“Forget Me Not”: Free Black Women and Sentimentality

Everything about friendship albums of the early nineteenth century indicates that they were exclusively for white consumers. Unique artifacts, manufacturers produced blank volumes with decorative covers—variously known as scrapbooks, friendship albums, or giftbooks—for inscription and display.¹ Emerging around 1825, these mass-produced items (ranging in price from about two to five dollars) were “placed beside the Bible and the hymnal on the center table in the parlor” (Adelson 646) to represent the gentility of the lady of the house. Album manufacturers created these token gifts of friendship for “socially conscious middle-class women,” white women who placed their albums where they might be appreciated in “places of honor on hundreds of parlor tables” (Wolf 3). Albums represent the commodification of print. Manufacturers produced these items to mimic handcraft, but with technological developments such as the steam-powered printing press, lithography, the availability of paper in rolls, and cloth binding, newer items could imitate the old integrity while appearing on the market faster than ever before. The move from stamped bindings pressed by hand with a woodcut to embossed covers, which used a steel or brass plate to engrave in one maneuver, made most friendship albums very fashionable and too expensive for most folk markets. In its signification of literacy and middle-class appetite, the friendship album as genre excluded antebellum African Americans.

Yet black women of the early nineteenth century also owned and maintained friendship albums. Items that belonged to black writers feature ornate Moroccan leather covers with intricate designs of ovals and lyres pressed into the leather. Roughly eleven-by-nine in dimension, some with more than seventy leaves of paper, these items were large, and guest contributors filled them with many mementoes. Black women’s albums bear special inclusions such as gold leaf embossing and quality paper that indicate their excellence among similar items. Free African Americans likely gifted scrapbooks to loved ones during special occasions or holiday seasons. Their friendship albums were for exhibition because owning an album of value represented one’s popular enjoyments and relative wealth among a small cadre of free black people in the early nineteenth century. Fine items such as African American friendship albums portrayed opulence and prestige, whether open or closed. On the inside, these albums reveal the promotion of “neatness, taste, and cultivated expression” (Lapsansky 22) among black writers, who used these items for pleasure and to administer lessons in literature and penmanship to younger generations of readers.² Presumably, African American women who contributed to friendship albums recognized that this genre of writing reflected their commitments to respectability, education, and social uplift. Album entries included poems about womanhood, copied floral illustrations from instructional booklets, and gifted contributions on abolition from prominent male readers. Although many black abolitionists supported free produce, refusing cotton and sugar produced by slave labor, it is unclear if this abstention pertained to their paper products.³ Decorative scrapbooks were part of a prolific black print culture that also included diaries, letters, pamphlets, petitions, and newspapers. African American friendship albums are special among these, however, because they illustrate the ways in which black women writers took up sentimental pastimes, reproducing popular print to suit their own practices of community.

Popular Sentiment

Sentimentalism, the chief vocabulary of the friendship album, excluded freeborn African American women from its derivative popular cultures. This philosophically derived literary discourse emphasized connections between affect and morality to render the feeling person as an ethical person. American sentimentality of the nineteenth century defined middle-class white women as affected, moral agents through a “double logic” of power and powerlessness, empowered by the “home” and excluded from the public (Samuels 4). This emphasis on domesticity and the suppression of public engagement inherently excluded black women; slavery and labor spoiled notions of virtue, home, and privacy for women of African descent. Instead, the black female body served constructions of white women’s sentimentality as the “Kneeling Slave” icon, bowed to plead “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” to white women abolitionists. Images of suffering black bodies were the touchstone of sentiment in transatlantic abolitionist movements...