Lies, Secrets, and Silences: Writing African American Women’s Biography

As far as subjects go, I chose poorly. She was dead with no known descendents. Many of the relevant records burned in the 1906 blaze that engulfed San Francisco. And although she helped to finance one of the most significant rebellions in U.S. history—John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry—few historians had ever heard of her. Some existing records, cited in footnotes, were privately owned and could not or would not be shared.¹ What could I possibly “know” about her given the sources to which I had access? What would a feminist biography of a woman accused of voodoo, inside trading, and murder look like? These questions haunted me and shaped my study of the nineteenth-century African American entrepreneur and abolitionist Mary Ellen Pleasant (1814–1904). My journey of discovery took me to expected sites: archives, public libraries, microfilm reading rooms, and the like. But I also learned about her from audience members at book signings, bed and breakfast owners, and the men and women who collected pieces of California’s African American history. I quickly discovered that the public investment in Pleasant’s past far exceeded the interest of academics. From the minute she landed in gold rush San Francisco, Pleasant created a sensation; the story goes that men in the city crowded the dock to bid top dollar for her services as a cook. To unravel her history, I encountered a different but no less determined crowd that gathered around her memory. Their interest in preserving her legacy as a feminist foremother, a voodoo queen, or a freedom fighter forced me to confront the differences between hagiography and critical feminist biography.

The history of an African American woman who amassed fortunes in the post–gold rush West is a story ripe for drama of all sorts. During her lifetime, the press had a field day writing fantastic headlines about her use of love potions and her intimate relationships with white men and women. Before the dust had settled over these highly public interracial relationships—for decades she lived with a wealthy banker and his wife posing as their maid—her history became fodder for a Broadway play in the 1920s that Hollywood remade as a “thriller” called The Cat and Canary. Pleasant was depicted as a classic mammy in blackface in the play and film, which further obscured her history as a leader of the Underground Railroad and an early civil rights activist.

Capitalism and abolitionism may, to some, make strange bedfellows. A black feminist foremother masquerading as a mammy figure also disrupts our accepted narrative of women’s history. This project required a framework that eschewed the celebratory and one that would, as Ula Taylor has observed, “disrupt those canonical discourses that have too often rendered African American women invisible.”² In this case, however, some of the discourses that rendered Pleasant invisible were the very ones celebrated by feminists. Black female abolitionists like Harriet Tubman, women who were self-sacrificing, working for the good of “the black community,” tend to be the models. Creating spaces for African American women who refused to fit this mold became central to my study. I was inspired to test the limits of feminist biography by writing about an African American woman who, as an entrepreneur, pushed at the boundaries of how we define feminist foremother and female abolitionist. Rather than “overemphasizing the recuperative and celebratory aspects of earlier women’s history,” feminist biography is now able to do just the opposite, probing the messier, less heroic aspects of women’s history and answering difficult questions about race, gender, capital, and power.³

Outside the academy I encountered those who had very different ideas about Pleasant’s history and how it should be told. Some believed that Pleasant’s successes, both entrepreneurial and abolitionist, resulted from her knowledge of voodoo. This is a conundrum: on the one hand, it is quite possible, indeed likely, that Pleasant, like many nineteenth-century Americans, held to belief systems we might now label “the occult.” It is also likely that she had knowledge...