Читать книгу Frances E. W. Harper - Utz McKnight - Страница 8

Born in 1825, in Baltimore, Maryland, Frances Harper was orphaned at 3 years of age and went to live with her uncle and aunt, William and Henrietta Watkins. The family had a library, and as a child Frances was, at a young age, given access to books and taught to read and write. This encouragement was to be her fortune, and words and their value would become her lifelong passion. In Baltimore, where the family was living, the social relationships of the family gave Frances conversational exposure to people with an interest in the major political causes of the day. Her uncle William Watkins was an abolitionist and public speaker, someone with social standing in the community of people, made up of free Blacks and Whites, advocating for social causes and racial equality. William Lloyd Garrison and many other activists were regular guests at the Watkins household.

Harper’s upbringing among those who were were active in organizing against slavery and other social problems not only taught her the value of political activism but also provided her with an understanding of the importance of education and writing as tools to address social ills. The public critic – the person who would address an audience in speaking halls, living rooms, and in formal gatherings to advocate for changes in the society – was a fixture in the everyday lives of the inhabitants of the young nation. The first decade after Frances Harper’s birth saw the publication of David Walker’s Appeal, the public work of Maria Stewart in Boston, and Nat Turner’s Rebellion.

In Harper’s day, there were established organizations that sought various types of reforms and social change in the society at large. And in Baltimore, where she grew up, free Blacks and Whites had long been able to establish a public audience ready to discuss a wide range of social causes and issues, through printing newspapers, adverts, and lectures (Foster, 1990). This public forum, a social space within which to publicly make statements and admonish fellow inhabitants and the government, was active throughout the mid-Atlantic seaboard and the East Coast in the 1820s. While, just as today, it was not clear how discussions in this public arena determined the definition of government interests, there is no question that the public intellectual in the nineteenth century had an importance beyond the imperatives of electoral politics. Much of this has to do with the place of this sort of public discourse in local politics – how independent town, city, county, and state politics are from the supervision of the federal government in the US. Electoral parties in the US are not an end in themselves, for a public is always engaged in discussion about the merits of a law, a policy, or the conditions in which local people live.

Unlike other Black women who became well-known public figures during her lifetime, Frances Harper did not have the financial means to remain at home throughout her childhood (Foster, 1990). Having established a school in 1820 – the Watkins Academy – her uncle William Watkins was able to provide the young Frances Harper with the vocational training necessary to succeed at those occupations conventionally available to her as a free Black woman. It was this training that allowed her to work, as a teenager, as a young servant in the household of a White family, and, eventually, to be the first woman hired as a faculty member to teach sewing at Union Seminary in 1850. When she later moved to Ohio with her husband to run a dairy farm and help raise their children, this practical experience as a servant was important, and necessary when she was shortly thereafter widowed and working to keep the farm. Frances Harper was raised with the best training available for someone Black who had no access to independent sources of income. This is a condition that most African Americans are too familiar with today, with a negative savings rate and few assets being the norm for too many families. She had to survive by the education that she received, opportunity, hard work, and the trust and assistance of those around her. This was a free Black person’s life in the 1820s and 1830s, and is true today for us as well.

Harper’s work as a servant paralleled the types of work done by those who were enslaved, but with the glaring distinction of being free – free to make use of her own life and time as she would, each day. As a servant, however, she came face to face with the consequences of a politics of race in the society whereby some Black people who worked were free, and some slaves. This experience undoubtedly transformed her thinking about how race defined the lives of Black people in America.

In the 1820s and 1830s, when Frances Harper was a child, the state of Maryland reflected many of the major forces for change in the new nation. Baltimore and surrounding areas were places where free Blacks could live alongside slaves in large numbers – enough to make the differences in status between Black people an explicit public issue that Whites sought to address. Whites did not generally suggest enslaving those who were free, but instead sought to reduce the number of free Blacks who lived in the state (Fields, 1985). The uneven economic development between the state’s northern counties and southern counties was a source of great tension among politicians. The importance of slaveholding for agriculture and economic development that prevailed elsewhere in the South was not evident in Baltimore, even if true in the southern parts of the state. The importance of Baltimore as a growing industrial center on the mid-Atlantic seaboard meant it was a center for the political currents that were sweeping the young nation. For Frances Harper, growing up in Baltimore meant that she was regularly exposed to the social conditions of slavery, as well as given an insight into the value of schooling and literacy for effecting social change (Parker, 2010, p. 102).

Think for a moment of what Frances Harper’s attendance at the Academy run by her uncle must have signaled for the slaves working around her, slaves who often were prohibited by their Masters from learning to read and unable to write. It is important not to make a false equivalence between what slavery and being free meant for Black people at the time. Slavery remains a terrible wound in our history today, but we don’t need to think of Black people as always available to its constraints as a condition of living in the society, or as the limit to our political ambition. The necessary national conversation that we have today about reparations and reconciling the effects of slavery generations later should not prevent a discussion of how free and slave Black people lived alongside one another. What it meant to be Black at the time, and after the Civil War, should include such an understanding of the complexity of Black life.

Frances Harper’s was a singular political awareness, if we consider the situation for a moment: to be free and yet to be exposed as a young child to those who were not; to be socially conscious of the aspiration toward racial equality derived from the attitudes and behaviors of those Whites who frequented the Watkins’ home; to know that many Black people discussed the plight of those enslaved even as they wrote, spoke publicly, and organized for the welfare of those who had run away. She also came into constant contact with White slave owners, and those who perceived her free status as an impediment to her exploitation, even as they dismissed her capacity for constraining their desires with regard to their own slaves.

What would a White stranger have represented socially, politically, for Frances Harper? What would a slave have been for a young Frances Harper, if not a person to be pitied, and also an immediate existential threat, a literal symbol of the precarious nature of her own status in Baltimore (Fields, 1985, pp. 39, 79)? In the 1820s and 1830s, when the kidnapping of free Blacks to be sold as slaves further south was common, how did Frances Harper determine the motives and interests of the adults, White and Black, around her? I write this to have us consider how race was a factor in the young Frances’ life, in contrast to how it is in our own lives. How would others have perceived this young woman, who was not only courageous and literate, but also independent? And though her situation with regard to opportunities for an education was unique, she herself, as a young free Black girl child, was not unique in Baltimore, or in the society as a whole.

How has our awareness of race changed, and what remains accessible to us of what she must have known? Answering this question requires a degree of reflective sophistication about the influence of race on our lives – an awareness that Frances Harper demonstrates throughout her work. It would be a rare person today who would have her degree of insight and courage. Thus, it is important to remember, when we read her poetry and books, how few of us have the same perspicuity, the determination that was required – when there were slaves present, and when women were unable to vote and were expected to be silent in most public fora – to confront the description of her own racial subordination in her public writing (Stancliff, 2011).

Today, when so many people write and publish works on race and society, it is simply too easy to remain within a narrative that sees progress in the fact that Black people can publish and find an audience for their work. Reducing the achievements of those like Frances Harper to a simple content analysis, or a discussion of literary form, reduces the achievements of those, like her, who succeeded at a time when there were substantial barriers to publishing and making a career as a public speaker and poet. Leveling the field of production in this way reduces the importance of the work that others have done to change how the society addresses race as a problem, and we tend to ignore the organizational and professional effort that this success took – how it was also a tremendous step in our progress toward the ideal of racial equality. To what extent is it possible to make sense of the types of commitments that are evident in the life of Frances Harper such that she would become the most successful Black poet of the mid nineteenth century, a writer of four novels – one of which was a bestseller – a public speaker, an essayist, and a leading organizer of social movements in the United States for almost 50 years?

In her letters, it is clear that Frances Harper led a life whose main ambition was to correct the racial and gender injustices that she perceived in the world around her. The activist and literary world in which she lived, as well as how she was raised when young, fostered an awareness of a politics of representation in her own person as a Black woman writer and social critic. This commitment to what we today call civil rights is ever present in her writing, her speeches, and her advocacy. I want to suggest that it is only now, with our complex theories that address the conjoining of the critical politics of race, gender, and sexuality, that there exists a public readership that can respect and understand how a Black woman could be one of the most important writers, poets, and activists of the last 50 years of the nineteenth century. Her story now can be brought to our attention as a difference of perspective that matters, her work given a place as an important component in a developing narrative of a diverse American democratic polity.

It is not a coincidence that, though Frances Harper was prolific and successful as a writer, her contribution to our understanding of the period in the nation’s history has until very recently been obscured. Today we largely accept a description of the period of US history from 1850 to 1900 that has emphasized the story of the slave struggling for freedom, those valiant individuals who freed themselves through personal ambition and great adversity, and the successful heroic work of White people to emancipate the slaves who were unable to escape to freedom – the benighted and beleaguered, the self-emancipated, the savior and humanitarian. This is too easy a combination of roles to be true, to be the only description of what was possible for those who lived in the period. There are other narrative voices. Today, we increasingly include the claims of how slaves and free Blacks fought alongside their White compatriots for freedom during the Civil War, and how slaves were forced to fight in support of Confederacy.

But a story about American democracy that seeks to simply reconcile the fact of enslavement for Blacks with the ownership of other human beings by Whites is too easy and inaccurate, and accepts a problematic convention for slavery as a condition for some in the society. Thus, we have Harriet Tubman, who was a friend of Frances Harper, as well as Frederick Douglass, who worked often alongside Frances Harper over the years, in the Abolitionist Movement and later in the fight for voting rights for Black people and women. These two are thought to represent today in the collective imagination a necessary and particular depiction of what it meant to be Black and American in that time in US history.

We ask the questions of the past that provide the answers we need in our own lives. The runaway slave, the slave who confronts and defeats the ambition of mastery by the owner, the slave who goes on to free others, who publishes and speaks in public about their successful emancipation, make us think about what it means to live in a society where slavery was possible. Both those whose ancestors owned slaves and those whose ancestors were enslaved can supposedly find a form of reconciliation, a foundation for going forward together, if the history of slavery is viewed as a mistake, reproduced over many generations – one corrected through righteous struggle by those whose morality and personal conviction overcame greed. Sacrifice and suffering finally came together for the cause of freedom: to free the benighted Black slave, to educate and lift up those least fortunate.

Frances Harper represents a different voice from that of Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass, as well as that of Sojourner Truth or William Wells Brown. Instead of seeking to establish her equality to a White person who is not a Master, as a concession to a personal emancipation, Frances Harper embodies in her writing and public speaking the always free Black person who also represents the democratic aspirations of the society. To constantly measure racial equality with a claim to having once been enslaved – as being less than human perhaps in the eyes of some – retains in the new conception of race after slavery the condition, the possibility, of an enslavement to come. Such an argument suggests that the baseline of the Black experience is always slavery, and not a freedom that is suborned or taken away. This difference in perspective matters today, as we seek a description of how racism thrives in spite of our effort to create conditions of equality socially, economically, and politically.

Imagine instead if a person had always been free, if someone Black in America had never been a slave. Should we then make the story of slavery their definition, rather than accept that for many Black people in the US slavery and freedom were more complicated, requiring a description of racial equality beyond that of asking Whites for justice in the form of allowing Black people to be free? The end of legal slavery occurred concurrently with the argument about what constraints could exist for free Black equality in the society, a conversation centuries old, about the definition of political equality between racial groups in the society. Frances Harper is an important voice in this tradition of exploring the definition of racial equality within the Black community – someone who left a legacy of published work for us to consider.

The kidnapping of free Black people and their sale into slavery caused a furor in the society in the decades leading up to the Civil War not solely because the sale of Black people was thought by many to be morally wrong, but because it suggested that all Black people were potentially slaves, in ways that had not previously been true in the US. This idea of slavery as a natural state of Black life in the US not only is incorrect historically, but also allows for an erroneous description of the racial justice to be achieved today. It is very important to understand the contribution of Frances Harper to how we think of race today, in terms of her being a free Black woman writing during the last two decades of legal slavery, and then for several decades after the Civil War. There was no one else in the period, no other free Black writer or poet, who addressed the problem of both race and gender, and what these ideas meant for the society, with such success. Frances Harper is singular, unique, and I want to suggest her work is central to a consideration of how we should think of race and gender in the US from the 1840s to the 1890s, and therefore also how we describe a critical race and gender politics in the US today.

Frances Harper’s work disturbs a desire to return today to a conversation about what race requires as a supposedly natural condition – the desire to engage in this as a question, rather than to reject its assumptions as fundamentally flawed. It is important to understand how important this counter-argument to slavery was in her lifetime, and how in the 1840s and throughout her life she wrote about the intersectional politics of race and gender as an aspiration of democratic society. Her life and work represents a very different description of racial reconciliation for the society than is often offered when thinking only about the concerns of the White male slave owner, the permission given through a definition of Whiteness for the ownership of human beings, over many generations in the society. That she spent her entire adult life writing, speaking, and campaigning on behalf of racial and gender justice is a fact that should add weight to our assessment of her legacy, and should make us think twice about the current tradition of reducing her contribution to American letters and society in her lifetime to a few short poems and one major novel, Iola Leroy.