“The Black Princess” and Black Editors: The (Re)Making of Piatt's “Most Anthologized Poem”
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19405103.55.3.05
ISSN1940-5103
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Humor Studies
ResumoThe editorial practices of two Black editors—Frederick Douglass and Pauline Hopkins—revolutionize our understanding of the circulation history of Sarah Piatt's “most anthologized poem”: “The Black Princess.”1 Douglass gave “The Black Princess” its earliest known reprinting on January 2, 1873, in the New National Era, exactly one week after its December 26, 1872, debut in the Independent.2 Twenty-five years later, Hopkins (mis)quoted “The Black Princess” twice in her first novels, Contending Forces and Of One Blood.3 In each novel Hopkins uses lines from the poem to describe the physical appearance of an elderly Black woman character. As will be discussed, both of these characters depart from the image of the formerly enslaved woman in Piatt's poem, as Hopkins portrays her characters leading culturally-rich lives in the postbellum era. Two of the most prominent African American editors of their respective eras, Douglass and Hopkins exerted unimaginable political and cultural influence. Their respective reprintings of the poem, however, do not answer questions about Piatt's position as a former Southerner on the topic of enslavement. They provide, instead, insights into the recirculation of Piatt's poems in the postbellum African American print marketplace. The example of their recirculation of “The Black Princess” affirms the power of the Black press, especially in relation to nineteenth-century debates about slavery's continued impact on the nation and African Americans’ ongoing struggle for equality.As editors, both Douglass and Hopkins perused white publications for material to repurpose. In Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature, Daniel Hack points out what he calls instances of “cross-racial transpositions and repurposings” that were the hallmark of editors like Douglass, Hopkins, and others.4 African American authors and editors so commonly repurposed literary texts, Hack argues, that it was the cornerstone of accepted practice. Undoubtedly, Douglass encountered Piatt's autobiographical poem in the Independent, one of the most influential New York weeklies of the era. In the years leading up to the Civil War, the Independent had risen to fame “as a radical antislavery paper.”5 During Reconstruction, it continued as an organ of social reform, with more than a hundred thousand readers. Douglass was both a reader of the Independent and a contributor. In 1863, when he announced the folding of Douglass’ Monthly, his third newspaper, he told subscribers to watch for his contributions to the Independent and other newspapers.6 He certainly would have known Piatt's name from the pages of the Independent, where she published over sixty poems between 1871 and 1911, more than a dozen of those in 1872 alone. As Kamila Janiszewska notes, “The year 1872 was a very prolific one for Piatt in terms of publication: her poems may be found in almost every other issue of Harper's Weekly and The Independent from that year.”7 When he transposed “The Black Princess” from the pages of the Independent to the New National Era, Douglass followed what Jim Casey and Sarah Salter call the “traditional reprint format.”8 He introduced the poem to new readers, replicating it exactly as it appeared in the Independent and crediting S. M. B. Piatt as the author. More than likely, those readers included Washington politicians. According to Kathleen Diffley, “During its four years of publication, the paper was laid on the desks of U.S. Senators and Representatives, who sometimes read aloud from its pages on the floor of Congress.”9 This audience alone points to the significance of Douglass’ editorial choices.Like Douglass, whose editorial decisions shaped the New National Era, Hopkins exerted immeasurable influence on the Colored American Magazine. From her first appearance, as a staff writer in the magazine's inaugural issue in May 1900, she advanced quickly: to editor of the Women's Department in 1901, literary editor in 1903, and editor-in-chief in 1904.10 Hopkins scholars routinely observe her contributions to the magazine under her own name as well as an array of confirmed and suspected pseudonyms. Edlie Wong, Alisha Knight, and Hanna Wallinger, among others, have posited that pseudonyms long hid the extent to which Hopkins’ content filled the magazine's pages, allowed her to advance more outspoken opinions, and avoid criticism for those viewpoints.11 After Booker T. Washington “surreptitiously gained control” in 1904, Hopkins briefly remained the assistant editor.12 In a ten-page letter recounting her forced departure later that year, Hopkins paid homage to Douglass as editorial forebearer, saying, “The Colored American Magazine was the strongest Negro organ put upon the market since the days of Frederick Douglass.”13 Knowing the extent to which her words informed its pages, it is easy to draw the implied connection she was making between Douglass’ nineteenth-century editorship and her own in the early years of the twentieth century.When Hopkins started writing Contending Forces at the end of the nineteenth century, Piatt's poem enjoyed wide circulation. Unlike Douglass, Hopkins reshapes the poem in both of her novels, substantially changing the form from what she read elsewhere. Writing about Hopkins’ adaptation of “The Black Princess” in Contending Forces, Carmen Manuel observes that she quotes the opening stanza, compresses the second stanza from a quartet to a tercet, and quotes the seventh stanza.14 In Of One Blood, Hopkins quotes fewer lines but makes the same changes to the poem's second stanza. Exactly where Hopkins first read “The Black Princess” remains unknown. Hopkins may have scissored “The Black Princess” from Douglass’ paper, or she may have found it in an anthology, like John Greenleaf Whittier's Songs of Three Centuries (1875) or John James Piatt's The Union of American Poetry and Art (1882).15 As the narrator of Of One Blood says when introducing Aunt Hannah through the eyes of Dianthe, “Somewhere she had read a description of an African princess which fitted the woman before her.”16 Inside the frame of her novel, Hopkins omits attribution of poet and source. Instead she uses the quotation, as Nadia Nurhussein posits, as part of a body of content that “shaped how the community of readers created and fostered by the magazine conceived of a black pride that could be based in modernity.”17 Her surprising reuse of Piatt's poem allowed Hopkins to subtly overwrite its nostalgic tone toward slavery.Both Douglass and Hopkins recognized the value of using various genres to attract readers, and to allow readers to make cross-textual connections. For instance, Diffley's analysis of Douglass’ editorial practices at the New National Era articulates how he used fictional texts to reach readers who might not engage with the political commentary found elsewhere in the paper.18 In the New National Era, his only post-Civil War newspaper, Douglass promoted equality and suffrage for African Americans in articles and editorials on the first page and in poetry and fiction on the last. He envisioned, as the title suggests, a new national era, and planned for his paper to be “a beacon for a reformed, racially integrated nation.”19 On the same page as “The Black Princess,” an advertisement for the New York Tribune declares the issue of slavery ended: At home the struggle for Freedom seems over. The last slave has long been a citizen; the last opposition to emancipation, enfranchisement, equal civil rights, has been formally abandoned. No party, North or South, longer disputes the result of the War for the Union; all declare that these results must never be undone; and, with a whole people thus united on the grand platform of All Rights for All, whereto our bloody struggle, and the prolonged civil contests that followed, have led us, the Republic closes the records of the bitter, hateful Past, and turns peacefully, hopefully, to the less alarming because less vital problems of the Future.20Imagining freedom won, with suffrage and equality for all, this advertisement for the Tribune projects the image of a utopian nation. However, the Tribune's notion of a peaceful era seems hyperbolic at best, especially when read alongside Douglass’ “Prospectus of the New National Era” on the same page. Therein, he outlines the guidelines of the periodical's Political Department: “Upon all questions involving the especial [in]terests of the colored American citizen, the simple rule of equal justice for all men will govern the policy of the New National Era.”21 In contrast to the Tribune's advertisement, Douglass suggests that equality has yet to be obtained by American citizens of color, and that his newspaper will continue to wage the political fight that the Tribune appears to have abandoned.Though “The Black Princess” appears alongside these items without commentary, we know it was a time of increasing disappointments for all African Americans. As Robert S. Levine writes in his study of Douglass’ growing disillusionment with President Andrew Johnson, Douglass “increasingly spoke of the failed promise of Reconstruction” during his editorship of the New National Era.22 That the newspaper published “The Black Princess” demonstrates that Douglass saw connections between Piatt's recollections about her former nurse and his demand for justice for Black Americans. In “The Black Princess,” the formerly enslaved woman finds relief from slavery (but not necessarily justice) only in Heaven, from where she looks “yearning, down” at the white speaker.23 But as Diffley reminds us, “the New National Era touted equality instead of morality, the rights of citizens instead of the ‘instruments’ of God.”24 Not all Black readers—indeed, if any—would be satisfied with the poem's focus on delayed reward.Douglass promoted progressive and forward-looking politics throughout the New National Era much like the Independent. The paper endorsed “Radical Republican positions in Reconstruction political battles, especially the protection of newly won African American rights,” writes John R. McKivigan, with Douglass campaigning editorially “for women's suffrage, penal code reform, and greater educational opportunities for African Americans inside the District as well as nationwide.”25 Through its reprinting, the New National Era reframed Piatt's poem, positioning it within a different framework of articles than those surrounding it in the Independent. Douglass and his readers would have seen Piatt's poem as speaking back to other items in his newspaper's pages, especially the advertisement for the New York Tribune and, in turn, Douglass’ implicit response to the Tribune in his Prospectus. In the context Douglass created, the poem's fantasy vision of a princess who escaped oppression only by leaving the earth stressed the arduous path to full citizenship that still lay ahead for all African Americans.Scholars have yet to recognize how Hopkins deviates in her novels from Piatt's image of her former nurse in “The Black Princess.” In the poem, the formerly enslaved woman neither speaks nor exhibits agency. That the poem registered on a different level with Douglass than with Hopkins can be seen in her characters, Madam Frances and Aunt Hannah. For example, in Contending Forces, Hopkins refashions Piatt's “Black Princess” into a post-slavery entrepreneur known, when in professional guise, as “Madam Frances.” Like the central character revered in “The Black Princess,” Madam Frances looks old with a “wrinkled, black face.”26 Yet she lives independently, operates her own fortune-telling business, employs hired help, and reads Shakespeare. In one of the fortunes she writes at the fair, she quotes two unattributed lines from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice: “All that glistens is not gold; / Often have you heard this told.”27 And, much like Hopkins herself, whose literary adaptations fill the pages of her novels and her nonfiction, Madam Frances uses the famous author for her own purposes. As Manuel notes in her careful reading of these lines, immediately after the Shakespeare quotation her fortune concludes with two lines of Madam Frances’ own making: “Despise the false; welcome the true, / So shall you receive your due.”28 Manuel identifies Hopkins’ extension of the quotation but not its resulting implications in regard to Hopkins’ own writing process. Like Madam Frances, Hopkins routinely meshed her ideas and words with borrowed literary quotations, transforming the meaning of the original sources. As I have written elsewhere, Hopkins’ methodologies of writing align with her work as a stenographer, whereby she learned strategies that facilitated her writing processes, particularly referencing and adapting source materials to advocate for African American equality.29 In language reminiscent of Piatt's poem's subtitle—“A True Fable of My Old Kentucky Nurse”—Hopkins calls attention with these lines about falsehood and truth to the tension between true and white-invented accounts of slavery. By mentioning what is “due” to African Americans, she also speaks to stalled post-Civil War efforts to pass federal legislation guaranteeing African American equality. Thus Madam Frances’ seemingly innocuous “fortunes” work to show her—and Hopkins’—capable editing of white print for their rhetorical purposes.Contending Forces contains a scene reminiscent of the questioning of Phillis Wheatley's poetic genius in the eighteenth century when she published the first book of African American poetry. In the novel, many of the fair attendees flock to the booth of Madam Frances for no other reason than to “test the ability of this woman” who possessed a “rare mind.”30 Yet as the narrator evidences, Madam Frances is a complex, multi-faceted character. When not role playing at the fair or at her home/salon, a rented “small ten-foot wooden building” where she tells fortunes at appointed hours, Madame Frances is “Aunt Sally” to Sappho Clark, the protagonist of the second half of Contending Forces.31 As Hack demonstrates in his study of Hopkins’ deployment of Tennyson throughout Contending Forces, Hopkins mobilizes Victorian poets to further her “challenge to existing racial and sexual norms.”32 Thus when Sappho needs money to flee from John Langley's unwanted sexual advances and his threatened exposure of her past, Aunt Sally's mediation of the sale of Sappho's jewelry makes a significant impact on the plot. Notably, Hopkins uses the poem to “other” Madam Frances in her role at the church fair, just as nearly every word of Piatt's poem is spent “othering” the woman it supposedly honors. Not only has Hopkins edited Piatt's poem, partly quoting it and altering its form, but she has also “edited” the “princess,” giving her a life outside of a fairy tale. In this way, she talks back—both to the genre of the white-princess fairy tale and to the racial othering in Piatt's poem. African American women in the early-twentieth century, Hopkins insists, can speak, think, and write for themselves.Two years later, the magazine publication of Of One Blood again brought Piatt's poem back into circulation. Like the New National Era, the Colored American Magazine targeted a primarily Black readership. Ira Dworkin recognizes Hopkins’ editorial contributions to the Colored American Magazine, saying it “was almost certainly the most widely read African American journal of the twentieth century's first decade, and Hopkins was its best-known personality.”33 And, like the Independent, the Colored American Magazine claimed a readership of a hundred thousand or about five readers for each of the twenty thousand monthly copies sold.34 The quotation from “The Black Princess,” in the Colored American Magazine's October 1903 edition, appears in chapter XXI of Of One Blood's next to last installment.As Nurhussein highlights in her analysis of the impact of “The Black Princess” on the novel's plot, “[T]he poem shares so many elements with the plot of Of One Blood that it is difficult to dismiss the similarities as pure coincidence.”35 But we must add to Nurhussein's analysis the central issue of the deceptiveness of Aunt Hannah's superficially simple persona. Like Madam Frances, Hannah maintains multiple, complex identities. Until she meets Aunt Hannah, Dianthe believes the servants she hears jokingly referencing the older woman as “the most noted ‘voodoo’ doctor or witch in the country.”36 Hannah's real identity, as mother to Mira and grandmother to Dianthe, Rueul, and Aubrey, remains concealed for most of the novel. So does her history as a survivor of sexual abuse and her history as an enslaved mother who saw nine of her ten children sold to pay the mortgage on the Livingston plantation. Most critically, her secret swapping of her infant granddaughter for her mistress’ dead baby stays hidden until Hannah chooses the optimal moment of revelation. Again Hopkins has rewritten the black princess motif to locate a black woman as the source of truth. “Hannah's story,” as Shawn Salvant argues, “is an indictment of the slaveholding fathers and male heirs of the Livingston family, whose unchecked legal powers over their female slaves provide the social license for their practices of miscegenous and incestuous sexual violation.”37 Near the novel's end, only Hannah can “read” the lotus lily mark on the skin of her three grandchildren that marks them as her descendants. Her knowledge brings to light their unwitting incestuous relationships, though she still insists that slavery is to blame and not them. In one final twist, Hannah accompanies Rueul to Ethiopia, where his kingship makes her an actual princess. Hopkins’ adaptation of the image of Piatt's Black princess gives the end of her novel a powerful legitimizing not only of African political power but also African American female agency and knowledge.With her use and reuse of “The Black Princess,” Hopkins insists on the linkages she sees between the slaveholding past and her post-slavery present. In particular, the edition of the Colored American Magazine in which she quotes Piatt's poem raises the specter of rape. For instance, on the first page Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poem “The Difference” insists that white male sexual aggression toward Black women goes unacknowledged and unpunished. A dozen pages later, readers encounter Hopkins’ reportage on the “race battle in women's clubs” in “Echoes from the Annual Convention of Northeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs.”38 Notably, she references the speech given by the president of New York's Women's Clubs in words that sound amazingly similar to the Tribune's advertisement thirty years earlier in Douglass’ paper: “The Civil War is past; the old wounds have been healed; the North and the South have been reunited, and we cannot afford to take any action that will lead to more bitter feeling.”39 Additional articles discuss Black literacy, poverty, education, and the lasting impacts of slavery. Hopkins’ adaptaton of Piatt's poem within this framework argues for a revision of the “truths” about slavery and its historical impact, especially in regard to African American women.Of the four poems Piatt wrote about the same enslaved woman, Douglass and Hopkins recirculated only “The Black Princess.” Between them, Douglass and Hopkins kept the poem in circulation for Black readers for more than a quarter of a century. Demonstrating strikingly different editorial approaches, they subtly aligned Piatt with their own political purposes. Douglass intervenes in nineteenth-century debates about citizenship and freedom, while Hopkins reimagines black female influence and agency at the turn of the twentieth century. Together they helped to cement not just Piatt's place in literary history, but also their own.
Referência(s)