A Nickel and a Prayer

FOREWORD

FOREWORD J ane Edna Hunter would be in good company were she alive in the current era of rampant African American conservatism—the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the US presidency notwithstanding . She would surely find many ideological soul-mates today. And yet, as the painstaking research of Rhondda Robinson Thomas illuminates in this vibrant edition of the autobiography A Nickel and a Prayer, Hunter was not an unequivocal, dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. She was by midlife, rather, a woman who deployed complex and sometimes contradictory strategies for the socioeconomic and political welfare of black women like her younger self: itinerant and undereducated, unprotected and unworldly, and thus vulnerable in the early twentieth-century Midwest. Hunter, emerging from impoverished origins in the rural US South, rose to the pinnacle of leadership among Cleveland’s black elite. In 1940, she chronicled that arduous journey, and the later story of her development of the Phillis Wheatley Association, in the pages of her autobiography—a narrative at once self-effacing and self-promotional. With this edition of A Nickel and a Prayer, Rhondda Robinson Thomas remembers and revitalizes Jane Edna Hunter for contemporary readers. John Ernest and I, coeditors of the series Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture, are privileged to present this meticulously researched portrait of the autobiographer. The Hunter who emerges in Thomas ’s volume is both more complex and more complicated than the carefully xi xii Foreword constructed figure Hunter herself devised. Thomas’s diligence and her skillful excavation of early twentieth-century black archives in South Carolina (where Hunter was born), Virginia (where she studied nursing), and Ohio (where she worked indefatigably for and among transient young black women) has yielded a complete study of a formidable if also confounding leader. Here, Thomas adds A Nickel and a Prayer to the growing body of African American women’s autobiography recovered and recontextualized for a new generation of readers. Until now, A Nickel and a Prayer has been neglected, but it has always been worthy of scholarly and public attention. Thomas’s expert attention to the details of its origins, its milieu, and its significance highlights its value today. Thomas situates the autobiography within several remarkably diverse scholarly contexts to demonstrate that A Nickel and a Prayer constitutes a compelling example of the irrepressible vitality of African American autobiography and of black women’s subjectivity and their insightful interpretations of their sociopolitical milieus. Representative of mid-twentieth-century African-American women’s autobiography, A Nickel and a Prayer challenges persistent myths about US black women of the pre-Civil Rights era as thoroughly oppressed and downtrodden , as lacking the internal fortitude, to say nothing of the academic background, to author a book. Hunter articulates an informed and complex black female subjectivity, and chronicles the development of her geographical , psychological, and professional movements from a poor, overworked farm girl in 1880s and 90s Pendleton, South Carolina, to the founder and general secretary of the esteemed Phillis Wheatley Association in Cleveland (begun as the Working Girls Home Association in 1911). From beginnings made miserable chiefly by the socioeconomic ramifications of her gender, color, and caste, Hunter went on to provide not only shelter and guidance but also empowering conditions for numerous women among those who flocked to US urban centers—Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and others—as part of the early twentieth-century great black migrations. A Nickel and a Prayer contributes significantly to the body of first- Foreword xiii person testimonies emerging from those twentieth-century great migrations , for it illuminates some of the southern horrors and other challenges that propelled thousands of African Americans from the South to the North, the West, and the Midwest. For individual accounts, contemporary readers can look back to highly acclaimed African American literary works about the mid-century migrations—including novels such as Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, and memoirs such as Black Boy, by Richard Wright (notably, two titles that underscore the authors’ phallocentrism), but far fewer texts document black women’s experiences of interstate/inter -regional migration. In its particular gendered complexity, A Nickel and a Prayer complicates what Joanne M. Braxton, in “Symbolic Geography and Psychic Landscapes,” has argued is a “deep and abiding” anger “inevitably” characteristic of black women’s autobiography.1 Braxton bases this claim on African American women’s experiences of multifold marginality in the United States. As one of relatively...