by Mia Bay
Still, Ida’s diary records few regrets about losing either Graham’s or Brown’s attentions. Instead, both before and after her California trip, Ida struggled with not just the idea of marriage, but the challenges of remaining single. Aware that she had failed to observe Victorian mores with regard to marriage, Wells was also troubled by the physical allure her suitors held for her. She faced one of the quintessential dilemmas of Victorian womanhood. Women were not supposed to have strong sexual feelings, especially for men that they did not intend to marry. So what Ida did end up regretting were passionate kisses she exchanged with suitors such as Graham and Brown, which she feared reflected poorly on her moral character. Yet, by all evidence, her transgressions did not extend beyond a few kisses, for Ida went into her marriage nearly a decade later still unfamiliar with the mechanics of birth control.
Like many other middle-class female contemporaries, black and white, Ida evidently adhered to a Victorian sexual ideology that prohibited sex before marriage.52 However, Ida gained little credit for her self-restraint. As an attractive, unmarried woman in her midtwenties with an active social life, she often generated suspicion and talk. The story of her rumored involvement with Dr. Gray followed her to Memphis, where it was alleged she had been involved with a “white man” in Holly Springs for money. And after that, her social life in Memphis created rumors of its own. Her dating habits clearly attracted some male censure, which seems to have been one source of the talk that swirled around her. Her ever ambivalent suitor Mr. Graham, for example, heard whispers that Ida believed that “any young man I went out with ought to feel honored because of the privilege & that whenever any one was with me all the young men in the town knew it and said of him he was highly honored”—a story clearly designed to convince him that Ida got around. Mad at Graham for even repeating this bit of gossip, Ida understood the male hostility that lay behind it and reflected, “He did not add (altho’ I knew it must be so) that they hastened to tell such an one of the rumor & thus maliciously have been setting all the young men against me & by their cock & bull stories, have kept them away, for a silly speech of mine—if, indeed—I really said it (of which I have not the slightest remembrance).”53
Ida faced a new set of ugly rumors about herself on her return from California in 1886. Her decision to decline a job in Kansas City in favor of returning to Memphis came back to haunt her. In refusing that teaching job, Wells had unwittingly angered several of the teachers who had helped her secure it. After she left, they retaliated with a rumormongering campaign in which they wrote letters to Memphis school officials alleging that Wells was having an affair with Graham, and that her youngest sister, Lily, was in fact her daughter. Faced with such mean-spirited misrepresentations of her own behavior, Ida was once again hard-pressed to defend herself.
Suing the railroads for discrimination was one thing, finding a way to protect her personal reputation was another. As a sixteen-year-old in Holly Springs, Ida had been able to correct the stories about her and Dr. Gray only by calling in her grandmother as a chaperone. And early in her Memphis years, Ida had been literally struck dumb by the stories she heard about herself. Told by a male acquaintance that he had heard “bad things” about her, Wells reported, “I was so angry I foamed at the mouth, bit my lips & and then realized my impotence—ended in a fit of crying.”54 On hearing the rumors coming out of Kansas City, Wells felt similarly silenced and powerless. Enraged by the gossip about Graham and herself, she viewed the rumors as “premeditated and deliberate insults” and wrote, “My blood boils at the tame submission to them.” But Wells took no action, simply telling Graham, who mentioned the allegations, that she had “been misrepresented.” And although she yearned for revenge, she settled for “praying for enlightenment.” Dismissing the idea of retaliation, she wrote, “I have never stooped to underhanded measures to accomplish an end and I will not begin at this late day by doing that which my soul abhors; sugaring men, weak deceitful creatures, with flattery to retain them as escorts or gratify a revenge, and I earnestly pray my Father to show me right.”55
Besieged by rumors about her personal life, Ida also wondered “what’s the matter with me.” In 1887, after three years in Memphis, she was the “only lady teacher left” in her school still unmarried. Worse, being single did not always make her happy. When her last unmarried colleague wed she felt “singularly lonely & despondent.”56 But Wells always stopped short of embracing marriage as a remedy for her loneliness, though she was often tempted to do so. In the fit of despondency mentioned above, for example, she wrote her former suitor Mr. P[oole], telling him that “if he desired my happiness to come home & help make me happy.” But Ida had already dropped the idea two weeks later when the surprised Poole wrote back asking “if his coming will really contribute to my happiness.” By then, Ida did not even consider a serious reply. “Shall write and ask to forget & send me back those letters,” she noted in her diary.57
An “emotional loner,” Ida was often unhappy while in Memphis.58 As the oldest member of her immediate family, she received limited emotional support from her siblings, whom she rarely mentions in her diary other than to chronicle her brothers’ money problems and the domestic conflicts she had with her sisters. Moreover, she had little sustained contact with other relatives, especially after her aunt Fannie moved to California. She had a cousin in Memphis, Stella Butler, for whom she served as maid of honor in 1886, but the two were not close—Stella is rarely mentioned in Wells’s diary. And she seems to have lost all contact with her grandmother Peggy and her Holly Springs relatives after Peggy’s stroke. When her aunt Margaret wrote in 1887 to tell her that Peggy had died that March, Wells was surprised to “know that she had been alive all that time & I never knew it or where she lived.”59
Emotionally isolated and overburdened, Wells suffered from a sadness that may have had more to do with depression than her remaining single. As biographer Linda O. McMurray points out, Wells clearly endured intense bouts of depression during her Memphis years. There were times when her chronic money troubles, grueling work schedule, and unending familial obligations, coupled quite possibly with the stresses of the lawsuits, got to be too much for her. She referred, for example, to the winter of 1886 as “the winter of my discontent,” and her diary entries bear her out. Frequently physically ill, she complained of neuralgia and thought that her “system was not in good order.” Still more problematic was her mood, which she reported as “sluggish” and “blue.” There were days when the busy young teacher accomplished nothing. On March 30 she wrote, “No lessons of anykind were covered Saturday or sewing done, the biggest job undertaken and finished was—a bath.”60 In her low moods, her social life and her suitors were a diversion, but could not always lift her spirits. A visit from Graham on a bad day, for example, did little to change matters. “Have been very blue all day,” she wrote, “& G[raham] was in trying to comfort me but he makes a mess of it as always.”61 But having no company could be worse. “I had no visitors today,” wrote Ida at a low point in her diary. “I am in as correspondingly low spirits tonight as I was cheerful this morning. I don’t know what is the matter with me. I feel so dissatisfied with my life, so isolated from all my kind. I cannot or do not make friends & these fits of loneliness will come & I tire of everything. My life seems awry, the machinery out of gear & I feel as if there’s something wrong.”62
Wells’s low mood that winter may also have been influenced by her “wavering steps” along a still uncertain career path. Established in the Memphis school system, where she “had made a reputation…for thoroughness and discipline in the primary grades,” Wells was increasingly conscious that in her teaching assignments, she would never be “promoted above fourth grade.” By 1886 she had begun to find the “monotony and confinement of primary work…distasteful,” but saw little way out of it. She had no normal-school training—as the college-level preparation courses for schoolteachers were then called—which meant that she had little hope of being assigne
d to teach any of the higher grades. Although she contemplated further education, she lacked the time and money to attend summer courses at Fisk University in Nashville, where many black teachers received their training. Moreover, a lack of money was not the only issue holding her back. Responding to a friend who asked her whether she thought she would be able “to stand examination in algebra, natural philosophy, etc”—as she would need to do to advance as a teacher—Wells could only “confess my inability.” At issue seems to have been a lack of dedication as much as anything else. Contemplating the limits of her teaching career in her diary, Wells regretted “those golden moments wasted, the precious hours I should have treasured and used to store up knowledge for future use.” But, try as she might, she could not make training for teaching her first priority. “It seems so hard to get at it [study],” she fretted in her diary. “I’ve made so many resolutions I am ashamed to make more.”63
Wells’s Memphis diary reveals that her energies were in fact directed elsewhere, toward a writing career that would ultimately provide her an “outlet through which to express the real ‘me.’”64 But in 1886, the success of her career as a journalist was by no means assured. So Wells’s doldrums may also have reflected doubts about her future as a writer. Increasingly widely published, Wells saw her articles for The Living Way reprinted in T. Thomas Fortune’s New York–based paper The Freeman, and was also invited to write for Kansas City’s Gate City Press. But she was rarely paid for her work, so she had scant hope of writing full time. Run by Baptist ministers, The Living Way had little or no resources with which to pay Wells, and they allowed other papers to reprint her work as part of a free exchange of copy common among nineteenth-century publications. Other papers behaved similarly, offering her no remuneration even when they solicited original articles. In lieu of pay, T. Thomas Fortune sent her ten copies of The Freeman for an original article titled “Woman’s Mission,” while the Gate City Press initially had her writing regularly for free. Frustrated in her hopes of becoming a “full-fledged professional journalist,” in 1885 Wells published a piece in The Living Way criticizing the editors of black newspapers for not compensating their authors.65 It brought her a stinging rebuke from Calvin Chase, the editor of The Bee (Washington, D.C.), who contended that magazines, not newspapers, were the appropriate venue for authors who sought pay for their writing. He also questioned whether Wells’s journalism was worth paying for, with the nasty suggestion that “if ‘Iola’ should write anything worthy of public interest The A.M.E. Review will no doubt publish it, and allow her something by way of compensation.”66
Chase’s comments did not crush Wells, who noted in her diary, “I would not write for him for great pay & I will write something someday that makes him wince.” But their exchange does underscore the difficulties that Wells faced making a living as a writer. Increasingly bored by teaching, she not only pursued journalism but also dreamed of writing a novel with one of her suitors, Charles S. Morris, a journalist from Louisville and for a time one of her favorite correspondents. But even as Wells sketched out a plot for a novel in her diary entries, fiction must have seemed even more unlikely than journalism to offer her a career path. Black novelists were even rarer than black journalists, as Wells knew all too well, having “never read a Negro book or anything about Negroes,” prior to arriving in Memphis. Indeed, only Morris’s steady encouragement allowed her even to contemplate “the stupendous idea of writing a work of fiction,” which she could hardly do without a “smile in derision” at herself for thinking of such a thing.67
Perhaps for this reason, Wells never began her novel. Even early in her career, journalism was clearly her métier, despite her love of fiction. “A Story of 1900,” which appeared in the Fisk Herald in 1886, was among the few fictional pieces Wells would ever publish—if the story’s obviously autobiographical reflections on how black teachers in the rural South could best serve their students can be called fiction.68 Likewise, Ida’s Memphis diary suggests that the novel she contemplated writing would have been all but true to life. Among her entries are plotlines of court cases involving black women, which she jotted down to “remember…when I write my ‘novel.’” One was the case of a young black woman who got into a fight with a white woman after being abused by both the white woman and her brother, and ended up remanded to the workhouse for defending herself.69 Far from fictional, the cases Ida recorded dramatized her concerns about the difficult and dangerous course that black women navigated in Southern society—as well as the legal injustices they faced.
In journalism, Wells found the perfect place to express such messages and share the dogged commitment to black progress inculcated in her by her parents, as well as her growing unease about social relations of all kinds in the late nineteenth-century South. Writing as “Iola,” she was a persistent critic of the black leadership class, whom she faulted for not “exerting their talents and wealth for the benefit or amelioration of the condition of the masses.”70 Not even the Masons were sacrosanct, despite their effort to help Wells and her family following the deaths of her parents. She worried that the Masons and other black secret societies achieved little beyond fellowship, at a time when African Americans needed leadership and support. In 1885, when several Memphis ministers denounced the power and mysterious practices of these fraternal orders—which often drained resources away from black churches—Iola agreed with them. The Masons and other fraternal orders had a “history of an enormous amount paid into their treasuries with nothing to show for it in the way of real estate, parks, or even [the care of] a multitude of widows and orphans.”71
Wells’s discussions of black leadership and organizations established her credentials with the largely male fraternity of black journalists, who praised her for plunging “into politics and other matters of national importance with the vivacity of a full-fledged journalist of the masculine gender.”72 But she also spoke, as one contemporary noted, to “women…around the fireside,” in articles clearly written for the “Woman’s Corner” departments then featured in many black newspapers.73 In pieces such as “Woman’s Mission” and “The Model Girl: A True Picture of the Typical Southern Girl,” Wells offered flowery assessments of the womanly ideals to which black women should aspire. In keeping with the nineteenth-century cult of true womanhood, Wells celebrated the importance of “women’s influence” in the “making of great men,” and urged black women to eschew “fashion, idleness, and usefulness” in favor of a standard of “earnest, thoughtful, pure noble womanhood.” The “model girl” must have a “character in spotless purity,” and esteems “it among her best accomplishments that she can cook, wash, iron, sew, and ‘keep house’ thoroughly and well.”74
At first glance, such columns speak more to the conventions that prevailed in Woman’s Corner columns of the nineteenth-century press than they do to Wells’s experience. A woman who took more pride in her intellect than her domestic accomplishments, Ida did not care for cooking and found most housework tedious. But she was partially sincere in her admiration for “ladylike refinement” in other women, and often rued her own “tempestuous, rebellious hard-headed willfulness.” Like many black women of her era, Wells was attracted to the feminine ideals enshrined in the cult of true womanhood, even though such ideals located women in a sheltered domestic feminine sphere largely alien to her experience. Her Memphis diary contains lavish praise for a white teacher, whom she met on a return visit to Rust in 1885 and who struck Wells as the embodiment of all feminine ideals. “Was introduced to Miss Atkinson, the music teacher, who seemed fair and pure, so divinely good, whose notions were grace and poetry personified—she seemed to me, one of the few women I have met who came near justifying the ravings of the poets and proving their metaphors not inspired alone by imagination.”75
At the same time, however, Wells’s appreciation for middle-class ideals of white womanhood was complicated by her awareness that many white Southerners considered black women incapable of attaining them. “Unmindful
of the fact that our enslavement with all the evils attendant thereon was involuntary,” she noted in one of her columns on women’s issues, “there are writers who have nothing to give the world in their disquisitions on Negroes, save a rehearsal of their worthlessness, immortality, etc.” Black women were especially subject to “wholesale contemptuous defamation,” she contended. “Among the many things which had transpired to dishearten the Negroes in their effort to attain the level in status of civilized races…none sting so deeply and keenly as the taunt of immorality; the jest and sneer with which our women are spoken of, and the utter incapacity or refusal to believe there are among us mothers, wives and maidens who have attained a true, noble and refining womanhood.”76 Such assumptions must have been all the more galling to Wells since she knew full well that female morality was not the exclusive preserve of the well-bred. According to her autobiography, her own determination to keep herself “spotless and morally clean” derived from the teaching of her “slave mother.”77 But in her early newspaper writings, Wells seemed less than certain about the morality of slave women, and instead highlighted the progress made by blacks since emancipation.
Seen in hindsight, Wells’s early columns on women show her beginning to make sense of the gendered character of white supremacy. As we have seen, with the end of Reconstruction, white Southerners campaigned for segregation and disenfranchisement by questioning not only the racial character of black people but also their gender characteristics—often construing black sexuality as a racial threat to the white race. Black women were deemed too base and immoral to deserve a place in the ladies’ car, while black men were stereotyped as sexual predators who lacked the disciplined and autonomous manhood required for voting. Wells’s years in Memphis saw an ever increasing sexualization of racism across the South that ultimately strained all social relations between the races. Whites became increasingly hostile to even largely apolitical middle-class blacks, whose hopes for advancing the race had rested on the achievement of a bourgeois respectability that whites were no longer willing to accord to any black people. In time, Wells would develop a hard-hitting analysis of the middle-class sexual mores with which Southern whites masked their attacks on the political and social rights of all black men and women. But, both in her early writings and in her personal life in Memphis, she struggled to reconcile class-bound white ideals such as “true womanhood” with the African American experience.
