From The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century
Interesting Links
“The Literary Legacy of Pauline Hopkins” (Katherine Ouellette, WBUR)
“A Pioneering Black Author’s Novel Takes Us to a Wakanda-like Civilization” (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post)
Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Wife of His Youth,” Charles W. Chesnutt
• “Désirée’s Baby,” Kate Chopin
• “Sister Josepha,” Alice Dunbar-Nelson
• “Stranger Than Fiction,” James Weldon Johnson
Buy the book
The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century
• More than 100 short stories
• 51 different writers
• Two-volume boxed set
• 1,641 pages
List price: $85.00
Web store price: $65.00
“The Literary Legacy of Pauline Hopkins” (Katherine Ouellette, WBUR)
“A Pioneering Black Author’s Novel Takes Us to a Wakanda-like Civilization” (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post)
Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Wife of His Youth,” Charles W. Chesnutt
• “Désirée’s Baby,” Kate Chopin
• “Sister Josepha,” Alice Dunbar-Nelson
• “Stranger Than Fiction,” James Weldon Johnson
Buy the book
The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century• More than 100 short stories
• 51 different writers
• Two-volume boxed set
• 1,641 pages
List price: $85.00
Web store price: $65.00
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| Three of the illustrations made by British Guiana–born American artist J. Alexandre Skeete (1874–1945) for the serial publication of Pauline E. Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter (1901–02) in The Colored American Magazine. [“With One Bound She Sprang Over the Railing of the Bridge” | “A Deep Sigh Startled Him” | “With a Cry Jewel Staggered to Her Feet” | Images from the Digital Colored American Magazine site.] “Talma Gordon” (1900) is widely considered the first African American murder mystery, while Hagar’s Daughter, which features a Black female sleuth, is the first detective novel by an African American author. |
In our next issue (June) we shall begin a department devoted exclusively to the interest of women and the home. This department will be under the editorial charge of Miss Pauline E. Hopkins, who is especially well fitted for this work among the women of her race. While Miss Hopkins has a very happy manner of presenting any subject which she may write, she has that which is of still greater value in a department of this kind, a heartfelt desire to aid in every way possible in uplifting the colored people of America, and through them, the world. There will appear from month to month in this department, articles that will be of special and practical value to all women. . . .Hopkins, who was 41 at the time but presented herself as 34, worked alongside the four founders of the magazine—Harper S. Fortune, Walter Alexander Johnson, Walter W. Wallace, and Jesse W. Watkins—all men in their twenties who had migrated from Virginia. Her employment background was atypical for a career as an editor for a literary monthly. In her late teens she had been an actress and singer in a family troupe called the Hopkins Colored Troubadours, and she was advertised as “Boston’s favorite colored soprano” when she began performing on her own. She sometimes wrote her own productions, including a musical play called Slaves’ Escape; or, The Underground Railroad. During the 1890s, she worked as a stenographer while giving speeches in support of social and political causes.
The debut issue of The Colored American Magazine included Hopkins’s first published short story, “The Mystery Within Us.” During the next four years, she published five additional stories, some two dozen biographical sketches in a Famous Men and Women of the Negro Race series, and numerous other pieces, many under at least two pen names. Her debut novel, Contending Forces, was issued in book form in late 1900 by the publishing company that printed the magazine, which in turn heavily promoted the novel and reprinted an excerpt in the November issue. It would be her only book; three additional novels (Hagar’s Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self) were serialized in the magazine between 1901 and 1903 but did not appear in book form.
The editors claimed a circulation as high as 17,000 and a pass-along readership of nearly 100,000, although it consistently faced financial challenges. As many as one-third of their subscribers were white. Hopkins would rise in importance; she became literary editor and briefly editor-in-chief in 1904, the year allies of Booker T. Washington bought the magazine in what one recent biographer has called a “hostile takeover.” The new publisher moved the offices to New York, replaced Hopkins and other staff members, and shifted the magazine’s contents to a more accommodationist take on civil rights and race relations. The changes effectively sank the magazine; over the next five years, its circulation plummeted, even among New York subscribers, and it ceased publication in 1909.
The magazine’s staff members during Hopkins’s tenure, while mindful of their white audience, were often unapologetic for the forthrightness and diversity of opinions, tackling hot-button topics that rankled some subscribers. In March 1903, a white reader wrote to complain about the fiction, focusing particularly on the two novels that had been published to date (Hagar’s Daughter and Winona, the first of which appeared under the pen name Sarah A. Allen—the maiden name of Hopkins’s mother):
I have been taking and reading with interest the COLORED AMERICAN MAGAZINE. If I found it more helpful to Christian work among your people I would continue to take it.Hopkins pulled few punches in her response, which reads in part:
May I make a comment on the stories, especially those that have been serial. Without exception they have been of love between the colored and whites. Does that mean that your novelists can imagine no love beautiful and sublime within the range of the colored race, for each other? I have seen beautiful home life and love in families altogether of Negro blood.
The stories of these tragic mixed loves will not commend themselves to your white readers and will not elevate the colored readers. I believe your novelists could do with a consecrated imagination and pen, more for the elevation of home life and love, than perhaps any other one class of writers. . . .
. . . My stories are definitely planned to show the obstacles persistently placed in our paths by a dominant race to subjugate us spiritually. Marriage is made illegal between the races and yet the mulattoes increase. Thus the shadow of corruption falls on the blacks and on the whites, without whose aid the mulattoes would not exist. And then the hue and cry goes abroad of the immorality of the Negro and the disgrace that the mulattoes are to this nation. Amalgamation is an institution designed by God for some wise purpose, and mixed bloods have always exercised a great influence on the progress of human affairs. I sing of the wrongs of a race that ignorance of their pitiful condition may be changed to intelligence and must awaken compassion in the hearts of the just. . . .Mixed-race relationships play an unexpected dual role in “Talma Gordon,” Hopkins’s second story to appear in the magazine and perhaps her best-known work today. Widely considered the first murder mystery written by a Black American, the story—particularly the trial scene—was almost certainly inspired by the Lizzie Borden case, which occurred eight years earlier and still haunted the Boston social imagination. John Cullen Gruesser, author of Race, Gender and Empire in American Detective Fiction, has noted that “Talma Gordon” combines the locked-room mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” with the buried treasure secret of “The Gold Bug” to create something altogether new. Catherine Ross Nickerson, in The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women, describes how the story “has the wildness of the story-paper and dime-novel from which it borrows, and incorporates plot elements from both gothic and adventure genres.” Yet, by the story’s close, the murders and the crime’s deus ex machina explanation have taken a back seat to other revelations that have changed the survivors forever.
Notes: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” is from Act 5 of Hamlet. “Smiling, frowning evermore, . . .” is from “Madeline” (1830) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. “Whom the gods love die young,” a common expression in many cultures and periods, appears in Greek author Menander’s (341–290 BCE) play Dis Exapatōn, which survives only in fragments. Roman playwright Plautus (254–184 BCE), whose work derives closely from Menander’s, uses the line in Latin in his fragmentary play Bacchides. The phrase “all went merry as a marriage bell” is from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) by Lord Byron. “A Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sea” (1837) is a poem by Scottish poet Allan Cunningham that he also set to music.
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The Canterbury Club of Boston was holding its regular monthly meeting at the palatial Beacon-street residence of Dr. William Thornton, expert medical practitioner and specialist. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.