Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West (review)

Virginia Woolf, whose periodical writing contributed to her income, is better known for her novels and her assertions about women and literature. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf recounted a fruitless search for earlier female writers and insisted that historians ought to seek out women who, she was certain, could and would write, "even in poverty and obscurity." To the list of such authors, Eric Gardner adds Jennie Carter, an African-American woman who lived and wrote in northern California during the Reconstruction era. Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West discusses Carter's identity and transcribes the letters, poems, and short narratives that Carter wrote for prominent African-American publications between 1865 and 1874. His aim is to demonstrate the importance of this alternately sentimental and forceful female contribution to the "black literary West" (xxxi). Gardner notes the significance of finding this unexpected female voice in a late-nineteenth century periodical printed in San Francisco. She represents, he argues, a direct contradiction to prevailing assumptions "that early black literature and the literature of the West cannot be synonymous" (xxviii). A lack of attention to periodical literature as a resource for literary and publishing history, Gardner indicates, resulted in the failure to recognize a distinctive, African-American, female writer whose words say much about life in a difficult time and place.

Yet Jennie Carter was no simple, self-apparent individual. A twice-married woman who wrote under the pseudonyms Semper Fidelis and Ann J. Trask, Carter's identity and her writings leave us with questions that Gardner openly states we cannot yet answer. While it can be discerned that having been born in New York, Carter moved to Nevada County, California as an adult, Gardner notes that despite the arduous, costly nature of a nineteenth-century westward journey, there is no indication of how or why Carter made this voyage. He observes that while she mentions caring for a son, her obituary denies that she ever had children. His introductory essay, too, does not contain all he knows about Carter, and readers must follow his footnotes to glean the whole of what he understands about her life and work. Carter, regardless of Gardner's scrutiny, remains something of an enigma.

Instead of a clear and full biography, what remains are a selection of her incisive accounts of the life of a middle-class, African-American woman in the American West. Gardner's book reproduces some eighty pieces that she wrote for The Elevator, noting that the intertwined problems of indexing and incomplete surviving editions of the paper suggest that she may have written more than this, as well as two didactic narratives printed in the Philadelphia Christian Recorder. Her words recount the pain produced by the experience of slavery and its enduring vestiges, the need for education reform, the merits she saw in temperance, and other contemporary issues. Political commentary was also a staple subject. At times, Carter revealed the details of domesticity, and, at others, she articulated moral precepts much as any popular writer or reformer of the time might. It is difficult to determine whether the stories she tells are drawn from her own life, from her husband's experiences, or those of her friends. The subjects she addressed, which were both political and domestic, clearly show Carter to have been abreast of current events. Occasionally, Carter provides glimpses of her own reading, mentioning how her subscriptions transcend popular magazines, and Gardner's footnotes trace her expressions to a contemporary text. Carter avowed that she revealed truth, not fiction; still, Gardner acknowledges that, despite his best efforts, the vagaries of nineteenth-century record-keeping mean he cannot always determine whether the carefully-disguised individuals in Carter's narratives correspond to particular individuals.

In matters of scholarship, Gardner works assiduously to contextualize Carter's writings by alluding to an interdisciplinary body of research in African-American history, literature, and journalism. The tenets of...