Meet the Black poet who helped lead the women's suffrage movement.
On a book of poetry lost only because no one was looking for it.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper is exactly why this newsletter exists. Her first book of poetry Forest Leaves was published in Maryland in the late 1840s. It launched the career of a young (20 years old!) Black woman who would become a seminal figure in women’s protest history. It is more of a pamphlet than a book, soft-covered and bound with string. Let’s start by reading this poem published in this book titled “Bible Defense of Slavery.” Please remember! It was published in the 1840s.
The rhythm of this stanza in particular (remember I know very little about poetry) has a groove to it that I absolutely love: “An infidel could do no more/ to hide his country’s guilty blot/ than spread God’s holy record o’er/ the loathesome leprous spot.”
Like most poems from the 19th century, it is metered with a clean rhyme scheme. And like many 19th century women’s poetry that we are not taught in school, it is political. It is an abolitionist poem. It is a brave poem. Also, it rules.
“Biblical Defense of Slavery” was lucky. It was republished in a 1854 collection of poetry so scholars knew it existed and tucked it into anthologies for 140 years. The poem on the opposite side was not so lucky. It was titled “To a Missionary,” and. like many of the poems in Forest Leaves, lost. Or at least, it was assumed to be lost. While researching Watkins Harper for this newsletter, I came across a blog by the scholar Johanna Ortner who wrote her thesis about Watkins Harper. She knew that Forest Leaves had been lost since its publication. It was fairly well-known in the scholarly community that it was missing. Here’s what she writes in her blog about her research published in Common-place:
To be honest, I had no clear concept of how to go about conducting archival research on a figure like Harper, who did not leave behind, as far as we know, any personal papers, other than letters and speeches, some of which were published in newspapers, such as The Christian Recorder and The National Anti-Slavery Standard.
I decided to begin with the Maryland Historical Society, which is located in Harper’s hometown of Baltimore. Having done my secondary source reading on her, I knew that Forest Leaves was deemed lost. Call it my naiveté as a young graduate student, but I figured I might as well type in the title in the society’s catalogue. Voilà, it came up, together with a collection number. Even as I stared at the number on my screen, I thought that it could not be the “real deal,” but instead was maybe a copy of the cover, or a newspaper clipping discussing the pamphlet (my naiveté knew no bounds). Fast forward to when the MDHS special collections archivist placed an envelope with the call number in front of me. I opened it up, peeked inside and wanted to let out a high-pitched squeal that I had enough sense to repress at the last second. The pamphlet slid right out of the envelope into my hands and there it was, staring me in the face.
So just to recap, the pamphlet of poems by an important 19th century activist and poet that was assumed to be lost for almost 150 years was actually just…. in the archive. All it took to find it was to go to a single archive and type the name into the search bar. This is not to diminish Dr. Ortner’s work which is fascinating and very well researched, but it is to talk some brief shit about academia. This important career beginning text was assumed to be lost for 140 years because no one bothered to go look for it. Everyone just accepted that it was missing. There are scholars out there literally digging through every single email that David Foster Wallace ever sent in the hopes of finding something no one else has seen that might tie into his work and whole books by important literary figures are just sitting in archives assumed to be lost!
And here’s the scary thing: Harper Watkins was very famous while she was alive! She grew up a free black girl in Baltimore. She was orphaned at three years old and learned to read by working for a white family’s bookstore. By the age of fourteen (14!!!!), she was writing anti-slavery and pro-abolition articles for political journals. In 1845, she became the first Black woman to publish a short story. She published almost a hundred poems and three novels. Her first novel, Iola Leroy (1892), was very popular, despite being of course slammed by white critics. Zora Neale Hurston read it. Ida B. Wells took the pen name Iola when writing about race in the south as an homage.
She gave lectures around the country, refused to give up her seat on a bus in Philadelphia 100 years before Rosa Parks, and gave a speech at the 1866 National Women’s Rights Convention demanding equality for Black women. She founded a whole organization in opposition to the racist bullshit (not supporting the 15th amendment) Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony supported. We are taught their names, but not hers.
Let’s read another poem to appreciate her. This one is from 1858 and titled “Bury Me In a Free Land”:
Bury Me in a Free Land
Make me a grave where’er you will,
In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth’s humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves.
I could not rest if around my grave
I heard the steps of a trembling slave;
His shadow above my silent tomb
Would make it a place of fearful gloom.
I could not rest if I heard the tread
Of a coffle gang to the shambles led,
And the mother’s shriek of wild despair
Rise like a curse on the trembling air.
I could not sleep if I saw the lash
Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,
And I saw her babes torn from her breast,
Like trembling doves from their parent nest.
I’d shudder and start if I heard the bay
Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,
And I heard the captive plead in vain
As they bound afresh his galling chain.
If I saw young girls from their mother’s arms
Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,
My eye would flash with a mournful flame,
My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.
I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might
Can rob no man of his dearest right;
My rest shall be calm in any grave
Where none can call his brother a slave.
I ask no monument, proud and high,
To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;
All that my yearning spirit craves,
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.
It sucks that Francis Ellen Harper Watkins’s work was lost for so long (just like it sucks that we collectively decided to forget about Our Nig, which I will write more about on Friday). But there is something exciting to me about Ortner’s discovery: at some point, someone knew that she was important enough for her work to be saved. Someone appreciated her work enough while she was alive to keep it in good condition and make sure it was preserved for more than a century. Which means (hopefully) there is still a robust, forgotten history of black women’s writing in this country just waiting out there for us to find it.
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