Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends Read online

  BELOVED SISTERS AND

  LOVING FRIENDS

  Civil War Letters from

  Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland,

  and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut,

  1854—1868, Historical African-American Memoirs

  edited by

  Farah Jasmine Griffin

  Table of Contents

  Begin Reading

  Connecticut ● New York ● Colorado

  Table of Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE & PREFACE

  Copyright Notices

  Other Books by Farah Jasmin Griffen

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Introduction - “Beyond the Silence”

  PART ONE - The Early Years

  Chapter One - “I’ve Lost a Day” (1854-1856)

  Chapter Two - “If you was a man…” (1859-1860)

  PART TWO - The Civil War Years

  Chapter Three - “Like meat to a hungre wolfe” (New York, 1861)

  Chapter Four - “Call you my sister” (1862-1864)

  PART THREE - The Reconstruction Years

  Chapter Five - “There is great excitement about putting money in the bank” (1865)

  Chapter Six - “Justice, impartial justice…” (Winter/Spring 1866)

  Chapter Seven - “I am pleased to hear of the success of those freedmen” (Summer/Fall 1866)

  Chapter Eight - “We must have a school house” (1867)

  Chapter Nine - “The people are quite cheered up & hopeful once more.” (1868)

  Chapter Ten - “And all nature is coming forth and clothing herself in beauty and fragrance.” (1869)

  Afterword

  Appendix

  Rebecca Primus in Later Life (David O. White)

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Copyright Notices

  FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN

  BELOVED SISTERS AND

  LOVING FRIENDS

  Civil War Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland,

  and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854—1868,

  Historical African-American Memoirs

  Copyright © 1999, 2014 by Farah Jasmine Griffin

  Int’l ISBN: 978-1-62071-096-8

  ISBN: 1-62071-099-4

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic means is forbidden unless written permission has been received from the publisher

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Singing Horse Press for permission to reprint an excerpt from Muse and Drudge by Harryette Mullen, copyright © 1995 by Singing Horse Press. Reprinted by permission of Singing Horse Press.

  Primus, Rebecca, 1836—1932.

  Beloved sisters and loving friends: Letters from Rebecca

  Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of

  Hartford, Connecticut, 1854 1868. / edited by

  Farah Jasmine Griffin.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-679-45128-5 1.

  1. Primus, Rebecca, 1836-1932—Correspondence.

  2. Brown, Addie—Correspondence.

  3. Afro-American women—Maryland—Royal Oak—Correspondence.

  4. Afro-American women—Connecticut Hartford—Correspondence.

  5. Afro-American women—History—19th century.

  6. Reconstruction—Maryland. 7. Royal Oak (Md.)—Biography.

  8. Hartford (Conn.)—Biography.

  1. Brown, Addie. II. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. III. Title.

  F189.R69P75 1999

  975.232—dc21 98-52930

  CIP

  For information address:

  Author & Company, LLC

  P.O. Box 291

  Cheshire, CT 06410-9998

  This eBook was designed by iLN™

  and manufactured in the United States of America.

  Other Books by

  FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN

  Harlem Nocturne:

  Women Artists & Progressive Politics During World War II

  Clawing at the Limits of Cool:

  Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (co-author)

  Who Set You Flowin’?:

  The African-American Migration Narrative

  Uptown Conversation:

  The New Jazz Studies (co-editor)

  If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery:

  In Search of Billie Holiday

  A Stranger in the Village:

  Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing (co-editor)

  Farah Jasmine Griffin is a professor of English and comparative literature and African-American Studies at Columbia University. She received her B.A. degree from Harvard and Ph.D. from Yale. Farah’s major fields of interest are American and African-American literature, music, history and politics. You can learn more about her books, articles, theatrical work and media appearances at:

  http://www.columbia.edu/cu/iraas/griffin.html

  Dedication

  For my own beloved sister-friends:

  Shaun D. Biggers

  Cheryl L. Dorsey

  Lynelle C. Granady

  Nina T. Henderson

  Karen F. O’Neal

  and

  in memory of

  Nathan Irving Huggins

  and

  A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS project has been supported and nurtured by many wonderful and generous people. David White of the Connecticut Historical Commission shared much of his early research on the Primus papers and was always there to answer a question, send a photograph, and offer encouragement. Through numerous conversations and an ongoing correspondence, Barbara Beeching shared my enthusiasm for Addie and Rebecca. Most important, Karen Hansen introduced me to the letters and was always willing to discuss the difficulties of editing and interpreting them.

  In addition, my students Jennifer Furman, Ericka Armstrong, Asia Slowe, Nicole Childers, and Michelle Wayne proved to be invaluable research assistants and typists. Of these, Ms. Wayne was a wonderful interpreter of the letters and devoted far more time and attention to them than I can ever thank her for. Ms. Valerie Savage-Pugh of the University of Pennsylvania English Department was a tireless and enthusiastic transcriber of the lengthy epistles. Maurice Black proofread the entire manuscript. I owe them all my gratitude.

  Frances Smith Foster, Drew Gilpin Faust, and Stephanie Shaw all provided invaluable criticism and suggestions for revision. Carla Peterson, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Barbara Savage, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham were extraordinary supporters of this project from the start. Barbara Sicherman and Saidiya Hartman read early drafts and offered important advice. Professor Sicherman was especially generous with her time and ideas.

  In Talbot County, Maryland, Mr. Lord Scott, owner of Scottie’s Taxi, Ms. Harriet Romero, and Ms. Scottie Oliver, curator of the Maryland Room, Talbot County Public Library, offered their assistance in helping me to learn about the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Scottie’s hospitality, guidance, and friendship are gifts from heaven.

  I am especially grateful to research fellowships from the University of Pennsylvania and summer stipends from the Women’s Studies Program and the Lindback Society of the university. The angelic staff of the Bunting Institute in Cambridge gave me the space and resources to spend the first part of my fellowship year adding the final touches. Without this assistance I would never have been able to complete this project.

  Members of the staffs of the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford, the Library Company in Philadelphia, Van Pelt Library at the University of Penns
ylvania, and Widener Library at Harvard University helped to facilitate my research.

  My agent, Loretta Barrett, recognized the importance of this project from the very beginning, and she always offered her advice and support with enthusiasm and kindness. Vicky Wilson, my editor at Knopf, suffered countless changed deadlines and revised versions of this manuscript. For this I am grateful.

  My mother, Wilhelmena Griffin, and my cousin Irvin Carson, Sr., loved to hear stories of Addie and Rebecca and helped to convince me that these letters had to be made available to readers outside the academy. Four gifted healers, Laurene Finley, Karen Jordan, Joyce Rubin, and Zulene, cared for me, mind and body, throughout. Jim and Edjohnetta Miller and their children, Ayesha and John, offered their home to me during my frequent research trips to Hartford. They also fed me, shared information, and helped to lift my spirits on a daily basis. Edjohnetta joins women like Alice Brown, Julia Turner Lowe, Vanessa Harley, Imani Perry, and my biological sister, Myra Griffin Lindsay, all of whom provide me with the crucial space of sister friendship. None have so lovingly and patiently offered this space more than the five women to whom this volume is dedicated. Nathan Huggins first introduced me to the formal study of African American history; in so doing, he changed the direction of my life. I am forever indebted to my godfather, mentor, and friend, Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. And finally, a special thank-you to Lisa Y. Sullivan.

  All of these individuals and institutions assisted in the enterprise that culminates in this volume—a testament to our love, respect, and admiration for those extraordinary ordinary women, Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown.

  Preface

  I DID not discover Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown. I was introduced to them by Professor Karen Hansen of Brandeis University. I came to know them through various encounters with their letters as well as through conversations with and the writings of persons like Professor Hansen, David White, director of the Hartford Historical Commission, and Barbara Beeching, a graduate student in history at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, who wrote an important master’s thesis on the Primus family.

  I knew that women like Brown and Primus existed before I ever met them. As a young college student interested in nineteenth-century black women’s history, I grew frustrated with the dearth of sources on even the most famous of the women. In the early to mid 1980s, when I was working on my college honors thesis on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, I recognized the problems confronted by scholars of black women’s history. It is not that the women weren’t there, as older generations of scholars had told us. No, it was that no one had made the effort to find them. At that time, Dorothy Sterling published her tremendous volume of primary sources on nineteenth-century black women, We Are Your Sisters. Sterling’s book was the first I encountered that confirmed what I thought I had discovered: that Frances Harper the poet and novelist was the same woman as Frances Harper the abolitionist, temperance advocate, and black freedom fighter.

  Since then, thanks to the efforts of scholars such as Frances Foster, Melba Joyce Boyd, and Hazel Carby and the methodologies of black women’s history, we have come to know a great deal about Frances Harper. We now have a biography, an edited volume of her letters, poems, and speeches, several editions of her novel Lola Leroy, her magazine novels, and numerous chapters detailing her activism and analyzing her literature.

  In their writings, these pioneering scholars pushed me to look for the records of black women in attics, in storerooms, in churches. In 1982, Gloria Hull, Barbara Smith, and Patricia Bell Scott emphasized the importance of finding the lesser-known black women. Their ground breaking anthology, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, urged: “Only through explaining the experience of supposedly ‘ordinary’ Black women whose ‘unexceptional’ actions enabled us and the race to survive will we be able to begin to develop an overview and an analytical framework for understanding the lives of Afro-American women.

  These brilliant and brave historians—most but not all of whom were African American—at times risked their careers to discover the ordinary women. I like to think of them as visionaries who knew, without ever seeing the evidence, the contours of Rebecca Primus’s and Addie Brown’s persons and lives.

  Almost four years after finishing the college thesis on Harper, I moved to Hartford to begin teaching at Trinity College and to finish my dissertation. I continued to keep up with recent scholarship in women’s history, but I had chosen to do my dissertation on twentieth-century subject matter. Just as I was finishing the dissertation, I got a call from Karen Hansen, a historical sociologist at Brandeis. Professor Hansen came across Rebecca’s and Addie’s letters while she was doing research for her book A Very Social Time. A portion of that book was devoted to the two women, and she planned to publish an article on the romantic and erotic nature of their friendship. After studying the letters, Hansen became convinced that they ought to be transcribed, edited, and published in their own volume. She began to ask around to see who might be able to do this work. She was given my name by Professor Frances Foster, a well-known scholar of nineteenth-century black women and of Frances Harper. She was also given my name by my beloved colleague at Trinity, Ron Thomas. After meeting Professor Hansen, I immediately went down to the Connecticut Historical Society and began to read the letters.

  So you see, my introduction to Rebecca and Addie came through the generosity of others, and in fact, the rest of the story is not only about Rebecca and Addie but also about the community of a small but dedicated group of scholars who have been committed to bringing Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown to the attention of a broader reading public.

  In editing this volume I have tried to remain true to the integrity of each woman’s voice. I attempt to provide a historical context for the letters. The introductory sections, along with the notes, help to provide necessary background information. At times I provide running commentary between individual letters.

  For the most part, original spellings and capitalizations have been retained. I have supplied some punctuation in Addie’s letters because she often wrote an entire page without placing a period. Many of the more repetitive sections of the correspondence have been cut. Brown’s letters are especially difficult to read. My research assistant, Michelle Wayne, and I have made every effort to transcribe them faithfully. On rare occasions uncertainties remained. I indicate such cuts with ellipses inside brackets. Personal names and places are identified upon first mention, either in the introductory paragraph preceding the letter or in footnotes. Historical events, public figures, books, and periodicals are also explained in the notes.

  Introduction

  “Beyond the Silence”1

  SILENCES. Loopholes. Interstices. Allegory. Dissemblance. Politics of respectability.

  These are but a few of the terms that black women scholars use to help make sense of the silence that surrounds black women’s lives and experiences.2 Such terms refer not only to black women’s literal silence around issues of personal importance to them but also to gaps in the broader historical record of the American experience.

  Given the historical and political contexts in which African American women have lived, and given their own desire to shape and influence these contexts for the benefit of all Americans, it is understandable that they often felt it necessary to present highly censored “positive” images to an often hostile public. Thus many have kept the most personal aspects of their lives as well as the full range of their thoughts secret. Furthermore, until very recently, scholars did not think it important to search for evidence of black women’s lives and activities. Fortunately, since the civil rights, black power, and feminist movements, a growing number of people have devoted themselves to pursuing and revealing the complex history of black women.

  For years, we have been led to believe that ordinary black women left no evidence of their historical existence. We were told that they did not keep diaries or journals and that they did not write letters. However
, black women historians, committed to writing black women into American history, suggested otherwise.3

  For over sixty years, Rebecca Primus’s papers have been housed in the Connecticut Historical Society.4 Primus, the daughter of a prominent black Hartford family, was one of many women, black and white, who traveled south after the Civil War to establish schools and teach the newly freed men and women. The Hartford Freedmen’s Aid Society sent Rebecca Primus to Royal Oak, Maryland, where she helped to found a school later named in honor of her, the Primus Institute. The sixty existing letters from Primus to her family provide a rare glimpse into the life and thoughts of a nineteenth-century New England black woman. Primus’s letters reveal her confrontations with southern prejudice, her struggles to educate the newly freed blacks, her descriptions of Reconstruction-era politics, as well as her joy in being surrounded by more African Americans than she had seen in all of Hartford. Filled with compassion, humor, and courage, the letters also tell of Primus’s growing political and racial consciousness.

  In addition to Primus’s letters to her family, the collection houses approximately one hundred fifty letters from Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus. Brown was a domestic servant who lived in the households of her various employers in Hartford, Farmington, and Waterbury, Connecticut, and in New York. Her letters cover the period from 1859 to 1868. Because she was not formally educated, Addie writes as she would speak. Throughout the course of the correspondence she acquires greater literacy. Her letters tell a story of a bright, intelligent, and personable young woman who struggles to make a living under very precarious economic circumstances. Brown’s letters paint a portrait of the lives of northern blacks in New England and New York. Finally, Brown’s letters reveal a close romantic friendship between the two women.

  Together, the letters of Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown tell us a great deal about nineteenth-century black Hartford, Reconstruction in Maryland, and the personal and public lives of two black women. Unfortunately, I have been unsuccessful in my attempts to locate Rebecca Primus’s letters to Addie Brown. Therefore, we are left to surmise Primus’s responses to Brown.