Death-Defying Testimony: Women's Private Lives and the Politics of Public Documents

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins succeeded as a playwright, acclaimed vocalist, enterprising journalist, feisty public intellectual, ambitious activist, eloquent patriot, and stalwart club woman from the 1870s through 1915.¹ A fifth-generation New Englander born in 1859 in Portland, Maine, Hopkins was the only child of Sarah Allen Northup of Boston and Benjamin Northup of Providence, a couple whose marriage united powerful political and religious dynasties and blended tumultuous histories of freedom and enslavement. Hopkins's writing life began with an award-winning school essay on the evils of intemperance and ended with the most economical of writing occupations at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a stenographer. Her writing life and the lives she documents shape my approach to private writing and biography. In writing Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution, I was compelled to document and assess the public and private lives she generated, sustained, and revised. I had time and reason to grapple with the archival and intellectual issues that emerge as a result of scholarly biography projects. We know projects like these often proceed as extended—sometimes seemingly never-ending—considerations of the politics of private writing, biography, and the archive.

A Sojourner in the Archive

As a literary historian, I have been a sojourner in the archive—one whose research plans do not always first yield the foundational organizing details of birth date, parentage, marriage, occupation, and church affiliations. I am in search of lives developed in the shadow of imagined democracy or sustained despite involuntary proximity to the blistering core of an America that accommodated and perpetuated enslavement.

The free-born, self-emancipated, or enslaved individuals I encounter in the archives negotiated peculiar, highly racialized, and deeply sexualized institutions that co-opted their labor, bodies, identities, relationships, offspring, and communities. Nineteenth-century people of color contended with racial and social realities and hierarchies that depended on and were strengthened by wholly permeable and vulnerable spheres—so much so that racialized notions of the private frequently are critiques of a volatile public sphere and of bodies that were always already available for public consumption. Biography projects about these individuals become considerations of the pursuits, acquisitions, fictions, and shifting valuations of privacy. This is a rigorous dance indeed, for biographer and subject alike, and there are breathless and breathtaking stakes at hand.

As an earnest graduate student in the early 1990s, I went to Fisk University to see the Pauline Hopkins Papers. The very first question the archivist put to me was rhetorical at best: "You're here for a week? I don't know why you think you need all that time. It's only one box." Yet what was in the box, and the other items that emerged over the course of that week as I proved myself an earnest and worthy scholar-in-training, revealed two questions: First, what must we do in the face of sparse and provocative private writing when it has no linear foot breadth or documented provenance and raises more questions than it answers? Second, how do we grapple with the seeming silences—these rhetorical ruptures and biographical caesuras—that all too often define the early African American canon and history?

I ask these questions even as I assert that our expectations of racialized private writing cannot be modest or anchored in disappointment and loss. We must have a practice of intellectual and archival optimism, and certainly the invaluable archival recovery and insistent intellectual work of many scholars—Carla Peterson, Frances Foster, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Gabrielle Foreman, Jeanne Pfaelzer, Karen Kilcup, Sharon Harris, and others—explains why. My decades-plus project on Hopkins and her world disciplined me and even rode me ragged at times as I embarked on wide-ranging physical and intellectual journeys, trekked to obscure and well-known archives, ventured into graveyards, stepped into municipal storage spaces, took up residence in countless airless microfilm rooms, and made forced, voluntary, and serendipitous marches across acres of library stacks. I muttered as much as I walked. Sometimes I cursed the fact that anything about Negroes was relegated...