The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins

Chapter Three: “Somethin’s gwine happen”: National Warning in Winona

95 chapter three “SOMETHIN’S GWINE HAPPEN” National Warning in Winona People will never forget that my mother was an American Negress even if I forget. —Winona From the nation’s capital, Pauline Hopkins moves to another site crucial to the nation’s mythos and to the construction of American identity : the frontier. Hopkins may have begun to form her ideas about the possibilities of the West as she wrote Hagar’s Daughter, where the West figured—albeit marginally—as a place of renewal and character building . In the West, Hagar finds the freedom to create a new identity, Zenas Bowen develops the character that made him stand out in Washington, and Jewel grows up experiencing the West as a place of wildness and freedom . Like Washington, D.C., or the colonial period that Hagar dreamed of, the West functions as a locus for one of the nation’s founding myths of the American character which, according to Frederick Jackson Turner, formed on the frontier: a romanticized hybrid of civilized and savage, exhibiting coarseness, strength, inventiveness, inquisitiveness, restlessness, and individualism. Hopkins explores—and debunks—this idyllic notion of the West in Winona, demonstrating that it is the West’s other legacy, a legacy of conquest and fraught race relations, which proves to be most formative for Winona, the novel’s heroine. Winona’s main action occurs during the 1850s in the Kansas territory, a nascent region of the nation whose status as a free or slave state had yet 96 The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins to be determined. This setting allows Hopkins to take a close look at the volatile and ultimately violent national debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, one of the important stepping stones toward the Civil War. In this struggle the analogue for the National Father, the United States, is divided against itself as it fights for more slave territory, thus further entrenching its denial of the African American “child’s” rights to national entitlement ostensibly available through identification with the Father. Like Hagar’s Daughter—and serialized in the Colored American Magazine almost immediately after that novel1 —Winona abounds with adventure, disguises, suspense, and romance. In the end, the villains get their comeuppance and the heroine gets her hero. But beneath the drama, danger, and happy ending, the novel raises questions about black women’s status in the nation and condemns the violence of the National Father. As we saw in Hagar’s Daughter, the power of the Father makes for extreme conditions of motherlessness and severely undermines the novel’s hope for maternal redemption. Unresolved until just months before the start of the Civil War, the havoc over Kansas’s statehood boded ill for the nation, and Hopkins treated it—along with Winona’s story—as a portent of the impending disaster for the nation and potential good for the African American community, so long abused by the National Father. Reserving the novel’s strongest representative of the African National Mother to the end, she lets the maternal Aunt Vinnie announce the promise of change: “somethin’s gwine happen.” Motherless in the “Unfrien’ly World” The novel begins in the wilds of Buffalo, New York, in the early 1850s with Judah and Winona, two children who live in the care of White Eagle , a man of mysterious origins. When White Eagle is murdered, Warren Maxwell, a British lawyer who has come to investigate White Eagle’s background, volunteers to take the children back to England with him after he has finished some business in the southern states. Upon his return to Buffalo to collect the children, however, he learns that they have been identified as runaway slaves and, thanks to the recently passed Fugitive Slave Law, returned to a southern plantation. Two years later, Maxwell discovers the children on a plantation where he conducts business National Warning in Winona 97 for an English client. He orchestrates their escape with help from the historical figure of John Brown and his “army.” This association plunges Judah, Winona, and Maxwell into the violent history of “Bleeding Kansas ,” the battle between the proslavery settlers from Missouri and the free state settlers, or Free Soilers, who sought to establish the new territory as a free state. Against this violent backdrop, two important plot lines develop. Maxwell and Winona discover their love for one another, and Maxwell confirms the information he had come...