Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography

Background and Beginnings

BackgroundandBeginnings S ometime in the 1870s, a young colored girl was sitting in an audience listening to the great and powerful orator Frederick Douglass . Recollecting this experience years later, she wrote: “Child as I was, I felt that I could listen to the mellow richness of those sonorous accents forever. His bearing full of simplicity, was the dignified bearing of a wealthy cosmopolitan, sure of himself and the world’s homage, master of himself, unpretentious yet brilliant as a star” (“Famous Men: Douglass” 125). Pauline E. Hopkins was in her early forties when she wrote about this childhood experience , which must have occurred on one of Frederick Douglass’s frequent speaking tours in Boston. It left an indelible mark on her. Her idolization of Douglass concentrates on his eloquence and pathos, his simple yet dignified bearing, and a display of gifts that she calls “God-like.” She pays her respect to a leading African American, who was an acknowledged figure, a “master of himself,” and an important role model.1 The second scene shows the same girl, now fifteen years of age, receiving a ten-dollar prize for an essay titled “The Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedy.” The prize was sponsored by the Congregational Publishing Society of Boston. The contest had been open to all the African American youth of the Boston high schools, and the young girl was singled out for praise among her peers, a form of recognition that foreshadowed later achievements. The prize may have been handed over by William Wells Brown, another scion of nineteenth-century African American leadership. Pauline Allen, as she was still called then, came into contact with a former escaped slave, orator, writer, and activist for abolitionism, temperance, and other social causes. What impressed the girl most, apart from his eloquence, achievements, and bearing, is written down in her later series called “Famous Men of the Negro Race,” which treats William Wells Brown in its third installment. It is Brown’s firm conviction that “we ourselves possess the elements of successful development ” (“Famous Men: Brown” 232). He also believes that “an ignorant man will trust to luck for success; an educated man will make success. God 19 20 Restlessness of the Spirit helps those who help themselves” (236). This rhetoric of self-help and the conviction that success results from willpower must have greatly impressed the fifteen-year-old girl. The pupil became a thorough reader of William Wells Brown and used and revised his writings in her own later literary career. Both encounters place the young Pauline in the cultural context of latenineteenth -century Boston that shaped her later career and the development of her thinking. At an impressionable age she had the chance to hear a famous orator and meet a famous writer. As will be shown in the pages that follow, her immediate family background provided her with the opportunities to witness these events, the Boston surroundings provided the necessary setting, and her own frame of mind conditioned her to remember these events, use them in later writings, and learn from them. Both Douglass’s and Brown’s activism, writing, and oratorical skills instilled in her self-confidence, pride in the history of African Americans and their achievements, and a desire to emulate their examples. Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was born in Maine in 1859 to a free family of color. In the January 1901 issue of the Colored American Magazine, the one-anda -half-page biographical sketch about her starts in this manner: “Pauline E. Hopkins of North Cambridge, Mass., was born in Portland, Me., but came to Boston when an infant; subsequently she was raised a Boston girl, educated in the Boston public schools, and finally graduated from the famous Girls’ High School of that city” (“Pauline Hopkins” 218). Since this sketch was either written by herself or from data that she had submitted, it is interesting to note that it emphasizes her Boston education and shows her pride as a graduate of a prestigious school. Her maternal ancestry is established in this biographical sketch with some detail: By her mother Miss Hopkins is a direct descendant of the famous Paul brothers, allblackmen,educatedabroadfortheBaptistministry,thebestknownofwhom was Thomas Paul, who founded St. Paul Baptist Church, Joy Street, Boston, Mass., the first colored church in this section of the United States. Susan Paul, a niece of these brothers, was a famous colored woman, long and intimately associated with William Lloyd Garrison in the anti-slavery movement...