The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers

by Various

  This anthology spans a century that saw not only the hard-fought end to slavery but also the development of communities of free black women and men dedicated to education, political participation, and to writing themselves into full citizenship and subjectivity, within and outside of what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the Veil.” During the struggle for emancipation that dominated the first two-thirds of the century, women’s voices were as loud and relentless as men’s voices in the clarion calls for freedom now. “To be free is very sweet,” insisted Mary Prince, bluntly contradicting her mistress. And freedom meant, for these women, the freedom to speak their minds as women, just as surely as it meant the abolition of chattel slavery. “I am women’s rights,” Sojourner Truth boldly declared, calling attention to herself as the embodied truth of her statement. Maria Stewart wondered, “How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?” Her response remains as inspiring today as it undoubtedly was then: “Until we begin to promote and patronize each other,” she answered, calling upon black women to think of themselves as a nation within a nation within a nation, to paraphrase Martin R. Delany’s famous description of black America well before the Civil War. “Can woman do this work?” Lucy Laney asks. “She can; and she must do her part, and her part is by no means small. Nothing in the present century is more noticeable than the tendency of women to enter every hopeful field of wage earning and philanthropy, and attempt to reach a place in every intellectual arena.”

  The fifty-two writers who appear in this anthology demonstrate a will to engage intellectually, in print, with the world, with other women generally, and with each other individually. These women writers looked at the world around them, before and after Emancipation, and resolved to speak out, to grapple with the political and social fact of their existence, and to begin to articulate the foundations of a black feminist thought, wide ranging and far seeing. Many of these women were widely read and drew on canonical literary and philosophical works to frame their own opinions on current events. Some, the children of slaves and former slaves, had no formal schooling at all and raised their voices first and foremost to express outrage in the most urgent tones. Nearly all openly acknowledged their goals and aspirations, desiring through their words to proclaim their presence, to call for social and political change, to give comfort and direction to their brothers and sisters, but also to provide context for their own goals and identities as writers.

  A majority of the writers featured here constituted themselves as a defined and organized community. Most knew each other, corresponded with each other, wrote about each other’s accomplishments, and supported each other’s ambitions. Many rallied around each other as part of political movements or social organizations. Others thrived in relative solitude, sustained only by their own determination, writing for minimum compensation and for all the purposes that writers write. With and without the help of social networks, black women sought the power of writing and used it to express themselves poignantly, humorously, boisterously, and artistically in print. Were hashtags available, we can be certain that they would have used them brilliantly!

  To be a successful writer in the nineteenth century required persistence, fearlessness, ambition, and salesmanship. Perhaps the most well-known figure in this collection, Sojourner Truth could not read or write but had an outsized flair both for self-articulation and for self-promotion. As Nell Painter describes her work, Truth “put her body and her mind to a unique task, that of physically representing women who had been enslaved.”2 Certainly there was widespread illiteracy among all the residents of the United States throughout the nineteenth century, but especially, of course, among slaves, former slaves, and the children of former slaves. But black women, just as surely as did black men, forcefully sought formal education and recorded their thoughts and reflections, their passions and fears, their aspirations and anxieties, in novels, newspaper columns, plays, poetry, letters, diaries, and scrapbooks. And perhaps not surprisingly, women fortunate enough to have experienced a formal education, such as Edmonia Highgate, strove to make a name for themselves also as advocates of modern self-determination: “Oh, how independent one feels in the saddle! One thing, I can’t imagine why one needs to wear such long riding skirts. They are so inconvenient when you have to ford streams or dash through briers. Oh, fashion, will no Emancipation Proclamation free us from thee!”

  As Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage’s essential recent volume Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women shows, when scholars continue to “put flesh on the bones” of often skeletal biographical details about these writers, the result will be “a dynamic new map of politics and culture that establishes the key relevance of black women to studies of history and literature.”3 These texts speak to the fact that feminism and women’s rights were far more institutionally ingrained throughout American—and African American—life in the nineteenth century than was typically recorded either in biographical sketches or literary histories. This volume builds on work such as P. Gabrielle Foreman’s Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century and Martha S. Jones’s All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900, which focus on the ways African American women in the nineteenth century worked individually and collectively for political and social change.

  The strength of the various small but remarkably sustaining communities of women writers makes those who succeeded in writing and publishing without assistance or moral support from these circles all the more remarkable. Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, we now know, gives proof of the escaped slave Hannah Bond’s commitment to telling her own story of captivity, flight, and freedom, insisting on her literary kinship with—but essential difference from—the popular Victorian heroines of her day. Abby Fisher’s 1881 cookbook, What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, demonstrates Fisher’s commitment to memorializing her life’s work in print, turning a stereotype of a black woman’s traditional “place in the kitchen” on its head by writing about it. Eliza Potter and Harriet Wilson chronicle their own experiences as working women in white households, turning the tables on former mistresses and employers. Collected together, these works point toward a deepening of our understanding of nineteenth-century black feminism as exemplified by both educated and wholly unlettered authors, employing the widest variety of writing styles.

  As Eric Gardner remarks in his groundbreaking volume on the nineteenth-century black press, Black Print Unbound, “rich scholarship over the past decade that reconceptualizes African American literature” has shown the field of texts by black writers is “much more diverse in terms of genre, approach, aesthetics, venue, and language and was amazingly dynamic even as it was shaped by systemic oppression.”4 Gardner looks at the complex literary interaction between black and white writers before and after the Emancipation Proclamation, as black activists sought political influence; he offers the most thorough examination to date of the Christian Recorder, which published several of the authors found in our collection, notably Julia Collins’s The Curse of Caste (1865) and the letters of Edmonia Highgate. The black press, through the regular publication of journalism, lectures, letters to the editor, serialized novels, poetry, book reviews and literary criticism, prayers, marriage notices, and obituaries, distributed a written record of the complexities of black humanity to thousands of subscribers throughout the country.

  Many of the texts collected here first appeared in one of the scores of black-owned publications launched over the course of the nineteenth century. In the pre-war period, Freedom’s Journal, the Colored American, the North Star, and the Elevator, among other publications, focused primarily on the battle to end slavery. After the war, black-owned newspapers promoted community, racial pride, and economic uplift. Women’s writing was essential to that success.

  While most black-owned newspapers and jo
urnals were published and edited by men, an important exception is the Ontario-based Provincial Freeman, launched in 1853 and edited by Mary Ann Shadd Cary. Shadd Cary also published a detailed guidebook for “colored emigrants” fleeing to Canada after the Fugitive Slave Law. “Information is needed,” Shadd Cary writes, and she helpfully provides it. Shadd Cary was praised by Bishop Payne, perhaps a bit condescendingly, in 1893 for her “familiarity with facts, her knowledge of men, and her fine power of discrimination.” While no other black woman published a prominent newspaper until Charlotta Spears Bass bought the California Eagle in 1912, women were represented in the nineteenth-century black press as staff writers and columnists. Notable journalists excerpted here include Maria Stewart, who answered William Lloyd Garrison’s call in 1831 for woman writers to publish in the Liberator, and Gertrude Bustill Mossell, who penned the first weekly column devoted to women’s issues in the New York Freeman in 1885, to Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who launched the first newspaper by and for black women, Women’s Era, in 1894.

  Important recent work such as Teresa C. Zackodnik’s “We Must Be Up and Doing” ably demonstrates the breadth of African American feminist political organization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Zackodnik’s anthology focuses on black women’s social engagement, our anthology emphasizes the contours of black women’s thought and personal ambition as exemplified in their own writings about themselves. The black feminist movement often aligned with but also flourished independently from movements focused on abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, and civil rights generally. While some texts are more recognizably “feminist” in a modern sense than others, all insist upon the recognition of women’s intellect as essential to the history of black life in nineteenth-century America.

  In total, fifty-two black women writers are collected in this volume. Their writings are organized by focus and genre and presented chronologically by publication date.

  In the first section, “Personal Accounts of Abolition and Freedom,” narratives by Mary Prince, Nancy Prince, Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, and Louisa Picquet testify starkly and movingly about harrowing experiences under slavery and the struggle to maintain dignity and seek escape. “I was flogged on my naked back,” Mary Prince reports bluntly. “For weeks I was tormented by hundreds of little red insects, fine as a needle’s point, that pierced through my skin,” Harriet Jacobs describes. “If I run off, he’d blow my brains out,” reports Louisa Picquet. Eliza Potter and Elizabeth Keckley write from relative privilege: Keckley, understanding her extraordinarily rare position as a former inhabitant of the White House, tells the story of how she rose to serve Mrs. Lincoln and chronicles daily life during the years of war—much, she would learn, to Mrs. Lincoln’s annoyance. Potter, born free and living a life of independence and adventure as a prized hairdresser for wealthy clients, writes a tell-all book that gets her banished from her community. Her narrative is a reminder that fashion has always been in fashion. “I was never more amused in my life,” she writes, describing efforts to be compensated from a train fire that burned up her clothes, “than at seeing the different railroad gentlemen pick up my list, look at and shrink from it, as if it were an impossibility for a working woman to have such a wardrobe. One of them seemed quite horrified at the very idea of my having ten silk dresses with me; but it afforded me a good deal of pleasure to let him know I had as many more at home.”

  “Fugitives and Emigrants: Moving West and North” features writers such as Mary Ann Shadd Cary, who left Pennsylvania for southern Ontario after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, and Mrs. John Little, who escaped with her husband to a farm in Canada. Black women made themselves at home across the country and in Canada, where Shadd Cary assured her readers that “There is no legal discrimination whatever effecting colored emigrants in Canada, nor from any cause whatever are their privileges sought to be abridged.” Jennie Carter, writing from Nevada, far from the Deep South, endeavors to set the record straight about life under slavery. “I know many,” she writes of slaveholders, “whose daughters in the big house were not as light as their daughters in the cabin.” Abby Fisher, who moved from Mobile, Alabama, to California after the Gold Rush, made a name for herself as a cook and published her volume of recipes in San Francisco. Carter and Fisher are particularly important to the geographic breadth of this anthology; African Americans remain underrepresented in historical scholarship on the American West. It is probable that more writers like Carter will be discovered, and more research will be done on the population as a whole.

  “Northern Women and the Post-War South” offers accounts of free black women determined to elevate and educate newly emancipated youths in Southern schools. After the founding of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, known informally as the Freedmen’s Bureau, on March 3, 1865, the great task of transitioning emancipated slaves into citizens required dedicated and sensitive teachers. Not surprisingly many black women, frustrated by career limitations in Northern school districts, leapt at the opportunity and promise of teaching in the South. Charlotte Forten Grimké’s “Life on the Sea Islands” tells of her teaching experience in 1864, before the war was over. “It is wonderful how a people who have been so long crushed to the earth, so imbruted as these have been,” Forten writes, “can have so great a desire for knowledge, and such a capability for attaining it.” Edmonia Goodelle Highgate was a favorite of readers of the Christian Recorder, telling witty tales of culture shock in Southern towns during Reconstruction. “I don’t believe in world-saving—but I do in self-making,” she writes. “Create something. Aspire to leave something immortal behind you.” Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin chastises white women in Georgia who did not welcome these educators from the North particularly warmly. “[O]ne of the saddest things about the sad conditions of affairs in the South has been the utter indifference which Southern women, who were guarded with unheard of fidelity during the war, have manifested to the mental and moral welfare of the children of their faithful slaves.”

  “Memoirs: Looking Back” offers comprehensive and organized accounts of lives in transition during the upheavals of the Civil War and its aftermath, new educational opportunities, and migrations north. Three of the writers here were preachers. Julia A. J. Foote, in A Brand Plucked from the Fire, describes her awakening from a life of drink to a life of religion. Jarena Lee argues that if fishermen, “ignorant of letters,” were inspired to preach, why not women? Zilpha Elaw likewise takes up the task. Lucy Delaney bluntly describes the lawsuit granting her freedom in From Darkness Cometh the Light, and Ella Sheppard’s “Historical Sketch of the Jubilee Singers,” published here in its entirety, is a firsthand account of a groundbreaking cultural phenomenon, a world-famous singing group who toured the world and changed forever the music of American concert halls. “Success followed us to Washington, D.C.,” Sheppard writes of their 1871 tour. “The President turned aside from pressing duties to receive us at the White House. Parson Brownlow, Tennessee’s Senator, too ill to attend our concert, sent for us to visit him. He cried like a child as we sang our humble Southern slave melodies. Returning to New England we received a perfect ovation.”

  “Poetry, Drama, and Fiction,” the central section of this volume, demonstrates the extraordinary imaginative vision of women writers in the nineteenth century. From Sarah Forten Purvis’s “The Abuse of Liberty” and Ann Plato’s “The Natives of America,” both published in the first decades of the century, to Alice Dunbar Nelson’s poem “To Madame Curie” published at the end of the century, these works testify to the sheer range of creative works that African American women produced, often in the face of harrowing obstacles. We publish here three poems from Frances Harper’s long-lost first poetry collection, Forest Leaves (ca. 1847), recently rediscovered by Johanna Ortner. These newfound poems offer an important perspective on Harper’s development as a poet and an intellectual as well as insight into Harper’s Chri
stian beliefs as the foundation for her lifelong political interventions. With Forest Leaves, we are given a snapshot of Harper at age twenty, a highly literate, politically engaged, and devout young black woman in the era of slavery. Given the contours of Harper’s literary output by the end of her career, we see how her ambitions grew and were nourished while her subject matter remained close to that of her early poetry.

  Also featured in this section are key works by Julia Collins, Pauline Hopkins, Kate Chapman Tillman, and Amelia E. Johnson, all known to students and scholars of the era. Featured here also is Mary E. Ashe Lee’s remarkable poem “Afmerica” (1885), telling the tale of “a child of liberty / Of independent womanhood, / The world in wonder looks to see / If in her there is any good,” here republished in its entirety. Finally, we are quite excited to include an excerpt from the 1891 novel True Love by Sarah E. Farro, newly rediscovered by Gretchen Gerzina. All together these selections delight, startle, and, most importantly, we hope, will provoke their readers to seek out the complete works by each author.

  “Women Addressing Women” offers addresses and essays from the closing decades of the nineteenth century by women dedicated to the cause of women’s education and women’s rights. As Mia Bay argues, while vocal black women faced challenges and obstacles to speaking out on race prejudice, ethnology, pseudo-scientific “race” theories, and the domestic ideal of “true womanhood,” by the 1880s and 1890s women “celebrated their embrace of female racial self-defense as a new goal.”5 We offer here essays by Sarah J. Early on women in the South, and by Virginia W. Broughton, Lucy Craft Laney, and Fannie Barrier Williams on work and education. Broughton emphasizes her belief in the moral and civilizing responsibilities women bear for keeping men on the straight and narrow. “Those places to which he goes, to the exclusion of women, such as saloons, club-rooms and legislative halls, are not suitable for him, and he is not safe, and we are sure it is not good for him . . . the wreck and ruin that result from his frequenting places of ill-repute, and the unjust and imperfect laws he makes are substantial proof that danger and death await those who disobey God’s word.” Mary V. Cook insisted upon the importance of women writers: “Often a short article, setting forth some digestible truth, is like seed sown in good ground, which will bring forth a hundred fold, or like bread cast upon the water, that may be seen and gathered after many days hence.” Reframing prevailing views of history, the optimistic Cook offers women motivation to come out of the shadows and act.