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ShortStoriesinthe “ColoredAmericanMagazine” I n the nine years of its existence, the Colored American Magazine published some fifty short stories, the majority of them by women. Thirty of them have been collected by Elizabeth Ammons in Short Fiction by Black Women, 1900–1920, a collection that includes a number of stories from Crisis (from 1912 to 1920) as well.1 A closer analysis reveals a range of subjects, from dialect stories to treatments of the tragic mulatto, from brief sketches to fully developed novellas, with a concurrent panoply of characters ranging from street urchin to colored high society. There is something like a Colored American Magazine school of story writing. As literary editor up to 1904, Hopkins was in a position to encourage writers and include stories she herself chose. As a writer herself, she also influenced the subject matter of some of the stories and thus has to be seen as participating in an ongoing dialogue among African American women fiction writers. Gabler-Hover calls them “empowering tales of women” that emphasized the bonding between women (124). There were certainly younger writers who imitated her example, although the dearth of biographical material about many of them makes it impossible to pursue their careers outside the Colored American Magazine. There are definitely some trends (e.g., stories about supernatural phenomena, dialect stories, stories about miscegenation and interracial love), which speak of a school, albeit local and limited, of contributors to the Colored American Magazine. Some of the names attached to the stories are clearly pseudonyms. Hopkins published six stories as Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and one, “The Test of Manhood,” as Sarah A. Allen, her known alias. It is less obvious that M. L. [Maitland Leroy] Osborne, author of “A Wild Mountain Rose” in the first issue of the magazine, other stories, and the serial The Stress of Impulse (Aug. 1900–Jan. 1901), was probably also O. S. Borne of the story “The Doctor ’s Great Discovery” (May 1900; see also Otten 252–53 n.18). Additional 240 Short Stories 241 pseudonyms are “A. Gude Deekun” (A Good Deacon?), who published six stories/sketches between May 1901 and January 1903; and “Deesha,” who published two sketches in June and July of 1905. In many cases, there is a conspicuous absence of biographical information about the short-story writers: Anne Bethel Scales, O. S. Borne/Maitland Leroy Osborne, Charles Steward, Georgia F . Stewart, Ruth D. Todd, Kate D. Sweetser, Lelia Plummer , Frances Nordstrom, Edith Estelle Bulkley, Gertrude Dorsey Brown[e], Grace Ellsworth Tompkins, Maude K. Griffin, T. H. Malone, and Osceola Madden. In some cases, it cannot even be determined if the writer is female or male. In her collection of thirty stories by black women in the Colored American Magazine, Elizabeth Ammons identifies two of the authors who contributed several stories. Ruth D. Todd is a “black servant working in the home of George M. Cooper in Philadelphia,” and Gertrude Dorsey Brown[e] is a sales agent of the magazine in Newark, Ohio (“Introduction” 9–10). Even R. S. Elliott, in his rather comprehensive “Story of Our Magazine” of May 1901, which includes numerous biographical sketches of editors, contributors, and agents, does not identify M. L. Osborne, who had just finished his long serial A Stress of Impulse. The same article also does not mention Sarah A. Allen, whose Hagar’s Daughter had just begun and who would be identified as Hopkins only much later, or give a clue to the identity of “A. Gude Deekun.” It can be assumed that some of these writers only published a few stories, but the intriguing hypothesis remains that some of these names may have been pseudonyms. Among the short-story writers published in the Colored American Magazine, only Angelina W. Grimke (“Black Is, as Black Does,” August 1900); Gertrude Mossell (“Mizeriah Johnson: Her Arisings and Shinings,” Jan.–Feb. 1902); Fannie Barrier Williams (“After Many Days: A Christmas Story,” Dec. 1902), and Marie Louise Burgess-Ware (“Bernice, the Octoroon,” Sept.–Oct. 1903) can be easily identified today. Grimke became a famous writer in the Harlem Renaissance, and the others were well-known clubwomen. Some of the stories are grouped together through related topics, like the Christmas stories of December 1902. Hopkins’s “The Test of Manhood” and Fannie Barrier Williams’s “After Many Days” ask for a comparative reading. Some of the stories treat the theme of such spiritual phenomena as clairvoyance and mesmerism: O. S. Borne, “The Doctor...

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