Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century

Verena Laschinger, Sirpa Salenius

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032093253
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429513930
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Verena Laschinger and Sirpa Salenius, is a collection of essays that offer a fresh perspective and original analyses of texts by American women writers of the long nineteenth century. The essays, which are written both by European and American scholars, discuss fiction by marginalized authors including Yolanda DuBois (African American fairy tales), Laura E. Richards (children's literature), Metta Fuller Victor (dime novels/ detective fiction), and other pioneering writers of science fiction, gothic tales, and life narratives. The works covered by this collection represent the rough and ragged realities that women and girls in the nineteenth century experienced; the writings focus on their education, family life, on girls as victims of class prejudice as well as sexual and racial violence, but they also portray girls and women as empowering agents, survivors, and leaders. They do so with a high-voltage creative charge. As progressive pioneers, who forayed into unknown literary terrain and experimented with a variety of genres, the neglected American women writers introduced in this collection themselves emerge as role models whose innovative contribution to nineteenth-century literature the essays celebrate.

Part I
On Children

1 Legacies of Music, Slave Narratives and Autobiography

Harriet Jacobs and Bessie Jones

Gayle Murchison

Bessie (Mary Elizabeth) Jones recorded a lullaby that appears on American Folk Songs for Children (1960); this song was reissued on Alan Lomax’s 1993 anthology Sounds of the South: A Musical Journey from the Georgia Sea Islands to the Mississippi Delta. In his liner notes Lomax characterizes it as “a lullaby with which Jones and her mother, and her mother’s mother, have cradled to sleep generations of Georgia babies.” We are thus informed that this song has been handed down via the oral tradition by unknown generations of women in Jones’s family, many of whom were enslaved as was her grandmother. We imagine a woman holding a heavy-lidded, fretful infant fighting sleep as we hear a resonant, soothing alto.

The timbre and beauty of the voice draw attention away from the lyrics. To be sure, generations of children have been warned about the boogie man who will take them away if they do not fall asleep when put to bed. Other lyrics jar: “All them horses in that lot,” which the woman sings twice. The second time, she asks adding emphasis: “Can’t you hear them horses trot?” We are left to wonder: what do horses have to do with putting a child to sleep? Oddly, she sings just once of mother leaving: “Mama went away and she told me to stay / And take good care of this baby.” Rather than sensing that the mother has left her child with an attendant for the time being, we have no hint that the mother will return. We know only that the child is being lulled to sleep and will be well cared for. The timbre of Jones’s warm voice provides a sense of safety. The repetition of the simple inducement to rest with the repetition of the refrain is reassuring. Our singer has made a single promise, and that is to take care of the absent woman’s child; the guardian’s resolution and favor towards the child is communicated through this simple lullaby. Soon, the child goes to sleep—we imagine—and our singer, Bessie Jones, a member of the folk ensemble The Sea Island Singers, returns to her other work about the house. The reader has to infer what is absent in this brief statement: that the song was sung not only by those in paid domestic service but also by those in bondage, such as Jones’s grandmother.

Although a children’s song, it is also the song of the oral historian. At one point, it dawns on the listener that the mother has not left voluntarily. The lyrics are vague: “Mama went away,” but why? This question is unanswered, yet something indicts the unspoken—we can hear it in the declamatory “all them horses in that lot,” with its flat, matter-of-fact delivery that lacks the lilting intonation inviting sleep. With this flash of recognition, the song ceases to be a lullaby, just a child’s song: it now dually functions as genealogy. In one minute and eighteen seconds (the recording’s duration), we have heard a brief slave narrative. Our assessment comes from two sources, internal and external. Internally, the lyrics provide the cue. Those with knowledge of sharecropping know that the mule is the work animal prized and typically owned by black sharecroppers. The song references horses, and the mention of this animal readily invokes power, as well as wealth and prestige; for example, horses ridden by patrollers and owned by land- and slave owners and traders. Externally, in the collection where a variant of this song is anthologized, Step It Down: Games, Plays, Songs & Stories from the Afro-American Heritage by Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes (the latter Alan Lomax’s sister), Hawes confirms this lullaby as a slave narrative: “This is Mrs. Jones’s version of the classic Southern lullaby, sung throughout the South by white and black mothers alike. It is always sad; the poignant sub-current of the great tragedy of slavery—the separation of mother and child—always runs through it, but Mrs. Jones’s version is gentle rather than bitter” (6). My close reading, confirmed by Hawes’s, reveals that Jones’s short lullaby obliquely comments on one of the great tragedies Harriet Jacobs (using the pseudonym Linda Brent) describes in her narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: motherhood, the separation of a slave mother (and grandmother) from a child who is sold away, and the separation of slave families in general. Thus, both this simple song’s genre and subject address issues of gender. In this respect, it is heir to and a continuation of Jacobs’s narrative though the latter revolves around gender and the vulnerability of female slaves to the sexual violence perpetrated by slave owners.

Slave narratives—from those published as freestanding books to those published in nineteenth-century newspapers, to others gathered under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, as well as those ethnographies transmitted orally but never recorded or documented in print—contain a wealth of information about music, ranging from repertories of songs to descriptions of musical practices. They document how music served both as a primary means of communication and as intellectual history. Many have established the foundational role sacred music, the spirituals especially, has played in pre- Emancipation African American culture. In Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987), Sterling Stuckey writes extensively about shout songs and the role the ring shout played in the formation of African American culture and identity. In his 1903 Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois called the spirituals the voice of the slave; his description has influenced several generations of black music scholars. Over the century of historical and scholarly study of the spirituals, musicologists, historians, and others have variously found that the spirituals not only express religious ideas and the worldview of the enslaved African American but they also serve as protest, and social commentary, as has been explored by Jon Cruz in his influential Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (1999). The song texts and ways in which they were used in the day-to-day-lives of these enslaved men and women provide insight into the emotional and intellectual lives of those who systematically were denied other means of written expression. They function as master signifiers of a political consciousness as they express not only hopes of freedom but also a critique of slavery. They also serve political purposes, such as their use by nineteenth-century abolitionists when they were often sung by former slaves speaking before nineteenth-century audiences and by 1960s Civil Rights Freedom Riders and activists, when they were sung at mass meetings, marches, demonstrations, and in jail cells.

Modeled on the nineteenth-century sentimental novel, Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl includes extensive, informative references to music and descriptions of a range of antebellum African American rituals and celebrations. Overlooked in the corpus of scholarship on slave narrative and slave song (both spirituals and secular) has been the specific question of gender. As Karen E. Beardslee briefly sketched in her article “Through Slave Culture’s Lens Comes the Abundant Source: Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” (1999), Jacobs’s narrative genders the tradition of the slave narrative. This can be extended and used as a critical framework for the critiquing of spirituals, secular songs, and other types of music found in the text. Similarly, like the discursive text, Incidents’s songs, along with stories, dances, rituals, and such—like the narrative in general—offer insight through the critical lens of gender into the lives, consciousness, and intellectual history specifically of enslaved women, which in much of the corpus of scholarship on slave narrative and slave song (both spirituals and secular) has been typically overlooked. In Incidents, Jacobs describes, in addition to the already mentioned motherhood and the separation of slave families, also the vulnerability of female slaves to the sexual violence perpetrated by slave owners. It then follows that songs found in the narrative reflect a gendered subjectivity, where, in multiple passages, the lyrics of specific songs express the bondswomen’s pain and resilience, rebellion, resistance, and agency where words fail. By extension, songs such as these particularly serve as a foundation of early black women’s intellectual history.

Music as Protest in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Jacobs’s narrative begins with her grandmother telling her life story. What we read in the narrative is corroborated both by contemporary and later slave narratives, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narratives. In reading the WPA narratives collected in North Carolina, one finds descriptions of rituals, entertainments, masking, religious services, shouts, and both secular and sacred music song texts. The songs, their uses and contexts remembered by aged freedmen and freedwomen in the 1930s are similar to what Jacobs includes in her narrative. We are to presume that Jacobs quotes directly or references as the adult Brent song texts heard in North Carolina when she was young. Much of the music throughout Incidents are spirituals, the pre-Emancipation sacred musical tradition that has been most extensively documented and studied of early African American music.

Throughout Jacobs’s narrative, we are confronted with scenes of sickening brutality and emotional cruelty. We come to understand that though one might avoid physical harm in Dr. Flint’s household, one could be vulnerable to emotional abuse and terror. Other than faith, the one fortress to which Linda and other women can always turn for emotional support and physical protection is the family matriarch, drawn by Jacobs in the figure of her grandmother, Aunt Martha. She does everything within her power to protect her children, grandchildren, and siblings—to keep her family together and alive at all costs. No doubt, Jacobs’s grandmother experienced extensive physical and psychological stress. In the absence of Linda, the grandmother must care for her children. Though the texts are not given explicitly, we can assume with certainty that Aunt Martha, Linda, and all the mothers mentioned in the narrative sang their children lullabies, a genre traditionally classified not just as children’s song but also as a genre specific to women.

Lullabies not only soothe children and coax them to sleep; they function in multiple ways culturally and psychologically. We return to Jones’s lullaby. She sings, “all them horses in that lot . . . mama went away and she told me to stay, and take good care of her baby.” The reader of Lomax’s liner notes has to infer what is absent in this brief statement: that the song was sung not only by those in paid domestic service but also by those in bondage, such as Jones’s grandmother. The research of Elizabeth MacKinlay and Felicity Baker has shown that the singing of lullabies benefits both children and their mothers: “By engaging in the singing of these songs mothers are, in effect, singing about their own feelings, and the very act of doing so allows them to release and let go of pent-up emotions.” The authors continue:

the tension underlying emotional energy is released and dissipated so that emotions such as sadness, fear, and anger can be safely acknowledged and explored . . . not only are the musical qualities contained in lullabies effective in promoting sedation in babies, but singing lullabies also promotes a relaxation response in adults. This is particularly important for mothers who may be experiencing difficulties with day-to-day coping, resulting in the development of feelings of failure, frustration, tension, and guilt (68–9).

Here, a close reading reveals and confirms that in her short lullaby Jones, too, comments on the separation of mother and child by a slave auction. MacKinlay and Baker identify the cultural work that Jones’s lullaby does beyond documenting the separation of mother and child. When a child or mother is sold away, three parties must be soothed: child, birth mother, and the new adoptive mother. Rather than call out the sale of a mother, Jones must sing in veiled allusions to a market of some sort, one where horses perhaps took the mother away. The new mother then calms her own fears: of raising another child, and that perhaps one day her own could be sold away—scenarios Jacobs knew all too well, given the sale of her own children.

We know historically that many of the daily activities and tasks done by those enslaved, such as field and domestic work, would have been accompanied by music, work songs specifically. Yet Jacobs does not mention these. She describes children at play early in her narrative, such as the description of her grandmother’s childhood and Brent’s own childhood in the first chapter. The first time she introduces the holidays, Christmas and New Year’s, Jacobs focuses on the January 1st Hiring Day and the New Year’s Day auction, the latter typically resulting in the separation of families (21).

Music and musical texts, however, do appear explicitly in Incidents: chapter twenty-two “Christmas Festivities,” and chapter thirteen, “The Church and Slavery,” the latter being the showcase and one of the rhetorical centerpieces of the narrative. Chapter twenty-two focuses on one of the most sacred and joyous holidays in the Christian liturgical calendar. For the slaves, the Christmas holidays were often a time of celebration, as the crops were in and they were given a few days of rest. As mentioned above, Jacobs introduces the holidays in reverse order, describing the intense sorrow on January 1st, when slave families could be separated as members were auctioned off. Yet, she does provide scenes of merriment—and biting sarcasm—in her description of a New World African masking tradition, Johnkannaus (also known as Jonkannu or John Canoe) (131).¹ She offers an elaborate description of the maskers’ costume: “Two athletic men, in calico wrappers, have a net thrown over them, covered with all manner of bright-colored stripes. Cows’ tails are fastened to their backs, and their heads are decorated with horns.” She also describes the makeshift drum: “A box, covered with sheepskin, is called the gumbo box.” Here, it is important to keep in mind that drums had been outlawed on most plantations, as slaveholders feared the enslaved’s ability to communicate slave uprisings via the drum. She goes on to mention other percussion instruments, the triangle and jawbone [rattle]. The music of the percussion ensemble accompanies dancers and singers who perform songs they have spent the previous month composing. This troupe visits plantations in the area, requesting money and rum from the white men. If refused, Jacobs recounts, the revelers sing a bitingly satirical call-and-response song commenting on the man’s finances:

Poor massa, so dey say;
Down in de heel, so dey say;
Got no money, so dey say;
Not one shillin, so dey say;
God A’mighty bress you, so dey say (132).

For an oppressive slaveholding system in which the enslaved could be punished (and even murdered) by slave owners with impunity, such satirical songs offered the enslaved ways to comment wryly and even ridicule their masters. Here, keep in mind that some among the revelers knew that there was a chance loved ones and other members of their community would be sold away in less than a week’s time. In this case, they could comment upon the masters’ finances—an especially important emotional and psychological safety valve (however small), given that financial exigencies often forced slaveholders to sell someone enslaved, even if that individual were the slaveholder’s own child fathered with a bondswoman.

Similarly, Jacobs uses her descriptions of the church services to further indict slavery, here rhetorically invoking the enslaved’s moral authority and slavery apologists' perversion of Christian theology. She describes two types of services: the church service held by white ministers and those held by the slaves themselves. Her description of the slave’s own services are telling. Her purpose is twofold. First, she exposes hypocrisy. This...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Progressive Pioneers: Recovering Voices of Women
• PART I On Children
• PART II On Adults
• Index