Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends

by Farah Jasmine Griffin

  The Brown-Primus correspondence provides material needed for moving beyond both the silence in the historical record and black women’s self-imposed silence about their inner lives. The letters differ from the historical documentation of the public lives of well-known black women such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman. Also, unlike the slave narratives of women like Harriet Jacobs or the postbellum novels and stories of writers such as Harper or Pauline Hopkins, Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus are not concerned with publication or with a white audience. As such, their letters provide a rare glimpse into the day-to-day activities of two ordinary black women.

  Primus and Brown take black humanity for granted; thus their letters do not censor their opinions about the diversity and complexity of black life or their feelings about white people. They openly discuss their intolerance of and resistance to racism, community scandals relating to unwed pregnancies, and, in Brown’s case, her love for Rebecca and her courtship with Joseph Tines, the man she eventually married. Both women reveal their thoughts about books, politics, friendship, and family. Finally, the letters broaden our current conception of nineteenth- century black women as either southern slaves or northern abolitionists. Addie and Rebecca were neither slaves nor famous abolitionists, although they shared much with these two groups of women: they were victims of American racism and active agents in the struggle against it.

  But, “In dreams begin responsibilities.”5 The Brown-Primus correspondence poses the challenge of remaining sensitive to the concerns of many black women that their private voices might be used against them in the service of sexism and racism. For years, black women have battled against stereotypes that label them as promiscuous harlots or asexual but nurturing mammies. In order to combat such images, nineteenth-century African Americans sought to offer counterimages of pristine Victorian black ladies. Brown and Primus are neither promiscuous harlots, nurturing mammies, nor one-dimensional Victorian ladies. They are complex, intelligent, sensual, and multidimensional women committed to both each other and black liberation. The letters challenge us to rise to the occasion of reading them, to defy any element of the negative stereotypes about black women that we may have internalized, and to accept these women in the context of their times and their communities.

  In their totality, the letters prove to be about the full extent of Brown’s and Primus’s ambitions, desires, frustrations, and membership in a black community committed to racial uplift. But they also chronicle more intimate lives: these women’s intense friendship and even romantic partnership, as well as their lives with men. In light of this, the letters reveal the contours of relationships between black women—mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, and romantic partners.

  The friendship between Brown and Primus is an example of what feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins identifies as one of the “primary focal points where Black women’s consciousness has been nurtured and where African American women have spoken freely in order to articulate a self-defined standpoint.”6 While Collins asserts the dominance of such friendships in fiction by black women as evidence of their dominance in black women’s lives, the correspondence between Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus is proof of the importance of sister- friendships in life as well as in fiction. For these two women, letter writing was a means of creating community, of gathering and expressing their thoughts, of seeing themselves through each other’s eyes and thereby seeing themselves as something much more than society would have either of them believe. Addie Brown’s open expression of love for Rebecca does not differ from that in many other letters of nineteenth- century women. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s pioneering article of 1975, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” first identified this aspect of women’s correspondence and uncovered the “abundance of manuscript evidence” that demonstrates the emotional ties between women and the development of same-sex friendships that were accepted in nineteenth- century American society.

  Historians such as Smith-Rosenberg and Lillian Faderman have shown that nineteenth-century white women often slept together and were openly affectionate with each other. Both speculate that some of these relationships may have been sexual as well.7

  If we are to believe Addie’s letters, her relationship with Rebecca was not simply an affectionate “friendship” or sisterhood. Several of Addie’s letters have fairly explicit references to erotic interactions between herself and Rebecca. While there are major differences of class and education between the two women, Addie was not in any way forced into these situations. In fact, she often seems to have been the assertive and insistent one. Without Rebecca’s letters, we may never know the full extent of their relationship. From Addie’s responses to what appear to be Rebecca’s concerns, comments, and queries, it seems clear that the passion and love were mutual. Nonetheless, it is not insignificant that though Addie frequently asks Rebecca to visit her in New York and though she requests that Rebecca send for her to come to Royal Oak, neither seems to have happened.

  In order to suggest the difference between Addie’s letters to Rebecca and those between other women of their peer group, I have included in the appendix two stray letters that I found in the Primus collection. The first was written to Rebecca by her friend and colleague Josephine Booth. The second was from the oft-mentioned Carrie of Rebecca’s letters, written to Rebecca’s younger sister Bell. While both letters share the writer’s affection and admiration for the recipient, neither of them matches the intensity of Addie’s letters to Rebecca. A third letter comes closest in its expressions of love and devotion. It is written to Addie. There is no date, and the last page is missing, so there is no signature. However, it appears to have been written to Addie by her husband, Joseph Tines.

  During a time when our society continues to posit black women’s sexuality in a negative light and when we continue to suffer from homophobia, the Primus-Brown letters are important documents because they reveal the complexity of the two women and their relationship to each other. Furthermore, they provide a historical example of women who loved each other romantically and who were no less committed (in fact, were more committed than most) to the struggle for black freedom and progress. Finally, Addie and Rebecca were the extraordinary human beings we come to know not in spite of but because of the relationship they shared with each other and with others who nurtured, supported, and loved them. We cannot underestimate the historical significance of these documents.

  The Primus-Brown correspondence provides a missing link between the historical documentation of the public lives of well-known black women and their unknown private lives. In selecting the letters available to compose a coherent volume, I hope to encourage others to pursue further such research. The letters demand a rewriting of the history of black New England, the history of black women in America beyond those who were exceptional, middle-class, and famous, and a history of free urban black women whose experience differs from slave women and their rural descendants. As such, the letters add to the work of scholars such as Frances Foster and Carla Peterson8 by encouraging us to consider the experiences of northern free black women in our construction of history. Also, this correspondence encourages us to broaden our conception of black women writers to include letter writers in addition to novelists, poets, journalists, speech writers, and diarists. But most important, they are a gift of friendship and love for all of us.

  Here we have the stories of two nineteenth-century African American women, Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown: stories about their lives, ambitions, struggles, and dignity; their politics, reading, and community; their commitment to black equality and to each other. It is a story that moves us beyond the silence.

  PART ONE

  The Early Years

  ON February 24, 1932, the following obituary appeared in the Hartford Courant:

  Mrs. Rebecca Thomas, 95, widow of Charles H. Thomas, of 115 Adelaide Street, died Sunday morning at the Municipal Hospital after a long illness. She leaves three nieces, Ms. Edna E
dwards of Hartford; Mrs. Jessie H. Harris of Cambridge, Mass.; and Mrs. Nellie Singleton of Detroit, Mich. The funeral will be held Tuesday afternoon at 1:30 P. M. at Johnson’s funeral home, 19 Pavilion Street, and at 2 o’clock at the Talcott Street Congregational Church. Rev. James A. Wright will officiate. Burial will be in the family plot in Zion Hill Cemetery.

  The paragraph gives details relating to the commemoration of Rebecca Primus Thomas’s death and her relationship to others, but it relays very little about the woman herself. As with so many women, especially so many African American women, the significance of her life and deeds is lost to history in this final public document of her life. To a knowing Hartford reader, the name and address might provide a hint that she had been part of one of Hartford’s oldest and most prominent black families. That she was the widow of Charles Thomas connected her to another well-known black Hartford resident.1 More information about her life and commitments might have been evident in the name of the church. However, even these identity markers link the value of her life to the deeds and reputations of others. Most important, there is no mention of her career as a teacher of freedmen.

  Until recently, historians did not acknowledge black women’s role in Reconstruction. Even W. E. B. Du Bois, who attended to the words of black participants in his important Black Reconstruction, published in 1935 (only three years after Primus’s death), failed to note the work of black women teachers. Du Bois applauded the efforts of the New England schoolteachers, but for him these instructors, dedicated and innovative, were for the most part white.

  Forty-five years later, the white feminist historian Jacqueline Jones published the first full-length study of New England teachers who went south to found schools for and to teach the freed people. In Soldiers of Light and Love, Jones, like Du Bois, leaves out the efforts of black teachers. Not until the publication of Linda Perkins’s 1984 article “The Black Female American Missionary Association Teacher in the South 1861-1870” and Dorothy Sterling’s We Are Your Sisters (1984) did black teachers begin to receive scholarly attention. The absence of primary sources left by these women was one of the reasons for the inattention to them.2

  Nevertheless, Rebecca Primus was one of many northern black women who went south to teach the freed people. As with most of her peers, Rebecca saw her teaching as a political and moral calling. She set forth on a mission that would influence her tremendously. The teachers who headed south organized schools that held day sessions for children, night sessions for adults, and Sabbath schools. In addition, they visited freedmen’s homes and became respected members of the communities they inhabited. Their mission was one of education and “uplift.”

  Rebecca Primus fit the profile of other black school- marms who were “northern born, middle class, single and childless.”3 Most were in their twenties and had above-average education. Most had taught in their hometowns before going south. Many of them suffered greatly from the stresses associated with their jobs. Others were the victims of violence and harassment.4 Primus documents all of these circumstances.

  What were the factors, the conditions, that might have led Miss Primus to take up the difficult mission of relocating to the South? The answer to this question can best be found in the community that produced and nurtured her. Rebecca was born in 1836 to Holdridge Primus and Mehitable (Jacobs) Primus. She was the eldest of four children; her siblings were Nelson, Henrietta, and Isabella (Bell).5 Her paternal great-grandfather was an African slave who won his freedom by fighting in the American army during the Revolutionary War.6 Her maternal grandfather owned a cobbler shop.

  Holdridge Primus, Rebecca’s father, in front of the Humphrey and Seyms grocery store in Hartford.

  In 1860, all the Primuses but the youngest, Bell, were gainfully employed. Holdridge Primus was a clerk in a well-known Hartford grocery firm, Humphrey and Seyms. His wife, Mehitable, sometimes worked as a seamstress. Nelson was a painter; he worked for a carriage maker, George Francis, and eventually moved to Boston to pursue his career as a portraitist. Henrietta was a domestic in the home of a local white businessman, Henry Ferre. The Primus family owned their home at 20 Wadsworth Street. Rebecca would return to this home after the death of her husband in 1891, living there until 1902. As property owners who were able to maintain steady employment, the Primuses were clearly part of Hartford’s black middle class. However, Henrietta’s employment as a domestic suggests the fluidity of class and the precarious nature of middle-class status in the African American community.

  Though they lived in a predominantly white neighborhood, the Primuses were part of a cohesive black community that centered around the activities of the city’s black institutions. They were members of the Talcott Street Congregational Church, one of two black Hartford churches. Rebecca continued to teach Sunday school there until her death in 1932. James Pennington, the nationally known black abolitionist, had been minister of the Talcott Street Church, which had been a site of abolitionist meetings and organizing. Furthermore, Rebecca Primus probably attended one of Hartford’s African schools, where Pennington and the essayist Ann Plato had been teachers.7 It seems that Rebecca might have taught in one of these schools as well. In her letters she speaks of her Hartford classes; she would not have taught in the city’s white schools. As early as 1861, Addie writes to her, “I see you still have your private School.”8

  All of this is to say that Rebecca Primus grew up in a city with a small black population (it numbered just over seven hundred in 1860, slightly more than two percent of the total Hartford population), but she worshiped in, was educated in, and was employed by black institutions with an explicit political focus—that of black freedom and uplift.

  The Hartford black community was made up of a vibrant network of families and institutions. In the letters, one encounters members of the Talcott Street Congregational Church as well as the Zion Methodist Church. The racially integrated Hartford Freedmen’s Aid Society and the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge were among the community’s major social and civic organizations. The latter provided many opportunities for dancing at its frequent balls.

  James Pennington, the activist pastor of Talcott Street Church.

  There are descriptions of visits to Allyn Hall to hear music, trips to New York on the ferry the Granite State, to New Hampshire, Boston, and Philadelphia. Both Addie and Rebecca were avid readers of both the mainstream and the black press, as well as of novels, sermons, biographies, and books on history and religion.

  Among the families who populate the letters were the Platos, the Sands, the Notts, and the Saunderses. Henry Nott was a black painter. William Saunders was a black tailor as well as an agent for William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator. He had two sons, Thomas and Prince, both of whom were tailors; one of them married Roxanna Saunders, for whom Addie frequently sewed.

  Rebecca’s maternal aunt Emily married Raphael Sands, a Portuguese baker and cook. The couple and their two children, Sarah and Thomas, lived on Wadsworth Street just down the block from the Primuses. For a while Addie lived with the Sands family, and when she worked at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, Mr. Sands was her supervisor. Thomas Sands married a woman who, like Rebecca’s younger sister, was named Bell. His family did not approve of the marriage because they thought her beneath him. Addie agreed.

  Rebecca’s other maternal aunt, Bathsheba (referred to in the letters as Aunt Bashy), married Reverend John Smith and had two children, Hattie and William. She later married a porter named Henry Champion. Their daughter, Mary Champion, appears frequently in Addie’s letters.

  Another prominent family, the Platos, were unrelated to other Platos in the city, among them the essayist Ann Plato. Gertrude Plato was a friend and contemporary of Addie’s and Rebecca’s. In 1863, Gertrude inherited her family’s estate, valued at approximately four thousand dollars.9 She made frequent trips and wore expensive clothing, though was not considered physically attractive. Rebecca’s sister Bell was the community’s beauty and attracted a number
of suitors with her charm and her flirtatious nature.

  Chapter One

  “I’ve Lost a Day”

  1854-1856

  THERE are no letters from Rebecca to her family prior to 1865. However, two pieces of her writing survive that period: a poem, “I’ve Lost a Day,” written in 1854, when she was eighteen, and an essay, “History of My Poodle Dog,” written in 1856. While neither are literary masterpieces, they do reveal several important traits that become more apparent in the later letters.

  First, both the poem and the essay suggest that she is comfortable expressing herself through her writing and that she writes in a number of forms. That she may have had literary aspirations appears in later letters when she laments being too busy to pursue her writing. Unfortunately, these are the only pieces of writing aside from the letters that seem to have survived.

  The poem reveals yet another aspect of her personality that is borne out in the letters. She is highly organized and concerned with the most effective use of her time. No doubt this concern with efficiency contributed to her success as a teacher and as a fastidious administrator of her school.

  The essay expresses her love of animals. The mourned poodle is eventually replaced by other pets—the cats Jim and Jim, Jr. As we will see, Rebecca dotes on pets and children. The seriousness and formality with which she customarily carries herself give way immediately in the presence of her beloved animals and the children in her life: her niece Leila and her little adopted sister, Doll.