Embracing the Incomplete: Speculative Reading in The Curse of Caste, Minnie’s Sacrifice, and the Christian Recorder

This essay examines two novels serialized during the 1860s by embracing the incompleteness of their publication and recovery. This approach views incompleteness not only as a material difficulty for reading these novels but as a methodology for making sense of them. Prioritizing speculative readings that hold open possibilities rather than attempt to fill in the gaps allows us to better understand the complexities and breadth of these texts as well as the generic relations between them.

As modern readers of the nineteenth-century Black press know, archival holdings of the Christian Recorder are incomplete—as are, therefore, the novels serialized within its pages. This essay takes up the examples of two incomplete, serialized novels—Julia C. Collins’s 1865 The Curse of Caste; or, The Slave Bride and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s 1869 Minnie’s Sacrifice—to develop a speculative methodology for reading incomplete texts that allows us to better understand the complexities and breadth of mixed-race heroine fiction. Although these novels are incomplete, scholars including William L. Andrews, Mitch Kachun, Frances Smith Foster, and others have shown that The Curse of Caste and Minnie’s Sacrifice are important novels for understanding African American literary history.¹ Because they share generic similarities and a publication context—both were serialized in the Christian Recorder within just four years of one another—Harper’s and Collins’s texts are often discussed together.²

While these novels have received scholarly attention and are taught in college classrooms, their incompleteness can be an impediment to working with them. The versions of Collins’s and Harper’s texts that we have lack key narrative elements— including an ending and climax, respectively—because of the incompleteness of their serialization and subsequent archival gaps. These facts make them difficult to teach and write about in part because the missing elements matter for their generic categorization. Making sense of them requires speculative methods. Readers rely on their knowledge of larger generic patterns and tropes to fill in the gaps and to create some sense of completion. Incomplete texts create opportunities to see how readers relate individual texts to the larger literary genres with which they might associate them. But the tendency to fill in the gaps, to definitively predict what is missing, also leads to misreadings. Readers trying to render texts complete can foreclose possibilities in their attempts to pin down and predict.

The most productive readings of incomplete texts embrace their incompleteness. Being open to the incomplete allows possibilities to emerge from readings and extensions that defy quests for their ultimate completion. This kind of literary incompleteness is perhaps best understood in forms like folklore and adaptation, in which notions of a single, complete text are rejected in favor of collective rather than individual literary ownership, or the value of retaining some recognizable elements while fundamentally changing others. Readers and writers repeat and revise, adding to the always-incomplete narrative. They may improve on it, but do not necessarily claim to perfect or even finish the story. I here suggest that we sit with the openness we encounter in incomplete African American periodical fiction. Reading speculatively and remaining open to the multiplicity of textual possibilities helpfully reveals the complex generic relations between texts. Incomplete African American fiction further reflects the disruptions and disarrangements of history and power of the lives and writing of Black authors, and therefore usefully structures our readerly relationship to these texts. Incompleteness is not a flaw or a loss to be supplemented or corrected, but rather is a powerful fact of early African American literature and a methodology for reading it.

Therefore, incompleteness is not simply a descriptor of certain texts but is also a methodology for continuing to understand and to build on them. To read the incomplete is to read textual possibility and broaden our scope for understanding it, rather than to limit its possibility by definitively filling in its gaps. I here suggest that reading for the incomplete—attending to the gaps but resisting the urge to fill in what is missing—allows us to better understand these texts’ generic possibilities. Dwelling in the incompleteness of these texts’ gaps and aporia forces us also to read beyond individual novels, recognizing their multiple possibilities as also inhering in the wider body of literary work with which they find themselves in conversation, in the material context of their print publication, in their respective historical moments, and in the contemporary context in which we read, study, and interpret them.

Rather than searching for textual completion, focusing on their incompleteness allows us to hold open possibilities not only for individual texts but also for larger intertextual relationships. I take the example of mixed-race heroine fiction to illustrate what reading incomplete texts can teach us about the workings of genre. The tendency to categorize fiction featuring mixed-race protagonists according to dominant generic tropes has led to classifications of this literature that limit understandings of the genre’s possibilities. What these texts do to expand literary tropes and genre is not unique, but their incompleteness forces the discussion of key textual elements in a way that makes them particularly useful pedagogical tools for discussing the workings of genre.

I read the gaps in these novels in order to explore not only the potential of these texts themselves but also the larger constellation of texts with which we might associate them. My discussion of incomplete novels in the mid-nineteenth-century Black press continues prominent conversations in the field of early African American literary studies. Amid twentieth- and twenty-first-century textual recoveries, scholars have made sense of incompleteness at a larger scale by recognizing the canon itself as incomplete, and adopting methodologies that can make sense of texts even in light of these absences and the continually shifting terrain of the field as more texts are recovered. Foundational thinkers in the field such as Foster, Hazel Carby, and Carla Peterson have acknowledged the incomplete status of the US literary canon and considered this in their methodologies for its study, thereby making future work possible.³ Following scholars such as Peterson, Saidiya Hartman, and Derrick Spires, I here offer a method of speculative reading that makes sense of incomplete texts without desiring to fill or supplement them.⁴ As these and other scholars show, speculation does not necessarily lead to completion; it allows, however, for other possibilities that spin literary tropes and genres into broadening ideas about what these kinds of texts are and do. As Foster has shown, recognizing “the revisions and repetitions, the experiments with genre and technique” that Harper—and others, I would add—employed in their work also allows us “to reconstruct our concepts of early African American literature and literary aesthetics” (“Gender” 54). Borrowing playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’s concept of composition, “Rep & Rev,” I take up such repetitions and revisions across texts as one speculative methodology that embraces incompleteness by exploring the potentiality of texts’ possible relations to larger generic patterns.

I begin with an explanation of speculative and Rep & Rev methodologies for making sense of incomplete fiction. Nineteenth-century African American literary scholars have shown the value and necessity of speculative readings. I argue that incomplete fiction illustrates the value of speculation that holds open multiple possibilities, rather than searches for completion. I present mixed-race heroine fiction as an apt genre for dwelling in the possibilities created by incompleteness because this genre has been incompletely rendered by readings that have foreclosed rather than acknowledged the generic possibilities of such literary narratives and tropes. I turn to readings of The Curse of Caste and Minnie’s Sacrifice, then, to illustrate how speculative readings that resist the draw to render texts complete allow us to construe broader and more complex understandings of generic relations between them. Read together, these novels show us one example of how readers (in this case, readers of the Christian Recorder, in which both novels were serialized) experienced the repetition and revision of mixed-race heroine fiction. This Rep & Rev of generic tropes and narratives, and the potentiality of what they do not reveal, but also do not foreclose, demands that we expand notions of the familiar genres to which these novels have been ascribed. Attending to the gaps in these pieces lends itself to this kind of reading across texts, as nineteenth-century African American authors themselves produced speculative repetitions and revisions of generic tropes and narratives.

Mixed-Race Heroine Fiction and Incomplete Readings of Genre

Incompleteness is often described as a liability for literature. Joanna Brooks discusses the gaps in African American periodical fiction as reflecting the effects of white supremacy on the life chances of both African American writers and the archives of their writing, reading a “vulnerability to disruption and discontinuity at work in the generic shape of early African American literature” (41). Lois Brown writes similarly of the centrality of navigating incompleteness in early African American literary scholarship, wondering how we ought to “grapple with the seeming silences—these rhetorical ruptures and biographical caesuras—that all too often define the early African American canon and history?” (131). Because of these ruptures and discontinuities, early African American literary study necessitates reading in incomplete forms. Reading such ruptures and discontinuities as places of open potential rather than in a search for completion allows for readings and rereadings that extend, rather than foreclose possibilities for individual texts as well as for even seemingly familiar literary tropes and genres.

Recognizing African American literature itself as an incomplete body of work has been the approach embraced by several scholars of early African American literary studies. As P. Gabrielle Foreman and Cherene Sherrard-Johnson note, scholars of Black women’s writing “face the challenges of partial recovery and responsible speculation that are the necessary genesis of our work” (157). Incomplete texts expose the gaps in our collective knowledge, making the work of speculation apparent and exposing this methodology as necessary not only to reading individual texts but also to making sense of the field. Benjamin Fagan makes this scalar connection between incomplete texts and the state of the field, reading what he calls the “fragmented form” as “an ideal place for the study of early African American literature.” Here, we see the particular usefulness of incomplete texts for analyzing and teaching African American literature. What Fagan calls the “edges rather than fixed borders” of incomplete texts are key sites, I argue, for reading relations of genre—not by tipping texts into fixed categories, but by reading for generic relationships between texts (454).

Acknowledging the messiness and uncertainty of a text’s ragged edge or missing puzzle piece allows for imaginative readings that extend beyond narrow textual and contextual bounds, making room for us to also adapt these readings continually to the ever-shifting and exciting literary terrain that is nineteenth-century African American literature. Focusing on the “missing pieces” of incomplete texts also allows us to better consider texts in larger, complex patterns of relation than to think of these gaps as fixed borders to be definitively filled with content and thus completed. As individual texts are recovered, our assessment of these gaps shifts. Foster has shown how the recovery of Harper’s serialized fiction alone “revises our knowledge of African American literary history and offers evidence for reinterpretation of previously known texts” (Introduction xxvii). Because some serialized fiction, like Harper’s novels, are incompletely recovered, our understanding of African American literature depends on being able to read incomplete texts.

While the precarious financial circumstances of African American print at times interrupted or truncated the lives of early Black periodicals, similar economic conditions, negligence, and racism contributed to the imperfect preservation of early African American texts. These circumstances exacerbate more mundane circumstances like accidents, sickness, and death, that left texts incomplete. Recovery efforts have not left such texts by the wayside but have instead restored partial texts to later readers. Some incomplete serialized novels—like Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America (1859, 1861–62)—have become prominent in the early African American literary canon, while others—like William Wells Brown’s Miralda; or, the Beautiful Quadroon (1860–61)—still remain understudied.⁵ For readers unfamiliar with early African American literature, reading incomplete texts can be a useful gateway to conversations about the conditions of African American print culture, the problems of preservation, and the work of recovery, as well as about the larger state and continually shifting terrain of early African American literary studies. Inasmuch as reading such texts allows us to talk about historical contexts, research methodologies, and canons, it also allows us to talk about genre.

Focusing on what is missing is an attempt to resist rendering a sense of completion or closure to an incomplete story. These narrative gaps—and the knowledge that we do not have access to all that the authors intended these narratives to do— can leave readers unsatisfied and even confused. But such gaps also open up possibilities beyond the expected. Readers of literature are often taught that fiction is comprised of plots and narrative arcs that can be mapped and genres that can be identified and taxonomized. But this is not always true. Imagining what is missing

is one strategy for making sense of a text, by effectively surmising the necessary information for its legibility and categorization. But to believe that one can definitively fill in what is missing, or that these texts demand or necessitate completion, is to fall into the trap of construing genre narrowly, according to only familiar confines. At times, imagining such completion is also to wedge a text into a category it does not neatly fill. Rather than searching for completion, sitting—even uncomfortably—with the incomplete allows room for possibility, rather than closure.

Sitting uncomfortably with the incomplete does not mean, however, that we must refrain from speculation about what is missing. Peterson discusses the appropriateness of speculation for narrating the lives of nineteenth-century African American women, reading speculation as a useful methodological tool when traditional methods do not provide answers.⁶ Spires also advocates for speculation in his description of the serial sketch, writing that this form’s “eschewing of narrative closure in favor of open-ended speculation cultivated the sense that the future as well as the past were always in the making and open for critique and revision” (48). Building on such approaches, I follow scholars whose literary methodologies embrace speculation but also eschew the closure of completion and even, perhaps, a complete understanding of the past. By closely reading the gaps in incomplete texts, not longing for their completion but reveling in their open-endedness, we expand our understandings of genre and textual possibilities.

One method for textual critique and revision is what Parks describes as “Rep & Rev,” “a concept integral to the Jazz aesthetic, in which the composer or performer will write or play a musical phrase once and again and again; etc.—with each revisit the phrase is slightly revised” (8–9). Literature that eschews closure similarly invites repetition and revision, as the telling and retelling and rewriting and reworking of stories produces bodies of interconnected texts having shared generic resemblances or relations. Spires connects the serial sketch’s “air of incompletion” and “resistance to stasis suggested in the movement from installment to installment” to Bakhtin’s notion of open-ended temporal “potentiality” (50). Even more so than other serialized fiction, the incomplete novels I discuss here lay bare their own textual and generic potentiality. Incomplete (or incompletely recovered) serialized fiction compounds a text’s temporal relations to its own seriality, as movement from installment to installment becomes rather a leap into the unknown. For this reason, these incomplete texts are prime sites for discussing the potential located in their serial gaps. Such potential causes us to rethink their relations to the familiar movement of genre, as reading these novels lends itself to repetition and revision that multiplies speculative readings.

Scholars of nineteenth-century African American women’s writing have noted how reductions of Black women’s writing to a limited number of generic tropes, plots, and political orientations produce misunderstandings that have too often led to dismissals of these women’s work. Valid critiques of the overrepresentation of mixed-race protagonists (and especially light-skinned protagonists) notwithstanding, dismissals that fail to recognize these texts have overrepresented particular genres and tropes that are insufficient to explain much of this body of literature. Most prominently, mixed-race heroines of US fiction have been reduced to the “tragic mulatta” trope precisely because scholars have assumed something like completion in their examination of the genre. Disproportionate focus on antebellum iterations of this figure via texts like Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons” (1842) and “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes” (1843), Richard Hildreth’s The Slave: or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836), and William Wells Brown’s Clotel; Or the President’s Daughter (1853) have caused scholars to sometimes trace this trope into profound misreadings. When mixed-race characters are not tragic—e.g., when they do not die; when they do not lament the fact of their blackness; when they do not prioritize their relationships to white people (and particularly their sexual relationships with white men)— then such characters expose the ways that the genre has been read incompletely.

Scholars of nineteenth-century African American women’s literature, in particular, have therefore had to attend to these kinds of generic misreadings. Foreman notes that critics of African American literature—in which mixed-race characters appear prominently—often “misrepresent many of the issues,” and thereby “erase the historical, racial, and textual configurations of their subjects and ignore the very contextual framework that should inform our theorizing” (507). In her discussion of “ ‘White’ Mulatta” narratives—stories featuring mixed-race heroines who are light-skinned enough to pass for white—Foreman identifies a common misreading of this kind of fiction as a misrepresentation of genre: the tendency to read these as “passing” narratives rather than what she more accurately distinguishes as “anti-passing” narratives (508). In short, stories in which characters who can “pass” for white but refuse to do so have been conflated with stories in which characters deliberately pass. The differentiation between passing and anti-passing is essential for understanding individual texts, their authors’ political complexities, the larger landscape of African American literature, and the workings of race itself.

Readers who do recognize the complexities of mixed-race heroine fiction follow a common methodology that may seem apparent but nevertheless cannot be taken for granted: They refuse to assume that existing characterizations of mixed-race protagonists or fiction are all-encompassing. They do not regard tropes like the “tragic mulatta” or the “passing narrative” as complete accounts. They hold themselves open to readings beyond dominant tropes and genres. They read with an assumption of incomplete knowledge that leaves open even not-yet-familiar generic possibilities. Increased attention to the broad spectrum of literature featuring mixed-race heroines includes the eighteenth-century trope that Lisa Ze Winters calls the “mulatta concubine”; readings of previously understudied texts that do not neatly fit into dominant genres and tropes, such as the anonymously authored English epistolary novel The Woman of Colour (1808) and the anonymous story serialized in Freedom’s Journal, “Theresa: A Haytien Tale” (1828); discussions of Frances Harper’s 1892 novel, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted; and recent readings of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century “creole” characters. The breadth of texts available and the ever-expanding scholarship around them indicate a wider variety of literary tropes and generic possibilities for mixed-race Black figures than some scholarship has indicated.⁷

I take the example of mixed-race heroine fiction also as a case for illustrating the tricky business of reading genre across texts when important scenes and information are missing. The urge to classify a novel according to genre is not unlike popular discussions around the categorization of mixed-race Black people in nineteenth-century US literature, where readers know that characters are liable to be racialized and re-racialized. Nineteenth-century mixed-race heroine fiction shows us that racial categories are messy, less clearly defined, and more subject to complications than simple and neat categorizations allow. Generic categories are not unlike racial categories in this regard. Race and genre are both more complex than discrete taxonomies suggest. So far as either race or genre are legible, they are sometimes subtle. They can be misread, particularly by people unfamiliar with their nuances. But people are drawn to “read” both race and genre according to readily available scripts for categorization, even if such readings tend toward simplifications that flatten racial/generic categories that might otherwise be read in more expansive terms. I turn now to readings of The Curse of Caste and Minnie’s Sacrifice to show how readings that resist filling in these texts’ missing pieces allow us to better understand their relations to the complexities and multiplicities of mixed-race heroine fiction genres.

The Open Ending of The Curse of Caste

When Julia Collins died unexpectedly in November of 1865, readers of her serialized novel The Curse of Caste; or, the Slave Bride were left with an incomplete text. Literary scholars have since speculated about possible endings Collins may have intended and how these inform readings of the novel. At the heart of such questions is one of genre: what kind of mixed-race heroine story is this? And how can we tell, given the novel’s lack of an ending? The Curse of Caste’s lack of ending makes it an odd case among other mixed-race heroine fiction, but in reading the unfinished nature of Collins’s narrative itself as this text’s contribution to this genre we can better unpack its importance to that larger body of nineteenth-century African American literature. Reading Collins’s mixed-race heroine in its unfinished form is fitting for developing a greater understanding of this figure’s development. The Curse of Caste’s absent conclusion and its attending generic uncertainty also call us to rethink the workings of narrative genre as its plot unfolds without closure.

Claire Neville is the child of a mixed-race woman, Lina, and Richard Tracy, the son of white enslavers. After her mother’s death, her father having been misled to believe his child has died also, Claire is raised by a Black nurse, Juno. Thinking Richard has abandoned his child, Juno has told Claire almost nothing about her parents and Claire believes herself to be white. When Claire accepts a governess position in the Tracy household, everyone notes her family resemblance, and friends of the family work to learn the truth of her genealogy. Richard (who has been living abroad) learns that his child is alive and begins traveling to meet her while his father waits nervously, longing to reconcile with his disinherited son. Claire eagerly awaits her father’s arrival while suffering from an unnamed illness. This is where readers are left when Julia Collins herself falls ill and dies.

Collins’s novel is an excellent starting point for exploring the logistical problems of literary knowledge and our resistance to “incompleteness.” Speculation about the ending of Collins’s novel frames scholarly readings of it. Editors William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun provide in their 2006 edition two “alternate” conclusions to the unfinished novel, “The Happy Ending,” and “The Tragic Ending.” In the ending Andrews and Kachun describe as the “best-case scenario for a conventional happy ending” (“Two Alternate” 113), the Tracy family reconciles, and Claire accepts a marriage proposal from Count Sayvord, perhaps relocating to France (along with her father, who also knows the Sayvord family) and avoiding whatever contestation their interracial marriage would likely garner in the United States. The tragic ending also includes Sayvord’s proposal, but the couple’s future is disrupted when her jealous cousin Isabelle murders Claire. The ever-forgiving mixed-race child has, however, reconciled her white father to his family and convinced her grandfather to free the Black people he holds enslaved.

Andrews and Kachun’s endings are, themselves, speculative in their imaginings of what more Collins might have written and how these literary choices would inform readers’ understanding of the novel. They fulfill a completist tendency that seeks narrative closure even as literary scholars know (as Collins’s death before the publication of her novel’s conclusion illustrates) that such reading experiences are not universal. Yet these editors’ suggestion of endings is understandable. They respond to the cliffhanger with which we are left before Collins’s illness as with the completion of an unresolved chord progression. Such speculative readings seek to soothe readerly discomfort with the denied climax and denouement by providing the most basic information to enact generic classification: Claire could marry (comedy) or she could die (tragedy).

These endings also seek to situate Collins’s novel within the larger array of mixed-race heroine fiction. Here is where limiting speculation about what is not there lends itself to misreading and misclassification. Colleen O’Brien refers to The Curse of Caste as “reconstruction optimism,” calling Claire “the seed . . . for an optimal future” in which her white family members are reformed (110, 112). Leslie Lewis theorizes similarly, writing that “we might also speculate that Claire Neville’s very existence will transform members of her family of origin, including the white supremacist patriarch, Colonel Tracy” (755). Jean Lee Cole calls the novel “particularly troubling because it aligns Collins’s mixed-race heroine with her white father and the white race by marrying her off to a member of the French nobility” (732). But neither reconciliation nor marriage occurs in the extant text. Collins did not only die before she could complete her novel’s serialization, but it is also unclear whether she composed an ending at all.⁸ In the absence of the likely possibility for recovering “lost” serialized chapters of Collins’s novel, readers imagine one in order to help make sense of what we do have. I give these completist speculative readings not to call out these readers, but rather to indicate the commonality of the kind of speculation that limits textual possibilities and to present an alternative reading that resists this urge to supply this novel an “ending.”

Claire does not get well, marry, reconcile, or die. She waits, nervously. She is still waiting. Unreconciled. Unmarried. Unwell. Uncertain. Unrecovered. Rather than imagine what may have come next had Collins lived to complete her novel, I want to explore the usefulness of incompleteness, rather than completion, for relating this text to a larger body of work. The impetus for these conclusions is, of course, the difficulty of classifying the unfinished novel according to dominant generic terms for understanding mixed-race heroine fiction. Without an ending, it is impossible to read The Curse of Caste as either aligned with or departing from the “tragic mulatta” trope most prominently associated with earlier mixed-race heroine fiction or the kinds of “race and reconciliation” fiction the readings above describe. Such readings are only possible if we speculate about the novel’s completion. Read as incomplete, The Curse of Caste is neither of these things. If we speculate instead toward recognizing the possibilities it affords, we also avoid limiting how it relates to these dominant genres, leaving open the possibility of its departure from them.

Chapter thirty-one of The Curse of Caste, the novel’s final installment, is titled “Strange Events.” These events are strange because they are left unexplained and thereby unresolved. The novel leaves its characters uncertain about their futures. Richard Tracy is waiting to be reunited with his daughter. Mrs. Tracy is unwell and may be on her way to see her estranged son. Claire is happy but excited, waiting for more information. Mattie, an enslaved servant, is crying. Another enslaved woman, Rose, comments on this state of affairs, “I don’t see what the house is coming to” (111). While Claire’s murmured articulation of happiness closes this installment, African American readers of the Christian Recorder may also have paid close attention to Rose’s perspective, her uncertainty and concern about the state of things.

The uncertainty with which Rose leaves readers mirrors the uncertainty with which we are left regarding Claire’s future, whose possibilities include options beyond marriage or death. Mixed-race characters who do not marry precede Collins’s novel: Olivia Fairfield of the anonymous English novel, The Woman of Colour and Theresa in the anonymous story “Theresa: A Haytien Tale.” The first story known to have been published by an African American woman, Harper’s 1859 “The Two Offers,” is about a woman who does not marry and lives happily ever after. If we imagine possibilities beyond heteronormative romance and the entanglements of patriarchal lineages, Claire’s possibilities multiply. Given Collins’s writing about education, one may wonder about the future of Claire’s occupation as a teacher. African American women writers, especially, were able to conceive of Black women’s potential.

An enslaved Black woman who is concerned about what the “house” is coming to resonates also beyond the novel’s protagonist. Apart from the question of Claire’s marriage or reunion with her father, readers might have anticipated resolutions that involved the novel’s other African American characters. Claire is not the “slave bride” of the novel’s title. But as Collins shifted her focus from Lina to Claire, she also left us with a novel in which the majority of Black characters are rather minor—and enslaved. Collins’s shift seems a product of the shifting political landscape of 1865 during which the text was serialized. In such a landscape it is not impossible to speculate about the possible introduction of emancipation into the timeline of this historical fiction. Readers may also have anticipated reading more about Juno in the novel’s conclusion. Juno is more knowledgeable, more perceptive, than Claire. It takes little stretch of the imagination to speculate that readers of the Christian Recorder may have looked to Collins’s free Black woman character and perhaps have anticipated more about her in the story’s conclusion.

Rather than speculate about Collins’s intentions for an ending, we might also embrace this unfinished state in the historical moment of its publication. This is how readers encountered the text. It likely left them unsettled in the wake of Collins’s illness and death. I have elsewhere called this unsettling appropriate in light of the novel’s publication in 1865, in a national context of political uncertainty.⁹ African Americans were unsettled at the war’s end, and Reconstruction would fail to bring racial reconciliation just as much as Collins’s racial romance failed to bring closure to her characters. What O’Brien calls “optimism” I have more generally referred to as “uncertainty” in the text. At the end of the Civil War, many Black people held what Gilbert Anthony Williams calls an “optimism . . . tinged with caution” regarding African Americans’ social and political future (21). If Collins’s novel is in any way optimistic, it reflects this “cautious optimism,” which acknowledges the probable hurdles to equality and “freedom” that emancipation alone will not eradicate (21). In 1865, one imagines that readers of Collins’s novel in the Christian Recorder might also have been only cautiously optimistic in their speculations about the text’s ending. Like Reconstruction, The Curse of Caste is rife with unresolved endings. Lina dies before Richard’s return. Manville dies before he can make amends for (or even explain the reasons behind) his deceit. Collins dies before her novel’s serialization is complete.

Whatever Collins’s intentions for her novel’s ending may have been, she did leave readers with a discussion of reading and thinking that we might productively read alongside “Rep & Rev” methodologies for multiplying speculative readings. In a letter published in the Christian Recorder in December of 1864, Collins shared her brief thoughts on the topic, “Originality of Ideas.” She here describes readers’ intelligence and responses to reading, writing that while “communing with our thoughts, we involuntarily and unconsciously contrast and compare our ideas with the author’s, and from the chaos of the mind comes forth new and beautiful thoughts, ‘original ideas,’ gems not of another’s finding, but as the reward of this effort of self-culture” (“Originality” 127). In this quest for originality, Collins still values “our knowledge acquired from various sources,” adding that “[t]oo much singularity of opinion savors of eccentricity, and that is not a desirable attribute” (128).

Collins also believed in African American people’s knowledge and potential; in another essay, she wrote that “our people . . . are born with faculties and power, capable of almost anything” (“Mental Improvement” 121). Here, she expressed similar Rep & Rev sentiments, promoting both reading and thinking, warning against imitation, and arguing that “[w]e must combine anew the items of knowledge. We must reflect on them often and draw from them fresh influences and new truths for ourselves. It is only by such processes that we become truly intelligent” (122). In either of these discussions of reading, Collins could well be writing about either nonfiction or fiction, particularly as we consider her own probable quest for originality as a novelist. Even while building on her clear knowledge of various literary sources that her novel in some ways resembles, Collins knew that her novel was neither uninformed of past knowledge nor simply imitative, that it repeated and revised what she knew of literature. Moreover, she invited her readers to take up the practices she promoted, writing, “Let us each be a ‘unique,’ doing cheerfully, and faithfully that which is required of us, or for which we have a particular talent; and we cannot hope too much, or dare too much” (122). While many writers may attempt some similar balance of repetition and revision in their work, a genre maligned for its repetition is a key place to explore the nuances of revision. Collins’s unfinished novel provides a clear avenue for such revision by not only inviting speculation about its ending but also leaving open a door for future repetitions and revisions.

The Anticlimax of Minnie’s Sacrifice

Tracing mixed-race heroine fiction through the mid-nineteenth-century Black press, we might read Frances Harper’s 1869 Minnie’s Sacrifice as one possible revisionary “conclusion” to The Curse of Caste. This, Harper’s first known novel, was serialized in the Christian Recorder in 1869, just four years after Collins’s appeared there. In this literary context, readers of the Christian Recorder experienced the cross-textual Rep & Rev of the mixed-race heroine plot. But Minnie’s Sacrifice is admittedly less a conclusion to Collins’s novel than it is revision that remains incomplete in itself. Also incompletely recovered, Minnie’s Sacrifice presents many of the same problems as Collins’s unfinished novel, despite the fact that we do have its concluding chapter. Unrecovered issues or pages of the Christian Recorder contained five installments of Harper’s novel that contemporary readers now lack.¹⁰ Although we read a comprehensible plot and its resolution in the pages we have, these missing installments read as gaps in the text, places in which Harper must have further developed her characters and narrative beyond what readers can presently observe. As with The Curse of Caste, Minnie’s Sacrifice is a site for speculative reading, although the latter’s gaps present a subtler space for considering Harper’s nuanced Rep & Rev of generic conventions both within and beyond her first novel. Reading the longer arc of Harper’s Rep & Rev, we can also trace the larger scale of generic incompleteness to which she consciously contributes.

Minnie’s Sacrifice tells the story of Minnie and Louis, both white-presenting mixed-race children of Black enslaved mothers and white enslaver fathers. Having learned their racial genealogies, both Minnie and Louis come to identify as Black, marry, and move to the South to live in a Black community and work toward racial uplift. Toward the novel’s close, chapters including Minnie and Louis’s conversations about suffrage are interrupted by a missing, unrecovered installment at the end of chapter nineteen. In the chapter before the one that includes this final gap, Louis speaks with community members about the failed impeachment of President Andrew Johnson and the terror of the Ku Klux Klan. In the next paragraph, his sleep is “restless and disturbed” with “strange and sad forebodings” as he dreams of reaching out to clasp his wife’s hand before she disappears before his eyes (86). The following chapter is unrecovered. In the next available installment, Minnie’s body has been prepared for burial.

Despite its absence, the missing penultimate installment—like the imagined ending of The Curse of Caste—is an opening for speculative readings. Speculation about what happens to Minnie is necessary for making sense of what follows. Scholars including Carla Peterson, Jean Lee Cole, Leslie Lewis, and Barbara McCaskill have necessarily read Minnie’s Sacrifice speculatively, filling in information about the novel’s climax based on their close readings of the rest of the text, Harper’s larger body of writing, and the text’s print and historical context.¹¹ Some speculation on this missing installment, however, has focused not simply on the circumstances of Minnie’s death—a plot-point we do not need this installment to surmise—but on the content of the missing chapter. In her discussion of Minnie’s Sacrifice, O’Brien writes that “the chapter describing her death has been lost” (146). Michael Stancliff similarly refers to “the penultimate chapter of the novel in which the murder occurs” (178n10). While readers do not require this chapter to understand Minnie’s fate (we do have the concluding chapter of Harper’s novel confirming her death), speculation that the missing chapter contains Minnie’s murder affects our understandings of the novel.

The fact of Minnie’s likely murder by the Klan is essential to the plot, but it is not the entire story of what the missing beginning of the novel’s twentieth chapter may have included. Importantly, the unrecovered text may not depict the scene of or further details about Minnie’s death. In her discussion of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century lynching drama, Koritha Mitchell explains that “the genre’s foundational scripts do not represent, or even describe, the brutalized black body” (2). We do not require such a representation or description of lynching to understand that one has occurred. Discussions of lynching would become familiar to readers of the Christian Recorder well beyond Harper’s novel; readers there would likely not have required these installments to understand Minnie’s fate. If not this, what more could this installment provide for readers, and how might this climax affect our understanding of the novel?

Harper herself provides a speculative reading of her heroine’s death, imagined by the African American community who mourns her. These people do not speculate about Minnie’s murder, however, but about her arrival in heaven. Aunt Susan, whose own daughter was hung by Confederate soldiers, recalls Minnie’s comforting words, saying that “she’s got in de shining gate afore me, but I bound to meet her on de sunny banks of deliberance.” Another woman agrees that “she done gone and folder her wing in de hebenly mansion” (88). Hearing this, Minnie’s widower reasons that “if the blessings and tears of the poor and needy and the prayers of him who was ready to perish would crystalize a path to the glory-land, then Minnie’s exit from earth must have been over a bridge of light, above whose radiant arches hovering angels would delight to bend” (89; emphasis added). Such musings on death are inherently speculative, and here they follow a mode of Christian eschatology that speculates more broadly toward an unknowable future even beyond this world. Christian belief is based in the uncertainty of such speculation that cannot be proven but about which people share faith. The speculations of religious faith are readings we must consider in light of Harper’s own uses of religion and her publication context of the Christian Recorder. This speculative focus not on death but on afterlife reorients the possibilities we might afford the novel’s missing installment.

Alternately, we might also speculate that this provided a different kind of climax, not one of Klan violence but rather of Black success. Mitchell argues that “blacks understood lynching as a white response to their success” (8). Minnie’s “sacrifice” is, of course, her martyrdom, but also what Harper describes as “a life of lofty self-sacrifice and beautiful self-consecration, finished at the post of duty” (91). Perhaps Harper’s missing scenes instead depicted a glimpse at the successes of Minnie’s life. Perhaps her climax even extended that success beyond the mixed-race heroine to feature Harper’s other Black characters, members of the community who would ensure the continuation of racial justice work beyond any one person’s efforts, or capacities, or life. Melba Joyce Boyd notes that “[t]his death is not glorified in the novel for dramatic entertainment. It is unglamorous and tragic,” focusing instead on the extant chapters’ discussion of Minnie’s murder after the fact (130). This focus, leaving us not simply with Minnie but with Harper’s other Black characters continuing the shared work of their community, is a deliberate shift away from prioritizing mixed-race Black characters’ relationships with white people.

Significantly, Harper herself plainly explains her intervention in mixed-race heroine fiction in her novel’s Conclusion. She here spells out her revision of the dominant genre, writing that “While some of the authors of the present day have been weaving their stories about white men marrying beautiful quadroon girls who, in doing so were lost to us socially, I conceived of one of the same class to whom I gave a higher, holier destiny” (91). Foster notes that Minnie’s Sacrifice cannot be reduced to a simple “variation on a theme or evidence of intertextuality” but “reveals ways in which Frances Harper experimented with genre, literary technique, and theme” (Introduction xxx). Harper’s experimentation repeated and revised and also combined genres, exploring not only mixed-race heroine fiction but also the Moses story, which she would also repeat and revise in her poetry.

Most clearly, Minnie’s Sacrifice departs from the “tragic mulatta” trope as an undeniably anti-passing novel, despite its unhappy ending. Regardless of her appearance or upbringing, Minnie is Black. This fact is not so much an essentialist commentary on race and nature as it is a matter of political alignment. In a cultural landscape reduced to racial dualism, Minnie has choices, and these choices are both ethical and radical. Her decision to live among Black people and risk her own personal safety for racial justice is a matter of embracing blackness, but it is also of rejecting the position of a white, Northern woman as insufficiently equipped for the cause. Minnie’s morals are impeccable; she is a model of respectability. Yet, she is murdered. The novel further reflects Harper’s sober realism regarding the Civil War’s aftermath and the vastness of the work it left undone.

Minnie’s death is, perhaps, predictable according to generic tropes. But it is not inevitable, and Harper’s revisions significantly shift its circumstances. The needlessness of Minnie’s murder clearly defies classic notions of tragedy that attend the “tragic mulatta” trope. This tragedy could have been avoided. Moreover, it does not arise from some inherent quality of the mixed-race heroine whose life is too unbearable to continue, but is wrought by the hands of white violence. Minnie’s unnecessary death explains what Black people in 1869 likely knew about mixed-race Black people: They might either wield or reject the white supremacist logics of colorism that granted them privileges denied to darker-skinned Black people. They were not liminal figures with no place in the world or the nation; mixed-race Black people had long embraced and been embraced by Black communities. Their narratives were not vexed and unresolvable only through their deaths. Neither were they bodily “problems” for the nation to solve nor bodily salves for the nation’s racial problems. Rather, the nation’s problem, and the cause of Minnie’s death, was white supremacist violence that did not spare mixed or respectable or white-passing Black people when they posed a threat to racist power structures.

Reading her penultimate chapter speculatively, we see how speculation itself factors into Harper’s framing of the mixed-race heroine. Whether Minnie’s murder appeared there or not, Harper projects this character beyond this definitive moment in the text. Other characters and Harper’s narrator consider the longer arc of her influence within her community and for Harper’s readers. Although Minnie’s life has been unduly shortened—itself left rather incomplete—her spirit lives on in other realms. From the theological speculation of her characters to her summative moral about mixed-race Black people’s political obligations, Harper paints Minnie as a figure for speculation. Readers are meant to take the incompleteness of her death as a vehicle for the Rep & Rev work with which Harper is most interested. We must speculate about Minnie because even as her story closes, we understand not only that it could have been otherwise but also that it will be, in future iterations. Whatever details Harper may have given readers in the final unrecovered piece of this novel, the finality of our protagonist’s death is an insufficient summation of the text. We must look beyond Minnie’s death, and even beyond Harper’s heroine herself, to comprehend this novel that is not only incompletely recovered but also tentative in its concluding gestures. Minnie’s death and the novel’s close propel readers into an uncertain future for African American life and literature, as Harper seems to place not a period, but rather a semicolon here.

The jazz aesthetic provides an even better metaphor for Harper’s staging of genre. Rep & Rev does not require a semicolon but a repeat sign, although the player may improvise differently in subsequent verses. Harper’s first novel is a riff on a tune that she would repeat again, refusing to render her first version conclusive. Inasmuch as we might understand Minnie’s Sacrifice as Harper’s repetition and revision of mixed-race heroine fiction like Collins’s The Curse of Caste, the novel gives only an incomplete picture of the author’s creative vision. Harper’s 1892 novel, Iola Leroy, would provide an extended view of Black women’s racial uplift work and an extended example of Harper’s own Rep & Rev.¹² As Harper repeats and substantially revises generic tropes for mixed-race womanhood, we might understand the relationship of these two novels as her own recognition of the former’s incompleteness, despite its original serial publication that provided both climax and conclusion. In this sense, we might read even a finished novel as incomplete when understood in light of the larger generic Rep & Rev of mixed-race heroine fiction.

And yet, reductive misreadings of mixed-race heroine fiction would extend to Iola Leroy at the time of its original publication. As one early reader of Iola Leroy, Rev. J. C. Embry, wrote in the Christian Recorder, “It does seem to us this day, that the quadroon and creole girl, suffering the misfortunes and hardships incident to slavery, has become a totally worthless subject to set before the public in the name of Afro American wellbeing, or in plea of the rights and dignity attached to free citizenship” (332).¹³ The reduction of books like The Curse of Caste, Minnie’s Sacrifice, or Iola Leroy to the story of “the quadroon and creole girl, suffering the misfortunes and hardships incident to slavery” seems itself a profoundly incomplete reading of what these novels do, but its real readerly failing is that it pretends the comprehensive completeness of scope that it lacks. This misreading and its accompanying assessment of a large swath of nineteenth-century African American women writers as attending “a totally worthless subject” would continue to haunt these genres, requiring many of the scholars I cite here to contend with this history of dismissing genres and tropes that just happen to be essential to understanding Black women’s literature. The readerly mistake made by Embry and others who would dismiss this genre based on ideas of only a small subset of texts is analogous to attempts to make definitive predictions about individual incomplete texts like Minnie’s Sacrifice. In trying to pin down and predict, the reading that is uninformed but attempts clear definition forecloses the possibilities beyond its scope.

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We are still in the process of assessing the scope and scale of incompleteness in nineteenth-century African American literature. Examples of this work include developing discussions of individual incomplete texts such as Landseer’s Hearts and Homes (1865), and of a newly recovered chapter of Harper’s Sowing and Reaping. At a larger scale, it involves discussions of previously unrecovered or understudied pieces in the African American literary canon—such as Forest Leaves, Harper’s first book of poetry, or typescript manuscripts of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s periodical-published short fiction such as “His Heart’s Desire” and other ’Steenth Street stories. These scalar relations make embracing the incomplete pedagogically useful for introducing students to early African American literature. Adopting, for example, what McCaskill calls a “process-oriented” approach to recovery rather than searching for completion, students might learn to read gaps as multiplying possibilities rather than as impeding avenues for interpretation (13). Beyond framing the incomplete as a mode for teaching, we also remember that even expert scholars of early African American literature must be continual learners as we approach this body of work. Sitting (even uncomfortably) with the unknown— and employing methodologies of speculation that hold open rather than foreclose the possibilities of the incomplete—allows us to read with an approach that will benefit readers seeking to make sense of larger generic patterns within the body of early African American literary history.

Reading thusly does not require a fatalist approach to our lack of knowledge, nor does it refuse the expertise of foundational scholarship. But it does position us with a kind of readerly humility that also acknowledges the incompleteness of our own work—its unfinished nature and ongoing state. In this, we also position ourselves within the larger “Rep & Rev” of our field’s literary scholarship, noting the necessarily collaborative nature of this work that extends, even intergenerationally, beyond what any one reader can do. This approach is unsettling, as it must resist notions of academic rigor that have, historically, been tied to foundational benchmarks in academic study such as the survey or the comprehensive exam, and similar touchstones for literary scholarship, like the anthology or canon formation. Recognizing our limitations for reading gaps and erasures, the need for speculative interpretation, and the potential of longer trajectories of repetition and revision allow for an easier shift from reading individual texts to reading a larger body of early Black literature. For these, we must be willing to continue practices of repetition and revision in our interpretive methodologies for making sense of the larger, perpetually incomplete whole.

Despite their difficulties, these novels present the perfect opportunity to discuss issues of nineteenth-century seriality and the history of African American print publication, the ongoing (and thrilling) project of recovery work, and how we read and make sense of texts. More broadly, they allow us to examine the popular reception, definition, and canonization of African American literature. The incomplete is itself a feature rather than a problem, a theorization of early African American fiction. Reading this incomplete mixed-race heroine fiction allows us also to understand the incomplete moment of its publication. Even the early years of Reconstruction were not simply a definitive end to slavery but were also, significantly, a moment of profound uncertainty for Black futures. Black literature, like Black history, was built on such moments of contingency. Black lives may be precarious; Black writing may encounter obstacles preventing its completion; Black texts may not be preserved for future readers. Black people’s lives have, historically, been disrupted, and African American writers have therefore written around and through these disruptions.

Readers of this literature, too, must—as these authors and their earliest readers did—approach these texts able to embrace the possibilities they leave open rather than reducing them to a limited set of expectations. The confusion incomplete texts create allows us to have sophisticated discussions about both the creation and current state of African American literary studies and the larger project of literary sense-making. Incomplete texts teach us to navigate genres with which we are not yet (and perhaps may never be) entirely familiar. They can also teach us to better read early African American literature by demanding that we think beyond notions of a static literary canon and toward one that is—like our realization of its history— ever evolving. By embracing the incomplete, we can approach this body of literature with the knowledge that even our collective understanding of this body of literature is perpetually in flux.