Introduction

On a “granite winter” Wednesday in January 1843, “anti-slavery friends” braved a “mischievous Nor’Wester” wind and snow to gather for a spirited convention in Milford, New Hampshire. Visitors from all over New Hampshire and Massachusetts joined local reformers to raise money and support for “the down-trodden and oppressed.”¹ Leading the crowd in raising their voices against injustice were the sons and daughters of Milford itself, the Hutchinson Family Singers, a group of young performers soon to become internationally renowned for their radically harmonic commitment to women’s rights, anti-slavery, and reform causes.²

     Milford later would memorialize events like this and congratulate itself for being distinguished for the “unselfish and sublime work of these splendid men and women in the grandest movement of the century, for human rights.”³
Frederick Douglass remembered Milford fondly, too, recalling a series of meetings he held there as “so full of life and spirit.”⁴ Yet neither Douglass’s reception nor the welcome audience received by the eloquent fugitives who addressed the 1843 convention crowd, helped a local indentured servant called “our nig,” though the Milford teenager could have testified to experiencing treatment as brutal as the fugitives.’ It is doubtful that she was invited, or that upon reading the announcements she could have snuck away from her “she-devil” “mistress.”⁵ Had she escaped and managed to travel the blustery two miles to the town’s center, the young woman soon to be known as Harriet E. Wilson would have been one of the very few Black women in attendance.⁶

     On an early October evening in 1892 almost fifty years later, more than two hundred Black women gathered at New York’s Lyric Hall to hear Ida B. Wells give her first official address. Fellow journalist “Victoria Earle” Matthews and the Wells Testimonial Reception Committee turned out a brilliant array. To honor Wells, the night’s program was a facsimile of the Memphis Free Speech, the newspaper Wells had co-owned until its office had been razed four months earlier. “Iola,” Wells’s pen name, lit up the stage, and appeared on the white silk badges the ushers wore proudly pinned to their chests. Some of the most important Black women of Wells’s time were literally standing behind her. Boston activist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, journalist Gertrude Mossell, education reformer Sarah (Highland) Garnet and her sister Susan McKinney, the first Black woman doctor of New York State, joined Matthews as they took their places behind the young journalist. Nonetheless, Wells felt like a “lonely homesick girl who was in exile,” as she later recalled.⁷ The death threats hanging over her if she dared return to Memphis carried the heavy memory of her close friends’ lynching murders earlier that year. Still, with more than two hundred women gathered to cheer her on both figuratively and financially, she responded by publishing Southern Horrors, her first exposé of lynching; she dedicated the pamphlet to them.⁸

     Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century takes as its subject women who in fewer than fifty years moved from near rhetorical invisibility and isolation to prolific literary productivity and connectedness. The study spans from 1859 through the 1890s, or from the year Harriet E. Wilson brought out Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black and Amelia E. Johnson [née Hall] was born, to the decade often called the “woman’s era,” when Black women organized themselves and insisted that their voices be heard in the national conversation about race, rights, respect, and reform.

     In large part, this book examines reading practices and nineteenth-century cultural, sociopolitical, and representational literacies. As the multiple resonances of its subtitle, “Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century” suggest, I am interested in African American women’s literary production, reception, and consumption and also in the ways in which varied audiences “read” Black women of that century. The vernacular signifying practice embedded in the active verb/al practice “to read” also resonates throughout this project. Nineteenth-century critics often locate Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life as the paradigmatic articulation of literacy’s link to freedom. Yet I take the declaration Iola Leroy’s Aunt Linda delivers—“I can’t read . . . but ole Missus’s face is newspaper nuff for me”⁹ —as another archetypical point of departure. It echoes Harriet Jacobs’s earlier proclamation that she had “felt, seen and heard enough to read the characters, and question the motives, of those around me.”¹⁰ Frances E. W. Harper’s Aunt Linda, like Jacobs’s Linda, offers an expanded and equally resonant model, one that asserts that social literacy and the power of interpretation are as necessary as, and perhaps even more important than, formal literacy itself.

     An emphasis on vernacular reading is a living legacy in contemporary African American culture. To “get read” or “be read” is to be dressed down, or told about yourself, as in, “girl, you just got read” or “oh, no, she’s going to read you.” In Activist Sentiments, I am invested in tracing the ways in which Black women’s writing “reads” multiple communities and ideologies: ostensible allies, white abolitionists, and white women and families, for example. Weaving together historical research and literary exegesis, this book underscores the resistant critique expressed through Black women writers’ signifying “readings.”

     Harriet Jacobs, Harriet E. Wilson, and Frances E. W. Harper are the well-known authors whose writings anchor this book’s chapters. Discussions of the “raceless” novels of the recently recategorized Blackened author Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins and the relatively unread Amelia E. Johnson help pave new inroads in understanding how such writing may actively engage racialized debates.¹¹ Grounded in primary research and close attention to the historical archive, like Carla L. Peterson’s Doers of the Word: African American Speakers & Writers in the North (1830–1880), this project offers against-the-grain readings that trace the textual imbrications that emerge when Black women’s novel and narrative writing are assumed to be happily married to—rather than painfully divorced from—their journalistic prose, organizational involvement, and reception communities.

     Activist Sentiments is part literary criticism, part cultural history. It situates its exegeses in the context of antebellum reform and civil disobedience; the meanings of legal, racial, and property classification and citizenship; petition and antiprostitution campaigns; “home protection,” temperance, and anti- and pro-lynching rhetoric; and heated international debates about race, medicine, and science. Offering interpretive models that help ground close readings in newly examined historical contexts and original research, I seek to account for the complex genealogies, tropes, and interventions of Black nineteenth-century sentimental—and simultaneously political— literary production.

     This project examines how some of the nation’s most injured nineteenth-century subjects make use of one of its most popular cultural forms. In doing so, the book both deepens and challenges prevailing interpretations about the relationship between Black women’s domestic and political prose and activism. In Reconstructing Womanhood, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire and The Coupling Convention, literary critics Hazel Carby, Claudia Tate, and Ann duCille broaden the definition of “political” work to include the gendered reform expressed through domestic rhetoric. As duCille contends, writers such as Harper and Pauline Hopkins “were propelled not by an accomodationist desire to assimilate the Victorian values of white society but by a profoundly political, feminist urge, to rewrite those patriarchal strictures.”¹² My work is indebted to and in concert with theirs. Like them, I am intrigued by the ways in which these writers and their readers not only take on and reimbue what duCille (via Nancy Cott) and historian Evelyn Higginbotham might call “passionlessness” and purity or “morals and manners” with radically new racial meaning.¹³ Yet my deeper investment is also in the ways in which these writers take pleasure and power in their strident critiques of dominant behaviors, groups, and structures. These authors highlight white sexual depravity and familial, national, and historical dysfunction even as they simultaneously seem to reflect dominant values and the modes of expression most often used to communicate them.

     The texts addressed in this book offer highly complex and politicized forms of cultural expression, resistance, and critique that simultaneously appear as narratives that transparently forward the accepted models and messages of racial reform and respectability. Entering a “fray of discourses,” as Dwight McBride puts it, these authors gauge the expectations and needs of various audiences.¹⁴ To do so effectively, they measure the hybrid worlds or horizons of their audiences, to mix McBride and Bahktin.¹⁵ These texts exhibit “hybrid discourses,” to add Carla Peterson’s gloss, while also assuming “the possibility of an ‘imagined community’ beyond their immediate readership, a community preoccupied with the central task of forging a political and cultural nationality.”¹⁶ In examining the expression of what we have come to understand as the rhetoric and agendas of reform and the culturally determined, overtly political sensibilities these texts also lay bare, I identify a practice of simultaneous address through which nineteenth-century Black women authors so often forward multiple imbricated agendas. Highlighting this practice illuminates a formal complexity often denied to prose affiliated with sentimental and domestic thematics and conventions, that is, to almost all of nineteenth-century Black women’s narrative and novelistic production.

     Activist Sentiments necessarily integrates a discussion of the literary and political genealogies of racial indeterminacy, the generic preoccupation with the figure of the mulatta. The mulatta is largely a figment—or pigment—of the racial imagination, a figure, as Jennifer DeVere Brody asserts, whose “status as an unreal, impossible ideal whose corrupted and corrupting constitution inevitably causes conflicts in narratives that attempt to promote purity.”¹⁷ As a symbolic personage who disrupts placid racial, sexual, and national mythologies, the mulatta is both highly ambiguous and extraordinarily ubiquitous in nineteenth-century writing. Almost any study of race and representation in this period necessarily addresses this subject to some degree. Indeed, the raceless and racially indeterminate protagonists who feature prominently in this book share their pale complexions with almost every major protagonist in Black women’s fiction until Ann Petry’s Lutie Johnson appears in 1946.

     All of the principal autobiographical and prose writing addressed in Activist Sentiments feature light-skinned, racially indefinite, or raceless characters who are traditionally understood to be employed in a transparent rhetorical appeal to white readers. These figures embody a plea for exceptionalist consanguinity, on the one hand, and an easy bridge for white identification, on the other. Following this logic, precisely because of her proximity to whiteness, the mulatta is often seen as the most affective figure through which to move whites to recognize Black sentience and humanity and act to ensure Black inclusion in the body politic. Joining Brody, I instead stress this figure’s racial surplus and plentitude, charting the various interpretive cartographies authors offer through that figure’s use. Ultimately, the writing I discuss displays how racially indeterminate and raceless heroines can simultaneously perform mimetic functions and also operate as a mirror through which white readers are forced to reincarnate their own racialized assumptions, the racial grotesque many habitually project onto others.

     Accordingly, the figure of the mulatta embodies the complex nexus rather than the focus of this project. I seek to disaggregate the representational predominance of the light-skinned figure from its putative Anglophilic associations and entitlements and to flesh out the multiplicity of meanings its use communicates in the nineteenth century. In Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the enslaved woman’s status as an “intelligent, bright, mulatto girl,” to quote from her master’s runaway advertisement, is largely incidental.¹⁸ Light skin in Black women’s narratives most often signifies a mother’s sexual vulnerability or, as in Jacobs’s uncle’s case, a son’s ability to “for once” use his white face to flee to freedom.

     In Black women’s work, fugitives and the characters based on them rarely pass for white; instead, they pass through whiteness, as I have put it elsewhere.¹⁹ They pass provisionally. Ellen Craft used her light skin to don the persona of a Spanish gentleman traveling north. Like the famous fugitive George Latimer, who passed for his pregnant wife’s master, Craft put on “white(male)ness” to escape with her “manservant” (actually her darker spouse) so they could live as members of a free and legally recognized Black family. Harriet Jacobs describes how as a runaway she darkened up, literally charcoaling her face to pass as a Black sailor, rightly assuming that her master would alert the public to her light skin, literacy, and black “inclined to curl” hair that can be “made straight.”²⁰ Indeed, we might usefully envision passing (and the skin, mannerisms, hair, and skill sets that facilitate it) as a flexible strategy, as a process, rather than as an objective or state of cross-racial performance, identification, and desire.²¹

     The writings I consider challenge gendered assumptions about interracial power, desire, purity, and alliance often mediated through the politics of naming and through the trope of the mulatta. These texts often use the mulatta as a conventional expression of sexual vulnerability, while they also display how Black men and women are targets of the desires of whites of both sexes. Linking an appeal for interracial sisterhood, reform, and reconciliation with a seemingly incongruous condemnation of white female power and sexual predation, this writing places white women under gendered and sexual scrutiny. Activist Sentiments proposes that incongruity—the simultaneous encomiums offered to white womanhood under an economy of supposed moral and literary mimesis and a skewering indictment of the political economy of white female desire—as a paradigmatic feature of what we might call Black women’s sentimental production.

     Taking the racially indeterminate protagonist’s capacity to pass in numerous ways and situating racial multiplicity (rather than deficiency) as a point of departure, this project stresses what I call “simultextuality” as an interpretive mode. In reworking the use of the tropes and terms of respectability, purity, and sexual vulnerability, I argue these texts often produce multivalent meanings that, rather than being subtextually buried beneath a principally reformist message of affective and emotional connection, are what I call simultextually available at the primary level of narrative interpretation. These uses of multiple social languages are not buried, some under the others, as coded discourse is often understood; they are not subtextual, as I argue, but simultextual. Put another way, readers don’t have to be literary archeologists or meaning-hunting mycologists, nosing around for textual truffles. Rather, this prose creates discursive layers “shot through” with “dialogized overtones” and “artistically calculated nuances,” as Mikhail Bakhtin might put it.²²The allusions to oppressive and resistant dynamics easily recognizable to culturally and historically literate readers—those acquainted with the complicated sexual politics of slavery or the tangled skeins of Northern racism, or those who challenge post-Reconstruction attacks on Black character and communities—add a calculated charge to texts whose reformist messages are simultaneously expressed in more accommodating prose. These strategies allow readers who do not always enjoy shared fields of cultural and social knowledge to take multiple interpretive paths through narratives. Simultexts exhibit their multivalent meanings on the surface for those who can access and then interpret them in accordance with collective political and literary concerns.

     Conventional sentimentality stresses the transparent and singular relation between the head and the heart, between reading, feeling, and doing. These works’ generic affiliations with sentimental modes of expression camouflage what is often hidden in plain sight. This in part explains their earlier exclusion from a Black literary sisterhood that stresses a complex subjectivity that is not a stand-out feature of sentimental representation. As Mae Henderson proposes in “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics and the Black Women’s Literary Tradition,” Black women “speak from a multiple and complex social, historical, and cultural positionality, which, in effect, constitutes Black female subjectivity.”²³ Her “speaking in tongues” is a merger of glossolalia, the private, unmediated (pre)language of the psyche, and heteroglossia, “the ability to speak in the multiple languages of public discourse.”²⁴ Upon first examination, this early prose hardly seems compatible with the very dialogized heteroglossia “of the Black women’s literary tradition,” to recall Henderson’s title, because it supposedly depends upon its “artless” moral force as its unitary source.

     Nineteenth-century women’s writing is rarely identified with the intersectional positionality associated with twentieth- and twenty-first-century subjectivity even as nineteenth-century writers’ reception communities are evidence of just such intersectionalities. That is, nineteenth-century Black women writers speak to, as well as from, “a multiple and complex social, historical and cultural positionality,” to recall Henderson’s language.²⁵ When reading their work without considering the fuller contexts of its production and reception, these authors’ generic choices seem to align their writing more closely with glossolalia’s “private, non-mediated, non-differentiated univocality.”²⁶ But this describes an expression of subjectivity within a closed and formal representational system. Henderson’s speaking in tongues, then, is not my simultextuality.²⁷ One focuses on contemporary Black women authors’ textual expression of multiple subjectivity, while the other invites an examination of the formal and historicized strategies by which earlier writers address multiple audiences simultaneously. Considering nineteenth-century authors’ simultextual use helps readers to hear and harmonize the seeming dissonance between early texts’ “univocal” sentimental affiliations and the dialogic complexity they engage to articulate messages in various social registers.²⁸

     Like Jacobs and Wilson, Harper, Dunham-Kelley, and Johnson, writers who imagine or enjoy multiple readerships can’t assume a set of references that overlap in their entirety or even, following theorist Hans Jaus, a unified system of historical time. The texts I address display literary strategies that can reach those experiencing what Jaus calls “de facto moments of completely different time curves, determined by the laws of their special history.”²⁹ While he contends that we can analyze “the literary horizon of a certain historical moment as that synchronic system in which simultaneously appearing works can be received diachronically in relation,” I examine writing that addresses this tension in a single text.³⁰ Nineteenth-century women often offer simultextual tropes to audiences who are formed by different moments of the “shaped time” that inflect their literary experiences, exposing these time curves as they arch both toward and away from each other.

     Activist Sentiments is organized in two sections. In its two antebellum chapters I chart how simultextual discussions disrupt narrative transparency, the faith in the direct and unitary correspondence between emotion, internal change, and public action, and the ideal of a self-effacing narrative simplicity that Amy Lang calls “the keynote of sentimental fiction.”³¹ Here I examine how autobiographical writers who borrow from fictional models unsettle direct “truth”-correlation demands projected upon narratives and subsequent writing about servitude and its immediate aftermath.³² By offering multiple interpretive cartographies that often are opposed to or are incongruent with each other, texts such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig remap discursive epistemologies and racialized associations. In doing so, their work scrambles the assumptions about truth, transparency, and easy accessibility with which antebellum Black women’s writing has been especially associated.

     The seeming promise of emancipation and equal protection called on intellectuals, activists, and others to turn their principal energies to the pressing work of a “brighter coming day,”³³ that is, to building educational, vocational, and political institutions and power. Formerly enslaved women such as Elizabeth Keckley wrote narratives in the two decades following the war; and Frances E. W. Harper added serialized novels to her representational arsenal, publishing three novels in the important Black newspaper, the Christian Recorder. But the writers of the following years, the late 1880s and 1890s, “found more outlets for publication open to them in both the white press and in African American journals,” as Richard Yarborough affirms, “than had been afforded to Blacks at any time since the height of the abolitionist movement.”³⁴ Facing state-sanctioned violence, lynching, and rape, and finding themselves under political siege, writers revisited the value of “race literature” and included novels along with history, biographies, scientific treatises, sermons, pamphlets, books of travel, essays, and contributions to magazines and newspapers to “influence the reading world,” as Victoria Earle Matthews put it in an 1895 address.³⁵ Matthews’s declaration that “we cannot afford any more than any other people to be indifferent to the fact that the surest road to real fame is through literature” found a new and welcome audience with what cultural critic Elizabeth McHenry calls the “literary activists” of the late nineteenth century.³⁶

     Matthews’s rhetorical question—“but for Race Literature, how will future generations know of the pioneers in Literature, our statesmen, soldiers, divines, musicians, artists, lawyers, critics and scholars?”—is the postbellum section of Activist Sentiments’ tuning note, its symphonic “A.”³⁷ “True culture in Race Literature will enable us to discriminate and not to write hasty thoughts and unjust and ungenerous criticism often of our superiors in knowledge and judgment,” Matthews contends.³⁸ The readings in these chapters take up Matthews’s call for discriminating the “true culture in Race Literature” by grounding simultextual analysis in a historicized discussion of growing socioculturally literate classes. These readers followed the leading figures, successes, threats, and issues that were outlined in the growing print and public culture concerned with reform, race, and advancement. Rarely is the sustained and sustaining activism of the postbellum authors I address critically linked to the rhetorical strategies they often employ in their fiction, however. Only a handful of critics examine how the unreservedly strident tone found in some writers’ nonfiction prose might inform the objectives and discursive strategies in “sentimental” novels by the same authors. Rather than examining how authors intertextually ground their literary strategies in other literary texts, Activist Sentiments’ postbellum chapters explore the ways in which broader historical movements, organizations, and tropes are embedded in, and simultextually complicate, the writings of Frances E. W. Harper, Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, and Amelia E. Johnson.

     Novels of the 1890s continue to redefine literacy in relation to the astute extraliterary analysis central to quotidian survival and strategic organizing as well as to the growing formal skills honed in church groups, schools, clubs, and lyceums. As Frances Smith Foster points out, the “commitment to African American literacy and literature was one not simply of individuals but of institutions.”³⁹ Historians including Stephanie Shaw, Deborah Gray White, Elsa Barkley Brown, Tera Hunter, Kevin Gaines, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham explicate how Black women workers, clubwomen, and religious denominations were involved in the overlapping activities, organizations, and conventions out of which a shared set of historical referents sprang. Foster’s recovery of Frances Harper’s postbellum novels and Elizabeth McHenry’s Forgotten Readers revise many received understandings about Black readership and reception. McHenry examines early Black reading societies and confirms that late nineteenth-century audiences—audiences that writers such as Frances Harper and Amelia Johnson had cultivated through their literary and activist contributions—were knowledgeable about and connected to historical agents and activities.

     The novels of this period ground their simultaneous modes of expression “histotextually,” a neologism I coin to name how culturally and socially literate audiences share not only epistemologies and literary sensibilities, but also specific historical references upon which one level of interpretation depends; they ground their simultaneous mode of interpretation in these references. Histotextuality overlaps with, but is distinguishable from, other literary terms and categories with which it shares an affinity. It differs from intertextuality, most obviously, in that it is predicated upon the recognizable historicized markers that authors and readers share, rather than on a formal appropriation and recirculation of texts. In his formulation of African American literature, Henry Louis Gates Jr. stresses intertextuality as the mortar that holds “the tradition” together. In one such instance he asserts that “writers read other writers and ground their representations . . . in models of language provided largely by other writers to whom they feel akin. It is through this mode of literary revision, amply evident in the texts themselves—in formal echoes, recast metaphors, even in parody—that a ‘tradition’ emerges and defines itself ” (emphasis in original).⁴⁰ Histotextual prose provides such a mortar not principally from other texts and writers but in the echoes and recast metaphors it borrows from events, debates, and understandings shared with the ever-larger audience that print culture and rising literacy rates engendered. The multiple threads that run through shared but often disremembered historical narratives provide the metaphorical kinship between “race literature” defined more broadly and the narratives and novels I examine here.

     As a strategy, histotextuality is akin to, but in ways only slightly resembles, strategies used in the historical novel. While they share many features, one conventional aspect of the classic historical novel, as with sentimental narrative, is transparency. All readers are meant to recognize the types or the historical personages that inhabit the local, but representative, social order of the historical novel. Yet histotextuality is a strategy used to reach the segment of the audience whose prior knowledge and interpretative schemata determine the level of historical and epistemelogical engagement they experience while appealing on a different level to a broader reading public.

     The historical novel, says Georg Lukács, brings “the past to life as the prehistory of the present” but does not “consist in alluding to contemporary events.”⁴¹ This would be a “simplistic” strategy that Alexander Pushkin, for example, “cruelly ridiculed.”⁴²The historical novel illustrates great crises, as Lukács comments, “struggles between classes or codes no longer tolerant of each other or even between ways of life,” as Philip Fisher affirms. Yet these struggles are linked to an already known clear outcome.⁴³ Histotextuality, on the other hand, brings into play a contemporaneous set of referents in addition to past ones; it bastardizes the form, Lukács and Pushkin might say, but not illegitimately.⁴⁴ That is, while the classic historical novel incorporates the past as a prehistory to explain present contending forces, work employing histotextual strategies goes beyond this, merging past and present referents to effect change in an as yet not determined future. Well in line with other nineteenth-century Black literary interventions, histotextuality directs social empathy and models social or political intervention.

     Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900) provides one of the most explicit examples of novelistic correlations between fictional and historical figures. Revisiting her text and the archive she draws upon helps to establish a range of histotextual use and to differentiate her historicized strategies from the more multivalent hermeneutics I will later address at greater length. Throughout the novel, Hopkins’s narrator refers directly to legendary people and institutions such as the Reverend Thomas Paul, founder of the African Meeting House (later called “St. Paul’s Church”), where “such men as Garrison and Phillips defied the vengeance of howling mobs that thirsted for the lives of Negro champions.”⁴⁵ By grafting socio-architectural memorials such as Archibald Grimké’s 1890 “Anti-Slavery Boston” with the strategies of popular fiction, Hopkins’s readers learn about abolitionist landmarks as the novel’s villain trolls the streets of Beacon Hill;⁴⁶ the narrator points out that the Twelfth Baptist Church was an offshoot of St. Paul’s and sat just across the way from Black Boston activists Lewis and Harriet Hayden’s well-known boarding house, where countless fugitives (such as Ellen and William Craft) found refuge. These references create neighboring narratives. The backstories that reside in them sit side by side with the fictive realism—stories about lynching and rape, protest and betrayal—that Contending Forces, houses. Hopkins’s histotextual strategies are authenticating ones. By incorporating highly recognizable historical narratives she lends credibility to the fictional and symbolic stories she unfolds.⁴⁷

     Hopkins also presents characters whose fictional names provide only the sheerest fictional veneer. The race woman and suffrage advocate Mrs. Willis, the “brilliant widow of a bright Negro Politician,” is an obvious if ambivalent rendition of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin.⁴⁸ In Contending Forces, Willis’s husband had enjoyed a “seat in the Legislature . . . urged by the loving woman behind him. Other offices of trust were quickly offered him when his worth became known,” while his wife later became “the pivot about which all social and intellectual life of the colored people of her section revolved.”⁴⁹ Likewise, George Lewis Ruffin, who married Josephine as a teenager, was elected to the Massachusetts Legislature before becoming the first African American to secure a judgeship in the North. After his death in 1884, Josephine became a powerful clubwoman and founded the Woman’s Era, the newspaper of national reach and importance that served as the official organ of the Black clubwomen’s movement. She shared her position as editor with her daughter, as Contending Forces’ narrator archly puts it, “like a title of nobility [she] bade fair to descend to her children.”⁵⁰ Another of Contending Forces’ characters, Madame Frances, the “spiritualistic soothsayer and marvelous mind-reader” whose fatidic services at a fund-raising fair contribute to its success, may be loosely based on a fabulously popular Boston medium of the era, the “earnest and eloquent colored medium” Hattie E. Wilson, author of Our Nig.⁵¹

     Hopkins sometimes outlines composite sketches of well-known figures or groups that serve as narrative archetypes. Other times she incorporates telling details about a leading figure that her contemporary audience would know—or should learn—in accordance with the text’s heuristic mission. Indeed, Hopkins “created fictional histories,” or histotextual fictions, “which could explain the present and which had a pedagogical function for both her characters and her audience,” as Hazel Carby puts it.⁵² The debates described in Contending Forces anticipate what would soon solidify into a “battle between W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington over educational policy and the advisability of black political activism,” as critic Richard Yarborough has suggested.⁵³ Described as the head of a large industrial institution “in the South devoted to the welfare of the Negroes,” the novel’s Dr. Arthur Lewis promotes accommodation, pronouncing at a community gathering that “politics is the bane of the Negro’s existence.”⁵⁴ Like Washington, Lewis visits the North regularly to collect “large sums of money from the best class of philanthropic citizens.”⁵⁵His eventual brother-in-law, the handsome Will Smith, is the novel’s radical Boston intellectual. He studies at Harvard and then does further coursework in Germany, Hopkins’s nod to DuBois’s education at both Harvard and the University of Berlin.⁵⁶

     Smith is a leading member of the “American Colored League,” “made up of leading colored men all over New England.”⁵⁷ The fictional league provides yet another layer of historical and narrative connection, for, as the Christian Recorder reported in 1889, in that era “the air [was] full of Negro Leagues. It [was] taking like wild fire.”⁵⁸ Just as Hopkins’s romantic plot makes respected family out of political foes, her naming practices suggestively marry institutional goals and leadership. Hopkins’s American Colored League captures this mood and series of movements. It recalls the American Negro Academy (ANA), whose second president was DuBois.⁵⁹ A reference to the fictional league’s longer name—the National League of American Colored Men—also calls to mind T. Thomas Fortune’s National Afro-American League (1890–93) and its later rendition, the National Afro-American Council (1898).⁶⁰ Boston’s Colored National League, whose officers included leading local activists such as Edwin Walker (David Walker’s son), Archibald Grimké and others, provides a closer source for Hopkins’s amalgamation; the mass meeting it held in October 1899, as Hopkins was finishing her novel, may have inspired the central gathering narrated in Contending Forces.⁶¹ The historicity of Hopkins’s league is paradoxically both definite and imprecise. It highlights the existence of these organizations even though it is difficult to identify a single organization that serves as her prototype. She so invites readers to recall the immediate past as a prehistory of her fictional moment, and merges past and present referents suggestively as a model for further present textual—and extratextual—action.⁶²

     For culturally literate readers, Contending Forces’s historical heuristics reinforce and authenticate the meanings communicated to its entire audience, working in harmony with the book’s narrative plot and mission. In other works, histotextual references create alternative, sometimes dissonant, interpretative possibilities. Histotextuality can be used in a range of ways, to enhance and deepen a text’s hermeneutics or to disrupt an assumed and univocal narrative transparency. In Activist Sentiments, my focus is on these narrative strategies and reading practices as they characterize much of Black women’s nineteenth-century literature. Yet they surely emerge in other discourses, writing, and periods that share conditions and economies of production and reception that resemble those I examine.

     Leaving harmonic historicizing to one side, in the chapters that follow I record the oppositional simultextual polyphonics in texts known—and often dismissed—for their putatively conforming and prosaic embrace of sentimental forms and themes. Tracing specific histotextual strategies in putatively “nonpolitical” turn-of-the-century Black women’s writings reveals both the potency and the multivalent character of their historical engagement. It is true that the novels that first emerge in the 1890s employ what seems to many contemporary readers to be conventional generic shells. Their valorization of motherhood, endorsements of marriage and traditional women’s concerns like temperance, and novelistic use of racially indeterminate protagonists, all characterize writing of this period. The commitment to these concerns was genuine and political, as scholars from Hazel Carby to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham have illustrated. Nineteenth-century African American women both embraced these concerns and also critiqued the racial biases found in larger economic and gender-inflected cultural and activist contexts.

     It is often difficult for contemporary readers—part of an American populace infamous for its amnesia—to identify historical references. The use of these histotextual conventions, then, often seems obscure to modern readers because their referents have been disremembered and rarely incorporated into the standard histories we inherit. Yet the nineteenth-century audiences who recognized historicized tropes could connect the references to people, events, and attacks upon which at least one semantic layer of representation depended. Histotextuality, then, names a method for interpreting sophisticated historicized tropes in narratives whose meaning has previously been thought to be produced by relying on the texts’ thin and putatively singular or seemingly impoverished mimetic referents. Revisiting the multiple meanings produced by several simultaneously situated interpretive phraseologies is one way to better access nineteenth-century Black women’s literary, cultural, and political workings.

* * *

Activist Sentiments’ first chapters feature readings of its most familiar texts and authors. My consideration of Harriet Jacobs expands a discussion of sex and slavery beyond its conventional, normalized representations to include homosexual and incestuous abuse that pose larger issues about readers’ identification, complicity, and engagement. I then turn to the politics of naming, and to issues of reproductive and historical agency. I argue that Jacobs challenges conventional power arrangements by setting up a contestation of paternity between Mr. Sands, Brent’s white lover, and Dr. Flint, her owner. Finally, examining the historical record and querying the circumstances of Molly Horniblow—or Aunt Martha’s—actual motherhood and sale allows us to further examine the simultextual discussion of sexual unveilings and idealized maternity that animates Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

     My reading of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig veers away from the historical research I have published elsewhere and instead traces the critique of human and property relations that Our Nig launches through its meditations about and manipulations of the politics of naming. Our Nig recalls the story of another servant girl and her master, Mr. B., made famous in the runaway bestseller, Pamela (1740). Our Nig’s multiple uses of homonymic overlay also calls attention to both anti-slavery friends and to “slavery’s shadows” being cast in Northern quarters. Its thematic and lexical mergers trouble characters’ nominally unitary and transparent roles. Indeed, Our Nig moves beyond a racial and regional critique of domesticity to simultextually challenge and complicate both white and Black maternity, a pattern we will see in Clarence and Corrine as well.

     The chapter titled “‘Reading Aright’: Sexuality and White Slavery in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy” explores how the novel employs the simultaneously racialized mulatta and the trope of “white slavery.” By examining the medical, legal, and civic debates through which Iola Leroy’s rhetorics gain meaning, it becomes clearer that the story of the “white slaves” who people the novel also references the white slavery scare, the name given to the growing abduction of young white women into an institutionalized system of sexual exploitation in the Progressive Era. Iola Leroy reappropriates language that is “already populated with the social intentions of others,” as Bakhtin says of the prose writer, “and compels them to serve [its] own intentions.”⁶³ Used to direct energy back to post-Reconstruction Black concerns, Iola’s color allows for a historically specified recirculation of white slavery that had served as the (essential) trope repeated in antebellum texts like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Clotel (1853, 1860, 1864), and Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom (1860).

     Iola Leroy’s examination of sexuality, power, and interracial desire raises the question of how the rhetoric meant to recast white victims of white slavery as sexual innocents revises our understanding of Iola’s testimony about her own sexual vulnerability. Following my reading of Incidents, I suggest that Iola never assures its readers of its heroine’s sexual purity. Nor does Iola equate white and Black sexual oppression. Indeed, the novel scrutinizes white women’s own sexual power over and desire for enslaved women and men in ways that again recall the multidirectional sexual power that Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl likewise highlights.

Emerging historical and genealogical research provides new contexts for considerations of Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins and Amelia Johnson, the two rarely examined authors included in this study. As African Americanists well know, we are still in the midst of recovering nineteenth-century writings and the buried biographical, historical, and political contexts of their production. Such research has augmented, for example, our knowledge about Frances E. W. Harper’s literary corpus. Frances Smith Foster’s rediscovery of the early novels Harper serialized in the Christian Recorder inform the ways we read Iola Leroy. Julia Collins’s recently republished novel The Curse of Caste; or, the Slave Bride, which also first appeared in the Recorder’s pages, likewise has renewed interest in questions of “firsts,” influence, and recovery. Similarly, despite Harriet Jacobs’s and Harriet Wilson’s near canonical status since the 1990s, we knew relatively little about the efforts and movements to which they devoted their later lives until Jean Fagan Yellin’s biography of Jacobs and P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald Pitts’s edition of Our Nig emerged in the twenty-first century.⁶⁴ The intriguing discoveries of Hannah Craft’s The Bondswoman’s Narrative and The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book by “Chloe Russell, a Woman of Colour in the State of Massachusetts,” are additional examples of recently reintroduced texts. In some cases, biographical information is so scant that these authors’ consanguineous connections to African American community or identity are based on rather anemic information.⁶⁵

     While historicized readings confirm Amelia Johnson’s lost activist biography and displace the assumptions about her life that emerged from previous considerations of her aracial, supposedly apolitical, novels, conversely, even as recent genealogical research conclusively establishes that Kelley-Hawkins was not African American (as critics had previously believed), histotextual readings of Four Girls at Cottage City provide strong textual linkages to Black activist engagement.⁶⁶ Kelley-Hawkins’s shifting racial and authorial identity invites wider analysis of the breadth of Black prose writers’ political and narrative strategies. In the chapter titled “Reading/Photographs: Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins’s Four Girls at Cottage City, Victoria Earle (Matthews), and the Woman’s Era,” I examine how, for culturally literate readers, not only her photographic frontispiece but her characters have linked (and continue to link) Kelley-Hawkins and her work to African American writing.⁶⁷ Focusing on late-nineteenth-century reading, photography, and reform, as well as on reforming contemporary interpretative practices that frame visual, racial, and historical “evidence,” I address the ways in which reading race and assimilating iconographic representation became increasingly central to late-nineteenth-century reading culture, bringing into view the emphasis on interpretation posed as critical to women’s development. Indeed, the novel takes up the mutually constitutive relation between women’s development and reform in ways that mirror the arc described in the pages of the Woman’s Era and that are expressed throughout the Black clubwomen’s movement.

     Throughout this project, I examine the ways in which the politics of naming open up polyvalent interpretative possibilities. The convergence between Kelley-Hawkins’s Vera Earle and Victoria Earle (Matthews), between multiple Harper characters and historical figures, as well as the inviting convergence of Nig, Nab, and Mag, are particular examples. Iola Leroy and Four Girls at Cottage City reaffirm that cultural literacy is necessary to “read aright” the texts’ “legible transcripts” of named and active civic participation and protest, to borrow from Iola’s narrator.⁶⁸ In a more specific sense, names covalently bond with their homonymic referents. That is, instead of floating freely, they become bound in mutual orbit or “combine with” historical referents, compounding the interlocking sets of amplified meanings that they provide. These novels’ allusions to such figures of resistance were well known to their multiple interpretive communities: those readers, whatever their race, who followed reform issues, clubwomen’s and temperance work, those, in other words, who were interested in reform work or what Matthews defined broadly as “race literature.”

     To date, this book also offers the fullest examination of Amelia Johnson’s Clarence and Corrine and the newly recovered nonfiction introduced in the last chapter. Rarely examined documents chronicle Johnson’s involvement in the Black clubwomen’s and Niagara movements. Recovering the context of Johnson’s literary production reveals her intimate connection to the inner circle of leaders who organized sustained and radical justice campaigns in late nineteenth-century Baltimore. Their efforts brought Maryland its first Black lawyer, challenged multiple statutes and court cases, got Black students—later the city’s leading municipal leaders—admitted to the University of Maryland’s law school, and launched organizing efforts to institute a Black high school that was unique in the lower and upper South. Nonetheless, to this date Johnson’s literary works have been described as flyweight evangelical domestic tracts. Yet Johnson uses characters who could be read as white to simultextually illustrate shared social problems despite the broader culture’s insistence that such issues illustrate Black dysfunction and degradation. Examining Johnson’s journalistic writing reveals that, as in her novel Clarence and Corrine, she emphasizes white historical and literary examples in order to aggressively defend Black progress. Yet, her novels have been almost completely abstracted from the sharp challenges to white violence, racism, and paternalism that characterize her hard-knuckled linguistic stance in other publishing venues.

     In both Clarence and Corrine and in Four Girls, racial construction as incarnated in the “raceless” body’s transformational ability has a wide range of expressive possibilities that reach beyond conventional texts in which phenotypically white-skinned but juridically Black characters pass. As we know, more complex and challenging racial signification is often at work in these instances. In Activist Sentiments, chapters on Our Nig, Iola Leroy, Four Girls, and Clarence and Corrine in part explore the sometimes radically transgressive ways in which light, bright, and could-they-be-white (?) characters might be used to please, tease, and create unease for the multiple reception communities their authors claim as their audiences. Activist Sentiments augments and reframes the assumption that garnering white readers’ sympathy is the principal thrust of the cultural work in which nineteenth-century Black women’s writing is engaged. While that dynamic exists, as I would put it, simultextually, this book charts the historical and formal complexity of texts that perhaps reinscribe—but also disrupt and challenge—such dynamics. My hope is that Activist Sentiments will provide a stronger foundation for our understanding of the racially inflected conundrums of sexuality and power—and the rhetorics we use to express and address them—both in the past and in the century in which we live.

Notes

¹ Fugitives George Johnson and George Latimer spoke at the convention. Newspa- pers noted Johnson’s eloquence. Through Latimer’s case he became a cause célèbre. The organizing against his owner’s claims to the fugitive led to one of the most serious acts of civil disobedience in the nineteenth century. Herald of Freedom, “Milford Convention,” January 13, 1843; The Liberator, “Anti-Slavery Melody,” January 20, 1843.

² Herald of Freedom, “Milford Convention,” January 13, 1843. This convention was one of their early performances covered in the anti-slavery press. “They are not performers— They are Abolitionists,” reports the Herald of Freedom, “with as much heart and fire as they have music.” The Liberator titles its coverage of the Milford meeting by referring to the Hutchinson Family Singers’ performance. The Liberator, “Anti-Slavery Melody,” January
20, 1843.

³ Ramsdell, History of Milford, 522. The North Star, June 9, 1848. The centennial was in 1894.

⁴ The North Star, June 9, 1848.

⁵ “My Mistress was wholly imbued with Southern principles,” writes Harriet Wilson in her Preface (np); also see Harriet Wilson, Our Nig, 3, 12.

⁶ Ramsdell, History of Milford, 202; there are no other Black females listed in Milford in the 1840 census. If the age given on Wilson’s death certificate is correct, then she would have turned eighteen in March 1843, several months after the convention. She would have reached her “majority” then, but it is not clear when she was released from her service to the Haywards. See Foreman and Pitts, Our Nig, viii.

⁷ Wells-Barnet, Crusade for Justice, 79. Also see McMurray, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 171.

⁸ “To the Afro-American women of New York and Brooklyn, whose race love, earnest zeal and unselfish effort at Lyric Hall, in the City of New York, on the night of October 5, 1892—made possible its publication, this pamphlet is gratefully dedicated by the author.” Wells, Southern Horrors.

⁹ Harper, Iola Leroy, 9.

¹⁰ Jacobs, Incidents (Painter edition), 21.

¹¹ See Flynn, “A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity” and “Profile, Emma Dunham Kelley- Hawkins.” Also see Holly Jackson, “Mistaken Identity,” The Boston Globe, February 20,
2005.

¹² duCille, Coupling Convention, 32.

¹³ Ibid., chap. 2, particularly 31–32; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, chap. 7, par- ticularly 188.

¹⁴ McBride, Impossible Witness, 2.

¹⁵ Ibid., 152.

¹⁶ Peterson, Doers of the Word, 14.

¹⁷ Brody, Impossible Purities, 16.

¹⁸ Jacobs, Incidents, 97, last page of chap. 17.

¹⁹ Foreman, “‘White’ Mulatta Genealogies,” 508.

²⁰ Jacobs, Incidents, 97, end of chap. 17.

²¹ For more on this subject, see Foreman, “Passing and its Prepositions.”

²² Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 279.

²³ Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues,” 19.

²⁴ Ibid., 22. See also Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse and the Novel” in Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 271–75.

²⁵ Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues,” 19.

²⁶ Ibid., 22. See also Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse and the Novel” in Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 271–75.

²⁷ As Frances Harper narrates, “Some of the shrewder slaves, coming in contact with their masters and overhearing their conversations, invented a phraseology to convey in the most unsuspecting manner news to each other.” Iola Leroy, 9.

²⁸ Lucy A. Delaney’s From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom (1891) and Annie L. Burton’s Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days are both featured in Six Women’s Slave Narratives.

²⁹ Jaus, “Literary History,” 28.

³⁰ Ibid., 30

³¹ Lang, “Class and the Strategies of Sympathy,” 135.

³² For more on this subject using different authors as examples see McBride, Impossible Witness.

³³ Harper, Iola Leroy, 282. The “Note” that closes Iola Leroy includes this last poem.
There is light beyond the darkness, Joy beneath 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.

Frances Smith Foster chose the last line as the title of her Harper anthology.

³⁴ Yarborough, “Introduction,” Contending Forces, xxviii.

³⁵ Matthews, “The Value of Race Literature,” 126, 135; McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 192.

³⁶ McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 190. Matthews, “The Value of Race Literature,” 136.

³⁷ Matthews, “The Value of Race Literature,” 145.

³⁸ Ibid.

³⁹ Foster, Three Rediscovered Novels, xxv.

⁴⁰ In contrast to Gates, Hazel Carby groups early African American women writers together but resists formulating either a singular or pluralized Black literary tradition and, indeed, “is critical of traditions of Afro-American intellectual thought that have been constructed as paradigmatic of Afro-American history.” More recently, Ann duCille asserts that her work assumes no single tradition of Black women’s writing and stresses a plural- ized approach. I join with others in modifying Gates’s emphasis on formal revision, and affirm duCille’s admonition about the dangers of constructing singular and homogeneous models of reading. Categorizing the patterns we sometimes claim constitute tradition, however, gives us insight into the cultural work these writers engaged. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Foreword,” in Cooper, A Voice from the South, xvii; Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 16; and duCille, The Coupling Convention, 9.

⁴¹ Lukács, The Historical Novel, 53, 71.

⁴² Ibid., 53.

⁴³ Fisher, Hard Facts, 16. Here he builds on Lukács who comments that Scott “presents great crises of historical life in his novels. Accordingly, hostile social forces, bent on one another’s destruction, are everywhere colliding.” The Historical Novel, 36.

⁴⁴ Pushkin ridiculed simply alluding to contemporary events in historical art and Lukács derided using history as a decorative backdrop for otherwise contemporary sto- ries. It was in “bringing the past to life as prehistory of the present,” as Harper does, that produced great writing. See Lukács, The Historical Novel, 53, 200.

⁴⁵ Yarborough, “Introduction,” Contending Forces, 276. Hopkins refers to Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society in the African Meeting House in 1832. Maria Stewart gave the first speech by an American woman to a “promiscuous” audience of men and women from its pulpit, and Angelina Grimké spoke there, despite resistance from angry mobs. August the First celebrations were held there. The meeting house remained a central location for Black resistance and worship for many years and was remodeled in the 1850s, when it attained the name “St. Paul’s Baptist Church.”

⁴⁶ Archibald Grimké, “Anti-Slavery Boston,” New England Magazine (December 1890),
441–59, as cited in Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Archibald Grimké, 66.

⁴⁷ Also see Stepto’s “Narration, Authentication and Authorial Control” in his From Behind the Veil, 4–5. I build on his description of the ways in which extratextual docu- ments are integrated or appended to slave narratives.

⁴⁸ Hopkins, Contending Forces, 143.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 148.

⁵⁰ Ibid. Hopkins writes that Mr. Willis’s “foot on the stairs mounting to the two-room tenement which constituted their home in the early years of married life, had sent a thrill to her very heart as she sat sewing baby clothes for the always expected addition to the family.” Profiles tend to stress the newly wedded couple’s trip to England; yet two years after their marriage, the 1860 census shows them residing in a tenement with about thir- teen in-laws and others. Josephine is seventeen or eighteen years old; their first child is six months old. For more on Hopkins’s ambivalence about the figure of Mrs. Willis, see Lois Lampere Brown, “Defensive Postures in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces.”

⁵¹ Hopkins, Contending Forces, 197. While Mrs. Willis is certainly and directly based on Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, the Wilson reference is a bit looser. Though Wilson was undoubtedly one of the most well-known colored mediums in Boston and her age coin- cides with Madame Frances’s, she was a healing clairvoyant and trance medium. Madame Frances is a trance fortune teller. Of course, Hopkins takes novelistic license as she makes histotextual incorporations. See Foreman and Pitts, “Introduction,” Our Nig, for more information on Wilson’s life as a Boston Spiritualist.

⁵² Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 128. In the 1890s, Hopkins gave special lectures on Toussaint L’Ouverture and other topics in Black history. See Yarborough, “Introduc- tion,” Contending Forces, xxix; McKay, “Introduction,” The Unruly Voice, 3. Her later audi- ences were heterogeneous, and according to Hazel Carby (building on DuBois) included “those in professional service . . . [predominantly] teachers and clergy” but also “male and female tobacco factory operatives, male blacksmiths, wheelwrights, book and shoe makers, butchers, carpenters and joiners, cotton and textile mill operatives, machinists” as well as “female dressmakers, milliners, seamstresses and tailoresses” as well as domestic workers. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 127.

⁵³ See Yarborough, “Introduction,” Contending Forces, xxxvii. One might add that Hopkins’s clear antagonism to accommodation but sympathetic delineation of her Wash- ingtonian character is aligned with many of her contemporaries’ take on Washington in
1899 and 1900. According to some historians, explicit anti-Washington expression did not coalesce until 1901, with the emergence of William Monroe Trotter’s The Guardian. Publication of The Souls of Black Folks in 1903 of course further articulated this opposi- tion. See Bruce, Archibald Grimké, 92, 102.

⁵⁴ Hopkins, Contending Forces, 250.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 242.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 385.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 224.

⁵⁸ Christian Recorder, October 31, 1889, as quoted in Williams, The Christian Recorder,
115.

⁵⁹ The academy was committed to fighting assaults against Black individuals and communities—as Hopkins’s League also is—but the ANA had an archival and scholarly activist bent.

⁶⁰ Though Fortune was known to disdain the term “Colored” that Hopkins employs, her local league structure, including visiting speakers from the South and elsewhere, recalls Fortune’s organization.

⁶¹ Other officers included Edward E. Brown and James Wolff. The meeting was held at Charles Street Church, and received press coverage. Grimké sent the open letter to President McKinley that he read at the meeting, along with newspaper coverage, to Booker T. Washington. See Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Archibald Grimké, 90.

⁶² The league’s first national meeting took place in Chicago, January 25, 1890, with 135 delegates from 23 states. In July 1893, Fortune disbanded the league for lack of financial resources necessary to advance the organization’s agenda. Some local leagues, however, continued. The league was reconstituted as the National Afro American Council in 1898 in Rochester, New York. One of the principal objectives was to fight lynching, which precipi- tates, in Contending Forces, the meeting that Hopkins outlines. Neither the league nor the academy was based in New England. The academy, founded in 1897, met in Washington DC. The council’s constitution is found on the Library Congress site at http://lcweb2.loc
.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/murray:@field(DOCID+@lit(lcrbmrpt1203div0)) (accessed
November 21, 2008).

⁶³ Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 300.

⁶⁴ Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life; Foreman and Pitts, “Introduction” and “Chronologies,” Our Nig.

⁶⁵ We still have almost no idea who “Hannah Craft” is, and there is little informa- tion available on Chloe Russell. See Gardner, “The Complete Fortune.” Also see African American Review 40, no.4 (Winter, 2006) on Julia Collins.

⁶⁶ See Flynn, “A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity.” Also see Holly Jackson, “Mistaken
Identity.”

⁶⁷ Scholars who are not adequately familiar with the range of nineteenth-century prose fiction often point to the ways in which Kelley-Hawkins’s ethnically neutral fic- tion falls outside of the racial uplift writing of Hopkins and Harper. Yet this ignores the range of African American early writing. Harper’s “Two Offers,” published in the 1859 inaugural edition of the Anglo African, was followed by many others. As Barbara Christian points out in her introduction of Amelia Johnson’s The Hazeley Family, Johnson’s three novels featuring nonracial characters mirror Paul Laurence Dunbar’s novels published between 1898 and 1901: “Afro-American writers used various tactics to overcome racial stereotypes.” Christian, “Introduction,” The Hazeley Family, xxvii. When Holly Jackson erroneously claimed that ethnically neutral characters fall outside of African American literary traditions, journalists reproduced the mistaken claim. See Scott McLemee’s “In Black and White,” Inside Higher Education.

⁶⁸ Harper, Iola Leroy, 14.