Mixed Race Studies

Mistaken identity

The Boston Globe
2005-02-20

Holly Jackson

What if a novelist celebrated as a pioneer of African-American women’s literature turned out not to be black at all?

IN THE LATE 1980s, scholars of African-American studies carried out the most impressive American literary recovery project to date, excavating and reprinting the works of numerous unjustly forgotten African-American writers. The most ambitious of these efforts was Oxford University Press’s 40-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, published in 1988 under the direction of Henry Louis Gates Jr., currently the chair of Harvard’s department of African and African American Studies.

Here at last, Gates explained in his foreword, were the literary ancestors of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. With one exception, all these works had been previously out of print, making it difficult for scholars to track down copies. In fact, it was Gates’ discovery of one such ”lost” novel, ”Four Girls At Cottage City” (1895) by Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, that prompted him to put these neglected texts back into print-”in part,” he wrote, ”so that I could read them myself.”

In the following decade, scholarship on black women’s fiction exploded alongside popular interest in the work of contemporary African-American writers. In particular, the flourishing of black literature in the 1890s-the decade that saw Jim Crow become federal law and witnessed the highest number of lynchings in American history-has remained a fruitful area of scholarly inquiry. For African-American writers of that period, the creation of a literary tradition was a political imperative. As Pauline Hopkins wrote in 1900, ”We must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history.”

But despite continual scholarly interest in Kelley-Hawkins as an important voice of the period, the woman who Gates credits with inspiring the Schomburg Library has never fit comfortably within the African-American canon. Most puzzling has been the apparent whiteness of her characters, who are repeatedly described with blue eyes and skin as white as ”pure” or ”driven” snow-a conundrum that critics have largely sidestepped by arguing that these women would have been understood as ”white mulattos,” or very light-skinned women of color, by Kelley-Hawkins’s original audience of black readers. Furthermore, while the novels of contemporaries like Frances E.W. Harper or Pauline Hopkins are explicitly concerned with racial uplift and protest, ”Four Girls at Cottage City” and ”Megda” follow a group of adolescent female friends in eastern Massachusetts from carefree youth through Christian conversion to appropriate wifehood, with no mention of the difficulties facing black women.

Meanwhile, Kelley-Hawkins herself remained a complete historical cipher. While she had been identified as an African-American writer as early as the 1970s, when her first novel, ”Megda,” was mentioned in several reference works, the most basic facts of her life-down to the date and place of her birth-were totally unknown.

As it turns out, these novels, and their author, are far more anomalous than scholars have realized. Judging from archival documents that I have recently uncovered, Kelley-Hawkins does not appear to have been African-American at all…

Read the entire article here.