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  • Whispers of Cruel Wrongs: The Correspondence of Louisa Jacobs and Her Circle, 1879–1911 ed. by Mary Maillard
  • Margaret Washington
Whispers of Cruel Wrongs: The Correspondence of Louisa Jacobs and Her Circle, 1879–1911. Edited by Mary Maillard. Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography. ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017. Pp. xxii, 219. $64.95, ISBN 978-0-299-31180-3.)

In an insightful introduction, Mary Maillard frames an interesting set of letters with informative genealogy and biographies of "elite" African American women bonded through kinship, friendship, and personal struggles (p. 4). Louisa "Lulu" Matilda Jacobs (1833–1917) authored most of the letters. Other writers include Harriet Ann "Annie" Purvis; Charlotte "Lottie" Louise Forten Grimké and her husband, Francis "Frank" James Grimké; and Frank J. Webb Jr. The lone recipient of the letters is Eugenie "Genie" Webb.

Lulu Jacobs's epistles are the most noteworthy. Her dear friend Cordelia "Delie" Sanders Chew, who like Jacobs was born in slavery, died of tuberculosis in 1879. Jacobs began corresponding with young Genie Webb, who attended the dying Chew. Jacobs was a distant cousin of the prominent freeborn Webb and Lottie Forten Grimké of Philadelphia through the bloodlines of white slave-owning men. Jacobs and her mother, Harriet Jacobs (1815–1897), had a busy but economically precarious Washington, D.C., life, which we glimpse through letters written over thirty-two years.

In rented residences, the Jacobses boarded politicians and family visitors and catered for white and "colored society" (p. 99). Lulu Jacobs taught home economics at Howard University, kept a jam and jelly business, and devotedly attended to her oft-ailing mother.

Lulu Jacobs updated Genie Webb, whom she called "Childie," on family, social, and religious news and offered encouragement and advice to her much younger cousin. Early on, Jacobs optimistically wrote of owning a home, "the hope of the thing that is to be some day" (p. 79). Yet occasionally, Jacobs's lighthearted, uplifting stoic persona exposes a stressful, difficult life and a fear of homelessness. [End Page 773]

Jacobs's letters reveal a deep religiosity mixed with a discerning skepticism, selfless generosity of spirit, an array of friends, and constant concern for deceased Delie Chew's two motherless boys. Jacobs offers vague but tempting peeks at post-Reconstruction Washington's political turmoil, rampant unemployment, economic depression, and disenfranchisement. Her circle included activist cousins Lottie and Frank Grimké, Quaker reformer Julia Wilbur, and black and white politician boarders. One must thus contextualize, read between the lines, and reflect on the history-making events surrounding the Jacobs women. Stoicism might frame the letters and the women's ways of dealing with trials, as Maillard suggests, but Washington women were creating a movement that Jacobs was surely caught up in.

As time passed, especially after Harriet Jacobs's death, Lulu Jacobs's letters unmasked her pain and bitterness. White executors denied Harriet Jacobs's right to her grandmother's Edenton, North Carolina, property even after nearly fifty years of litigation. If she had money, Lulu Jacobs wrote after the final denial in 1901, she would "prosecute it to the bitter end though I gained not a cent myself" (p. 155).

Maillard considers Jacobs among the "'colored aristocracy,'" but Jacobs seems to mock the term in her letters (p. 4). The Webbs, the Chews, and the Fortens had economic privilege and standing in free northern society. For years the Jacobs were impoverished fugitives fleeing from New York to Boston, with Harriet Jacobs's owner in pursuit. Maillard maintains that Lulu Jacobs's white father, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, paid for her education and "supported her until his death" (p. 36). When Lulu Jacobs reunited with Harriet Jacobs at age ten, she had spent four years with her congressman father and his Brooklyn cousin. According to Jean Fagan Yellin's Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York, 2005), Harriet Jacobs did domestic and seamstress work to finance Lulu Jacobs's education. Lulu Jacobs's father did not free his slave children. "The South never did anything for me," Jacobs wrote to Genie Webb, "and to know that white Southern men have the benefit of my great grandmother's labor is too unjust to bear quietly" (p. 155).

Perhaps...

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