The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers

by Various

  Too long have we been silent under unjust and unholy charges; we cannot expect to have them removed until we disprove them through ourselves. It is not enough to try and disprove unjust charges through individual effort that never goes any further. Year after year southern women have protested against the admission of colored women into any national organization on the ground of the immorality of these women, and because all refutation has only been tried by individual work the charge has never been crushed, as it could and should have been at the first. Now with an army of organized women standing for purity and mental worth, we in ourselves deny the charge and open the eyes of the world to a state of affairs to which they have been blind, often willfully so, and the very fact that the charges, audaciously and flippantly made, as they often are, are of so humiliating and delicate a nature, serves to protect the accuser by driving the helpless accused into mortified silence. It is to break this silence, not by noisy protestations of what we are not, but by a dignified showing of what we are and hope to become that we are impelled to take this step, to make of this gathering an object lesson to the world.

  For many and apparent reasons it is especially fitting that the women of the race take the lead in this movement, but for all this we recognize the necessity of the sympathy of our husbands, brothers and fathers. Our women’s movement is woman’s movement in that it is led and directed by women for the good of women and men, for the benefit of all humanity, which is more than any one branch or section of it. We want, we ask the active interest of our men, and, too, we are not drawing the color line; we are women, American women, as intensely interested in all that pertains to us as such as all other American women: we are not alienating or withdrawing, we are only coming to the front, willing to join any others in the same work and cordially inviting and welcoming any others to join us. If there is any one thing I would especially enjoin upon this conference it is union and earnestness. The questions that are to come before us are of too much import to be weakened by any trivialities or personalities. If any differences arise, let them be quickly settled, with the feeling that we are all workers to the same end, to elevate and dignify colored American womanhood.

  This conference will not be what I expect if it does not show the wisdom, indeed the absolute necessity of a national organization of our women. Every year new questions coming up will prove it to us. This hurried, almost informal convention does not begin to meet our needs, it is only a beginning, made here in dear old Boston, where the scales of justice and generosity hang evenly balanced, and where the people “dare be true” to their best instincts and stand ready to lend aid and sympathy to worthy strugglers. It is hoped and believed that from this will spring an organization that will in truth bring in a new era to the colored women of America.

  “An Open Letter to the Educational League of Georgia” (1889)

  SOURCE: Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, “An Open Letter to the Educational League of Georgia (1889),” in Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence. Ed. Alice Moore Dunbar (New York: The Bookery Publishing Company, 1914), 173–177.

  Ladies of the Georgia Educational League:

  The telegram which you sent to Governor Northen to read to his audience, informing the people of the North of your willingness to undertake the moral training of the colored children of Georgia, merits more than a passing notice. It is the first time, we believe, in the history of the South where a body of representative Southern white women have shown such interest in the moral welfare of the children of their former slaves as to be willing to undertake to make them more worthy the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. True, there have been individual cases where courageous women have felt their moral responsibility, and have nobly met it, but one of the saddest things about the sad condition of affairs in the South has been the utter indifference which Southern women, who were guarded with unheard of fidelity during the war, have manifested to the mental and moral welfare of the children of their faithful slaves, who, in the language of Henry Grady, placed a black mass of loyalty between them and dishonor. This was a rare opportunity for you to have shown your gratitude to your slaves and your interest in their future welfare.

  The children would have grown up in utter ignorance had not the North sent thousands of her noblest daughters to the South on this mission of heroic love and mercy; and it is worthy of remark of those fair daughters of the North, that, often eating with Negroes, and in the earlier days sleeping in their humble cabins, and always surrounded by thousands of them, there is not one recorded instance where one has been the victim of violence or insult. If because of the bitterness of your feelings, of your deep poverty at the close of the war, conditions were such that you could not do this work yourselves, you might have give a Christian’s welcome to the women who came a thousand miles to do the work, that, in all gratitude and obligation belonged to you,—but instead, these women were often persecuted, always they have been ruthlessly ostracised, even until this day; often they were lonely, often longed for a word of sympathy, often craved association with their own race, but for thirty years they have been treated by the Christian white women of the South,—simply because they were doing your work,—the work committed to you by your Saviour, when he said, “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it unto me,”—with a contempt that would serve to justify a suspicion that instead of being the most cultured women, the purest, bravest missionaries in America, they were outcasts and lepers.

  But at last a change has come. And so you have “decided to take up the work of moral and industrial training of the Negroes,” as you “have been doing this work among the whites with splendid results.” This is one of the most hopeful stars that have shot through the darkness of the Southern sky. What untold blessings might not the educated Christian women of the South prove to the Negro groping blindly in the darkness of the swamps and bogs of prejudice for a highway out of servitude, oppression, ignorance, and immorality!

  • • •

  The leading women of Georgia should not ask Northern charity to do what they certainly must have the means for making a beginning of themselves. If your heart is really in this work—and we do not question it—the very best way for you to atone for your negligence in the past is to make a start yourselves. Surely if the conditions are as serious as you represent them to be, your husbands, who are men of large means, who are able to run great expositions and big peace celebrations, will be willing to provide you with the means to protect your virtue and that of your daughters by the moral training you propose to give in the kindergartens.

  There is much you might do without the contribution of a dollar from any pocket, Northern or Southern. On every plantation there are scores, if not hundreds, of little colored children who could be gathered about you on a Sabbath afternoon and given many helpful inspiring lessons in morals and good conduct.

  • • •

  It is a good augury of better days, let us hope, when the intelligent, broad-minded women of Georgia, spurning the incendiary advice of that human firebrand who would lynch a thousand Negroes a month, are willing to join in this great altruistic movement of the age and endeavor to lift up the degraded and ignorant, rather than to exterminate them. Your proposition implies that they may be uplifted and further, imports a tacit confession that if you had done your duty to them at the close of the war, which both gratitude and prudence should have prompted you to do, you would not now be confronted with a condition which you feel it necessary to check, in obedience to the great first law of nature—self-protection. If you enter upon this work you will doubtless be criticised by a class of your own people who think you are lowering your own dignity, but the South has suffered too much already from that kind of false pride to let it longer keep her recreant to the spirit of the age.

  If, when you have entered upon it, you need the co-operation, either by advice or other assistance, of the colored women of the North, we beg to assure you that
they will not be lacking,—until then, the earnest hope goes out that you will bravely face and sternly conquer your former prejudices and quickly undertake this missionary work which belongs to you.

  20

  EDMONIA GOODELLE HIGHGATE

  (1844–1870)

  Born and raised in Syracuse, New York, Edmonia Goodelle Highgate spent most of her short life traveling throughout the South with her sister, Caroline. Their father, a barber, died when Edmonia and Caroline were in their teens. At Syracuse High School, Edmonia graduated with honors and received a teaching certificate. She started work at a black school in Montrose, Pennsylvania, the only job available to her at the time; from there she moved to a larger school in Binghamton, New York. In 1863, energized by the American Missionary Society’s effort to set up makeshift schools for emancipated and fugitive slaves, Edmonia asked to take part in the effort to educate freedmen. While teaching in the South, both Edmonia and Caroline became romantically attached to white men who abandoned them. Edmonia died after a botched abortion; Caroline struggled alone, raising six children.

  The following four pieces, all originally published in 1865 and 1866 in the Christian Recorder, give the reader a sense of the enthusiasm Highgate had for her work. She pours herself into her writing before sprinting off to partake in the next task (“Oh! It is time for my night school.”). The black press as a whole was optimistic during Reconstruction. Her pieces are enthusiastic rallying cries for self-improvement, educational equality, and a vision of the United States in which possibilities were open to all.

  “A Spring Day Up the James” (1865)

  SOURCE: Edmonia Goodelle Highgate, “A Spring Day Up the James,” Christian Recorder, May 27, 1865.

  DEAR RECORDER:—Bright, joyous April, yet tearful enough to be in sympathy with the national sorrow, will ever be memorable to your scribbler. The recent trophies and grand victories placed us in the king’s gallery of delightful enthusiasm; but to how many, many hearts, they brought mourning in their train, because of the sacrifice of the first born or dearest one? How many mothers, wives and sisters read telegrams or letters saying: “He fell on the field making a desperate charge,” or, “terribly wounded in five places!” “Oh, Christ of the seven wounds, comfort the hearts of the national mothers whose sons die with faces turned away, and no last word to say!” Our pangs in this freedom birth of America are agonizing, yet we rejoice, for the cost endears the end.

  Reader, did you ever go to the front to search for your beloved wounded? If you have, you can sympathize, if not, you can learn how trying it is to spend long hours on government transports, moving slowly and lazily along. Then after you have got within five hours’ sail of some desired place, to be ordered back to Point Lookout, or somewhere else to be overhauled? Or worse, to be detained by such examination as to have to wait a day and night in such agony that two nights come together, then to miss entirely what you hoped to gain, and then looking vainly upward to see the hand of God in these delays.

  We started up the James on a half-fare ticket, owing to the kindness of that most Christ-like body, the “Christian Commission,” with several delegates, whose kind attention tended to assuage the grief that burdened our heart. A young lady, unattended, going to the front is something unusual, but still she is protected on her sad mission by the better part in the hearts of the roughest.

  We anchored first at Newport News, very important in the first days of the war. Then at Grove’s landing. Again we paused as if by consent at Jamestown, so famous in the history of American Slavery, which is a most miserable, unimportant dilapidated little town, but ever notable as being the birth-place of the monster which has swallowed our brothers, ay! and spoiled our maidens, and beaten our mothers, robbed and killed their babes. Thank God for the privilege of telling it! Next we moored our bark at Fort Powhattan, a name interwoven with the romantic legendary of Virginia. Then at Harrison’s Landing, where diminutive Mac found a retreat. Again we stop, and find ourselves at Wilson’s Wharf, where one black regiment defeated the chivalry under Fitz Hugh Lee. After nine hours’ ride we reached City Point, or rather, the city of tents and hospitals, cheering members of the Christian Commission bade us welcome, and gave us some refreshments. Then we walked on for over a mile, looking for the Fifth Corps hospital, fear and hope in conflict at every step. At last we looked into the schooled face and calm eyes of a delegate who visited the corps and knew the whole story that we wanted to hear. There in the darkness of that night, the rain pouring down in torrents, we searched with great patience clerks, hospital records with a very reasonable amount of “red tape.” Oh, how they hated to say that “your brother died of his wounds two weeks ago.” But we felt it to be the truth, and their pale lips confirmed it. We then knew how sublime a thought it is to suffer and be strong.

  So feelingly they led us back to a rough tent, where three other women were lamenting similar losses. With a soldier’s blanket about us we stretched upon a board to watch through the long, long, weary night. Two of these women were southerners who grumbled about being out of the union, yet grew livid because their husband’s property had been taken from them. Who knew that they might be true to their confederate instincts, and attempt our lives! One sweet young wife smiling so pleasantly—and with kindly hands she tried to comfort us—was on her way to the front to find her husband, who she said was sounded, little dreaming of the real truth.

  Next morning we sat down with about fifty noble representatives of the Christian Commission to a rude fare, but our masticating powers were paralyzed with grief, and refused to do their work. Then we went in an ambulance to follow the body of our hero. His comrades in the fight and playmates from his youth up, have sent his body home to his mother.

  We left those kind friends who had wept with us for our bereavement, and as we together listened to the groans of the dying, martial-music sounded in the distant, which heralded the execution of some convalescent rebel, who rewarded the Governmental nursing by tearing up a portion of the Railroad. There was a large concourse of southern female friends on the boat back to Fortress Monroe, who sneered at the Yankee flag, while receiving favors from the very source which they spurned in their apologies for souls. Would that every confederate female could be turned, lest they meet eternal retribution.

  Waiting for the transport to B. Oh! God, thou art past finding on tin the afflictions with which thou visitest on thy children. Waiting, weeping, hoping, yet,

  “I praise Thee while my days go on,

  I love Thee while my days go on,

  Through dark and death, through fire and frost,

  With emptied arms and treasures lost,

  I thank Thee while my days go on.”

  “Rainy-Day Ink Drops” (1865)

  SOURCE: Edmonia Goodelle Highgate, “Rainy-Day Ink Drops,” Christian Recorder, September 30, 1865.

  A debit and credit side you will find all through nature and life. They do pay,—perhaps not the price we put upon them, but undoubtedly all they are worth. If man can’t wring compensation out of snarled matters, God can.

  Didn’t it pay England, even though Charles the First was so bad, that she had to behead him, to have him for her king, when, if she had had a better man, the English people never would have got the degree of liberty which they now enjoy. Didn’t it pay England, in 1216, to have the imbecile John for her monarch, for if a better man had ruled the British Isles, would they have obtained the Habeas Corpus Act, which was to the Magna Charta, as the marriage certificate is to the betrothal ring?

  Didn’t it pay to have McClellan, Scott, and Halleck make the war drag its slow length along when it gave us the assurance that four millions of our race are forever free, even though they have not yet the right of suffrage—the safeguard of liberty? Don’t it pay to humble the South and secure something like a balance of power in this country, even at the cost of millions of dollars and streams of blood? Don’t it pay to make soldiers
of slaves—to teach chattels the sublime act of taking life scientifically, and the sublimer one of reading and writing. I tell you, it does.

  But I am afraid it will appear not to pay, if the wives and daughters of our colored soldiers, who can’t read, do not know as much as these blue-coated ones, when they come marching home. This inequality, which too often exists in the domestic circle, will be the ten percentage some families must pay, if our sisters,—fond women though they have been,—don’t embrace every opportunity to be equal, in that respect, to their returned or returning soldiers husbands. It don’t pay to get some one to write your letters in the long run. Our nice, trim, blue coat, who learned so much from some camp teacher or chaplain, won’t be content to remain at home at nights, after the first flush of joy is over, unless his home is neat and attractive. Don’t it pay to dress to please a pair of brown or black masculine eyes? Maybe a clean collar and a nicely combed head don’t inspire the right sort of pride, but you will find they pay. Don’t it pay to love prayerfully and steadily one who is almost entirely lost to you? I tell you a woman who grasps tight hold of the Savior, and goes nobly, blamelessly, on her quiet way, can save a man, if he be a man. If not, she can inspire to noble deeds, mere masculine clay. It pays to love a bad, faithless husband, with a reforming love. It pays to bear and forbear with a good husband. Mothers, it pays to work your fingers off to educate that bright-eyed, high-browed boy or that sweet, thoughtful girl. It will pay when you are in the grave. It will pay you, teacher, to study the nature of that wayward pupil. It will always pay to be true to yourself and every body else.