The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins

Coda

157 CODA I return, in conclusion, to the song lyrics that this book is built on: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child Sometimes I feel like a motherless child Sometimes I feel like a motherless child A long ways from home A long ways from home The haunting, melancholy quality of this song spoke powerfully to its intended audience of African American slaves in the antebellum period, and it has continued to speak to a broad range of listeners in the twentyfirst century. It has been recorded by such diverse artists as Paul Robeson , Louis Armstrong, Ike and Tina Turner, Van Morrison, and Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish.1 If the theme of this song has struck a chord with musicians over the years, it has similarly spoken to—and been spoken by—writers. From Frederick Douglass to Countee Cullen to Alice Walker and beyond, motherlessness and the longing for the mother have been expressed in the memoirs, poetry, and fiction of African Americans. Although Hopkins never explicitly invokes this sorrow song in her work, her novels point to the many voices that have sung the refrain, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.” Hopkins’s writings have garnered significant attention in recent years, and for good reason. Hopkins was a woman writer and recognized as the first African American woman playwright (Bernard Peterson 125). 158 The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins She belonged to the thriving Boston community of race activists. She participated in and spoke before women’s clubs and literary circles, work she felt qualified for by virtue of her early career as a singer, actress, and playwright. Her reputation in her community earned her invitations to speak at such important public events as “The Two Days of Observance of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Charles Sumner” and the “Citizens’ William Lloyd Garrison Centenary Celebration.”2 As editor of and frequent contributor to the popular Colored American Magazine from 1900 to 1904, she helped shape one of the leading voices in race politics at a crucial time in African American history. Hopkins’s political message has been the focus of most of the scholarly attention directed at her work, while the recurring theme of motherlessness has received scant attention. In this study, I have argued that motherlessness emerges in Hopkins’s novels as a coherent and consistent theme that addresses the personal but also the public and national condition of African Americans. I have focused on the long works of one author to illuminate her literary importance, but also to establish a pattern and develop a model for identifying and analyzing texts that participate in this literary tradition—which we can, at this point, call motherless child literature. In Contending Forces, Hagar’s Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood, motherlessnesstakesavarietyofforms:fromanindividualcharactermissing her or his biological mother, to a mother separated from her children and therefore from her rights and identity as a mother, to a community of slaves exhibiting the melancholy that comes from being taken from its Motherland and made virtual orphans in a country that withholds the rights of citizens, to post-emancipation African Americans whose ties to African heritage have been made the grounds for exclusion from the full rights of American citizenship. As these various forms suggest, the trope of motherlessness can speak to both the individual and the community experiences. It can describe both the personal and the political aspects of individuals’ lives. It can represent the experiences of first-generation slaves, abducted from Africa and sold into slavery, as well as the experiences of later generations born into the condition of slavery. Grounded in the sentimental tradition, the trope of motherlessness tells an emotional story, portraying the condition of melancholia and facilitating catharsis. Coda 159 Motherlessness depicts the national upheaval, family fragmentation, and civic alienation that took place first under slavery and, later, in the institutionalized racism of the post-Reconstruction era. Representing their common experiences, motherlessness draws together the African American community in the recovery of its “glorious past” and the retelling of its history. To accommodate the individual and collective levels at which the model of motherlessness functions, I have drawn on two theoretical models to inform these interconnected lines of inquiry. First, attending to the individual or personal trauma of this experience, I have looked to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, arguing that the recurring expression of...