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Reading Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “The Deliverance” (1872) invites strategies of contextualization that are not available for Sarah Piatt’s “A Child’s Party” or Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert’s Loew’s Bridge. At sixty quatrains, “The Deliverance” is the longest of the six poems in “Aunt Chloe,” a first-person narrative cycle whose overall patterns are missed if the cycle is not read as a whole. Further, Harper is today the best known of these three poets, the one whose writing is most widely available and the first one on whom a moderately substantial body of criticism has developed ,1 not only about her poetry and fiction but also about her historical role as an activist. Little has been published on the “Aunt Chloe” cycle as a whole, and much of what exists makes critical gestures characteristic of the early stages of an author’s recuperation. Framing Harper as a precursor to the modernism of the Harlem Renaissance, critics have focused on the narrator ’s colloquial speech, agreeing that it enhances Chloe’s authenticity and avoids the stereotypical restriction of expressive range that much dialect writing imposes on black characters.2 Critics who admire Harper but are put off by the didacticism of much of her poetry appreciate the “Aunt Chloe” cycle; Joan R. Sherman, for instance, notes a wit and irony uncharacteristic of Harper in these poems and praises them for being unsentimental .3 Melba Joyce Boyd, who did give a full reading of the cycle in Discarded Legacies, says of Aunt Chloe and other of Harper’s characters that they “speak fluidly and intelligently about enslavement, the Civil War, literacy , religion, and electoral politics. Speaking their own consciousness, their tongues are rounded from injustice and embellished with insightful imagery.”4 And, indeed, the sense of Chloe as a real and trustworthy witness , her storytelling enriched by folk humor and wisdom, is the cycle’s great attraction. We Women Radicals Frances Harper’s Poetics of Racial Formation 6 Yet Harper was never, as Chloe was, a slave; Chloe’s authenticity is an achievement of Harper’s literary skill. While the former slaves Harper met as she traveled in the post-emancipation South were one source for Chloe’s voice and story, another source was Harper’s resistance to the voice and story of another Chloe, Uncle Tom’s wife, a mammy figure who speaks in a thick dialect. Readers who come to “Aunt Chloe” with a fresh familiarity with Iola Leroy will be startled to see that Chloe is the prototype for Aunt Linda in Harper’s later novel. Nearly all of the narrative elements in the “Aunt Chloe” cycle reappear in the novel, but in the twenty years that separate the verses from the prose, the character has reverted to the type Stowe had created: round, nurturing, comically voluble, expert at making biscuits and fried chicken. In becoming Linda, Chloe also yielded center place in the story of the transition from slavery to freedom to Iola Leroy, a young mulatta who, ignorant of her racial mixture until she is remanded to slavery when her planter-father dies, brings to the role of racial spokesperson the benefits of breeding and education equivalent to those of an upperclass white woman. Underlying Chloe’s authenticity is a systematic theory of racial uplift that informed Harper’s post-emancipation activism—a set of ideas whose origin she embodied in a figure of folk feminism at this early stage. Twenty years later, during the period that has been described as the nadir of American race relations because of the extent of antiblack terrorism and legal repression,5 Harper no longer found folk wisdom sufficient to the task of uplift; she subordinated the voice of Chloe-Linda to debates among an educated racial elite. “The Deliverance,” the second poem in the cycle, calls attention to the grit that may corrupt the exchange of sweetness between races, whether in the domestic or the political sphere. With the end of slavery, the advocacy politics of abolitionism gives way in Harper’s cycle to stories about liberatory forces that originated within slavery and post-emancipation communities ’ own delimitations of support roles for outsiders. In the formation of individual and collective raced identities, the politics of self-help eventually draws subjects away from the public sphere into the family and home. As a model of activism, Chloe differs from the readers and mothers whom abolitionist poetics sought to convert to historical agency; slavery has...

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