In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

150 6 Ghosts and Shadows A library, wrote Annie Nathan Meyer, “may be a place overflowing with dynamic energy as up and doing as a modern business office.”1 The description accords well with the story of the Woman’s Building Library, with its panoply of committees, efficient staff of industrious librarians working on deadline, and the busy tide of fairgoers flowing continually across its orderly, well-lighted expanse. The “dynamic energy” of the Board of Lady Managers (BLM) and affiliated state boards pervades the record of the library’s development, while the correspondence of “Dewey’s girls” reflects the up-to-date professionalism of their cataloging and management. Writing over half a century after the doors of the Woman’s Building closed forever, Meyer offered a second image that is equally—though not as obviously—apt: alternatively, she wrote, a library “may be a place of ghosts and shadows.”2 Meyer’s spectral imagery evokes the library as an inhospitable site, hushed and somber, a vacant repository of shrouded forms and indistinct outlines. Despite its facade of optimism, gaiety, energy, and enthusiasm, the Woman’s Building Library was also a place of omissions, gaps, silence, and obscurity. Its official narrative of limitless progress and unitary, idealized womanhood eclipses counternarratives that reflect experiences of oppression, which the fair masked through “a dream scenario” and reinforced through exclusionary policies. The Woman’s Building belonged to what Rosemarie K. Bank describes as “the ‘White City’(with full racial inflection) of a power elite, simulating for a mass audience its own sense of beauty, control, hierarchy, and self-secured success.”3 To their credit, Candace Wheeler (who “grew up in a mental atmosphere strongly tinctured with abolitionism”) and the New York Board of Women Managers created a library space in which the work of race reformers such as Stowe and Child appeared prominent.4 In addition,the room T U 151 Ghosts and Shadows made a subtle but important visual statement by incorporating artwork that honored the nation’s multiracial heritage. Yet in many respects, the contents of the library recapitulate the racial politics of the BLM in particular and the Columbian Exposition in general, where, Hazel Carby argues, the exclusion of African Americans “embodied the definitive failure of the hopes of emancipation and reconstruction and inaugurated an age that was to be dominated by ‘the problem of the color line.’”5 Indeed, the legacy of genocide, slavery, “removal” and forced assimilation, institutionalized discrimination,and cultural erasure haunts this archive in manifold ways.In this chapter we survey the Woman’s Building Library from the perspective of race, uncovering a complex response to the way individual lives as well as the nation’s history were shaped by ideologies of European supremacy and entitlement. Among the library’s fourteen hundred works of American fiction was an anonymously published novel titled Towards the Gulf: A Romance of Louisiana (1887).A few weeks after its original publication,Lafcadio Hearn,reporting for the New Orleans Times-Democrat, revealed that Towards the Gulf was the work of Mrs. Alice Morris Buckner, daughter of Colonel E.W. Morris, former sheriff of Warren County, and the widow of Captain Richard L. Buckner, a New Orleans cotton merchant and “soldier of the Confederacy.”The recent death of her husband had exacerbated a “financial crisis”that prompted Mrs.Buckner to write the novel, which was “founded on fact,” in the hope of earning money to support her five children. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, the folklorist John Q. Anderson provided additional details of Buckner’s life. “Born Mississippi Morris on Bending Willow Plantation, Madison Parish,”he writes,“Mrs. Buckner was the daughter of Mrs. Minerva Morris.” “Missie” and her sisters Virginia, Louisiana (“Lou”), and Missouri (“Zou”) were neighbors of Kate Stone, whose journal of the years 1861–1868 Anderson edited and published.6 At the time of the novel’s release Hearn praised Buckner’s novel as “a work of art,—a literary masterpiece,—a story of astonishing power and pathos;— which contains no social untruths, offends no social prejudices, and champions no hypotheses”; he called it “the most powerful story that any Southern writer, without exception, has yet produced.”7 William Dean Howells commended the novel as “intensely touching” and “pathetic,” with “an abundance of local color.”8 Notwithstanding the cachet of a largely positive notice from Howells in Harper’s Monthly, however, Buckner has been all but lost to twenty-firstcentury readers. Her erasure is not unusual: Buckner’s...

Share