Treading the Winepress; Or, a Mountain of Misfortune

Illinois State University ISU ReD: Research and eData Undiscovered Americas 12-2019 Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen Gabrielle Brown Illinois State University Eric Willey Illinois State University Jean MacDonald Illinois State University Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/ua Part of the African American Studies Commons, Fiction Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons Recommended Citation Thompson Allen, Clarissa Minnie; Brown, Gabrielle; Willey, Eric; and MacDonald, Jean, "Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune" (2019). Undiscovered Americas. 2. https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/ua/2 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by ISU ReD: Research and eData. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undiscovered Americas by an authorized administrator of ISU ReD: Research and eData. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Treading the Winepress Treading very life hath its chapter of sorrow. THOMP ENo matter how rich the gilding or fair ALLEN SON reading the pages of the volume, Trouble will T the stamp it with his sable signet. Winepress Edited by Eric Willey, Jean MacDonald, and Gabrielle Brown Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen AMERI CAS ODL DOWNSTATEO LEGACIES Treading Winepressthe Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen Treading Winepressthe or, A Mountain of Misfortune Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen Edited by Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, and Jean MacDonald AMERICAS Ï DOWNSTATEO LEGACIES Undiscovered Americas Series Editor: Steve Halle Illinois State University 4241 Publications Unit Normal, Illinois 61790-4241 http://english.illinoisstate.edu/pubunit/N Editor’s Introduction Copyright © 2019 by Gabrielle Brown All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Cover and Book Design: Publications Unit, Department of English, Illinois State University, Director: Steve Halle Cover Design: Hannah Kroonblawd Book Design and Composition: Gabrielle Brown Cover Art: Bird (Furnishing Fabric, Detail), 1878, William Morris. Public Domain, CC0 1.0. ISBN: 978-0-9974041-5-9 First Edition 2019 Contents Editor’s Introduction xi Gertie 1 A Presentiment 8 At Madame De Verne’s 16 Gypsy’s Homecoming 28 The Old, Old Story of Man’s Duplicity 30 and Woman’s Trust Why Gypsy Left School 34 A Father’s Course is Run 40 Will De Verne’s Return 44 Our Hero Calls at the Rectory 47 Another Wanderer Returns 50 Sundered Hearts 59 “Watch Over My Love for Me” 72 Dr. De Verne’s Mysterious Traveling Companion 80 Where is My Sister? 85 Dr. De Verne or Herbert—Which? 92 The Self-Commissioned Detective 101 Tidings of the Lost One 106 Peri at the Gate of Paradise 110 A Memorable Night 114 Visitation of Providence—the Bitter Cup 121 The Bitterest Stroke of All 125 Stunned 129 A Visit to the Prison, and its Results 135 A Few Leaves from Corinne De Vern’s Journal 142 The Verdict 150 “Thy Will Be Done!” 156 Sequel 161 EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION “Some things you forget. Other things you never do.” Toni Morrison, Beloved There is something beautiful about discovery, about learning the journey we were once familiar with involved a detour that could possibly explain what we did not understand. While it is common to emphasize those who are the first, we must not forget those who came after, because they provide us the opportunity to learn more, which is a privilege we cannot take lightly. When I was approached with the opportunity to work on an archival editing project involving an apparently unknown African American female author, I was excited but also nervously anticipating how large of a role I would take on in bringing this project to fruition. Taking Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen’s serial publication Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune, which circulated as a serial in late-nineteenth-century black newspapers, and turning it into a novel provided the rare opportunity to expand my individual knowledge in another aspect of publishing while doing the important work of creating an open access book Treading the Winepress vii available to educators and students in classrooms all over the world. This unique novel appears to drift away from the common spiritual and slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and instead envelops readers in a story of intrigue with the majority of characters being African American themselves. While portraying the racial, economic, and classist disparities facing African Americans of that time, Allen’s writing grabs her readers’ attention through love, mystery, and murder happening in the fictional city of Capitolia, based on Columbia, South Carolina. Few mentions of Allen exist on the Internet; her Wikipedia page consists of fourteen total sentences, with this novel the only published work mentioned by name and her other contributions to the literary arts unspecified. She was an educator as well as an author of poetry and novelettes for Texas-based publications. While Treading the Winepress is considered her most notable work, the serial publication has only been available in microfilm from historic newspapers, the Christian Recorder of Philadelphia and the Boston Advocate. Over time, I became increasingly passionate about the project. Allen appears to be one of the earliest African American female novelists published in the United States—the first divided between Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (believed to have been written between 1853 and 1860). Treading the Winepress takes readers on a journey through the lives of African American elites, with love affairs and murder mysteries abounding. The first step to sharing Allen’s novel with the world was to get all of the available chapters into a single document. The first three chapters were available via Accessible Archives, an online database of archived historical information, most of which were formerly only available in microfilm. The earliest record of publication comes from the Christian Recorder’s August 6, 1885 issue; the chapters were printed in each week’s issue until ending at chapter three with viii Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen “to be continued” on August 20, 1885, with no future installments published in this newspaper. The novel stopped serial publication in the Christian Recorder because the tragedies and intrigues of the narrative would not match the conservative, religious values of the newspaper. Her novel then began serial publication in the Boston Advocate, the first chapter printed in the September 26, 1885 issue, and would continue through to completion December 25, 1886. As I reviewed the copies of the microfilm from the Boston Advocate, I discovered that eighteen chapters, along with what I later assumed to be three partial chapters, were missing from the films provided for transcription. All of the film copies were low in contrast, so each individual microfilm was darkened using Adobe Photoshop, making the words more legible. Since I had begun the transcription process with text from the Christian Recorder, I decided to compare the content of the two newspapers, discovering that many of the phrases in the Boston Advocate were modified in some way. For consistency, I changed any text that did not match directly with the Boston Advocate issues, noting with red font the areas that could not be verified due to missing portions of the newspaper, and used the Boston Advocate as the sole source for the transcriptions. As mentioned, many of the microfilms were not in perfect, pristine condition, often having entire sections either unreadable or cut off when copies were made. For these areas, I opted to use brackets to denote a word, phrase, or paragraph that was not legible. For consistency within the interior, it was decided that having consistent representation of illegible areas provided a more efficient way for future modifications of those sections. Many issues had a single chapter broken into multiple parts or sections, but I chose not to show this in the transcription because I believed this to have been a decision made by the newspaper editors for spacing, rather than the request of Allen herself. Treading the Winepress ix There were other inconsistencies throughout various chapters, like the spelling of the last name De Verne, which is shown both as one word, “DeVerne” and two words, “De Verne.” I opted to keep De Verne as two words because this format appeared first in the publication. The bracketed phrases denote areas that were difficult to discern, but there were small words and phrases that could be determined by the language or scene surrounding them. Although there are many missing chapters and phrases, it was decided that enough of the manuscript was available to give a clear picture of the plot of the story. Unfortunately, the microfilm with the final installment was not available to us when creating this printed edition, but it was agreed that leaving it to the readers to draw their own conclusions about the fates of the characters, based on the clues Allen provides throughout the text, would still provide an enjoyable reading experience. It is my hope that, in the coming years, new discoveries of heretofore unknown archival materials are made and this edition is expanded, the missing chapters discovered and similarly transcribed, adding more stops to the journey that Allen takes us on in the pages of Treading the Winepress. My hope is that teachers and students will seek to know more about the unsung novelist Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, as well as other female authors of color, taking note of how they contributed to the rich culture of American and world literature. –Gabrielle Brown December 2019 Illinois State University x Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen Treading Winepressthe or, A Mountain of Misfortune —CHAPTER 1— GERTIE Every life hath its chapter of sorrow.

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