Whispers of Cruel Wrongs: The Correspondence of Louisa Jacobs and Her Circle, 1879–1911 ed. by Mary Maillard (review)

Mary Maillard's book is an expertly curated collection of letters addressed to Eugenie Webb, a member of Philadelphia's long-established African American elite, following Reconstruction. Louisa Jacobs, Webb's primary correspondent, was the only daughter of Harriet Jacobs, author of the most iconic antebellum slave narrative written by a woman, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Given that affiliation, readers might expect to read lurid details of atrocities in the South or explicit condemnations of racial bias in the North, but this is not the case. Most often, the private letters' primary confessions concern anxieties surrounding the death of loved ones, imperfect health, financial insolvency, and religious questions. If anything, born out of the implicit understanding of those who actually lived and witnessed slavery's trauma, the letters appear to avoid explicit references to the peculiar institution, as in a December 1884 letter when Jacobs groans (without intentional irony): "I regret you must go back to your school so soon. Oh! Genie what slaves necessity makes of us" (123). This is one of the main revelations of Whispers of Cruel Wrongs. Even if their lives were inextricably linked to and descended from racial tragedy, some African American women led lives and wrote in genteel ways that do not easily accord with our contemporary demands for open resistance and social critique. As such, the volume is an indispensable contribution to mapping the psychic realities, language patterns, and ideological matrix of late-nineteenth-century middle-class African American women.

At the center of the book is Eugenie Webb, affectionately referred to as Genie in most missives, the recipient of all seventy-eight letters collected in the volume. Fifty-eight of those letters come from Louisa Jacobs, called Lulu by Eugenie, but another thirteen are penned by Annie Purvis, Eugenie's de facto cousin and the niece of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee leader, Robert Purvis. A sprinkling of letters come from other members of the black elite, such as Eugenie's cousin Frank J. Webb Jr. (son of the novelist Frank J. Webb, whose The Garies and Their Friends was published in London in 1857), cousins and antislavery luminaries Sarah L. Forten and Charlotte Forten, and Jacobs family benefactress, Edith Willis (the lone white correspondent). Born of mixed-race parents, Eugenie was the unacknowledged great-granddaughter of Vice President Aaron Burr. She spent her early years in Philadelphia, but by the time she and Louisa began their correspondence she was working as a schoolteacher in nearby Camden, New Jersey. Eugenie and Louisa's extensive communications resulted from a common motive in Victorian America: a need for consolation after the death of a loved one, in this case, Cordelia Webb (Delie in the letters), cousin to Eugenie and best friend of Louisa, who died in 1879 of tuberculosis.

When they began their correspondence, Louisa was forty-six years old and Eugenie was twenty-three. Consequently, many of Louisa's letters to Eugenie speak in the voice of self-conscious experience, often referring to Eugenie as "dear child" and "childie" (84, 94), although in one letter Louisa wistfully remarks, "I often wish you and Edie [Genie's sister] would get married and not have that troublesome School work again" (117). These are epistles from independent, self-sacrificing women. Among other ventures, Louisa and her mother operated a Washington, DC, boardinghouse that catered to congressmen, and Eugenie worked as a teacher in Camden, New Jersey. The letters reflect this elect status and are often characterized by smart turns of phrase. In an April 1883 letter, Lulu teases Genie: "Love to the sisters. The same to yourself with some few kisses which are quite a different thing written from given. In this case the will must go for the deed" (107).

Having already completed several scholarly editions of other antebellum North Carolinian letter writers...