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TheValuesofRaceLiterature P auline Hopkins opens the preface to her first novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, by saying: “In giving this little romance expression in print, I am not actuated by a desire for notoriety or for profit, but to do all that I can in an humble way to raise the stigma of degradation from my race” (13). Her tone of female modesty was felt to be appropriate by many women writers of her time and concealed her outspoken and articulate voice. In calling her story a “romance,” she grounds herself firmly in a tradition, and neither her undertaking nor her style is new or runs totally against the grain of literature at the turn of the century. Her goal to lift the stigma of degradation from her race serves as an apologia for this “somewhat abrupt and daring venture.” The goal, she feels, justifies the means, and her “simple, homely tale, unassumingly told, which cements the bond of brotherhood among all classes and all complexions,” will foster tolerance and promote her audience’s awareness of color relations in the North and the South. Hopkins, as this chapter sets out to demonstrate, was not alone in her undertaking. She was part of a generation of like-minded African American women writers. It is my firm belief that Hopkins was one of the guides to the footsteps of a future generation. Viewed against the background of the literary discourse of her own generation, she undertook the task of presenting the hardships, injustices, and wrongs committed against her own race. She chose to write about light-colored heroes and heroines, slavery and Reconstruction , dark-colored laundresses, maids, mothers and daughters, and white villains and their black servants, as well as about connections between Africa, Europe, and America. Her project was inclusive rather than exclusive, and many of her choices of style, genre, narrative voice, plot, and setting may be explained by grounding them firmly in their historical contexts. Hopkins’s preface to Contending Forces can best be evaluated when it is put in context with the more general African American literary discourse of her time. This discourse shows that it is the duty of the race woman to 135 136 Negotiations in Literature engage in literature, that literature has a social function to which the writer must be committed, that race literature is an American record of the past that comprises many possible perspectives.1 The texts that will be treated here in greater detail are Anna Julia Cooper’s essay “One Phase of American Literature,” which is included in her A Voice from the South; Victoria Earle Matthews’s “The Value of Race Literature,” a speech that she first gave in Boston in 1895; two essays by Mrs. N. F . Mossell (Gertrude Bustill Mossell) from her collection The Work of the Afro-American Woman, which appeared in 1894 and was reprinted in 1908; as well as George M. McClellan’s contribution to Donald Culp’s anthology Twentieth Century Negro Literature (1902). The texts demonstrate the nearly unknown and usually unacknowledged discourse going on among African American men and women of that time about the use and function of literature. They lead to a discussion of the readers of this literature and to questions of genre. For Hopkins, literature is a means of education and possesses a social and political function. Every writer must be committed to the common cause of teaching a lesson in antiracism while captivating the audience by the mere force of the tale. Hopkins is firmly convinced of the rightfulness of her mission, as she maintains in her preface: “No one will do this for us; we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history, and, as yet, unrecognized by writers of the AngloSaxon race” (14; emphasis in the original). In this sense, Hopkins’s general literary project of writing simple, homely tales with “fire and romance” in them is expanded to include pedagogical material and political content. Long political speeches follow scenes in which the plot is propelled forward, often with the help of coincidence. Although later literary critics tend to detect a stylistic incompatibility between the simple tale and its political teaching, Hopkins and her generation of writers clearly see no contradiction at all. Race literature is written by one of the race about...

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