P. Gabrielle Foreman

This paper appears in Yale Journal of Criticism, Fall, 1997 and is copyrighted.You are granted permission to use this paper for

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I.

Until fairly recently, time had not been kind to Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892). Though it was long considered the "first" novel written by an African-American woman, more often than not it was noted for only that. Countless critics of various methodological and ideological persuasions derided the novel for its seeming historical amnesia, myopia, and racial and sexual restraint. Almost all agreed on at least one thing: they considered Iola Leroy a failure of aesthetic and political sorts.

Frances Smith Foster's rediscovery of Frances Harper's first three novels⁽²⁾ and the convergence of the rapidly growing fields of African-American women's writing, cultural studies and women's history, has facilitated a growing reconsideration of Iola Leroy. It began to garner more serious attention in the mid-1980s just about the time its status as "first" was displaced by Emma Dunham Kelley's novel Megda (1891) and then by the rediscovery of Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859). As the field of Black women's literature consolidated, and as work on other early women writers's strategies emerged concurrently, Iola Leroy was reprinted in 1987 for only the second time in ninety-two years and was placed in a literary and historical context that provided readers better access to Harper's textual workings.⁽³⁾ Still, Harper's generic choices have been viewed as too sentimental, too imitative, while she continues to be chided, as a Black writer, for not being sufficiently "authentic." Iola Leroy, supposedly, is disconnected from the "real" concerns of "real" African Americans at the turn of the century. While Charles Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition (1901) has been seen as both artful and oppositional in large part because his mimetic, historical and intertextual referents -- the Wilmington race riots, the Plessy Vs. Fergusan decision, and Twain's Puddn'head Wilson -- are meant to be easily recognizable to a large group of readers, Iola Leroy has been dismissed for describing "no significant orbit."⁽⁴⁾ Even Deborah McDowell, who has skillfully illuminated the workings of other neglected novels, suggests that the characterizations in Iola Leroy are lacking in "honesty and imagination" and that the novel is directed toward a readership "outside the black cultural community."⁽⁵⁾ Yet despite some critics's continuing cavils, it has become increasingly clear that if readers heed both John Reilly's familiar cautionary note not to conflate the "work of literature" with the "reality either of the exterior world or of the author, for to do so is to deny the text its epistemelogical status, its special function as an instrument of literary cognition,"⁽⁶⁾ and readers also attend to the text's socio-ideologic contexts and various social registers, we can better recognize Iola Leroy's ignored dialogics. The text is compellingly artful in communicating differently to sets of readers who do not always enjoy shared fields of cultural knowledge or levels of literary sophistication. To some, Harper's generic choices occlude her use of historical tropes that, I will argue, were crystal clear to a set of her contemporaneous readers. If, as Reilly points out, "works of [African-American] literature are dissolved into their referents,"⁽⁷⁾ then Harper's most "literary" moments -- the places in her text where she queries the connections between "historical" and representational epistemology -- are lost unless we acknowledge the reading cartography she provides, and map her literary use of the referents at work in what she calls the "invented phraseology" of Iola Leroy.⁽⁸⁾

In "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics and the Black Women's Literary Tradition," Mae Henderson proposes a theory of interpretation in which Black women "speak from a multiple and complex social, historical and cultural positionality, which, in effect, constitutes Black female subjectivity."⁽⁹⁾ This is a tradition -- one that often is said to begin with Zora Neale Hurston and to reach forward to writers like Toni Morrison -- with which Harper is seldom identified, in part because Black female subjectivity as we now understand it critically is rarely central to Harper's project. Henderson's "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."⁽¹⁰⁾ Both are modes of expression rarely if ever attributed to Harper despite the sophisticated literary strategies she employs.

Harper's generic affiliation with sentimentality in part explains the justification for her exclusion from a Black literary sisterhood that expresses complex subjectivity. Sentimentality stresses the transparent relation between the head and the heart, between reading, feeling and doing. Ostensibly depending on its "artless" moral force as its unitary source, on first examination it hardly seems compatible with the very dialogized heteroglossia I argue Iola Leroy accentuates. Instead Harper's generic choices seem to align her text more closely with glossolalia's "private, non-mediated, non differentiated univocality." But because this might describe sentimentality's extra-textual assumptions rather than its internal system of expressing subjectivity, Harper's textual workings differ from, rather than incorporate, glossolalia. Henderson's "speaking in tongues," then, is not Harper's "invented phraseology"; Henderson's theory doesn't address the antecedents of the contemporary writing her model so beautifully explicates. She illuminates contemporary Black women authors's expression of a multiple subjectivity, the author's, narrator's, character's, while I examine the strategies by which earlier writers address multiple audiences.

Like Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson before her, and like her contemporaries Lucy Delaney and Annie Burton, Harper uses the seeming dissonance between her text's sentimental affiliations and its dialogic complexity to articulate its message in various social registers;⁽¹¹⁾ the specific historicized strategies Harper uses to speak in these social languages is what I attend to in this piece. Harper engages in what I call "histotextuality": a strategy marginalized writers use to incorporate historical allusions that both contextualize and radicalize their work by countering the putatively innocuous generic codes they seem to have endorsed.

Just as politicized writers often encode their texts's more radical nature in order to reach broad audiences they might otherwise alienate, Harper offers one semantic layer in Iola Leroy that circulates within a nonthreatening epistemelogical interpretive system that shades her text's simultaneously more radical nature. The histotextual strategy I propose to locate in Harper weaves references couched in a socio-ideological determined language that only an already politicized segment of the audience would recognize. Yet, I would argue, Harper's appeal to multiple audiences, her use of multiple social languages, is not hierarchized; the more radical text is not buried under the others, as is often typical of coded discourse. Rather, the social heteroglossia of histotextual prose, one might say building on Bakhtin, creates a textual layer that is "shot through with "dialogized overtones," "artistically calculated nuances on all the fundamental . . . tones of this heteroglossia."⁽¹²⁾ Harper's allusions to symbols of resistance known to some subsets of her readers, white reformists and those who followed the Black press, for example, add a calculated activist charge to a text whose reformist message is simultaneously expressed in more accommodating prose. The radical nature of Harper's prose is on the surface for readers who can access and then interpret the text in accordance with their own nuanced activist and literary concerns.

Histotextuality overlaps with, but is distinguishable from, other literary terms and categories with which it shares an affinity. It differs from intertextuality, most obviously, because it is predicated upon the recognizable historicized markers that authors and readers share, rather than on the recirculation of formal texts. In his well-known 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

[W]riters 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.⁽¹³⁾

The histotextual text provides such a mortar in the echoes and recast metaphors it borrows from historical events, debates and understandings. The multiple threads that run through a common but often unofficial historical fabric provides the metaphorical kinship -- the interpretive bond between certain readers and certain semantic textual layers -- and literary tradition that I examine here.

The historical novel and the histotextual one differ as well. While they share many components, one tenet of the former, and of the sentimental novel, is its transparency. Readers are meant to recognize the types or the historical personages that inhabit the local, but representative, social order of the novel. Histotextuality, however, in novels and narratives, is a strategy used to reach only a segment of the audience whose prior knowledge and interpretative schemata determine the level of historical and epistemelogical engagement they have with the narrative itself, while appealing on a different level to a broader reading public. The historical novel, says Lukacs, brings "the past to life as the prehistory of the present" and does not "consist in alluding to contemporary events."⁽¹⁴⁾ It illustrates great crises, as he comments, "struggles between classes or codes no longer tolerant of each other or even between ways of life," Philip Fisher adds. Yet, Fisher continues, these struggles are linked to an already known clear outcome.⁽¹⁵⁾ Histotextuality, on the other hand, brings into play a contemporaneous set of referents in addition to past ones; it bastardizes the form, Lukacs and Pushkin might say, but not illegitimately.⁽¹⁶⁾ That is, while the classic historical novel incorporates the past as a prehistory to explain present contending forces, the histotextual narrative 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, histotextual narratives are meant to direct social empathy and to model social intervention.

Histotextuality marks many putatively "non-political" Black women's turn-of-the-century writings and expresses both the potency and the multivalent character of these authors' historical engagement. It is true that African-American women often fit their writing into what to many contemporary readers seems like conventional generic shells. Their valorization of motherhood, their endorsements of marriage and traditional women's concerns like temperance, and their novelistic use of racially indeterminate protagonists, all characterize later nineteenth-century Black women's writing. Their commitment to these concerns was genuine and political as critics from Hazel Carby to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham have illustrated. Nineteenth-century Black women writers both embrace these concerns and critique the racial biases found in their larger economic and gender inflected cultural and activist contexts. In much the same way that Nina Baym characterizes the "woman's novel" of the mid-nineteenth century,⁽¹⁷⁾ I mean to suggest that these tenets combined with the narrative workings that simultaneously critique them constitute the characteristics of Black sentimentality as a genre. This genre is marked by its ironic use of apparent sentimental transparency and also by its reliance on a simultaneous appeal to different, if sometimes overlapping, historically situated readers's knowledge and decoding abilities.⁽¹⁸⁾ It is often difficult for modern readers -- part of an American public infamous for its historical amnesia -- to recognize histotextual codes. African-American authors's use of histotextual referents often seem obscure to modern readers because their referents have been disremembered, never incorporated into the standard histories we inherit. Yet the nineteenth-century audiences who recognized histotextual tropes were intimately connected to the referents upon which 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's putatively singular or seemingly impoverished mimetic referents. Attending to the multiple meanings produced by several simultaneously situated interpretive "phraseologies" is one way to better access the writings by Black women of the nineteenth century and to appreciate the aesthetic sensibilities of Frances E.W. Harper's discursive strategies in Iola Leroy. It provides one way to identify the multiple strands at work in an African-American women's literary tradition.

As I will argue in the following section of this essay, Harper's use of histotextuality allows her to inscribe the volatile context of the era in which she writes -- rape and lynching, sexual and political intimidation and disenfranchisement -- onto the fiction of sentimental history.⁽¹⁹⁾ Her use of the mulatta is similarly layered. As I will show, ultimately Harper uses the simultaneously racialized white mulatta, a figure that stands as a multi-gendered symbol of both the white lady and the Black woman, to connect her own interventions about African-American rights to contemporary white reformist rhetoric.⁽²⁰⁾ Harper taps into a central icon for white activists of that time, the "white slave," the abducted girl forced into prostitution. Finally, I will establish that Harper radicalizes Iola Leroy by homonymically connecting her characters to historical personages her African-American and acculturated audience would know. Most significantly, Harper places Iola, the ostensible sentimental heroine, side by side with "Iola," the noted pen name of the fiery radical activist, Ida B. Wells. Daphne Brooks suggests that Wells takes on a pseudonym to "distance herself from the horrific details of her discourse."⁽²¹⁾ Harper similarly adopts for her protagonist the same name, Iola, in order to associate her work with her young friend Wells's voice and writings without dwelling on the "horrific details" of the violent sexualized politics of the 1890s. In other words, by entitling her novel Iola Leroy and incorporating other historical figures as well, Harper situates her coded explorations firmly in the context of the volatile decade in which she wrote.

Harper's simultaneous appeal to different sets of historically and politically situated readers ties together my interpretation of her appeal to the activists who would recognize her "white slavery" plot, and to the politicized segment of Black press readers who would recognize the historic import of her use of homonyms. Separate though perhaps overlapping cultures and communities, and readers of cultures, existed together; they brought differing needs, desires and interpretive capacities to the same text. Few authors were better able to anticipate these capacities -- and to engage them simultaneously -- than Frances E. W. Harper.
 

II.

Throughout Iola Leroy's entire first chapter Harper alerts those "eagle-eyed" readers of her interpretive community to her coding strategies.⁽²²⁾ When she writes that "under [slaves's] apparently careless exterior there was an undercurrent of thought which escaped the cognizance of their masters" (9), she reinscribes the importance of audience positionality and underscores the slippery terrain of transparency in reading we might otherwise assume. Hazel Carby comments that Harper's "`folk' are manipulators of skills that become weapons, not [the] least of which is literacy. Literacy, the power of the word, becomes a lesson for Harper's readership to learn" (xix).⁽²³⁾ Harper locates much of her subversive praxis in the "aunts" and "uncles" who open her novel. Aunt Linda's comment, "I can't read. . . but ole Missus's face is newspaper nuff for me" (9), suggests an expanded definition of literacy -- the power of the word -- one which emphasizes the power of reading more than an explicit directive to write.

Reading the text as is, is not the only signifying reading at work in Iola Leroy. Indeed, the last sentence of Harper's opening chapter brings home her insistence that reading script does not ensure literacy. She writes, "[B]ut slavery had cast such a glamour over the Nation, and so warped the consciences of men, that they failed to read aright the legible transcript of Divine retribution which was written upon the shuddering earth" (14). The manipulated master and the duped reader occupy similar places in Harper's textual economy. She alerts us early that her narrative shell, the sentimental genre, is an "apparently careless exterior," as her narrator put it, she uses to interrogate systems of power and knowledge.

Harper articulates her theories of literacy more explicitly in her essays than she does in Iola Leroy. In "Women's Political Future" (1893) she writes,

In coming into her political estate woman will find a mass of illiteracy to be dispelled. If knowledge is power, ignorance is also power. The power that educates wickedness may manipulate and dash against the pillars of any state when they are undermined . . . by injustice.⁽²⁴⁾

Harper's equation posits both knowledge and power as literacy's referents, for they are equatable, "knowledge is power." Yet, she goes on, "ignorance is also power," and so can also stand as a referent for literacy. Harper, then, resists fixed theories of literacy as an absolute good and so brackets literacy's absolute usefulness. Instead, she insists that knowledge must be informed by justice if the masses are to learn to "read aright," if they are to become truly literate. Here Harper diverges from Frederick Douglass's explicit emphasis on writing and his founding paradigm that literacy equals freedom. Instead, her articulation coincides with African-American women's endorsement of a broader oral literacy, one that does not valorize or fix the power of formal and individualized literacy over communal ways of knowing.⁽²⁵⁾

If one does not read Iola Leroy "aright," Harper's strong opening directive toward subversive interpretation can be easily lost. In a much-cited passage, Harper writes that a General was

much impressed by [Iola's] modest demeanor, and surprised to see the refinement and beauty she possessed. Could it be possible that this beautiful girl had been chattel, with no power to protect herself from the highest insults that lawless brutality could inflict upon innocent and defenseless womanhood? (39)⁽²⁶⁾

Harper uses what readers recognize as the language of the sentimental romance to articulate a coded invective against arbitrary male power. Harper pairs "innocent and defenseless womanhood" against "lawless brutality" instead of against "brutal manhood" as one might expect; she uses "brutality" as a noun that stands in for manhood, rather than using "brutal" as a mere qualifier to "manhood." Harper's grammatical economy inscribes the essential negative qualities of men, then, even as she subverts the ideology of true womanhood which posits modesty and innocence -- adjectives which Iola very well may have lost -- as essential female qualities.

Harper not only destablizes sentimental assumptions, she also racializes them, even though in this passage the words "black" and "white" are loudly silent. While it is exactly this scenario -- lawless brutality wreaking havoc upon defenseless womanhood -- that white writers and mobs used to justify lynchings, in this passage Harper inverts the terms and temporal scene. By both invoking and disrupting the justification for lynching in the era in which, not of which she writes, she indicts the continuation of the very violence ostensibly repressed in Iola Leroy. In other words, the dynamics of Harper's writing invoke a modified palimpsest; here the present continually informs her treatment of a "past" era. In Iola Leroy, Harper expresses in invented phraseology what Ida B. Wells's "Iola" expresses when Wells argues that

white men who had created a race of mulattoes by raping and consorting with Negro women were still doing so whenever they could, [while] these same white men lynched, burned and tortured Negro men for doing the same thing with white women, even when the white women were willing victims.⁽²⁷⁾

In the passage in Iola Leroy quoted above, Harper, like Wells, appropriates the linguistic support of the legal apparatus by inverting the racial sign system. In each passage white men are "lawless" and brutal. Both women stress that African-American womanhood, not white, is innocent and defenseless. Indeed, each Iola indicts the violence of a decade in which white male brutality is rapidly and systematically being inscribed on Black bodies and in American law.

Frances Harper indicted lynchings throughout her life in her private letters and in public prose. Her first novel, Minnie's Sacrifice (1869), was serialized in the African Methodist Episcopal's (A.M.E) journal the Christian Recorder. Written during Reconstruction and directed, importantly, toward an African-American audience, this novel, though more explicit in its denunciation of white terrorism, anticipates Iola Leroy. Like Harper's later heroes, after finding out that they are of African ancestry, Minnie and her husband Louis devote their lives to organizing in the South. Unlike Iola and her husband Frank Latimer, however, Minnie and Louis advocate that Blacks defend themselves with force, as Ida B. Wells's "Iola" will twenty years later. Harper does not romanticize the costs of the couple's commitment; the Klu Klux Klan responds to their activism by lynching Minnie.

Nearly thirty years after Minnie's Sacrifice, now approaching eighty years old, Harper was still a vital member of African- American leadership. Her interest in challenging lynchings had not changed in the intervening years. What was new about her approach was her commitment to engaging multiple communities in response to African-American disenfranchisement, an agenda that she had advanced in Iola Leroy. In 1903, for example, she writes to Rev. Frances Grimke, pastor of the influential 15th Ave Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C., husband of African-American writer and activist, Charlotte Forten and nephew of early white activists Sarah and Angelina Grimke:

Dear Sir:

I received your sermons on lynching for which accept my thanks for your remembrance of me. And also permit me to emphasize my gratitude to you especially for your manly refusal to accept the verdict of the mob in the cases of lynching. I hold that as long as there are such things as mental imbecility, mistaken identity, as long as Potiphar's wife stands in the world's pillory of shame that no man however guilty should be deprived of life or liberty without due process of law. . . . Do these sermons have a circulation outside of our people? Could there not be some contrivance planned by which your sermons would reach larger audiences than they do now? Could not the council plan for their circulation, and the women's clubs be induced to scatter them among the white people in different localities? . . . If at any time there is any movement to circulate these sermons, though my means are limited, count on me as a subscriber (emphasis mine).⁽²⁸⁾

In Harper's first sentence, in which she thanks Grimke for his "remembrance of her," she situates herself as a cited participant in the public dialogue on lynching. She then goes on to further her own thoughts on the subject, rather than to offer comment on Grimke's sermon itself. Additionally, Harper's interest in extending the scope of Grimke's "manly" comments by using [Negro] women's clubs to "scatter" the word to white people assumes the same nexus of interest and activism she assumes as the basis for her polyvalent use of the "white slave" in Iola Leroy.

We now know that when Harper wrote in an African-American journal both in and about reconstruction, she depicted just the sort of "pressing problem" of white terrorism that was to peak in the 1890s. As Frances Smith Foster avers, Harper was a savvy activist and "there was nothing demure or passive about her politics and her insistence upon her rights."⁽²⁹⁾ She measured her audience in order to engage them in a struggle white activists were finding increasingly expedient to ignore. When we examine the scope of Harper's writings, it becomes clear that the putatively "demure and passive" generic choices she makes in Iola Leroy reflect her narrative strategies and her political commitments. She expresses herself more explicitly when addressing the African-American community; when speaking to multiple audiences simultaneously she chooses strategies that allow her to address each group in the register she thought most appropriate and effective.
 

III.

As a fourteen-year member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and as its national superintendent of the African-American division for at least five years by 1892, Frances Harper had her finger on the pulse of the activist movements of her era. Barbara Christian explains that because Women's Rights organizations had effected consciousness-raising among certain classes of Northern women during the latter half of the nineteenth century, Harper could well surmise that they would be a potentially effective audience who needed only to be inspired by her words. Hence, Christian concludes, Harper's choice of the romance novel.⁽³⁰⁾ Critics often notice the closing sentence of William Still's introduction to Iola Leroy, that the "thousands of colored Sunday-schools in the South, in casting about for an interesting, moral story-book" will gladly receive Harper's novel. Yet, they generally ignore his penultimate paragraph which notes that "[being] widely known not only amongst her own race but likewise by the reformers. . . there is little room to doubt that the book will be in great demand and will meet with warm congratulations from a goodly number outside of the author's social connections" (3). One of the movements of the "reformers" to whom Still refers, was the struggle against "white slavery" or enforced prostitution of young girls caught in the snares of an increasingly institutionalized business. Harper's invocation of the mulatta heroine, then, seems to rely upon the received conventions of sentimental race fiction and simultaneously to be an anti-romantic trope of "white slavery," already resonant with the very audience that Christian and Still name.

The use of "white slavery" to describe the oppression of white women dates back to at least the mid-nineteenth century. Angelina Grimke and Lydia Maria Child, for example, both used the term to label white women's relation to patriarchal oppression.⁽³¹⁾ Nor was the image of the white slave confined to feminist circles. Hiram Powers's sculpture "The Greek Slave," a marble nude that depicted a young woman captured by the Turks, was the most popular American sculpture of the nineteenth century.⁽³²⁾ By the 1880's, however, white slavery had taken on the specific meaning of forced prostitution. While interest in and agitation for Black rights had dramatically declined in the post-reconstruction era, progressive organizations and their constituencies rallied behind anti-white-slavery efforts. Many early anti-prostitution activists belonged to the Marlborough Church, where William Lloyd Garrison had been a leading member;⁽³³⁾ and "former abolitionists . . . joined forces with `social purity' reformers to battle the new slavery,"⁽³⁴⁾ as historian Ruth Rosen notes. Increasingly, organizers distinguished white slavery as a subset of ex-Black slavery or positioned the two as equal evils. Eventually, the chief of investigations in the Department of Justice requested that Congress use the thirteenth amendment -- passed at the close of the Civil War specifically to free slaves -- to fight the rising white slave trade.⁽³⁵⁾ Meanwhile, however, the Supreme Court, Southern Democrats and the executive branch actively eroded this same legislation as it applied to the ex-slaves whose rights it was drafted to protect.⁽³⁶⁾

By the first two decades of the twentieth century, growing anti-prostitution sentiment would develop into what more than one critic has characterized as "the white slavery hysteria."⁽³⁷⁾ Census figures and surveys of the 1880's and 1890's charted the swelling concern and confirmed that prostitution was on the rise; indeed, like lynching, it was becoming institutionalized. In large cities, the judiciary and the police were increasingly complicit. Prostitutes (like share-croppers) could find themselves trapped in a constructed cycle of debt. They were forced to buy clothing and food from employers who might charge up to four times the market price; when they tried to leave they were sometimes arrested and charged with non-payment of debt and robbery. Harper was well acquainted with organizational energies to protect women from such abuses, for the WCTU had joined the fray in full force. Just three years before Iola Leroy's publication, for example, their official paper published an in-depth expose of the white slave trade.⁽³⁸⁾

That the issues of white slavery overlapped with growing concerns within a now "free" Black community must have been obvious to Harper and other African-American women activists. The growing state-sanctioned attack on "white slaves" and Black ex-slaves and their families was evidenced by institutionalized economic and bodily terror: prostitution, continued rape, debt peonage, and lynching. Indeed, the specific language used to describe forced prostitution also described the methods of intimidation post-Reconstruction white supremacists used on African Americans. Such language also characterized relations between white slave masters and desired slave women. In Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition, Barbara Hobson cites studies that examine "pimps's breaking-in system," a "combination of affection, threats, brute force and protection."⁽³⁹⁾ Through these they either "seduced" or raped women. This process also describes many slave masters's behavior; it effectively names Harper's allusions to just what Iola's master intended to do if he had realized his desire to "break her in" (38).

Throughout the novel, circumstances place Iola in situations that vividly encode popularized dynamics of "white slavery." Indeed, Harper links the only physical description of Iola in the entire book to the description of Iola's struggle to escape "her reckless and selfish master" whose intent was to "drag her down to his own low level of sin and shame" (39); as the slave Tom Anderson announces while planning to ferret the "spitfire" away: "she's putty. Beautiful long hair comes way down her back; putty blue eyes, an' jis' ez white ez anybody in dis place. . . I heerd Marse Tom talkin' 'bout her las' night [sayin'] she war mighty airish, but he meant to break her in" (38). As the innocent girls abducted by male interlopers pretending to be agents of legitimate business, Iola had been remanded to slavery by men who purportedly were there to bring her back from her Northern boarding school to see her dangerously ill father, a rich white planter who had actually already died; these men were Leroy's usurper cousin Lorraine's henchmen. Iola, whose parents had allowed her to think that she was white, trusted these men, as the girls and young women of white slavery tales trusted their abductors only to be abused by their sexual overtures. Literally lulled to sleep in her innocent acquiescence, dreaming of returning to the domestic "bliss" of the protected paternal, Iola "was awakened by a burning kiss pressed on her lips, and a strong arm encircling her" (103). In this initial white slavery/deception scene -- Iola, a "white" girl, is accosted by her white deceiver -- Harper provides her readers with the most explicit sexual details of the entire novel.

"White Slavery" was a particularly useful metaphor for African-American organizers who tried to attract reformist energy back to issues of African-American concern. Reformers depicted prostitutes as victims and insisted that the women involved were "sexual innocents, helpless young women who `fell' into illicit sex."⁽⁴⁰⁾ They viewed prostitutes as victims not only of "male dominance in general but of kidnapping, sexual imprisonment, starvation, and/or seduction."⁽⁴¹⁾ Such arguments held men, rather than sexualized women, accountable. Indeed, these reformists argued that "men were always blameworthy, whether they accomplished their purpose by brute force or subtle persuasion."⁽⁴²⁾ Slave women often tried to describe similar dynamics. By invoking "white slavery" and the surrounding activist discourse, Harper deflects making Iola's sexual status central; instead, she stresses the connection between the sexual vulnerability long expressed by her African-American antecedents and now echoed by her white contemporaries.

Anti-white-slavery rhetoric did battle with rising "medical" theories of deviance which purported that prostitutes were "an atavistic subclass of women."⁽⁴³⁾ Supporters of such views explicitly tied essentialized notions of white prostitution to doctrines of so-called deviantly embodied "Hottentot" women and their African- American offspring. Indeed, Sander Gilman notes that to prominent medical and philosophical theorists of polygenetics, "the primitive is the Black, and the qualities of Blackness, or at least of the Black female, are those of the prostitute."⁽⁴⁴⁾ By invoking "white slavery" as a trope for Black women's abuse, Harper aligns her language with the rhetoric of white feminists. She thus uses white activists's rejection of polygenetic arguments to contest essentialist "scientific" claims of Black sub-human classification.

Harper's use of white slavery is additionally effective because reformist organizers insisted -- an insistence that again echoed slave women's analysis of agency, force, and coercion -- that a prostitute could not be guilty of "choosing" her "fall"; she could, then, always be redeemed. If women shouldn't be condemned for their sexual falls, if indeed they were not essentially bad women, only a small leap brought reformers (and they in turn brought their audience) to the conclusion that anyone could be so seduced. This sentiment was explicitly articulated by the 1910s when posters "appeared in conspicuous places in major urban areas with the warning: `Danger! Mothers beware! Sixty thousand innocent girls wanted to take a place of sixty thousand white slaves who will die this year in the United States!'"⁽⁴⁵⁾ (italics mine). Women of the nineteenth century had organized with just this point in mind. The primary goal of the New England Female Moral Reform Society and its bi-monthly journal Friend of Virtue (1836-1891) was, in their own words, "to guard our daughters, sisters, and female acquaintances from the delusive arts of corrupt and unprincipled men" and "to bring back to the paths of virtue those who have been drawn aside through the wiles of the destroyer."⁽⁴⁶⁾ Harper, Wells, and other African-American organizers shared the perspective expressed in Friend of Virtue, that powerful white men acted as "the destroyer." This shared analysis of power politics aligned their rhetoric -- and they hoped, in the future, their efforts -- with those of white feminists of their era.⁽⁴⁷⁾

By situating Iola as a "white" chattel slave, Harper invokes the rhetoric of sexual white slavery. Harper retells the story of a nubile heroine who looses her father only to find that the marriage securing her legitimate stats is invalid and she instead is chattel. Read transparently, this is a familiar and recirculated tale of antebellum injustice; but at the level of its telling, to borrow from Richard Brodhead, Harper gauges oppression and resistances in another social situation, the new sexual order of the post-bellum U.S.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Harper uses histotextuality to draw attention to a "past" figure -- the slave woman so often symbolized by the sexually vulnerable mulatta -- in order to bring into play the resonant phrases of activists in her own time. In linking the two, she calls up the very structures of power that led white feminists to label their "white slaves" innocent and redeemable. Moreover, by placing Iola Leroy at the crossroads -- a "white" mulatta who is implicitly threatened with the dynamics of the new white slavery -- Harper both invokes activist systems of assumptions and extends them to other narratives of sexual slavery, narratives in which the heroine is everything an extended anti-white-slavery model acknowledges, except white. Thus, Harper charts a map of resistance that counters the stereotypes of African-American female promiscuity, stereotypes that blame the very victim that in white "white slavery" narratives activists exonerated. She counters myths about the race, and so, by extension, challenges the intersecting mythologies of Black male sexuality used to justify the very physical and sexual violence that in Iola Leroy she has been accused of repressing.⁽⁴⁹⁾

IV.

By 1892, the year in which Frances E. W. Harper published Iola Leroy, Ida B. Wells's "Iola" was a household name in Black communities across the country and in many white areas as well. As Harriet Jacobs became "Linda" to abolitionists, in the media world Ida B. Wells was known simply by her pen name "Iola." By 1887, "Iola" was considered one of the most prominent citizens of Memphis, her adopted home. The same year she was the only woman at the Colored Press Association Convention. Thrilled by editorials which maintained that Blacks were sent to prison for stealing five cents while whites were honored for stealing thousands of dollars, and her retort -- "Let Blacks steal big"⁽⁵⁰⁾ -- scores of African- American newspapers countrywide carried her reprints. "Iola" was the name by which the editor of the New York Age, T. Thomas Fortune, referred to her; it was the name the masses knew: "Iola" was a fiery journalist, "the princess of the press."

In 1892, the year her friend Thomas Moss was murdered by a white mob, Wells left a terse editorial to be printed in the Black Memphis newspaper Free Speech, of which she was one-third owner: "Nobody in this section believes that old thread-bare lie that Negro men assault white women. If Southern white men are not careful they will overreach themselves and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women."⁽⁵¹⁾ Wisely, Wells quickly left Memphis and visited New York City and Philadelphia where she saw Frances E. W. Harper, the most popular African-American poet of the era, now in her sixties, a first time "real" novelist.⁽⁵²⁾ While she was gone, enraged whites razed her newspaper office and threatened to hang Wells if she dared return to the South. Wells responded forcefully both to white threats and terrorism and to the surge of African-American support she received; she published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) and went on to become a leading anti-lynching activist.

Black women rallied behind her; a Northern contingent organized a major event that filled New York's Lyric Hall and raised a collection to subsidize Southern Horrors's publication. Wells later wrote that a "brilliant array" came out to support "a lonely, homesick girl who was an exile."⁽⁵³⁾ However, these women did not come just to defend an exiled "girl"; they came to celebrate "Iola" and her uncompromising writings -- and it was that (pen) name, spelled out in electric lights, that lit up the platform that night.

That Frances Harper's Iola Leroy was published the same year as her young friend visited her illustrates that, as Hazel Carby comments, "African-American women like Frances Harper, Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells were not isolated figures . . . ; they were shaped by and helped to shape a wider movement of African-American women. What each of them wrote and lectured about influenced and was influenced in turn by a wider constituency."⁽⁵⁴⁾ Harper knew that her protagonist's name did not conjure images of a prim and repressed Black middle-class. Instead, "Iola" stood for forthright struggle against white supremacy. She symbolized exposing white media lies and the advocation of armed response to white encroachments on African-American rights.

Literary critic Robert Stepto notes that in The Narrative of the Life (1845), Frederick Douglass wrests authorizing control from William Lloyd Garrison by constructing a circular ending that does not start where he began, but that reaches back to include and revise Garrison's prefatory remarks. Similarly, the end of Iola Leroy -- "Iola quietly took her place in the Sunday school as a teacher" (278) -- while seemingly demure and properly feminine, reaches back to the beginning of Wells's "Iola's" literary career. As Harper herself published her first novels in the A.M.E's Christian Recorder, Wells's first article appeared in the Baptist weekly The Living Way. Though church going women are routinely dismissed as being pacified by their religious convictions, religious historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham notes that "the church-sponsored press played an instrumental role in the dissemination of a black oppositional discourse and in the creation of a black collective will," and women expressed their discontent with the status quo through these channels.⁽⁵⁵⁾ Additionally, Wells's diary reveals that as a young woman she, too, had planned to write a good strong novel in addition to her articles.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Harper, then, situates Iola in the very place -- the activist Black church -- where both she and "Iola" begin their literary careers: encouraged by her husband to write a "good strong book," (262) working with a "young pastor who found in her a strong and faithful ally" (278). Harper ends her novel by positioning Iola to develop into Wells, or, in other words, into her more radical homonymic sister (text).

Frances E. W. Harper and Ida B. Wells have more in common than Iola; both were committed activists who struggled throughout their lives for African-American rights. As a young school teacher Wells boarded a train from Memphis; after unsuccessfully ordering her from the ladies's car that was reserved for whites, the conductor called for help and dragged her off the train, wiping his blood from the hand she had bitten. Wells sued, won damages, and set a precedent -- soon overturned -- that the 1883 Civil Rights Act must be enforced. Harper, who was also a teacher as a young woman,⁽⁵⁷⁾ previously had displayed the same resistance to segregation. When accosted by a conductor who demanded that she leave a restricted train car, she steadily held her ground: "When I was about to leave," she writes, "he refused my money, and I threw it down on the car floor, and got out, after I had ridden as far as I wished."⁽⁵⁸⁾

Both Wells's and Harper's challenges anticipate the orchestrated and nationally publicized Jim Crow resistance that evolved into the beginning of the Plessy case; in 1892, Homer Plessy, as light-skinned as Iola, was ousted from a similar train ride in a planned effort to commence a test case. I recall this simple historical narrative because so many readers choose to ignore what could not escape at least one of Harper's original interpretive communities. It is hardly far-fetched to assert that Harper was aware that "Iola" was an appellation African-American audiences recognized to stand for protest and resistance.

Carby contends that Harper's characters "gain their representativeness from an engagement with history." She goes on to say that "each carries an aspect of the history of the Black community in his or her own individual history, while as a group they represent an historical force: an elite that articulates the possibilities of that Black community" (xxii). Harper includes direct references to Black greats: Ira Aldridge, Alexandre Dumas, Frederick Douglass, and to slave rebel leaders Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey. Additionally, several of Harper's characters's names are analogues of African-American historical figures. Though Iola's character provides the most suggestive engagement with history, Harper uses the names of Lucille Delany, who becomes Iola's sister-in-law, and Dr. Frank Latimer, who becomes her husband, similarly. Their namings augment the text's interpretative possibilities and again signal Harper's inclusion of a reading community within an African-American cultural matrix.⁽⁵⁹⁾

V.

Lucille Delany, the dark-skinned educator who marries Iola's brother Harry, offers a close homonym to Lucy A. Delaney, who published her feisty autobiography From the Darkness Cometh the Light in 1891. As she relates her experience in slavery, the actual Delaney contains her explicit articulation of Black female agency by aligning her text with prototypical expressions of antebellum maternal inspiration.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Interestingly, Delaney's alignment with this matrifocal paradigm falls away at the very moment when her own use of histotextuality is most prominent. When Delaney sues in court to prove that she is the child of a kidnapped free woman whom the court has released from bondage, her mother unaccountably disappears. Delaney relates that her mother's absence causes her so much stress that she imagines her own disembodiment which she expresses through a shift from the first to the third person. She writes that

my long confinement, burdened with harrowing anxiety, the sleepless night I had just spent, the unaccountable absence of my mother, had brought me to an indescribable condition. I felt dazed, as if I were no longer myself. I seemed to be another person -- an on looker -- and in my heart dwelt a pity for the poor, lonely girl sitting on the bench apart from anyone else. I found myself wondering where Lucy's mother was and how she would feel if the trial went against her..." (47)

What gives this reader pause here is not only the mystery of symbolic maternal abandonment, but also the anomaly of a material petition to law as a recourse for individual emancipation. Anti-slavery authors often appealed to the spirit of the law symbolized by the Declaration of Independence, and groups of mutinous slaves in the 1830s and 1840s wrested judicial affirmation for their rights as free people on the "naturally" free zone of the sea. Delaney links her representations of legal appeals with these by emphasizing that her lawyer was a Quaker who later became a "prominent antislavery" man (38) and ship owner. Yet, in 1844, the year her case is entered, the vast majority of African-American activists were aligned with Garrisonian moral suasion and endorsed Wendell Phillips's arguments that the constitution was a pro-slavery document. The law was not the place of effective resort. While there is evidence of successful manumission suits, they were the exception.

What I mean to stress is that while Delaney's pattern of representation was closely aligned to earlier women's narratives in her celebration of maternal dedication, when she abandons the maternal (depicting it as maternal abandonment) her representation of the law also diverges sharply from the paradigms set by earlier (mostly male) narrative writers. Delaney's petition for individual legal emancipation makes little discursive sense in the antebellum context. However, when we shift her historical referent from the trial of slavery to the trial of legal appeals in the 1890s, the pre-Plessy years of court challenges to the growing formalization of Jim Crow law, Delaney's judicial foregrounding becomes clearer.⁽⁶¹⁾

Delaney's lawyer's admonition "You need not think because my client is colored that she has no rights, and can be cheated out of her freedom" is much more logical as a projected proclamation of the pre-Plessy 90s in which Delaney and Harper wrote. Moreover, this legal allegory -- the post-thirteenth and fourteenth amendment constitution as a site of appeal -- resolves both Delaney's move from the first to the disembodied third, or abstract, person and her representation of her mother's absence throughout the court hearing. By the 1890s, it is the legal, as much as the maternal, that has the power to serve as the representative protector of an increasingly, if abstractly, disembodied national citizenry.⁽⁶²⁾

Harper's Lucille Delany, is a proud and highly-educated woman who shows no "sign of blood admixture." She is also the most political woman in Iola Leroy. Arguably the proto-feminist heroine of the novel, she refuses to give up her teaching once married, an act then sure to be viewed as an controversial assertion of independence. Just three years before Iola Leroy's publication, the Black paper The Washington Bee reported on "Married Women in the Schools." The editors opined in support of the Rev. Francis Grimke, that:

The action of the School Trustee Grimkie [sic] . . . dismissing certain married ladies from school, because they refused to resign, meets the hearty approval of the citizens. It was not only Rev. Grimkie's duty, but it is an unwritten law that has been in vogue in the schools from the time of memory of man runneth not to the contrary, that married women shall not teach.

After the Leroy family has been reunited in the aftermath of the war, Iola's brother Harry meets and proposes to Lucille. Expressing her reservations, she first counters "that school-teachers are uncomfortable people, and Harry, I would not like to make you uncomfortable by marrying you" (278). Unwilling to cede her identity to marriage, the end of the novel finds Harry and Lucille "at the head of a large and flourishing school" (280). In 1889, the Washington Bee notes that when female school teachers married and so "assumed another name, by act of law their contract previously made, under their maiden names ceases. They do not exist in law."⁽⁶³⁾ Harper situates "Miss Delany," as she's called until the very penultimate page of the novel, as an assertive woman who will only accept a husband who accepts her chosen vocation, and moreover, represents Delany as more active and articulate than her husband Harry or any of the Leroys. By doing so, Harper challenges the stance of the disembodied D.C. "citizens," of the Rev. Grimke whose "manly" anti-lynching comments, as we've seen, she will later laud, and of others who might object to women's independence and independent identities.

VI.

Harper uses Iola's marriage partner, like her brother Harry's, to open new interpretive paths for her politically situated and savvy readers. When Iola decides to marry the light Dr. Latimer rather than the white Dr. Gresham, Harper is not enacting a simple racial substitution as critics often suggest. Instead she asserts a commitment to both Black progress and to legal and grassroots resistance to encroachments on Black advances. Dr. Latimer's status as a doctor and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania is not merely a signifier of bourgeois Black achievement and extraordinary academic pedigree. It also allows Harper to relate circumstances at a medical conference -- the very site of racist scientific production and eugenic propaganda in the 1890s.

Harper introduces Dr. Frank Latimer as a participant at a postbellum professional gathering where he presents a well-received paper, prompting an admirer, Dr. Latrobe, to wax poetic on the benefits of "heredity and environment." Harper soon reveals "Dr. Latrobe's mistake," as the chapter is entitled, for Dr. Latimer "belongs to [the] negro race both by blood and by choice" (238). He has rejected his master's mother's post-emancipation offer to "overlook 'the missing link of matrimony,' and adopt him as her heir, if he would ignore his identity with the colored race" (239). Harper's invocation of matrimony is barbed, for this slave mistress never would have sanctioned a binding union between her son and his slave mistress. Harper has already illustrated the problems of translating interracial social arrangements into legal ones through her delineation of Iola's parents's "marriage." It's not "the missing link of matrimony" but the crucial link of maternity that Latimer's "grandmother" is willing to "overlook" or negate.

Harper's representation of the similar choices that Iola and Frank Latimer make to confirm their African-American racial status gives her the opportunity to interrogate and reinflect judicial categorizations. As contemporary critic Eva Saks points out, in the post-Reconstruction South "to the law, a black person was not represented by a perceptible physical phenomenon like black skin, but instead consisted in black blood," (49), the sign of an overdetermining maternal genealogy. One's mother, in other words, not one's color, continued to determine one's racial status. By reappropriating one of the central tenets of racial law and reaffirming that tenet in African-American culture, Harper casts Black maternity -- the blood of the mother -- not Latrobe's exclusionary white phallocentrism, as the most central conduit of environment and heredity.

Not only was the increasing clout of scientific discourse being used to advance racist eugenics in the 1890s, "an entire social science literature of hereditary deviance -- a deviance of the blood -- upheld the discipline and punishment of the dangerous miscengenous body in the interest of racial purity."⁽⁶⁴⁾ Latimer's "grandmother" is willing to honor her nostalgic desire to substitute Latimer's white face, which forcefully reminds her of her "dear departed son," in place of her former chattel's mixed "blood." Dr. Latrobe thinks that his racial perception is infallible, that he can detect such a substitution of the counterfeit for the real because he recognizes "the presence of Negro blood when all physical signs had disappeared" (239). When Latimer turns down his biological grandmother's offer and "all the possibilities which only birth and blood can give a white man in our Democratic country" (emphasis mine), and finally announces this to Latrobe, Harper illustrates both the national irony and the social impossibility of trying "to substantiate blood, to substantiate what is neither a mimetic description [the grandmother's reaction to phenotype] nor a tangible entity [what Latrobe insists he can detect] but instead a semiotic figure."⁽⁶⁵⁾ By taking Harper up on her invitation to read Iola Leroy histotextually, the subtleties of her historically situated semiotics become clearer.

Lewis Howard Latimer, who serves as Harper's character Dr. Frank Latimer's histotextual shadow, has a genealogical story that provides an augmented interpretative route through the closing section of Iola Leroy. He was heir to a hard-fought Black paternal legacy that provides a counter-story to the classic slave tale of white paternal abandonment upon which Harper's Dr. Latimer's modified story relies. Lewis Latimer was the youngest son of George and Rebecca Latimer. Born in 1848, six years after his father posed as his pregnant wife's master in order to escape slavery, as a youth Lewis Latimer sold the Liberator and later fought for the Union. He became a self-taught renaissance man who played the flute and violin, painted portraits, and wrote poetry that appeared in the Black press.⁽⁶⁶⁾ Moreover, like Harper's Dr. Latimer, Lewis Latimer was a man of science. In 1876 -- as Union troops pulled out of the South -- he composed Alexander Graham Bell's drawings for the first telephone. By the 1880s he had worked for electricity moguls Hiram Maxim of what would become Westinghouse, and for Thomas Edison's General Electric. By 1890 Latimer was a well-established inventor in his own right.⁽⁶⁷⁾ Moreover, at a time when Blacks were increasingly being denied due process and judicial rights, in 1890 Latimer became Edison's legal department's chief draftsman and expert witness. Million dollar questions of intellectual property were settled -- usually in his favor -- on the basis of his testimony.⁽⁶⁸⁾

Like his son, George Latimer's name was also linked to questions of property and judicial process. The elder Latimers escaped from Norfolk to Boston in 1842. Soon after George was arrested, identified by his owner who had come North to catch him. When Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw denied Latimer a trial "Boston went wild with excitement. Placards were distributed and handbills posted throughout the city denouncing the outrage, and summoning citizens to a meeting in Faneuil Hall."⁽⁶⁹⁾ A group of Black Bostonians mobilized immediately and attempted, unsuccessfully, to rescue the fugitive. With the broader abolitionist community, they then organized a state-wide campaign that included grass-roots protests and judicial challenges. Through legal aid committees they spear-headed petition drives and also published a tri-weekly newspaper entitled The Latimer and North Star Journal.

Ultimately, the legal challenges of leading anti-slavery lawyers did little to free Latimer -- but organized grass-roots resistance did. As in the 1890s, the jailor was a central linch-pin. In this case, he refused to honor a writ ordering Latimer's release into his owner's temporary custody -- and releasing Massachusetts from its role as an enforcer of slavery -- for he knew that the Southerner could not hold Latimer against the anti-slavery mob. By petitioning to have the jailor fired for his refusal to uphold the law, anti-slavery organizers pressured his boss to convince him to honor the writ. Latimer's owner, cognizant that he couldn't escape Boston with his "property," sold his slave at a sharply reduced price which was quickly raised by Latimer aid committees. When Latimer was "freed," city-wide celebrations were organized with the ex-fugitive as a central figure. The ground-swell of organization continued after his release. Indeed, the aid committees presented the state legislature with a petition that resulted in the passage of the 1843 Personal Liberty Act, which defied the power of the federal government to impel Massachusetts to comply with fugitive slave returns. Almost ten years later, when another to-be famous fugitive, Shadrach, was captured, Blacks "engineered a daring courtroom rescue" in which Latimer was a central player, keeping watch over Shadrach's master and securing the carriage they used in the escape.⁽⁷⁰⁾

Frances Watkins [Harper] was seventeen when the Latimer case exploded. She lived in Baltimore with her uncle William Watkins, an abolitionist of national repute who contributed regularly to the Liberator, and had subscribed to Garrison's journal since its inception. Indeed, Watkins corresponded personally with Garrison and served as "the conduit linking Baltimore blacks with the broader antislavery movement."⁽⁷¹⁾ No doubt the Latimer case -- which "stimulated the most thorough professional, ministerial, and popular debate over the duty of resistance heard in America"⁽⁷²⁾ -- elicited much interest in her circles. In any case, soon after the Shadrach escape, another fugitive case with a tragic ending caused Harper, then Watkins, to reassess the level of her anti-slavery commitment. By 1854, she was on the abolitionist lecture circuit. She would become, with Sojourner Truth, one of the two most prominent Black women speakers of her era.

In Iola Leroy, Harper's use of the Latimer name subtly challenges contemporaneous racists's use of the law. When Chief Justice Shaw advanced the argument that despite one's (and his) personal antislavery sentiments, the federal law was supreme, abolitionists were appalled, while pro-slavery forces applauded the decision to return the fugitive slave, George Latimer, to his owner. Harper's homonymic recollection of the case reminded her readers that legal consistency, highly valued by all respectable jurists, called for even white supremacist intellectuals to acknowledge their legal antecedents and their former reliance on formal interpretation of the federal law. The Latimer reference reminded readers who could access it that they could argue that if the pre-Civil War constitution ensured the right of property in slaves despite individual citizen's personal reservations, then the post-thirteenth and fourteenth amendment constitution likewise ensured due process for all citizens.

Readers of the Black press, part of Harper's natural constituency, would be familiar with the Latimers, father and son. Latimer was already a well-known name in anti-slavery-turned-reformist circles, white and Black. It was extended by his son's active and reported involvement in scientific and Black communities. Lewis Latimer was a regular contributor to T. Thomas Fortune's The New York Age, one of the most widely distributed and respected Black weeklies. Indeed, in the 1890s readers of the Age might come across Latimer's name more frequently than that of Harper, the renowned author, or Iola, the famous journalist. His public appearances as the featured speaker at popular public gatherings were regularly announced. Additionally, between October 1891 and February 1892 his poetry, under the byline "written for the New York Age," appeared an average of once a month.⁽⁷³⁾ Indeed, one 1891 poem appears on the same page as Fortune's gender-bending "Men Worth Talking About" column which announced that:

Mrs. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper of Philadelphia stopped at THE AGE office recently on her way to Boston, and showed me the manuscript of a novel she has written and hopes to have printed in a while. In such parts of it as I was able to scan hastily I discovered an engaging style many interesting situations and a wealth of dialogue. I should like to see the work in print. Mrs. Harper is one of the foremost literary women of the race.⁽⁷⁴⁾

Harper's stop at The Age and Fortune's pre-publication announcement of Iola Leroy illustrates that both she and he envisioned a shared audience. Like Lewis Latimer, Wells's "Iola" had corresponded with Fortune and wrote columns for the paper, then the New York Freedman, that were reprinted nationally in the mid-1880s. Subscribers to the popular A.M.E. Church Review had even more explicit reasons to link Wells's "Iola" with Harper's. The two women had contributed to a temperance symposium together in 1891; they continued to publish in the paper almost side by side in the following year when an announcement of Harper's soon to be published novel simply entitled "Iola" also appeared.⁽⁷⁵⁾

VII.

Contemporary critic Houston Baker has dismissed Iola Leroy and other writings of African-American women in the 1890s insisting that recent reassessments infer a "great deal more social effect and liberating reader response . . . than their actual reception histories seem to warrant."⁽⁷⁶⁾ The convergence of Latimer's, Harper's and Wells's publishing histories, however, substantiates that Harper enjoyed an informed audience that would be receptive to her histotextual strategies. Harper's use of the "white slave" allows her to simultaneously appeal to another set of readers. Harper takes words that "are already populated with the social intentions of others," as Bakhtin says of the prose writer "and compels them to serve [her] own intentions."⁽⁷⁷⁾ Critics have reduced Harper's discursive appeal to white reformists by maintaining that the "tragic mulatta" is simply a mediating device with whom Harper's undifferentiated "white readers" can identify. Yet Harper's use of the ostensibly demure and transparent sentimental shell of her prose and character is multivalent. On the level of plot, Iola's color allows the author to recirculate and recharge the trope of white slavery -- the (essential) story repeated in William Wells Brown's Clotel, the William and Ellen Craft narrative and Uncle Tom's Cabin -- in order to direct activist energy back to African-American concerns. Simultaneously, marking a phenotypically "white" character "Black" allows Harper to reflect on the multiplicitous political positions indeterminate racial bodies symbolized in a culture obsessed with race and with bodily and juridical classification, and engaged in the full disenfranchisement of its "Black" "citizenry."

The overlapping publishing histories of the very personages that provide Iola Leroy with some of its histotextual depth illustrates how adept Harper was at identifying her readers's frames of reference. Harper and readers of the Black press knew that Wells's "Iola" simultaneously promoted the very values of moral uprightness and, in Wells's own words, "earnest, thoughtful, pure, noble womanhood"⁽⁷⁸⁾ that Harper and her heroine endorsed. The name Iola acts as the bridge between "respectability" and the oppositional sensibility encoded in Harper's histotextual sign system. By choosing this name, Harper creates an accompanying text, a loophole that situates Iola Leroy in a more radical context and register. Her character Lucille Delany and Lucy A. Delaney of From the Darkness Cometh the Light assert themselves as specifically raced and gendered subjects with legal and ontological standing. By grafting the forthrightly feisty Lucy Delaney onto her own character, Harper again locates her text both in antebellum times and in the postbellum moment in which it is authored. Moreover, the coextention of Delaney's and Harper's narrative strategies further supports that Iola Leroy is an expansive palimpsest -- not simply a text written on an unerasable past -- but a histotextual novel that encodes and embraces the imprints of the era in which it was authored in order to resist the (racial, scientific and class) determinism running so rampant as the century came to an end. Harper's reference to the Latimer legacy also reminded activists struggling against Black disenfranchisement that legal appeals on their own were not enough. One of the lessons of the Latimer campaign was that the combination of legal challenges, grass-roots organizing, pressure from print media and the threat of direct action, was most effective. One has to be an informed reader to access this surely. But, as Frederick Douglass wrote to Lewis Latimer in 1894 as he recollected first meeting fellow fugitives George and Rebecca Latimer, "you can hardly imagine the excitement the attempts to recapture them caused in Boston."⁽⁷⁹⁾ If Douglass subsequently became the most famous fugitive, the Latimer affair had been the singularly most important fugitive slave case in an era when "fugitive slave rescues were important as the most dramatic events in antislavery campaigns"⁽⁸⁰⁾ -- and both Harper and her informed readers were well aware of it. Moreover, the Black press provided details of literary, social and political activities that encompassed the very historical and literary geography Harper uses in Iola Leroy. Harper's historically situated namings, like her use of the trope of white slavery, took on surplus meanings in her novel, meanings she could be assured that at least overlapping communities of her readers were sure to recognize. By sustained and subtle histotextual maneuvering, Harper works to draw attention to reading national power aright; she so aligns her novel with the goals espoused by the radical "Princess of Press," "Iola" herself.
 
 

1. I would like to thank David Wills, Barbara Christian and Richard Yarborough for their early support and feedback, Jacqueline Goldsby, Donna Landry, Laura Wexler and Jean Wyatt for their invaluable readings of multiple drafts and Maurice Wallace at the Yale Journal of Criticism for his fine suggestions and sure editorial hand. I also appreciate the time and support that the Ford Foundation and the Huntington Library have extended to me.

2. Harper published Minnie's Sacrifice (1869), Sowing and Reaping (1876-77) and Trial and Triumph (1888-89) in serialized form in the African Methodist Episcopal Church's journal, the Christian Recorder. Foster rediscovered these novels while doing work on A Brighter Coming Day: a Frances E.W. Harper Reader (New York, 1990). While segments of the stories have yet to be rediscovered, the novels share many of the tenets of turn of the century Black women's fiction: they feature indeterminate racial characters and address temperance, for example. See Frances E.W. Harper, Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph, ed. Frances Smith Foster (Boston, 1994).

3. Many of the critics who have paid more than passing attention to Harper's novel have been African American women. Most prominent among them are Melba Joyce Boyd, Hazel Carby, Barbara Christian, Deborah McDowell, Frances Smith Foster and Claudia Tate. On Iola Leroy see especially: Hazel Carby Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York, 1987), chapter 4; Frances Smith Foster, Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892 (Bloomington, 1993); Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1992).

4. Houston Baker, Workings of the Spirit: Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing (Chicago, 1990), 31.

5. Deborah McDowell, "'The Changing Same': Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists," in Reading Black, Reading Feminist, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ed. (New York, 1990), 93 and 99.

6. John M. Reilly, "History-Making Literature" in Studies in Black American Literature, Vol II: Belief Vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism, ed Joe Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot (Greenwood, Florida: 19 ), 88.

7. Reilly, 89.

8. See Hazel Carby, "Introduction," Iola Leroy (Boston, 1987), xxiii. All further references to the text itself, and to William Still's or Hazel Carby's introduction, will be found in the body of the essay.

9. Mae Henderson "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics and the Black Women's Literary Tradition" in Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, ed. Cheryl Wall (New Brunswick, 1991), 19.

10. Henderson, 22. See also Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse and the Novel" in The Dialogic Imagination (Texas, 1981).

11. 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, ed. William Andrews (New York, 1988).

12. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, (Austin), 1981, 279.

13. 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 pluralized 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., "Foreward: In her Own Write," The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers (New York, 1988), xvii; Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood (New York, 1987), 16; and Ann ducille, The Coupling Convention (New York, 1993), 9.

14. Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel (London, 1962), 53 and 71.

15. Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York, 1985), 16. Here he builds on Lukacs who comments that Scott "presents great crises of historical life in his novels. Accordingly, hostile social forces, bent one another's destruction, are everywhere colliding." The Historical Novel, 36.

16. Pushkin "cruelly ridiculed" simply alluding to contemporary events in historical art and Lukacs derided using history as a decorative backdrop for otherwise contemporary stories. It was in "bringing the past to life as prehistory of the present," as Harper does, that produced great writing. See The Historical Novel, 53 and 200.

17. Black critics, most notably Gates in his introduction to Our Nig, have borrowed concepts from Baym's explicit characterization of the genre she labels "woman's fiction." See her Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca, 1978), and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Introduction," Our Nig, Harriet Wilson (New York, 1988), xli-xliii. I build here most explicitly on Tate, and on duCille's compelling refinements of Tate's work in The Coupling Convention.

18. Janice Radway puts this another way. She argues that "there are patterns or regularities to what viewers and readers bring to texts in large part because they acquire specific cultural competencies as a consequence of their particular social location." Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), 8.

19. President Harrison's 1889 call for legislation to protect the black franchise made Southerners particularly worried that black votes, if guaranteed, could make a difference. See George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate On Afro-American Character and Destiny 1817-1914 (New York, 1971), 262.

20. On how race creates a differently gendered subject see Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Baby: An American Grammar Book," fill this in. section one.

21. Daphne Brooks, "'All the News that Fit to Print': Nineteenth-Century Black Women Journalists and Sentimental Novelists." Undergraduate English Thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1990, 31.

22. Susan Harris notes that Melville contrasts what he calls the "eagle-eyed reader" with the "superficial skimmer of pages." My usage of Melville's term is meant to transport the complexity of his writing to the very authors of his era and those who build on their work, that is, the colored component of the "damned mob of scribbling women" sentimentalists. Susan Harris, " "But is it any good': Evaluating Nineteenth-Century Women's Fiction," American Literature 63 (March 1991): 50.

23. In the introduction to Iola Leroy Carby aptly revises her earlier contention that "Harper placed in the mouths of her folk characters a poorly written dialect that was intended to indicate their illiteracy," Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 78. Foster, in contrast, notes that Harper depicts "heroic folk characters"; in A Brighter Coming Day, 4.

24. From Harper in Lowenberg, "Woman's Political Future," 245.

25. See Harryette Mullen, "Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved." The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed Shirley Samuels (New York, 1992), 244-264; Deborah McDowell, "In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition," Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston, 1991), 192-214.

26. See Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn and into the Twentieth Century, (New York: 1992), 30. Also see P. Gabrielle Foreman, "Looking Back from Zora, or Talking Out Both Sides My Mouth for Those Who Have Two Ears," Black American Literature Forum 4 (Winter 1990): 652. In this passage I borrow from, and build on, my previous reading of the general's comment.

27. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago, 1970), 71.

28. Harper, "Count on Me as a Subscriber," in A Brighter Coming Day, 322-323.

29. Foster, A Brighter Coming Day, 17. For instance, Harper not only publicly vowed to assist John Brown's wife and his supporter's families, she also stayed with Mrs. Brown for the two weeks preceding his execution, 16.

30. Barbara Christian, "Uses of History: Frances Harper's Iola Leroy, Shadows Uplifted (1983)," in Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (New York, 1985), 168.

31. Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters (New Haven, 1989), 53. Angelina and Sarah Grimke were the white relatives of the Black Grimke family, which included Rev. Francis Grimke, and Angelina Grimke, the Harlem Renaissance poet, and playwright.

32. The antislavery press commented on "The Greek Slave" as an effective icon of protest. William Wells Brown laid a picture of a black woman, "The Virginia Slave," in front of Powers's sculpture as "its most fitting companion" while in London. Though Powers denied that his piece was meant as an anti-Black-slavery work, Douglass and others commented upon it in the Black press. See an excellent chapter on "The Greek Slave" in Jean Fagan Yellin's Women and Sisters, especially page 122.

33. Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York, 1987), 46.

34. Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America (Baltimore, 1982), 117.

35. For greater detail see Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, 117.

36. The Slaughterhouse cases severely restricted the 14th amendment The 14th amendment, Justice Miller declared, had not fundamentally altered traditional federalism; most of the rights of citizens remained under state control, and with those the Amendment "nothing to do." U.S. V Cruiskshank in 1876 arose when a group of freedman in LA defended the county seat from whites who claimed that democrats had won a contested election. The victors slaughtered some fifty blacks who had laid down their arms under a white flag. The Supreme Court overturned the convictions declaring that the federal government was only empowered by the postwar amendments to prohibit violation of Black rights by states themselves and that the punishment of individuals should be acted upon, as always, by state and local authorities. Finally, in

1877 President Hayes retired the last federal troops (in LA and SC) during contested elections and let the democrats take over. " Said The Nation "The Negro will [now] disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth, the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him." See Eric Foner, History of Reconstruction, 582.

37. Hobson, Uneasy Virtue, 114.

38. Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, 117.

39. Hobson, Uneasy Virtue, 144. Also see Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, 129.

40. Carol Ellen DuBois and Linda Gordon, "Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth-Century Feminist Sexual Thought," in Pleasure and Danger, ed. Carole Vance (London, 1984), 33.

41. DuBois and Gordon, "Seeking Ecstasy," 33.

42. Hobson, Uneasy Virtue, 55.

43. Gilman, Sander L. "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature." Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 226.

44. Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies," 229.

45. Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, 115. Journals and newspapers also emphasize this theme.

46. Hobson, Uneasy Virtue, 55.

47. The relations between white and black feminists were often tense. Harper was well aware of the WCTU's president Frances Willard's racism. Wells, too, became involved in struggles with white feminists who refused to take strong stands against racist exclusion and violence. By no means do I mean to romanticize the relations of female activists of the nineteenth century.

48. Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: 1993), 201.

49. Many critics agree that Harper -- and other writers of her era -- "naively" create counterstereotypes, "saints" and not women, in order to resist the stereotypes to which I and they refer. While this is one way to read these texts, it seems to me that Harper's historical engagement is much more sophisticated and implicates the sexual dynamics of her day rather than represses them. See Deborah E. McDowell, quoted above, in "The Changing Same," pp. 95 in Reading Black, Reading Feminist. Also see Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition (Westport, Conn, 1980), 22-23; Arlene Elder, The Hindered Hand: Cultural Implications in Early African American Fiction (Wesport, Conn), 1978, p. 16; and Blyden Jackson's A History of Afro-American Literature (Baton Rogue, 1989), pp 393-395. Jackson argues that "very little in [Iola Leroy] links it to the 1890s. Very little in it, furthermore, commends it either to us or to its own day." It is characterized, he suggests, by its "saccharinity and its milksop gentility." By not addressing the "raped" "enslaved" servant of the ante and postbellum period, women who worked with their own hands, Pauline Hopkins, Emma Dunham Kelley and Francis Harper, Alice Walker tells us, "turned away from their own selves in depicting "black womanhood" and followed a black man's interpretation of white male writer's fantasies." See Alice Walker, "If the Present Looks Like the Past. . ." in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (New York) 1983, 296-299.

50. Mildred I. Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman (New York, 1990), 22.

51. Wells became an anti-lynching activist in direct reaction to the hanging of Moss and two other Black business owners. Memphis media tried to justify mob action by intimating sexual impropriety when, if fact, the Black grocers' economic success had precipitated the violence. Crusade For Justice, 66.

52. Although Harper had published three serialized novels, Iola Leroy was the first novel she was to print in book form. Indeed, in William Still's introduction to the 1892 edition he expresses concern that trying her hand at this "subject," presumably a novel, might be "a blunder which might detract from her own good name" (1). He implies that writing in this form is a new venture. Indeed, he lists five of her previous works, but does not mention fiction she composed that was not in book form.

53. Wells, Crusade for Justice, 78-9.

54. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 115.

55. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Boston, 1993), 11.

56. Ida B. Wells, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, Miriam Decosta-Willis, ed. (Boston, 1995), 99.

57. In 1851 Harper became the first woman to teach at the AME sponsored school, Union Seminary, for black students. Foster, A Brighter Coming Day, 9.

58. Foster, A Brighter Coming Day, 16.

59. John Ernest mentions Harper's use of historical personages in his essay, "From Mysteries to Histories: Cultural Pedagogy in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy," American Literature 64 (September 1992), 509-510.

60. Despite their significant differences, like Aunt Martha, the grandmother in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Delaney's mother Polly is feisty, skilled and economically viable. She is also motherhood exalted -- sacrificing, spirited in the fight for freedom for her children. Like Jacobs, who constantly regulates her grandmother's image and encodes her various forms of illicit behavior, Delaney seems to anticipate the dangers of too feisty an image. Passages like:

"Dear, dear mother! How solemnly I invoke your spirit as I review these trying scenes of my girlhood so long agone! Your patient face and neatly-dressed figure stands ever in the foreground of that checkered time; a figure showing naught to the on-looker but the common place virtues of an honest woman.

echo the closing lines of Jacobs's narrative:

It has been painful to me to recall the dreary years I passed in bondage... Yet the retrospection is not altogether without solace; for with those gloomy recollections come tender memories of my good old grandmother, like light, fleecy clouds floating over a dark and troubled sea.

See Delaney, 50 and Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jean Fagan Yellin, ed. (Boston, 1987), 201.

61. 51.In 1890, Louisiana passed an act mandating segregation in intra-state transportation and posing penalties for those who refused to enforce it. Black members of the American Citizens Equal Rights Association denounced the act and organized to test its constitutionality. Albion Tourgee, a novelist, lawyer and journalist, had publicized and Black resistance to this law in his Chicago column, which was picked up by Black papers nation wide. In 1891 he became their principal legal advisor. The court challenge had national implications, as other states had explicitly flaunted the equal protection clause guaranteed by the fourteenth amendment. After one test case fell through, Homer Plessy was recruited to be arrested in a pre-arranged agreement between the committee and the railways in a case that would reach the Supreme Court to challenge the act. In May, 1896 the court decided against the Plaintiffs, and gave legal credence to the codification of "separate but equal." Only Justice Harlan dissented. See Charles A. Lofgren, The Plessy Case, (New York, 1987), 28; also see Andrew Kull, The Color Blind Constitution (Cambridge, MA., 1992), 119.

62. For more on the concept of a disembodied national citizenry see Lauren Berlant's "National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life" in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text, ed. Hortense Spillers (New York, 1991); and her piece "The Queen of America Goes To Washington City: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, and Anita Hill," American Literature 65 (September 1993): 554-574, which develops this concept while advancing some problematic notions of a "mulatta genealogy."

63. The Washington Bee, 14 Dec., 1889.

64. Eva Saks, "Representing Miscegenation Law," Raritan 8 (Fall 1988): 45.

65. Saks, 58.

66. There is evidence that Latimer published poetry in both 1887 and 1888 in Leisure Hours: The Society Journal in Philadelphia, where Harper resided. He also continued to write for the Age and to be an active member of the political scene in NYC. Victoria Earle Matthews, the president of the National Association of Colored Women for which Frances Harper served as a Vice-President, sent Latimer a note thanking him for his mention of the NACW in The Age in 1897. In 1902 Latimer organized a petition drive presented to the mayor of New York City, to protest Black disenfranchisement and the withdrawal of "the only position ever offered in government that a colored man of means, influence and culture could, with justice to himself, accept." See the Latimer file in the Spike Harris Collection, Box 28, SCM 76-30, Schomburg Library.

67. Latimer invented the first low cost electric light filament. This allowed electric lighting to be cost effective and used from in households to places like New York's Lyric Hall where "Iola" was lit up in lights behind Ida B. Wells in 1892. In 1890 he also authored a book, the first of its kind, that was considered "the bible" of electric lighting.

68. The Hidden Contributors: Black Scientists and Inventors in America, (New York, 1971), 102.

69. Philip S. Foner, "Introduction" in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Volume 1, (New York, 1950), 54.

70. Lois E. Horton, "Community Organization and Social Activism: Black Boston and the Anti-Slavery Movement," Sociological Inquiry 55 (Spring 1985): 194.

71. C. Peter Ripley, ed. The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol III.62. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1991), 97.

72. William M Wiecek, "Latimer: Lawyers, Abolitionists, and the Problem of Unjust Laws" in AntiSlavery Reconsidered, ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman (Baton Rouge, 1979), 220.

73. See The New York Age, 1891, October 10th and November 14th. In 1892 his poetry appears in the February 13th and the February 20th editions. This is the last extant edition in microfiche circulation during 1892 and 1893. Latimer's involvement in literary circles and the stream of poetry he published must have made him an even more attractive homonymic choice for Harper, for she herself had long been recognized as the most beloved Black poet of her era.

74. The New York Age, 12 Dec. 1891. In the column Fortune reports on Booker T. Washington and others as well.

75. The temperance symposium is found in the A.M.E. Church Review, April 1891, Vol. 7, No. 4. The announcement of Harper's "Iola" was published in a poorly replicated microfiche I can best attribute to the April 1892 publication, 381. In Vol. 1, 1892, Wells has an article entitled "Afro-Americans and Africa"; in Vol. 2, Harper contributes a poem entitled "The Black Hero."

76. Baker, Workings of the Spirit, 25.

77. Bakhtin, "Discourse and the Novel," 300.

78. Wells, "Woman's Mission," 181. Also see Wells's "The Model Woman: A Pen Picture of the Typical Southern Girl," DeCosta-Willis, 187. Both were first printed in the New York Freeman which eventually became the New York Age. It was edited under both names, and earlier as the New York Globe, with T. Thomas Fortune as editor. The was first article appeared on Dec. 26, 1888, the second on Feb. 18, 1888.

79. Latimer File, the Spike Harris Collection, Box 28, SCM 76-30, Folder 3. New York, Schomburg Library.

80. James Horton, "Freedom's Yoke," 71.