Sister Josepha

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935)
From The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century

Interesting Links

“Evergreen Words to Live By, from Alice Dunbar Nelson” (Katie Yee, LitHub)

“A Creole Activist in the Age of Jim Crow” (Carolyn Kolb, 64 Parishes)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Ozème’s Holiday,” Kate Chopin
• “A Matter of Principle,” Charles W. Chesnutt
• “Felipa,” Constance Fenimore Woolson

Buy the book
Arriving from the printer in December
The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century
• Over 100 short stories
• 51 different writers
• Two-volume boxed set
• 1,641 pages
List price: $85.00
Web store price: $60.00

“St Anthony’s Garden”: view of garden from Royal Street behind St. Louis Cathedral, French Quarter, New Orleans, 1916, oil painting by American artist Robert W. Grafton (1876–1936). From the booklet Souvenir of New Orleans—The City Care Forgot, published by the St. Charles Hotel, 1917. (Wikimedia)

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“You will pardon my boldness in addressing you, I hope, and let my interest in your work be my excuse,” Paul Laurence Dunbar began a letter to Alice Ruth Moore in April 1895. “I am drawn to write you because we are both working along the same lines and a sketch of yours in the ‘Monthly Review’ so interested me that I was anxious to know more of you and your work.” The sketch in question was “At Eventide,” one of several stories about the Creole residents of New Orleans that nineteen-year-old Moore had published in newspapers and magazines during the previous months. She almost certainly recognized Dunbar by name—one of his poems had appeared in the previous issue of the Monthly Review—yet she nevertheless set the letter aside and waited a month to respond.

The Monthly Review had included a photographic portrait of Moore alongside her story, and Dunbar seems to have already been smitten with her. Yet his first letter posed a question that might have been seen as a challenge: “I want to know whether or not you believe in preserving by Afro-American—I don’t like the word—writers of those quaint old tales and songs of our fathers . . . or whether you like so many others think we should ignore the past and all its capital literary materials.” He referred specifically to Joel Chandler Harris, of Uncle Remus fame, and other white authors whose folktales featured plantation dialect and characters. Dunbar himself included such dialogue and types in his poems and tales—but they were entirely absent from her story. “I should like to exchange opinions and work with you if you will agree,” he added.

Moore didn’t hold back in her response:

You ask my opinion about the Negro dialect in Literature? Well, frankly, I believe in every one following his heart. If it be so that one has a special aptitude for dialect work, why it is only right that dialect work should be made a specialty. But if one should be like me, absolutely devoid of the ability to manage dialect, I don’t see the necessity of cramming and forcing oneself into that plane because one is a Negro or a Southerner. Don’t you think so? Now as to getting away from one’s race—well I haven’t much liking for these writers that wedge the Negro problem and social equality and long dissertations on the Negro in general into their stories. It’s too much like a quinine pill in jelly—I hope I’m not treading on your corns. Somehow, when I start a story, I always think of my folks (characters) as simple human beings, not as types of a race or an idea—and I seem to be on more friendly terms with them.

Later that year, Moore published her first story collection, Violets and Other Tales. After Dunbar had read the book, he compared her to George Washington Cable and Grace King, who were famous for their Louisiana Creole tales:

Your determination to contest Cable for his laurels is a commendable one. Why shouldn't you tell those pretty Creole stories as well as he? You have the force, the fire and the artistic touch that is so delicate and yet so strong.

Do you know that New Orleans—in fact all of Louisiana—seems to me to be a kind of romance land. Its very atmosphere must teem with stories and its streets and by-ways be redolent of dramatic incident that lingers as a sort of perfume from a fragrant past.

Dunbar and Moore corresponded for two years before they met in New York; they were married in March 1898 and moved to Washington, DC. The following year, Alice Dunbar published her second collection of Creole tales, The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, with Dodd, Mead, & Company—her husband’s publisher. The Dunbars’ marriage proved to be contentious and worsened after Paul was diagnosed with tuberculosis. His doctors recommended whiskey, but the “cure” led inexorably to alcoholism and caused him to became violently abusive. They separated in 1902; Paul died four years later at the age of 33. Alice moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where she taught at Howard High School for many years. Her second marriage, to another teacher, was a short-lived disappointment with a man twelve years her junior, but in 1916 she found happiness in marriage with journalist Robert J. Nelson, giving her the name by which she is known today: Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

Until the year before her first marriage, Alice lived with her mother and older sister among the community of mixed-race Creoles in the French quarter of New Orleans. “Alice was born with reddish-blonde curls which darkened to red to auburn and was fair enough to ‘pass’ for white,” notes Akasha Gloria Hull, the scholar largely responsible for bringing Dunbar-Nelson’s work back in print in the 1980s. Alice’s mother had been enslaved on a plantation in Opelousas, Louisiana, and moved to New Orleans after the war; her father was a seaman, probably white, possibly Creole, who apparently left the family when Alice was a toddler. In “A Creole Anomaly,” an article she wrote for Leslie’s Weekly Illustrated in 1895, she described her neighbors with the local term, “Gigi (pronounced gay-gay). . . . The term has frequently been misused to denote any creole, but properly speaking, it belongs to those tinged with African blood. . . . The Gigi may be white or colored. It is difficult to tell one from the other.” In his book Black New Orleans, John W. Blassingame quotes Union soldier Silas E. Fales, who observed in 1863 that “it is hard telling who is white here, the Creoles are blacker than some of the mullatos.”

The ambiguity of racial identity for the Creole characters in Dunbar-Nelson’s stories led a number of critics in recent decades to argue that she “camouflaged the issue of race,” that she “spurned that racialized element of her identity,” or that she “shaped her tales of Creole life for white audiences.” In “Sister Josepha,” which we reprint below as our Story of the Week selection, the reader realizes that the lead character is not white only through descriptive hints (“brown hands,” “tropical beauty”) and and by what the other nuns do not say about her. In Dunbar-Nelson’s stories, as in the Gigi community, it is often “difficult to tell one from the other.”

Yet, as Caroline Gebhard notes in a recent article, Alice “presumes that readers already read her work as ‘black.’” In the 1890s and early 1900s, most of Dunbar-Nelson’s stories, essays, and poems appeared in Black newspapers and magazines; The Monthly Review, for example, advertised itself as “the only illustrated periodical published by Negroes in this country.” Dunbar-Nelson’s first collection, Violets, was issued by the Review’s book publishing arm and was promoted widely and almost exclusively to Black newspapers, which in turn printed virtually all the reviews of the book. As early as November 1896, The Enterprise, a newspaper for Black readers in Omaha, Nebraska, honored Moore and Dunbar as “two widely known lyrists of the race” when each of them had a poem in the inaugural issue of the AME Church Review. “Dunbar-Nelson knew she would be read as a Black author and never tried to pass in print,” Gebhard concludes. “To read Dunbar-Nelson’s fictions as addressing only white readers, which the accusation of passing implies, is to dismiss the fact that Dunbar-Nelson’s first and most loyal readers were African Americans.”

Notes: The expression told her beads refers to the practice of reciting the prayers associated with each bead of the rosary. “O Salutaris” is a hymn (“O Salutaris Hostia”) by Thomas Aquinas. “Kyrie Eleïson, Christe Eleïson,” Greek for “Lord, have mercy, Christ have mercy,” is a line in the invocation for divine mercy in the Eucharist liturgy of the Latin Mass. “Confiteor, Deo omnipotente” (Latin: “I confess, God Almighty”) is the beginning of one of the prayers that can be said during the Penitential Act at the beginning of Mass of the Roman Rite. The translation of the sentence in French uttered next by Sister Josepha is “I confess to God Almighty—that I have sinned in thought—it is my fault, it is my fault, it is my most grievous fault.”

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Sister Josepha told her beads mechanically, her fingers numb with the accustomed exercise. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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