynching. Following the abandonment of federal troops from the South and the end of Reconstruction in 1877, black people were left without any protection or resources to fight against the rising tide of white racism. This event was followed by the 1883 Supreme Court decree that struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which was an act that came out of Reconstruction and reflected an ideology that was the most viable tool for coping with the “Negro question”. The Act of 1875 banned legal segregation in both publicly and privately owned establishments and accommodations and obliged that the federal government protected the rights of blacks against private citizens and state and local governments who tried to restrict access. Therefore, needless to say, the cut down of the Act of 1875, left black people without any protection, and to a certain extent, the refusal to protect black people against other private citizens contributed a lot to mob violence (ABDULLAH, 2007, p. 332, 341). White southerners, to a greater extent, saw black people as a threat to white society. As black people were no longer the legal properties of white owners, blacks then became increasingly subjected to mob violence: that is thereby the time when lynching emerged 60
within the American society. In 1865, the most violent known anti black group created in order to make black population give up their rights and live in a condition of oppression, fear and submission emerges in the North American scenario – the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan made lynching as much a part of its organization as the hoods and burning crosses. The number of blacks who were lynched is shocking, during the period comprehended within 1882 to 1903, 2,060 Blacks were lynched in the North American soil. Moreover, Shirley W. Logan, in her essay Out Of Their Own Mouths, asserts that between 1892 and 1920, more people were lynched than were executed legally (LOGAN, 1999, p. 70). Beyond, women and children were not excluded from Ku Klux Klan violence, as they were also lynched (BEAULIEU, 2006, p. 554). There were two purposes involved in the act of lynching. First, lynching served to satisfy the hatred toward and fear of black people held by many whites of all classes, but mainly the white working class who wanted to affirm their position of superiority in the society. The second, and perhaps the most important reason, was to preserve the material benefits that came with whiteness. Many black men, who were lynched, were accused of rape. Others were targeted because of their economic successes. Furthermore, as Melina Abdullah declares: “Thus, lynching not only was a tool designed to instill fear and maintain social racial hierarchy; it was also used to preserve the White monopoly on wealth” (ABDULLAH, 2007, p. 332). The movement to end mob violence and lynching during the post-Reconstruction period and into the twentieth century was regarded as one of the major radical endeavors of the time. Black women and black men were driven to confront lynching for the benefit of their lives and of the survival of their whole community. Anti-lynching activism took place in many ways. Regarding the importance of the anti-lynching movement into African American society, Abdullah claims that, “Anti-lynching was a movement that rallied the efforts of the nameless, faceless Black masses who would work tirelessly for their collective right to life” (ABDULLAH, 2007, p. 333). As public lecturer, journalist, activist, and writer, Ida B. Wells stood at the center of the anti-lynching movement. To a great extent, Ida Wells had become synonymous with the anti-lynching movement of the late nineteenth and early twenty centuries. In 1982, since three of Ida Wells’s friends were lynched in Memphis and her office newspaper was burned down by a furious mob, she then initiated her verbalized war against lynching; she produced a discourse deconstructing the lynching for rape scenario and awakening other influential people to be more outspoken. Reacting to these events, Wells 61
delivered her first public lecture, named “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, in which she suggested corrective action against lynching (LOGAN, 1999, p. 71). Before the abovementioned events, many famous black people, including Ida B. Wells, were convinced that those people who were lynched were undeniably guilty and deserved death. Yet, after incidents like the ones occurred in Memphis, they began to realize lynching as an attempt to impede the progress of black people (LOGAN, 1999, p. 16-7). Concerning lynching as an attempt to deny black progress, in her elucidative and pedagogical Lynch Law in America, Ida B. Wells argues that:
Colored women have been murdered because they refused to tell the mobs where relatives could be found for “lynching bees.” Boys of fourteen years have been lynched by white representatives of American civilization. In fact, for all kinds of offenses – and for no offenses – from murders to misdemeanors, men and women are put to death without judge or jury (WELLS apud GUY-SHEFTALL, 1995, p. 72).
Deeply involved in the lynching cause, she knew the controversy of a nation that had as a motto, “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” And that was one of the weapons she made use of, in order to protest against the cruelties done by the whites, she declared that “The nineteenth-century mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd” (WELLS apud GUY-SHEFTALL, 1995, p. 73). Wells, goes even deeper, and claims that: Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense. Neither do brave men or women stand by and see so such things done without compunction of conscience, nor read of them without protest (WELLS apud GUY-SHEFTALL, 1995, p. 75).
Having in mind that the nineteenth century, more particularly the period between 1890 and 1910 (“the Women’s Era”), it is undeniable to assert that such powerful woman as Ida B. Wells did not influence Pauline E. Hopkins. Indeed, Pauline Hopkins joined the myriad voices of northern blacks, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, William Monroe Trotter, and others who protested the increase in lynching, disenfranchisement, and racial violence against black people in the South at the turn of the twentieth century. Pauline E. Hopkins introduces her Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South as being a historical study grounded in rigorous research, as she argues, “The incidents portrayed in the early chapters of the book actually occurred. Ample proof of this may be found in the archives of the courthouse at Newberne, N.C., and at the national seat of government, Washington, D.C.15” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 14). Echoing the sentiment spread by the leading activists of the time, Hopkins discards the notion of black progress and
15 The extract was faithfully typed as in its original. 62
happiness registered in books and papers that support the white U.S. government ideas/ ideals since she argues that, “Mob-law is nothing new” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 14), and continues asserting that: Let us compare the happenings of one hundred years ago, with those of today. The difference between then and now, if any there be, is so slight as to be scarcely worth mentioning. The atrocity of the acts committed one hundred years ago are duplicated today, when slavery is supposed no longer to exist (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 15).
Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces, “written in the hope of aiding in putting down lynch law” (BROWN, 2008, p. 194), was shaped by the nadir, which was the period in which America was fraught with controversial politics of division, disenfranchisement, and racial violence. The writer, being completely aware of her role in the black community, offered a less genteel response to the issues of black inequality and the humiliating treatment extended to black people. Moreover, she emphasizes the importance about the changing of white people’s mind as well as her concern about mob violence being perpetuated through the whole American soil. Regarding the cruelty of mob violence, mainly spread in the South, Hopkins claims that: Southern sentiment has not been changed; the old ideas close in analogy to the spirit of the buccaneers, who formed in many instances the first settlers of the Southland, still prevail, and break forth clothed in new forms to force the whole republic to an acceptance of its principles (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 15).
Needles to say, the writer was influenced by such turbulent period, and to a certain extent, the conception of what she may accomplish as she published “the first significant novel by an African American woman writer since the 1892 publication of Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy” was thereby delineated by this tumultuous time she herself experienced (BROWN, 2008, p. 220). In the preface of her narrative, Hopkins is clear about her aims at publishing her first novel, as she declares: I have tried to tell an impartial story, leaving it to the reader to draw conclusions. I have tried to portray our hard struggles here in the North to obtain a respectable living and a partial education. I have presented both sides of the dark picture – lynching and concubinage – truthfully and without vituperation, pleading for that justice of heart and mind for my people which the Anglo-Saxon in America never withholds from suffering humanity (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 15).
Beyond, Lois Brown, in her Black Daughter of the Revolution, declares that Pauline Hopkins’s novel was a direct result of Hopkins’s exposure to the Colored National League debates, held in Boston, about African American civil rights and her full participation in antilynching campaigns (BROWN, 2008, p. 190). It is pertinent to say that, throughout the 1890s, Hopkins found herself in the middle of a Northern chaos, one in which her “postbellum community was mobilizing with impressive vigor” (BROWN, 2008, p. 175). Furthermore, the scenery of Boston’s antilynching campaign and increasingly militant blue 63
prints for resistance evoked the turmoil of the 1830s that Hopkins’s own family ancestors had witnessed firsthand, and fortunately, survived (BROWN, 2008, p. 175). Bearing in mind the importance of bringing to literature a little of the “hidden” purposes engaged with the act of lynching. In chapter XIV (“Contending Forces”), Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces brings us the story of Luke Sawyer, a man who was “thirty but looked fifty”, because all the sufferings he had faced in his lifetime. He had the opportunity to tell a little about his life story at the meeting of the American Colored League. It is when we found out that at the age of ten, Luke lived with his mother, two brothers, a sister and with his father, who “went into business of trading”, and “soon had the largest business and as much money in the country.” A white man decided to open a store on the same street, but Luke’s father continued being favored by his customers. Luke’s father, after a time, began receiving “threatening letters ordering him to move”, and “in the case he did not do as ordered he would lose his wife” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 255, 256, 257). At this point of the narrative, Hopkins powerfully elucidates the cruelty committed against many black families at her time. Hopkins, through Luke, shows that:
One night a posse of men came to our house and began smoking us out. […] Thoroughly enraged they broke up the doors back and front, seized my father and hung him to the nearest tree, whipped my mother and sister, and otherwise abused them so that they died nest day. My brothers were twins, still so small that they were nut babes. The mob took them by the heels and dashed their brains out against the walls of the house! Then they burned the house. I saw all this, and frenzied with horror, half-dead with fright, crept in the woods to die […] That, gentlemen, was my first experience of lynching (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 257-8).
It is relevant to declare that out of 110 black men who were lynched, from 75-85 were not even accused of rape, and many who were accused of it were innocent, as pointed out in Gerda Lerner’s Black Women in White America (LERNER, 1992, p. 207). Taking the fact into consideration, throughout her character, Hopkins declares that “If every case of Negro lynching could be investigated, we should discover fearful discrepancies between the story of the mob and the real truth” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 299). Furthermore, as an activist woman, in chapter XVII (“The Canterbury Club Dinner”), Hopkins supported this idea, and through a conversation among some influential intellectuals, she postulates that: ‘What about the crime of rape?’ asked Mr. Withington. ‘In nine cases out of ten’, replied Lewis, ‘you will find that the Negro is guiltless of this awful crime. It is brought forward to alienate the sympathy of all decent men from us. It is a crime that strikes the home ties, and as such is the most deadly weapon that has yet been used against us (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 297-8).
Also remarkable it is the issue concerning the invisible victims of rape, mainly during the Reconstruction; the unseen victims were the black women, not the white ones (LOGAN, 1999, p. 70). Considering the fact that the invisible victims of rape were the black women, 64
also that the act of rape was a political device of terrorism against female blacks, Hopkins, fully aware of it, brings in her Contending Forces, three relevant instances of this barbarity. At chapter IV (The Tragedy), Hopkins brings us the rape of two women: Gracie Montfort and Lucy. The Montfort family had just assembled at the table for their usual 8o’clock-breakfast. Their attention was caught by the sound of hoofbeats of several horses on the road, which “drew nearer and paused on the graveled walk.” Mr. Montfort went towards the door, while Mrs. Montfort turned toward the entrance of the breakfast-room with a “pleasant smile of welcome on her lips.” It is the beginning of their tragedy; Mr. Montfort was shot to death by a “crowd of angry men, headed by the envious Anson Pollock”, the crowd took possession of the Montfort’s mansion, Gracie Montfort was taken to the whipping post, where she was cruelly beaten up. Moreover, she was raped by Pollock and as an attempt of resisting those atrocities, Gracie Montfort committed suicide. Yet, unfortunately, that was not the end of their tragedy since Pollock elected to take Lucy, who was Mrs. Montfort’s foster sister, in the place “he had designed for Mrs. Montfort” (HOPKINS, 1991, p.66, 67, 70, 71). In addition, in chapter XIV (“Contending Forces”), the already mentioned Luke Sawyer recounted the accident occurred to Monsieur Beaubean, “who married a quadroon woman of great beauty”, with whom had a boy and a girl. Monsieur Beaubean had a half- brother, who was a white wealthy man and stood very high in politics, and seemed “extremely found of” Beaubean’s daughter. One day, Beaubean’s half-brother kidnapped “Mabelle” (Sappho Clark), and after three weeks she was found as a prisoner in the lowest portion of the city of New Orleans (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 258-9). In an attempt of justifying his unjustifiable attitude towards Sappho Clark, Monsieur Beaubean’s half-brother declares that:
[…] ‘whatever damage I have done I am willing to pay for. But your child is no better than her mother or her grandmother. […] It is my belief that they were a direct creation by God to be the pleasant companies of men of my race. Now I am willing to give you a thousand dollars and call it square” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 260-1).
Monsieur Beaubean grabbed the bills and threw them into the villain’s face. That night Monsieur Beaubean’s house was mobbed by a crowd that surrounded the building after firing it, and as a prisoner “would show his head at the window in the struggle to escape from the burning building, someone would pick him off” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 261). To a great extent, lynching and rape were interconnected acts. Taken together, they were used by white people as tools for terrorism against black people. Throughout her novel, Hopkins demonstrated engagement with the interconnection between rape and lynching, as she demonstrates in chapter XV (“Will Smith’s Defense of his Race”), when Will Smith as the last speaker of the meeting of the League, thinking about Luke Sawyer’s speech, spoke 65
about the violent incidents faced by Black people, mainly, lynching and rape. Hopkins, making use of her character, Will Smith, clearly demonstrates how she does believe in the link between rape and lynching, as she claims that: Lynching was instituted to crush the manhood of the enfranchised black. Rape is the crime which appeals most strongly to the heart of the home life. Merciful God! Irony of ironies! The men who created the mulatto race, who recruit its ranks year after year by the very means which they invoked lynch law to suppress, bewailing the sorrows of violated womanhood! (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 270-1).
It is obvious to notice Pauline Hopkins’s effort in promoting, throughout her novel, a space in which African American people could voice their perspectives, denounce their sufferings and, mainly move from the margins to the center of their own stories. It is pertinent to say that the meeting of the American Colored League, which was the organization “made up of leading colored men” from “all over New England” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 224), was an opportunity to engrave the opinion and response of black people to brutal racial oppressions. Thus, throughout Hopkins’s novel, she inscribes the Other history and his(her)stories. Contending Forces was an expressive indictment of racial violence as well as of economic injustice. Interwoven with the narrative’s perceptible political content is a noteworthy attempt to uplift the African American society, mainly Black women. We do take into account the importance of Pauline Hopkins’s novel as a means to enable the uplift of black people, mainly the allowance of progress for African American women. Hazel Carby comments that Pauline Hopkins was described by a colleague as considering fiction as a valuable method of gaining a wide audience for the instructive by being entertaining: “Her ambition is to become a writer of fiction in which the wrongs of her race shall be so handled as to enlist the sympathy of all citizens, in this way reaching those who never read history or biography” (apud CARBY, 1989, p. 127). Throughout Hopkins’s narrative, it is clear her intention of spreading the history and stories faced by the black community, as she states that:
While I make no apology for my somewhat abrupt and daring venture within wide field of romantic literature, I ask the kind indulgence of the generous public for many crudities which I know appear in the work, and their approval of whatever may impress them as being of value to the Negro race and to the world at large (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 13).
We might bear in mind that Hopkins was inserted into “the Women’s Era”, in which women decided to handle with their own problems, their own destinies and beyond anything, they were in search for the empowerment of their race, mainly of women. Likewise, “the Women’s Era” is considered “the single most important period in the history of, as well as the future for, African American women’s activism” (HILL, 1997, p. 553). Therefore, Hopkins’s 66
novel may be read as a mirror of this period, in which literature was, indeed, a key for the uplift of black women, an instrument of salvation for black community. In the nineteenth century, separate churches, and schools, with all-black shops, clubs, and fraternal organizations made part of the lives of African American people in order to reach their own empowerment. According to Lois Brown, throughout Hopkins’s work in order to set places of uplift for black community, she centered on two distinctly different women’s organizations: “a traditional Northern secular women’s club and an African American women’s religious order in the South, the Sisters of the Holy Family of New Orleans, Louisiana” (BROWN, 2008, p. 194). At chapter VI (Ma Smith’s Lodging-House), Hopkins makes clear her intention of depicting the lodging-house as a place which, though belonged to a domestic sphere, would enable power for black women. After a conversation between Sappho Clark and Dora Smith about hypocrisy, forgiveness and religion, Sappho states that: “‘You are a little preacher” […] and if our race ever amounts to anything in this world, it will be because such women as you are raised up to save us16”’ (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 101). In opposition to many novelists of her time, Hopkins, throughout her work, portrays African American women as just active and politically conscious as men. To a certain extent, as she belonged to the period in which black women were expressing themselves as they had never done before, we may postulate that her belief in racial uplift was inextricably connected to women advancement. In chapter VII (“Friendship”), it is time for Hopkins to show her readers how a conscious and activist woman may be able to change and uplift society. Through the chapter, Dora Smith and Sappho Clark are talking about their lives, their convictions; and in the middle of their conversation Dora begins talking about her special friend Dr. Arthur Lewis, who believes that “industrial education and the exclusion of politics will cure all our race troubles (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 124). It is then that Hopkins, majestically, through the conversation between Sappho and Dora, contests and states that: I doubt it […] The time will come when our men will grow away from the trammels of the narrow prejudice, and desire the same treatment that is accorded to other men. Why, one can but see that any degree of education and development will not fail of such a result.’ ‘I am willing to confess that the subject is a little deep for me’, replied Dora, ‘I am not the least bit of a politician, and I generally accept whatever the men tell me as right; but I know there is something wrong in our lives, and nothing seems to remedy the evils under which the color man labors17.’ ‘But you can see, can’t you, that if our men are deprived of the franchise, we become aliens in the very land of our birth?18’ ‘Arthur says that would be better for us; the great loss of life would cease, and we should be at peace with the whites’
16 My highlighting. 17 My highlighting. 18 My highlighting. 67
‘Ah, how can he argue so falsely! I have lived beneath the system of oppression in the South. If we shall lose the franchise, at the same time we shall lose the respect of all other citizens. Temporizing will not benefit us19; rather it will leave us branded as cowards, not worthy a freeman’s respect – an alien people, without country and without a home’ (HOPKINS, 1991, p.125).
The highlighted statements, mainly the ones declared by Sappho Clark, were pointed out in attempt to reinforce the importance of the awareness of black community, mainly of women’s understanding of their role within their society. Moreover, it is clear to depict through Dora’s thoughts how black women were deprived and still oppressed into a patriarchal society in which they were inserted. It is obvious the double oppression faced by black women, the first for being black, the second for being women. Professor Mary Helen Washington, in her Invented Lives, goes even deeper into the analysis, and claims that Hopkins: clear intends for Sappho to represent the militant politics of Du Bois which are in opposition to the ideas of Arthur Lewis, who is modeled after Booker T. Washington. Taking Du Bois’s position, Sappho argues for the franchise, respect and equality without which ‘we become aliens in the very land of our birth’. She rejects the Washingtonian program of ‘industrial education and the exclusion of politics,’ calling Lewis (and presumably, Washington) an insufferable prig’ (WASHINGTON, 1998, p. 80-81).
Moreover, if we analyze Sappho’s and Dora’s interaction, we may determine that this is Hopkins’s attempt in building the conception of true womanhood through her remarkable work. To a great extent, Hopkins, throughout her narrative, echoed the additional burden suffered by black women writers at the end of nineteenth and at the beginning of twentieth century. Taking into account the “additional burden” – where we may read sexism – faced by black women, Mary H. Washington, while discussing on the problems lived by African American people, mainly by women writers, observes instances of sexism even among the great and influential intellectuals of the time. Leading black intellectuals, such as Francis Grimké, W. E. B. Du Bois and Alexander Crummell, who created the American Negro Academy in 1897, with the intention of promoting Literature, Science and Art, labeled black women as incompetent for such and intellectual atmosphere and restricted their membership to “men of African descent” (WASHINGTON, 1988, p. 74-5). After the Civil War, some institutions were created by black people for attending black people in order to provide aid to the new freed African Americans; the sewing circles were organizations established to furnish aid and comfort to the African American people, after a time, women were instructed to provide clothing and food for poor in their community. In chapter VIII (“The Sewing Circle”), perhaps not by chance, Hopkins brings us an aid
19 My highlighting. 68
atmosphere, and uplift could be the word that summarizes the chapter. The Sewing Chapter presents us the colored characters as the ones who were responsible for the uplift of their own community. Ma Smith, “a member of the church”, is presented as a key for women uplift, she is portrayed as “the most prominent one of color in New England” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 141). Hopkins functions as the narrator of the chapter, and claims that: Colored people are nothing if not beauty-lovers, and for such a people the grandeur of the service has great attractions. But in justice to this church one must acknowledge that it has been instrumental in doing much toward helping this race to help itself, along the lines of brotherly interest. These people were well represented within the precincts of Mrs. Smith parlor one afternoon, all desirous of lending their aid to help along the great project (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 142-3).
Furthermore, Hopkins mentions the role of the young ladies, who were “ready to perform any service which might be required of them in the way of putting garments together” (HOPKINS, 1991, P. 143). Moreover, Hopkins makes clear to her readers that these organizations were not only concerned on providing material things, but also information about the situation of black community, as she puts that, “first business of the meeting was to go over events of interest to the Negro race which had transpired during the week throughout the country” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 143). It is relevant to say that each member of the organization was supposed to give their contribution, “Each one was supposed to contribute anything of interest that she had read or heard in that time for the benefit of all. Beyond, at the same chapter, which is rich in details and in information, we are informed about the importance of the formation of the clubs organized by black women, as we may read in the following passage: The advancement of the colored woman should be the new problem in the woman question that should float her upon its tide into the prosperity she desired. And she succeeded well in her plans: conceived in selfishness, they yet bore glorious fruit in the formation of clubs of colored women banded together for charity, for study, for every reason under God’s glorious heavens that can better the condition of mankind (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 147).
Hopkins’s belief in the role of black women as being the responsible for the uplift and as the redeemers of the whole African American society was clearly depicted on the abovementioned passage. Also remarkable as a sample of Hopkins’s belief in the empowerment of black community through women is the name she chose as the subject of the meeting presented by Mrs. Willis, that is “The place which the virtuous woman occupies in upbuilding a race” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 148). Pauline E, Hopkins, throughout her Contending Force: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, invites readers to believe in black women’s power, strength, courage and wisdom. The idea of uplifting permeates the whole narrative. It was the way found by Hopkins to protest and to encourage social and political change. Hopkins created a 69
space in which black women were able to voice their ideas, their urgencies and their hopes. Likewise, the novel is a calling to black people, mainly to black women, to commit themselves to the fighting back of institution-building and racial uplift in the face of white supremacist brutality. The author brought us the past in order to learn from it and to posit new possibilities for the future. Moreover, as Hopkins, through her character, brilliantly asserts that:
Agitation and eternal vigilance in the formation of public opinion were the weapons which broke the power of the slaveholder and gave us emancipation. I recommend these methods to you today, knowing their value in the past. ‘Up then and act! Thy courage wake! Combat intrigue, injustice, tyranny, And in thine efforts God will be with thee’ (Hopkins, 1991, p. 245).
The following chapter presents a comparative reading of the female protagonists of Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted and Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Force: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. Moreover, the reader verifies how Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins, through their literature, demonstrate their effort to rescue the image of black women and respond to the stereotypes created by white society as a tool to disenfranchise and to undervalue black women.
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4 LITERARY REPRESENTATION IN IOLA AND IN CONTENDING FORCES: GIVING BIRTH TO NEW DISCOURSES IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
[..] she had nothing to fall back on; not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may well have invented herself Toni Morrison
Throughout the first chapter, the reader was presented to some of the deepest and most remarkable sorrows experienced by African American people in the period between the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century. Concerning the attempts made by African Americans, mainly women, to inscribe the effects provoked by these brutal experiences, the present chapter aims hereby to show how literature, mainly produced by African American descendant women, can be seen as an effort to heal the pain and transform it, to a great extent, into a powerful weapon in order to set them free. Besides, throughout the current chapter, a comparative reading through the women protagonists of Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South will be taken into effect. Professor María Soledad Sánchez Gómez in a letter entitled “UN POCO MÁS SOLAS: MUERE ADRIENNE RICH (1929-2012)”, which she wrote in order to express her sadness because of Adrienne Rich’s death, raises the importance of writing as an act of resistance as well as a tool which enables the excluded, the oppressed, to make changes in the already “established” world. Gómez states: “language is power and the contempt of the other is already a gesture which precedes any authoritarian and fascist politics.”20 Thus, writers, who are aware of the importance of writing as a new way of conceiving of community and resisting to oppression and domination, do believe in writing as a hopeful space. Black women have been recording and influencing American history, quiet as it’s kept, since their earliest arrival upon the North American shores. Since they are recognized as the Other, much of what we are taught about the status of Female African descendant writers who were “excluded by appearance, national origin, or class can be applied to our understanding of African American women and their literature” (FOSTER, 1993, p. 11). Therefore, for these women, language was used as both a tool and a weapon in order to correct, to create, and to confirm their visions of life as it was and as it could become. Beyond it, concerning the importance of the appropriation of the English language and its
20 My translation. 71
consequence by African American women, the critic Frances Smith Foster in her Written by Herself claims that,
Not only did African American women appropriate the English language to record their truths, but assuming prerogatives to its literary traditions, they consciously revised that tradition to more accurately conform to their truths and their visions […] They were consciously creating new criteria against which the testimonies of others must be judged. And they were testing ways in which the English language and its literature might better serve them as African American women writers (FOSTER, 1993, p. 2).
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins were authors who produced their works actively during the age known as “The Women’s Era” – a term that was coined by Frances Harper. The aforesaid phase corresponds to the period between 1890 and 1910, which was a productive time for African American women, in which they were able to voice their perspectives and record their activities in fiction, in investigating reporting, in essays, and in autobiographies. Taking into consideration the end of nineteenth and the turn of twentieth centuries in terms of remarkable men, as the Age of Washington and Du Bois, marginalizing the political contributions of black women, “the Women’s Era” was not only a period of intense intellectual activity and productivity, but it is considered as the first flowering of black women’s autonomous organization. African American descendant women were proclaiming themselves as entitled to full participation in the life of the nation and of the world. Moreover as Henry Louis Gates Jr. observes:
Nor were their voices alone, for during this time volumes testifying to the women now claiming the era for themselves and their race appeared. Their tenor is evident in their titles, such as Monroe Major’s Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities (1893), Lawson Andrews Scrugg’s Women of Distinction: Remarkable in Works and Invincible in Character (1893), and Gertrude Mossell’s The Work of the Afro-American Woman (1894) (GATES, 1997, p. 471-2).
The role of these African American writers was crucial for the whole black community, and their thoughts and actions continue inspiring many contemporary Black women intellectuals. The activities developed by the nineteenth-century educated Black women intellectuals such as Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell are instances of the tradition of amalgamating intellectual work and activism. Taken together, these women examined the intersection oppressions that circumscribed Black women’s lives and worked for social justice (COLLINS, 2009, p. 37). Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., in his Writing, “Race” and the Difference It Makes, discusses about the situation experienced by black people, mainly, black writers, and cites that the representation of Black people on the Great Chain of Being Theory (which was deeply 72
discussed in chapter 1) consisted either as the “lowest” of the human race, or as “first cousin to the ape” (GATES, 1998, p. 5). Indeed, the act of writing has not liberated black people from racism, and then they accepted a false principle by assuming that racism would be ruined once white racists became convinced that they were also human. Therefore, as Paulin J. Hountondji claims that the act of writing for black people stands as a complex “certificate of humanity” (HOUNTONDJI apud GATES, 1998, p. 1586). According to Carole E. Boyce Davies, historically speaking, black women have been seen as having nothing relevant to speak. Therefore, when a black woman gets up in a crowd to speak, or presents herself publicly, she has to fight against all the cultural and historical meanings widespread about her and the content of her speaking is already framed as non- speech or not important. For black women there is the necessity to disrupt the monolithic categories like ‘community’, ‘black’, ‘women’ and examine them in terms of a variety of writers and speakers and their relationship to these. Thus, Black women who recognize their access may use it to best advantage or to speak against brutality by condemning its perpetrators (DAVIES, 2001, p.4-5). Bearing in mind the notion of writing as an act of resistance as well as an uplifting act, the present chapter aspires to present literary representation as a means that enables Black people, mainly women, to create alternative discourses in which they might raise their voices and move from the margins to the center of their own hi(her)stories. In other words, by means of representation it is possible to allow people to be themselves. Critic and theorist Gayatri Spivak, Professor Ella Shohat as well as the prominent critic Edward Said reveal concern with the matter of representation. Since representations are constructed images, that may serve to strengthen systems of inequality and subordination, the images, mainly those involving the subaltern, must be interrogated for their ideological content (BALDONADO, 1996). Furthermore, the critic Stuart Hall, concerned with the importance of representation, claims in his The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity, that the greatest cultural revolution of the twentieth century was the acquisition of voice by oppressed groups, that is intimately connected to the power of representation, in which the subaltern may have the power to speak as well as the power to be heard (HALL, 1996, p. 183). Rather as Gayatri Spivak affirms, in her powerful Can the Subaltern Speak?, that though the subaltern can speak, she/he will not necessarily be heard (SPIVAK, 1988, p. 66-111). Beyond it, in his article New Ethnicities, Hall analyzes the black cultural politics of representation through a reflection that reveals that a change in this politics is in process in postmodernity, presenting two different ways of understanding representation. In the first place, he presents 73
representation as an imitation of reality and then he highlights the fact that meaning attributed to things is cultural and justified and mediated by discourse (HALL, 1997, p. 224). To a great extent, writing, and especially revisionary writing, is the key used by women writers to preserve their sanity, their prevention against civil and social death. According to Venetria K. Patton, professor of English and director of African- American Studies and Research Center at Purdue University, historically, African-American women writers, fully aware of the negative images and ideas disseminated about black women’s movement and status within the larger society, have a history of trying to rescue the image of black women and responding to these stereotypes through their literature. As Patton states, “These writers used their texts as a means to reclaim black womanhood by removing the stigma of sexual promiscuity associated with black womanhood” (PATTON, 2000, p. xvi). Professor Frances Smith Foster argues that historians point out that white people’s attitude toward black people moved from “curiosity to ethnocentrism to more insidious forms of racism”, recognizing blacks as the Other, highlighting the apparent contrasts in color, religion and lifestyle” (FOSTER, 1993, p. 10). Given their “identity” as the Other, much of what we learn about the status of African women, descendant of those marginalized by appearance, national origin and/or class, can be applied to our understanding of African American women and their literature. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall and the influential critic Homi K. Bhabha demonstrate great concern with topics such as the construction of identity and subject representation, considering the ways in which the colonial subjects as "Others" are constructed as stereotypes in colonial discourse and how this discourse operates as a demonic "apparatus of power". Moreover, according to Bhabha, stereotype is a limited form of otherness; it is the site of a similar fantasy and defense – the longing for an originality that is aggravated by the differences of race, color and culture, as he states in The Location of Culture:
My contention is splendidly caught in Fanon’s title Black Skin, White Masks where the disavowal of difference turns the colonial subject into a misfit - a grotesque mimicry or 'doubling' that threatens to split the soul and the whole, undifferentiated skin of the ego. The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality (BHABHA, 2010, p. 107).
Stereotypes have been used as a means of power of the dominant, the oppressor, in order to demean, to disenfranchise as well as to control the oppressed, the Other since the very beginning of the contact between blacks and whites. Concerning the aim of the using of stereotypes in order to control people, , in her Reconstructing Womanhood, Professor Hazel 74
V. Carby asserts that “[…] the objective of stereotypes is not to reflector represent a reality but to function as a disguise, or mystification, or objective social relations” (CARBY, 1989, p. 22). The intersection of oppressions of race, class, sexuality as well as gender could not take place without influential ideological justifications for their survival, an instance of a powerful ideological reason was corroborated by Thomas Jefferson, who provided a moral escape clause that permitted lascivious “Christians” slavers to sexually bear down black women; Jefferson helped eradicate religious guilt by the animalization of slaves, defining them as unfeeling, unemotional beats, as he establishes in an essay entitled Thomas Jefferson on Race and Slavery:
They are more ardent after their female; but love seems with them to be more and eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation than reflection […] an animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect […] (RODRIGUEZ, 2007, p.563).
Furthermore, as the feminist critic Barbara Christian, in her Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers, assures that in the Unites States, the “enslaved African woman became the basis for the definition of our society’s Other” (CHRISTIAN, 1985, p. 160). To a certain extent, we may assume that one of the possible justifications for the great number of rapes against black women through slavery time can be explained by this type of thought ironically supported and spread by so influential people of the time, such as Thomas Jefferson, who was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States. Professor and philosopher Angela Davis, in her Women, Race and Class, goes deeper and argues that the rape of African American women was not simply an expression of the lust of Euro-American men but, mainly, an instrument of control, utilized to discipline the labor force and to keep African American men and women in line (DAVIS, 1983, p. 172- 201). Likewise, professor Deepika Bahri, in her Feminism in/and postcolonialism, brings us the categorization of Homo sapiens in early natural history portrayed by Mary Louise Pratt, which shows us the essentialist descriptions of the African as “black, phlegmatic, relaxed…governed by caprice” in opposition to the supposedly scientific description of the European as “gentle, acute, inventive…governed by laws” (PRATT apud BAHRI, 2008, p. 209). In accordance with these descriptions, we may perceive the demand for the naturalization of the European superiority myth. The power of stereotypes to shape the perception and treatment of a given identity group is one of the essentials of negative iconography referred to by the use of the expression “controlling image” propagated by Patricia Collins in her remarkable work Black Feminist 75
Thought that refers to the way that the widespread embrace of negative portraits of black womanhood demands that black women first engage with and dismantle those stereotypes that define the ways that African American womanhood becomes visible in order to create a space for the depiction of black female subjects whose interests and characteristics contradict the popular understanding of the limits of African American women’s identity. In her own words, Patricia Collins declares that “These controlling images are designed to make racism, sexism, poverty and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life” (COLLINS, 2009, p. 76). Essentialism may function negatively since it is a way of controlling people; however, it can also work positively since it has been used strategically by minority groups, in order to set them free from the already established representations, enabling them to find their fair share of development and uplifting as well as providing them with a way to redress historical mistakes against individuals or groups. Taken together, Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces serve as powerful instances of the use of literary representation as a tool to portray black women as human beings rather than beings who “possessed an excess of “animality and a peculiarly potent sexuality” (FOSTER, 1993, p. 10). Pauline Hopkins and Frances Harper, quite aware of the importance of breaking with the stereotypes already established by the white Anglo-Saxon society, in order to enable black people to move from the margins to the center of their own hi(her)stories, beautifully declare that:
No one will do this for us; we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history, and, as yet, unrecognized by writers of the Anglo-Saxon race21 (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 14).
Nor will it be in vain if it inspire the children of those upon whose brows of God has poured the chrism of that new era to determine that they will embrace every opportunity, develop every faculty, and use every power God has given them to rise in the scale of character and condition, and to add their quota of good citizenship to the best welfare of the nation (HARPER, 2010, p. 219).
Throughout Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, we may witness their endeavor to build Black characters that would disrupt white imagery/representation of Black people. Regarding the relevance of these nineteenth authors, their writings and their legacy, the teachers and authors Bert James Loewenber and Ruth Bogin state in their Black Women in the Nineteenth Century American Life that:
21 The passage remains faithfully written in italics as well as in the original Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1991). 76
Differing in experience from white women, they spoke as blacks. Differing in experience from men who were black, they spoke as women. Differing from one another in their experience as black women, they spoke as individuals. Literacy made the aspirations of these women public and durable (LOEWEMBERG; BOGIN, 1996, p. 4).
In Hopkins’s Contending Forces, the female protagonist faces the malicious accusations and the indecent offer made by Mr. Langley. Langley bribes telling Sappho’s boyfriend what he has found out: that Sappho’s son is the result of a rape. Considering that Hopkins is engaged in disrupting the misrepresentations created by the dominants, the author gives voice to Sappho in order to build an alternative discourse of black womanhood, escaping from the traditional notion in which black women were labeled as promiscuous. Moreover, throughout the novel, Hopkins criticizes the dominant and repugnant idea spread among the oppressors, that black women were not the victims of rape, in reality; they were seen as the provokers of such violence, as we may witness in the following passage: ‘Mr. Langley, your intrusion into my private apartment is unpardonable; your innuendoes are still more so. If you have anything to say, please say it; if not, let us close this remarkable interview’ […] ‘Do not be rash. It is better for you to listen to me and not arouse my enmity. I have seen Luke Sawyer, and I know your secret – Mabelle Beaubean! […] (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 318).
‘Sappho, do not think that I forget how abominable I must appear to you. I know what you will say – that I betray my friend, and worse than that, the girl who holds my promise; but my excuse is that passion is stronger than reason. […] Give up Will, and trust yourself to me. I am making money in my profession. I can and will do well by you. Your story need never be known’ ‘Doubtless you mean it in kindness’ […] ‘and I thank you, but I can never marry anyone but Will’ ‘Marriage! Exclaimed John, ‘who spoke of marriage? Ambitious men do not marry women with stories like yours!’ […] ‘Infamous villain!’ […] ‘you abuse my forlon condition. Leave me! Never till this moment have I realized the depths of my degradation!’ ‘Go! Go! will you go?’ interrupted Sappho, pointing to the door with queenly dignity 22 (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 319-320).
In Harper’s Iola Leroy, following the same track on criticizing the dominant discourse, breaking with the white imagery of white people in which black women were not able to speak and above all, breaking the silence of black women’s oppression positing different roles for women that broadened the domestic space, through Iola in a conversation with her uncle Robert, she asserts that, “I have a theory that every woman ought to know how to earn her own living. I believe that a great amount of sin and misery springs from the weakness and inefficiency of women” (HARPER, 2010, p. 160). Bearing in mind Harper’s and Hopkins’s importance and their contribution to the whole African American community, Hanna Wallinger declares that both writers were able to
22 My highlighting. 77
“reformulate a theory of race” (WALLINGER, 2011, p. 193). To a certain extent, Harper and Hopkins demonstrate their readers how the revision of history through writing is able to generate a revolution. Beyond, as Angelique V. Nixon postulates, “the process of (re)visioning, (re)writing, and (re)defining histories and (her)stories can be seen as resisting the long-lasting effects of colonialism and slavery” (NIXON, 2009, p. 335). Pauline Hopkins and Frances Harper demonstrating their commitment to uplift the race and their vision of literature as a hopeful space, wrote remarkable passages throughout their novels, as following: “In giving this little romance expression in print, I am not actuated by a desire for notoriety or for profit, but to do all that I can in an humble way to raise the stigma of degradation of my race” (HOPKINS, 1991, p.13).
From threads of fact and fiction I have woven a story whose mission will not be in vain if it awaken [sic] in the hearts of our countrymen a stronger sense of justice and a more Christlike humanity in behalf of those whom the fortunes of war threw, homeless, ignorant and poor, upon the threshold of a new era (HARPER, 2010, p. 219).
Considering the thesis discussed in Stephen Bann’s Romanticism and the Rise of History, that the nineteenth-century man found himself ‘devoid of history’ and in need of recovering “‘a historicity…bound essentially to himself,’ it does indeed make sense to view historicism as a necessary strategy of recuperation, which will generate a ‘new confidence in the future’” (BANN, 1995, p. 26-7). Therefore, Harper’s and Hopkins’s narratives, either directly or indirectly, engage with the question of the past and history as a strategy of recuperating the brilliant and brave “untold” history of African-Americans, taking the opposite side of the “paralyzing effect” brought within the idea of the “insistence on the uniqueness of historical events”, as Edward Hallet Carr in his What is History argues:
[The] insistence on the uniqueness of historical events has the same paralysing effect as the platitude taken over by Moore […] 'Everything is what it is and not another thing.' Embarked on this course, you soon attain a sort of philosophical nirvana, in which nothing that matters can be said about anything (CARR, 1961, p. 79).
In addition, Harper and Hopkins reformulate the relationship between history and identity, offering readers an instance of how history can be re-written to include women and other marginalized groups, therefore joining the number of contemporary authors who are concerned in historicizing “the event of the dehistoricized” (BHABHA, 2010, p. 283). Considering the narratives as a means of deconstructing specific racist and sexist misrepresentations of African-Americans, Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins might be – making use of Toni Morrison’s terms presented in Beloved – the “definers” rather than “the defined” of their race. Regarding the importance of Harper, Hopkins, and other African- 78
American women writers at the end of nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Professor Hazel Carby argues that, “black women intellectuals reconstructed the sexual ideologies of the nineteenth century to produce an alternative discourse of black womanhood” (CARBY, 1989, p. 6). In Contending Forces preface, Hopkins, becoming the “definer” of her race, expresses that:
I have presented both sides of the dark picture – lynching and concubinage – truthfully and without vituperation, pleading for that justice of heart and mind for my people which the Anglo-Saxon in America never withholds from suffering humanity (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 15).
Regarding the same above mentioned notion, Harper, through Iola, in the last chapter of her novel, states that: ‘“I wish I could something to my people than I am doing […] now that I am well and strong, I would like to do something of lasting service for the race”’(HARPER, 2010, p. 203). Furthermore, Harper and Hopkins conscious of the implications for real life in real contexts brought by misrepresentations, images or ideas, turn their narrative into a new direction, in which the object will turn into subject as Michelle Cliff argues in her Object Into Subject: On the Work Of Black Women Artists. According to Cliff black people are objectified by the oppressor as she pointedly remarks, “[…] under racism the person who is oppressed is turned into an object in the mind of the oppressor” (CLIFF, 1990, p. 271). Objectification is a detrimental tool used by the dominant culture in order to dehumanize the oppressed, the Other, denying their history, their language, their music, their cultural values. The practice of objectification is a way to make Black people be thought as different from white, and as Cliff postulates, “this difference is usually translated as less than” (CLIFF, 1990, p. 273). Since black women have been doubly objectified- first as Black, second as women- it is the duty of Black women artists to alter this objectification. It is their role to become the subject refusing the object and enlightening the real experience of being. Harper responding against these misrepresentations, as in an act of resistance, through a conversation between Hon. Dugdale and Rev. Carmicle about the situation of Black people in the South after the Civil War, exposes that: ‘Very hopeful, although at times I cannot help feeling anxious about their future. I was delighted with my visits to various institutions of learning, and surprised at the desire manifested among young people to obtain an education. Where toil-worn mothers bent beneath their heavy burdens their more favored daughters are enjoying the privileges of education. Young people are making recitations in Greek and Latin where it was once a crime to teach their parents to read. I also became acquainted with colored professors and presidents of colleges. Saw young ladies who had graduated as doctors. Comfortable homes have succeeded old cabins of slavery. […] I read with interest and pleasure a number of papers edited by colored men. I saw it estimated that people two millions of our people had learned to read, and I feel deeply grateful to the people who have supplied us with teachers who have stood their ground so nobly among our people (HARPER, 2010, p. 200).
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Hopkins also concerned about fighting against misrepresentations, portrays, through a conversation between Mrs. Smith – William’s mother, and Charles Montfort-Withington, how black people were able to uplift in life. As she points out: ‘Are you aware, madam, that your son possesses rare intellectual gifts?’” […] ‘I must confess to a feeling of curiosity to learn how such characters are nourished among a people like yours.’ Mrs. Smith looked at him thoughtfully a moment, and then said: ‘Sir, it would afford me great pleasure to give you a sketch of his life so far, if you would care to listen.’ ‘It is what I desire most to hear.’ The great man listened to her humble story with marked attention, as she related the history of early struggles which her husband and she had braved for the maintenance and education of their children. It was a story common enough among Negroes ambitious to avail themselves of the privileges which were now open to them – a story of faithful fathers bearing insult and injury to keep the meanly paid employment; of mothers ‘spending weary days and nights over the washtub and ironing-board in order to get money to educate their children.’[…] ‘Your story is revelation to me, madam. […] Believe me, you have my heart- felt sympathy […] And it is against such spirits of nobility and self-sacrifice that many would close the entrance door to the higher education of the century! Blind and foolish prejudice! Monstrous injustice!’ (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 372-73).
In short, self-representation creates imaginative space for citizenship in Harper’s Iola Leroy and in Hopkins’s Contending Forces. As a result, Vanessa Holford Diana, in her essay “Narrative Patternings of Resitance in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces, highlights that both writers perform what Barbara Harlow has termed the literature of resistance, which “sees itself […] as immediately and directly involved in a struggle against ascendant or dominant forms of ideological and cultural production” (DIANA, 2007, p. 174). Paradoxically, the ascribed oppressions of race and gender promoted empowerment to black women. Harper and Hopkins challenge racist and sexist depictions of African- Americans that characterized white supremacist rhetoric in the slavery era. For instance, slave owners, who raped or forced these women to serve as their concubines, tried to rationalize their behavior by depicting them as promiscuous and immoral. Gerda Lerner in her Black Women in White America, argues that the rape of black women was justified by claims that they were “eager for sexual exploits, voluntarily ‘loose’ in their morals, and, therefore, deserved none of the consideration and respect granted to white women” (LERNER, 1992, p. 163). In other words, these women who were victims were depicted as guilty. Taking into account the importance of raising her voice against these atrocities, Pauline Hopkins presents Sappho Clark, who was abused by her own “white” and “wealth” uncle. The following passage refers to the moment when Sappho’s story is being revealed, through an old man called Luke. He is recounting the day when Sappho’s father faced his brother and accused him of his crime. Through the sadistic uncle, Hopkins states that: 80
whatever damage I have done I am willing to pay for. But your child is no better than her mother or her grandmother. What does a woman of mixed blood, or any Negress, for that matter, know of virtue? It is my belief that they were a direct creation by God to be pleasant companions of men of my race (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 260-61).
Commenting on the horrors faced by black women, bell hooks points out that: Rape was not the only method used to terrorize and de-humanize black women. Sadistic floggings of naked black women were another method employed to strip the female slave of dignity. In the Victorian world, where white women were religiously covering everybody part, black women were daily stripped of their clothing and publicly whipped. Slave owners were well aware that it added to the degradation and humiliation of female slaves for them to be forced to appear naked before male whippers and onlookers (hooks, 1991, p. 37).
In addition, other practices reinforced the stereotype of black population, such as the laws against intermarriage, the denial of the title “Miss” or “Mrs.”, the different legal sanctions against rape, abuse of minors and other sex crimes when committed against white or black women and so on (LERNER, 1992, p. 163-64). Taking into consideration the importance of fighting against the system, Harper brings to the center of her narrative the idea that the law was for white people, not for blacks. Two relevant passages will serve us as instances. The first passage is the conversation between Marie and Alfred Lorraine, just after Eugene Leroy passes away: I have come to take possession of these premises By what authority? She gasped, turning deathly pale. He hesitated a moment, as if the words were arrested by sense of shame. By the authority of the law, answered Lorraine, which has decided that Leroy’s legal heirs are his white blood relations, and that your marriage is null and void But, exclaimed Marie, I have our marriage certificate. I was Leroy’s lawful wife. Your marriage certificate is not worth the paper it is written on (HARPER, 2010, p. 81).
The second passage is the moment when Iola is talking to Dr Gresham, who is in love with her, about the complications of intermarriage at that time. As she puts it: […] my mother’s marriage had been declared illegal, because of an imperceptible infusion of negro blood in her veins; and that she and her children had been remanded to slavery. I was torn from my mother, sold as a slave, and subjected to cruel indignities […] (HARPER, 2010, p. 95).
Similarly, African-American men were excluded from mainstream definitions of manhood characterized by restraint and chivalry, as is evident in the prevalent stereotype of the black rapist, which was employed in much public discourse to justify lynching, as Vanessa Holford Diana clarifies in her Narrative Patterning of Resistance (DIANA, 2007, p. 176). Regarding this atrocity, Hopkins brings us a remarkable passage in which some people are trying to defend a black man who was wrongly accused of rape and whose condemnation was lynching. A white man, belonging to a high political position, claims that:
To come to the case in hand, I wish it to be distinctly understood that I am absolutely opposed to mob law. But there is an unwritten law, not peculiar to any section, which demands the quickest execution, in the quickest way, of the fiend who robs a virtuous woman of her honor to gratify his hellish diabolism […] If in return for all benefits conferred upon the Negro at the 81
South, which I have enumerated preciously, they give us the heinous crime of rape? Where find excuses for such ingratitude? (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 248).
Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted and Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South offer instances of a different and more respectful look on the Black culture. Moreover, both novels using the Civil War period onwards as the historical background attempt to deal with the rewriting of history through fiction and memory in order to tell stories that had been overlooked, sometimes denied, and, why not to say, almost forgotten. Throughout their novels, both Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins make use of memory as way of uncovering and recovering the forgotten and manipulated histories of the “nameless and faceless”, of “Iolas”, “Saphos”, “shadows” “who” must be uplifted in order to reshape a future of and for other subjects. Therefore, throughout their work, the act of remembering is fundamentally social and collective; it is a way to keep the continuity of an ethnic community; in other words, they make use of memory as a political process. Indeed the stories and traumas brought within their narratives may be seen as an attempt to construct a collective memory in which the discourse of the “Other” will come from the margins to the center moving away from historical discourse. Regarding the importance of memory as a political process, Stephen Bertman, in his work Cultural Amnesia: America’s Future and the Crisis of Memory, refers to memory as a very fluid process in constant change, stating that: Memory is distorted by needs, desires, interests and fantasies. [Memory] is subjective and malleable rather than objective and concrete, memory is emotional, conceptual, contextual, constantly undergoing revision, selection, interpretation, distortion, and reconstruction… Cultural or collective memory constitutes the collective memory of many people, encompassing generations (BERTMAN, 2000, p. 27; 31).
Hopkins’s awareness of the importance to build a collective memory is well portrayed in her preface, where she highlights that, “Fiction is of great value to any people as a preserver of manners and customs – religious, political and social. It is a record of growth and development from generation to generation” (HOPKINS, 1991 p. 13-4). The proud claim of heritage is also a shared aspect in both novels. The claim of heritage may be read as a way to build a collective memory and also as Harper’s and Hopkins’s support and engagement with the one-drop rule in order to uplift Black people. Professor and critic Ella Shohat, like Stuart Hall, highlights the importance of communities that have experienced brutal ruptures and which get into the process of forging a resistant collective identity through the retrieving of their traditions, in other words, their past “not as static, but as fragmented sets of narrated memories and experiences” – “no matter how hybrid that identity has been before” (SHOHAT, 2006, p. 244-245). In accordance with Shohat, Hall 82
argues that “identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past” (HALL, 2010, p. 236). It is pertinent to say that in Iola Leroy, the protagonist was not aware of her black ancestry and she passed as a white. In an episode at the institution Iola used to study, Mr. Galen’s school, in which the presence of a “colored girl” caused dissatisfaction of some white people, Iola feels sorry for the girl and tells her mother that she would not like to be a colored girl since “‘It is so hard to be looked down on for what one can’t help”’ (HARPER, 2010, p. 78). While talking about slavery to a classmate, Iola, “being a Southern girl and a slave- holder’s daughter, always defended slavery” (HARPER, 2010, p. 83), as she expresses that, “‘Slavery can’t be wrong’ […] ‘for my father is a slave-holder, and my mother is as good to our servants as she can be. I never saw my father strike one of them […]” (HARPER, 2010, p. 83). Iola’s transformation from white to black comes with her father’s death. As soon as Eugene Leroy dies of yellow fever, his cousin Alfred Lorraine in order to inherit Leroy’s goods, divides the inheritance among Eugene Leroy’s white relatives, and that Marie and her children must be remanded to slavery. Therefore, the transformation of the protagonist from white to black may be pointed out as the shift of the protagonist from object to subject, Iola’s proud claim of heritage may be seen as the moment when Iola definitely engages with the idea of Black people’s empowerment, as she states that “My life-work is planned. I intend spending my future among the colored people of the South” (HARPER, 2010, p. 182). Beyond it, Iola argues that, “I must serve the race which needs me most” (HARPER, 2010, p. 183). In Hopkins’s Contending Forces, the protagonist makes clear the importance of the role of black women in the uplifting of black people, as she asserts that, “‘You are a little preacher’, said Sappho gently, as she looked at Dora from two wet eyes; ‘and if our race ever amounts to anything in this world, it will be because such women as you are raised up to save us’” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 101). In a more political tone, Hopkins, through Sappho, claims the importance of fighting against the system of oppression faced by black people and the engagement with the idea of Black people’s uplifting , as Sappho argues that,
I have lived beneath the system of oppression in the South. If we lose the franchise, at the same time we shall lose the respect of all other citizens. Temporizing will not benefit us; rather, it will leave us branded as cowards, not worthy a freeman’s respect – an alien people, without a home (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 125).
In addition to it, Hopkins, through a conversation between Sappho and Dora, denounces the difficulty faced by black girls while trying to get a job in the North of the US, 83
place where black people were supposed to be more respected than they were in the South. As she expresses that:
‘How did you finally succeed in getting work? I have always heard that it was very difficult for colored girls to find employment in offices where your class of work is required.’ ‘And so it is, my dear. […]. I shall never forget the day I started out to find work: the first place that I visited was all right until the man found out I was colored; then he said that his wife wanted a nurse girl, and he had no doubt she would be glad to hire me, for I looked good-tempered. At the second place where I ventured to intrude the proprietor said: ‘Yes; we want a stenographer, but we’ve no work for your kind23 […] It was dreadful! ‘I cannot understand people. Here in the North we are allowed every privilege. There seems to be no prejudice until we seek employment; then every door is closed against us (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 128-9).
According to DoVeanna S. Fulton, taken together, the protagonists of the discussed novels, Iola and Sappho, redefine gender and nineteenth-century marriage constructs that are based in a democratic relationship. As she observes that: “They represent a sophisticated negotiation of Victorian definitions of womanhood and marriage with notions of a progressive modern woman” (FULTON, 2006, p. 75). There was no patriarchal shift of Iola and Sappho, as properties, from father to husband. According to Hazel Carby, “[f]emale and male sexuality were repressed and replaced by mental and spiritual kinship” (CARBY, 1989, p. 80). Moreover, bearing in mind the activist and revisionary writing of both writers, the suppression of sexuality may serve as a tool in order to enable the creation of a new discourse, of a new “reality” in which black women will have the same importance of men within the African American society. In Hopkins’s narrative, at the very end of it, it is clear the intention of the writer to bring the importance of the mental and spiritual relationship mentioned by Carby, as we may read in the following passage: Sappho was happy in contemplating the life of promise which was before her. Will was the noblest of men. […] United by love, chastened by sorrow and self-sacrifice, he and she planned to work together to bring joy to hearts crushed by despair. They stood upon the deck that night long after the others had retired to their staterooms, watching the receding shores with hearts filled with emotion too deep for words. ‘My wife, my life. O, we will walk this world Yoked in all exercise of noble end, And so through dark gates across the wild That no man knows...... Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me’ (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 401-2).
Likewise, in Harper’s novel, the author demonstrates her commitment with the suppression of sexuality in order to bring a different discourse from the ones, widely spread by the dominants, in which black people were used to be the inferior people not able to progress in life. In the end of the final chapter, we are told about the duties of each character
23 My highlighting. 84
and Iola and her husband, Doctor Latimer, are presented as an active couple, as Harper highlights:
Soon after Iola had settled in C––she quietly took her place in the Sunday-school as a teacher, and in the church as a helper. She was welcomed by the young pastor, who found in her a strong and faithful ally. Together they planned meetings for the especial benefit of mothers and children. […] In lowly homes and windowless cabins her visits are always welcome. Little children love her. Old age turns to her for comfort, young girls for guidance, and mothers for counsel. Her life is full of blessedness. Doctor Latimer by his kindness and skill has won the name of the ‘Good Doctor.’ […] He is a leader in every reform movement for the benefit of the community. […] He has great faith in the possibilities of the negro […] he hopes that the future career of the negro will be a greater influence for freedom and social advancement than it was in the days of yore for slavery and its inferior civilization (HARPER, 2010, p. 216).
What makes Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces special and their telling so valuable is their attempt recounting experiences that are not only segments of individual lives but also vital segments of African American History. They seem to apply in their narratives the idea discussed by James Baldwin in his The Fire Next Time, in which he asserts that: In order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is […] To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought (BALDWIN, 1993, p. 81).
Both authors do not accept the past told by the white people, they wanted more than it; they wanted themselves to voice the experiences of African American people through their weapons, their pens. In sum, they learned how to use the past and move away from the official discourse. The endings of Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted and Hopkins’s Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South are hopeful, though not happy. And the hopefulness one feels does not descend from any expectation of a white change-of- heart, but from the fact that both writers have tested their characters throughout the novels and they have risen as people of integrity, capable of facing reality and white racism. In order to portray the aforesaid notion, two relevant passages will be presented; the first passage it is taken from Hopkins’s novel. It is a passage in which Will Smith is visiting “Doctor Lewis’s pupils and the neighboring schools” and after “gaining a clear insight into it all” (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 389), Will states that: ‘I hold that a man to gain true self-respected and independence must not be hampered in any way y prejudice. I would remove my school far from such influences.’ ‘Where would you your choice fall for the establishment of such a paradise?’ asked Doctor Lewis with a smile. ‘There are places enough in the world. One could easily find such environment abroad. There across the water, associated on equal terms with men fo the highest culture, the Negro shall give physical utterance to the splendid possibilities which are within him’ (HOPKINS, 1991, p. 389).
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The second extract is taken from Harper’s note, in which she deeply expresses her faith in the uplift of black people, as she, remarkably, declares that: There are scattered among us materials for mournful tragedies and mirth-provoking comedies, which some hand may yet bring into literature of the country, glowing with fervor of the tropics and enriched by the luxuriance of the Orient, and thus add to the solution of our unsolved American problem. The race has not very long to straighten its hands from the hoe, to grasp the pen and wield it as a power for good, and to erect above ruined auction-block and slave-pen institutions of learning, but
There is light beyond the darkness, Joy beyond the present pain; There is hope in God’s great justice And the negro’s rising brain. Though the morning seems to linger O’er the hill-tops far away, Yet the shadows bear the promise Of a brighter coming day (HARPER, 2010, p. 219).
It is pertinent to say that Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins found creativity ways to express themselves in a society that did everything to repress it and them. For Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins writing created a hopeful space that enabled them to produce an alternative discourse in which in turn Black people were allowed to voice their experiences, voice their expectations. Thus, the act of writing for Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins might be considered as a powerful weapon of uplifting for black people, mainly for African American Women. Furthermore, their literature serves not only as historical recovery but also as historical intervention, challenging us to broaden traditional historic definitions.
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5 CONCLUSION
If there is a single distinguishing feature of the literature of Black women – and this accounts for their lack of recognition – it is: their writing is about black women; it takes the trouble to record the thoughts, words, feelings, and deeds of black women, experiences that make the realities of being black in America look very different from what men have written […] Women talk to other women in this tradition, and their friendships with other women – mothers, sisters, grandmothers, friends, lovers – are vital to their growth and well-being Mary Helen Washington
Despite, or perhaps, in part because of the mournful state of race relations at the time comprehended between the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century, the American society eye witnessed an emergence of an unprecedented number of important black writers of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, among them Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline E. Hopkins, Paul Laurence Dunbar and W. E. Du Bois. These writers confronted, directly, the challenges as well as the miseries facing African-Americans of the post-slavery generation producing works that finally received a place in the American canon after nearly a century (WALLINGER, 2011, p. 193). Although literary historians have paid more attention to the fiction produced by men writers such as Chesnutt, Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois, today they are aware of the contribution of women fiction writers in the canon of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction fiction. African-Americans have been, throughout centuries of controversy, vital collaborators and many times pioneers in the struggle for their own freedom and uplift. For Black Women, writing in itself was and it is a political act, an act of resistance as well as an uplifting act; it is a “talking back” in their own voices, about their own experiences, informed by a special awareness forged out of four hundred years of oppression. We may say that there are certain features common in the writing of Black women. Yet, there is a specific trait, which most critics agree: “their writing is about black women” (WASHINGTON, 1988, p. xxi). Likewise, literature for black women might be seen as a hopeful space, in which new perspectives could be portrayed in order to enable them to move from the margins to the center of their hi(her)stories. Besides, Harper’s and Hopkins’s novels were callings for black women in order to enable them to become responsible for the uplift of the whole black community. Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline E. Hopkins join the female African-American writers who include in their works the ones who have been historically silenced and oppressed for 87
ages in consequence of racial, social and/or gender discrimination. Resistance is the key idea that permeates the African American literary production. While resisting the oppressions suffered by the society on here, Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces posit new possibilities, providing hope for African Americans. Taken together, both authors enabled the oppressed to become the subjects of their own histories, their own destinies. Therefore, their novels were not simply negative reactions of blackness; indeed, they were efforts to create a positive racial image within the framework of American society. The nineteenth century represents the starting point at which there is substantial documentary proof of black women working in a planned mode toward their own empowerment. Black women made use of leadership as an effort to reorganize the existing power system. As such, a model of leadership, which was rooted in Black feminism, appeared among Black women activists, such as Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Ida B. Wells, and Anna Julia Cooper. Black women gave birth to their own movements, developing quite particular meanings and forms of leadership, such as the Black women’s club movement and the anti-lynching movement. It is undeniable that the emphasis on the role of womanhood defined Harper’s and Hopkins’s writings about the formation of the American family, the evaluation of the past, miscegenation, the moral and political values of the nation, and, to a certain extent, a utopian hope for a better future. Bearing in mind the relevance of the connection between past and present within African American society, Jill Matus observes that Du Bois dedicated his career to create a counter memory, a counter history of the past in black history that would challenge the American myths of a promised land, and revise the foundations on which works of American history were constructed (MATUS, 1998, p. 1). Thus, it is pertinent to say that Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins were engaged with W. E. Du Bois’s intention of creating a “counter history.” Reinforcing the importance of the retrieval of the history of African American people, Matus mentions an interview with Toni Morrison, in which she claims that: The reclamation of the history of black people in this country is paramount in its importance because while you can’t really blame the conqueror for writing his own way, you can certainly debate it. There is a great deal of obfuscation and distortion and erasure, so that the presence and the heartbeat of the black people has been systematically annihilated in many, many ways and the job of recovery is ours (MORRISON apud MATUS, 1998, p. 1-2).
It is clear that Harper as well as Hopkins were completely involved with the past they depicted throughout their novels. Their main intention was to look back to (re)discover their own histories, so often erased by strong hegemonic power, and offer a vision of and for the future. Therefore, throughout Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted and Contending Forces: a 88
Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, the past was supposed to be reconstructed to gain meaning in the present time. Both novels revised historical events, such as Slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction, in order to give these events different meanings, reconstructing history not as absolute truth, but as a topic of discussion. Furthermore, Harper and Hopkins made use of the past to allow the inscription of the ones who had been denied before to take part into the history of their own country. Therefore, both novels might be considered as works which attempted to challenge Black people’s stereotypes, the “controlling images” connected to promiscuity and inferiority (COLLINS, 2009, p. 76-106), which were spread and engraved in the collective imaginary of the West, having as their principal aim the controlling of black people, mainly of African American women. The literary representations presented throughout Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted and Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South may be seen as time markers of a much needed change in the black community perspective. Therefore, their narratives can be regarded as a means of deconstructing specific racist and sexist misrepresentations of African-Americans. Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins made use of their novels as means of retelling the past in order to posit new possibilities for the future, used their narratives as a tool of deconstructing pre-established representations, made use of writing as a weapon of resistance. It is thereby applicable to assume that Harper’s and Hopkins’s main target was the uplift of Black people, mainly of black women. Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted and Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South are permeated by the notion of uplifting. Harper and Hopkins, throughout their literature, created a space in which black women were able to voice their ideas, their urgencies and their hopes. Likewise, the novels are a calling to black people, mainly to black women, to commit themselves to the fighting back of institution-building and racial uplift in the face of white supremacist brutality. The endings of Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted and Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South are hopeful. And the hopefulness which comes from them lies in the fact that Harper’s and Hopkins’s characters, throughout their novels, rise as people of integrity and dignity capable of facing and responding to white racism. Their novels provided space to Black heroes, to Black heroines, to Black issues. To a great extent, Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted and Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North are potential narratives of empowerment for African American people, mainly for Black 89
Women. Therefore, as activists, Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins, by means of literature, worked for brighter coming days.
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In: ______. A people´s history of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2010. 98 APPENDIX A – Frances E. W. Harper Fonte: HARPER, Frances E. W. Iola Leroy, or, Shadows uplifted. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. 99 APPENDIX B – Mrs. F. E. W. Harper Fonte: POETRY Foundation. Disponível em: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/frances- ellen-watkins-harper. Acesso em: 5 fev. 2013. 100 APPENDIX C - Cover of Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted Fonte: HARPER, Frances E. W. Iola Leroy, or, Shadows uplifted. New York: Dover Publications, 2010. 101 APPENDIX D - Pauline E. Hopkins Fonte: BROWN, Lois. Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: black daughter of the revolution. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008. p. 8. 102 APPENDIX E - Pauline E. Hopkins’s picture and signature in Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South Fonte: HOPKINS, Pauline E. Contending forces: a romance illustrative of negro life north and south. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. p.3. 103 APPENDIX F - Cover of Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South Fonte: HOPKINS, Pauline E. Contending forces: a romance illustrative of negro life north and south. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1900. 104 APPENDIX G - Safe House’s Picture – the candle at the window was the signal to a safe house on the Underground Railroad Fonte: NATIONAL Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. Disponível em: 105 APPENDIX H - Routes used by nineteeth-century black slaves in order to set themselves free Fonte: CHURCHILL HISTORY. Disponível em: 106 APPENDIX I - Poem by Frances E. W. Harper “Bury me in a free land” (1858) Make me a grave where'er you will, In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill; Make it among earth's humblest graves, But not in a land where men are slaves. I could not rest if around my grave I heard the steps of a trembling slave His shadow above my silent tomb Would make it a place of fearful gloom. I could not rest if I heard the tread Of a coffle gang to the shambles led, And the mother's shriek of wild despair Rise like a curse on the trembling air. I could not sleep if I saw the lash Drinking her blood at each fearful gash, And I saw her babes torn from her breast, Like trembling doves from their parent nest. I'd shudder and start if I heard the bay Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey, And I heard the captive plead in vain As they bound afresh his galling chain. If I saw young girls from their mother's arms Bartered and sold for their youthful charms, My eye would flash with a mournful flame, My death-paled cheek grow red with shame. I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might Can rob no man of his dearest right My rest shall be calm in any grave Where none can call his brother a slave. I ask no monument, proud and high, To arrest the gaze of the passers-by; All that my yearning spirit craves, Is bury me not in a land of slaves. Fonte: BOYD, Melba Joyce. Discarded legacy: politics and poetics in the life of Frances E.W. Harper 1825-1911. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. p. 33-34.