Sometime 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...

While most studies of Hopkins so far have concentrated on her four novels, a few of the short stories, and the journalism, any in-depth analysis of her development as a writer is incomplete without an interpretation of her play Slaves’ Escape; or, The Underground Railroad, later renamed Peculiar Sam; or, The Underground Railroad. A look at Peculiar Sam, as the play is now commonly referred to, entails references to Hopkins’s interest in music and her background in theater, especially minstrelsy and musical drama. This text also invites general considerations of the legacy of William Wells Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe...

Her reputation as a performer and writer, a certain financial stability, and “grim determination”—as R. S. Elliott, a white man in charge of the technical management of the magazine in its early years, chose to call it (“The Story” 47)—allowed Pauline Hopkins to grasp one of the few opportunities available to her when the Colored American Magazine was founded in Boston in 1900. Elliott includes this information probably upon her request: “Pauline Hopkins has struggled to the position which she now holds in the same fashion that ALL Northern colored women have to struggle—through hardships, disappointments, and...

Hopkins published her short story “The Mystery Within Us” in the first issue of the Colored American Magazine (May 1900). In the June issue it was announced that she would be in charge of the women’s column. The September issue featured a long advertisement for her novel Contending Forces, which was forthcoming from the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company. In the next issue her short story “Talma Gordon” appeared. From then onward there was often more than one contribution by Hopkins in each issue of the magazine: usually one biographical sketch and often a short story or one chapter of her...

Hopkins’s journalistic essays at the Colored American Magazine shed light on her biography, although the references are often indirect. Her “Famous Men of the Negro Race” series, running from November 1900 to October 1901, is the best starting point for a discussion of her negotiations with one of the most influential race leaders, Booker T. Washington, and of her position as a radical African American in the Boston of her time. Similar to most women who aspired to obtain positions of prominence, Hopkins faced a power structure working against her.

In November 1900 Hopkins started her series “Famous Men of...

The black woman’s era was the age of a generation of famous race women. Between 1880 and 1920 African American intellectuals, educators, public lecturers, and artists of all branches found recognition in the club movement. Hundreds of African American women were eager to uplift the race through motivations to self-help and race pride. The rise to prominence of several leading personalities is documented in Hopkins’s essays, which provide the public awareness these women needed and deserved. It was not a homogeneous movement that united all the women involved in it; discord often predominated over agreement. Hopkins was aware of the...

Hopkins tried to stay with the Colored American Magazine for a short time after its transfer to New York. Due to ill health, incipient arthritis, and disagreement with the new editorial policies, however, she returned to Boston after a few months. Whatever the case, her health did not prevent her from writing for the Voice of the Negro. Its editorial policies under J. Max Barber were rather radical and close to the position of W.E.B. Du Bois and thus agreed more with her own preferences. In late 1904 and early 1905 Hopkins published an essay, “The New York Subway,” and...

Pauline Hopkins opens the preface to her first novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, by saying: “In giving this little romance expression in print, I am not actuated by a desire for notoriety or for profit, but to do all that I can in an humble way to raise the stigma of degradation from my race” (13). Her tone of female modesty was felt to be appropriate by many women writers of her time and concealed her outspoken and articulate voice. In calling her story a “romance,” she grounds herself firmly in a tradition,...

The engraving of the whipping scene at the beginning of Contending Forces (1900) offers an excellent opening for a discussion of Pauline Hopkins’s fiction. In addition to the contrast between the female victim and the two male torturers, there is a subtle play of colors in this black-and-white engraving. The whiteness of the woman on the floor stands out in contrast to the dark attire of the man looking down upon her, while the white shirt and trousers of the man occupied with the whip are repeated by the white color of the whipping post and the trunks of the...

In the March 1903 issue of the Colored American Magazine, when Cornelia Condict criticized Pauline Hopkins for writing about interracial love rather than intraracial love, her reproach was basically aimed at the figure of the mulatta, the beautiful light-colored woman who may pass for white and who occasionally marries a white man without letting him know of her ancestry.¹ In a country where interracial marriage was legally forbidden—in the case of Alabama even up to the election of the year 2000—the position of the mulatto was and continues to be of special and conspicuous significance. It is not...

In Hopkins’s fiction, the female protagonists correspond to the image of the beautiful heroines under duress who either must be rescued or rescue themselves through memorable deeds. The roles available to her male figures also correspond in part to accepted positions of heroes and villains, with race added to their noble or ignoble character traits. There is always an underlying argument about the validity of racial inheritance that puts black and white men at opposite ends of the scale of development. Often the test of manhood involves the position they take toward the woman of mixed blood. More than any...

Of One Blood (1902–3) is the only one of the four novels by Pauline Hopkins that features a mixed-race male character who passes for white. It is the only novel by Hopkins and one of the few African American novels of the period that combine an American with an African setting. The guiding thought of this chapter, therefore, is movement and transition in various forms. In Contending Forces, there is movement in time and space between the Bermuda of the late eighteenth and the Boston of the early twentieth centuries. Hagar’s Daughter is dominated by metaphorical transition, the passing...

In all of Hopkins’s fiction, folk characters are an integral part of the world of her heroines and heroes. Hopkins clearly tries to reconcile her own and her characters’ aspirations to middle-class respectability with a need to demonstrate race solidarity. Former slaves often form the connection between the earlier and later lives of the main characters; they are allowed humorous remarks; their life stories often speak of the thrift and expediency of their strategies for survival in a racist surrounding; their loyalty speaks of their positive moral abilities, while their evil ways usually reflect bad passions in their masters or...

In the nine years of its existence, the Colored American Magazine published some fifty short stories, the majority of them by women. Thirty of them have been collected by Elizabeth Ammons in Short Fiction by Black Women, 1900–1920, a collection that includes a number of stories from Crisis (from 1912 to 1920) as well.¹ A closer analysis reveals a range of subjects, from dialect stories to treatments of the tragic mulatto, from brief sketches to fully developed novellas, with a concurrent panoply of characters ranging from street urchin to colored high society. There is something like a Colored American...

Hopkins’s prolific years were dominated by her journalism and her own writing. She was engaged in editorial work and the day-to-day business of publishing a magazine much of the time. Some of her time, however, was always devoted to community work in the women’s club movement and public lecturing. Two speeches in 1905 and 1911, respectively, demonstrate her consistent concern with racial issues, politics, and the role of the African American woman.

There are records of six public lectures by Hopkins between March 1903 and November 1905. Two of them were for the Boston Literary and Historical Association, two for...

Hopkins made a brief comeback as editor of the Boston-based New Era Magazine in 1916, together with Walter Wallace, her former colleague at the Colored American Magazine. The magazine attempted to recreate and revitalize the goals of the former publication, with a series on “Men of Vision” and the fragment of a novel, Topsy Templeton. Hopkins also planned a column entitled “Helps for Young Artists,” which showed her continuing concern for the advancement of young artists. New Era Magazine ceased publication after two issues and received hardly any comment, not even by Du Bois, who had commented on the changes...

In her study of Boston’s black upper class, Adelaide Hill Cromwell calls the period between 1830 and about 1910 or 1915 “the period of integration” (197). This time can be divided into a “stage of protest,” which began with the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison in 1831 and lasted till the end of the Civil War. It was followed by a “stage of florescence,” during which the African American community “realized sufficient political and economic achievement to have justified the fondest hopes of Garrison, Phillips, Douglass, Hayden, Sumner, and other liberals.” It furthered the development of an upper class, which...