Iola Leroy Read online

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  IOLA LEROY

  FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER (1825–1911) was born in Baltimore to a free black mother. Orphaned as a young child, she was brought up by her uncle, William Watkins, a teacher and civil rights activist, who oversaw her education. She published her first volume of poetry, Forest Leaves (now lost), in 1845. After moving to Ohio, she became the first female teacher at the Union Seminary. Her second collection of poetry, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, was published in 1854, with an introduction by William Lloyd Garrison; the volume included the popular poems “The Slave Mother,” “Eliza Harris,” and “The Bible Defense of Slavery.” In 1854 Harper began a long and successful public speaking career, promoting abolition, temperance, and women’s education. “The Two Offers,” the first short story published by an African American, appeared in the Anglo-African in 1859. After the Civil War, Harper published a long blank-verse poem, Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869), and three novels serialized in The Christian Recorder: Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869), Sowing and Reaping: A Temperance Story (1876–77), and Trial and Triumph (1888–89). Her best-known later work includes Poems (1871), Sketches of Southern Life (1872), Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892), The Martyr of Alabama and Other Poems (1894), and Idylls of the Bible (1901). In 1896 Harper was a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women.

  HOLLIS ROBBINS is a humanities professor at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and associate research scholar at the Center for Africana Studies. She is the co-editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (W. W. Norton, 2006), as well as In Search of Hannah Crafts: Essays on “The Bondwoman’s Narrative” (Basic Books, 2003). With Paula Garrett, she co-edited The Works of William Wells Brown (Oxford University Press, 2006). She is the author of articles and book chapters on Hans Christian Andersen, Henry “Box” Brown, Maria Edgeworth, and Edith Wharton. From 2003 to 2006 she served as the director/managing editor of the Black Periodical Literature Project at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

  HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is editor in chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center. His most recent books are African American Lives, co-edited with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Oxford University Press, 2004), and The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, co-edited with Hollis Robbins (W. W. Norton, 2006). Finding Oprah’s Roots (Crown, 2007), a book and a documentary project, is a meditation on genetics, genealogy, and race. In 2006 he wrote and produced the PBS documentary African American Lives; a four-hour sequel aired in February 2008. He also wrote and produced the documentaries Wonders of the African World (2000) and America Beyond the Color Line (2004) for the BBC and PBS, and authored the companion volumes to both series. He is the general editor for a Penguin Classics series of African American classics, including The Portable Charles W. Chesnutt, edited with an introduction by William L. Andrews, and God’s Trombones, by James Weldon Johnson with a foreword by Maya Angelou.

  FRANCES ELLEN

  WATKINS HARPER

  Iola Leroy,

  or

  Shadows Uplifted

  Edited with an Introduction by

  HOLLIS ROBBINS

  General Editor

  HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published in the United States of America by Garrigues Brothers 1892

  This edition with an introduction by Hollis Robbins and a general introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,

  published in Penguin Books 2010

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Introduction copyright © Hollis Robbins, 2010

  General introduction copyright © Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 2008

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 1825–1911.

  Iola Leroy, or Shadows uplifted / Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; edited with an Introduction by

  Hollis Robbins; general editor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65594-8

  1. Racially mixed people—Fiction. 2. Slaves—Fiction. 3. Free African Americans—Fiction. 4. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—African Americans—Fiction. 5. African Americans—

  Social conditions—19th century—Fiction. I. Robbins, Hollis, 1963– II. Gates, Henry Louis.

  III. Title. IV. Title: Shadows uplifted.

  PS1799.H7I6 2010

  813’.3—dc22 2009035095

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Adobe Sabon

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  To my daughter

  Mary E. Harper,

  this book is lovingly dedicated.

  Contents

  What Is an African American Classic? by HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

  Introduction by HOLLIS ROBBINS

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  A Note on the Text

  IOLA LEROY

  Introduction by WILLIAM STILL

  CHAPTER I. Mystery of Market

  Speech and Prayer-Meeting

  CHAPTER II. Contraband of War

  CHAPTER III. Uncle Daniel’s Story

  CHAPTER IV. Arrival of the Union Army

  CHAPTER V. The Release of Iola Leroy

  CHAPTER VI. Robert Johnson’s

  Promotion and Religion

  CHAPTER VII. Tom Anderson’s Death

  CHAPTER VIII. The Mystified Doctor

  CHAPTER IX. Eugene Leroy and

  Alfred Lorraine

  CHAPTER X. Shadows in the Home

  CHAPTER XI. The Plague and the Law

  CHAPTER XII. School-Girl Notions

 
CHAPTER XIII. A Rejected Suitor

  CHAPTER XIV. Harry Leroy

  CHAPTER XV. Robert and His Company

  CHAPTER XVI. After the Battle

  CHAPTER XVII. Flames in the School-Room

  CHAPTER XVIII. Searching for Lost Ones

  CHAPTER XIX. Striking Contrasts

  CHAPTER XX. A Revelation

  CHAPTER XXI. A Home for Mother

  CHAPTER XXII. Further Lifting of the Veil

  CHAPTER XXIII. Delightful Reunions

  CHAPTER XXIV. Northern Experience

  CHAPTER XXV. An Old Friend

  CHAPTER XXVI. Open Questions

  CHAPTER XXVII. Diverging Paths

  CHAPTER XXVIII. Dr. Latrobe’s Mistake

  CHAPTER XXIX. Visitors from the South

  CHAPTER XXX. Friends in Council

  CHAPTER XXXI. Dawning Affections

  CHAPTER XXXII. Wooing and Wedding

  CHAPTER XXXIII. Conclusion

  Note

  What Is an

  African American Classic?

  I have long nurtured a deep and abiding affection for the Penguin Classics, at least since I was an undergraduate at Yale. I used to imagine that my attraction for these books—grouped together, as a set, in some independent bookstores when I was a student, and perhaps even in some today—stemmed from the fact that my first-grade classmates, for some reason that I can’t recall, were required to dress as penguins in our annual all-school pageant, and perform a collective side-to-side motion that our misguided teacher thought she could choreograph into something meant to pass for a “dance.” Piedmont, West Virginia, in 1956, was a very long way from Penguin Nation, wherever that was supposed to be! But penguins we were determined to be, and we did our level best to avoid wounding each other with our orange-colored cardboard beaks while stomping out of rhythm in our matching orange, veined webbed feet. The whole scene was madness, one never to be repeated at the Davis Free School. But I never stopped loving penguins. And I have never stopped loving the very audacity of the idea of the Penguin Classics, an affordable, accessible library of the most important and compelling texts in the history of civilization, their black-and-white spines and covers and uniform type giving each text a comfortable, familiar feel, as if we have encountered it, or its cousins, before. I think of the Penguin Classics as the very best and most compelling in human thought, an Alexandrian library in paperback, enclosed in black and white.

  I still gravitate to the Penguin Classics when killing time in an airport bookstore, deferring the slow torture of the security lines. Sometimes I even purchase two or three, fantasizing that I can speed-read one of the shorter titles, then make a dent in the longer one, vainly attempting to fill the holes in the liberal arts education that our degrees suggest we have, over the course of a plane ride! Mark Twain once quipped that a classic is “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read,” and perhaps that applies to my airport purchasing habits. For my generation, these titles in the Penguin Classics form the canon—the canon of the texts that a truly well-educated person should have read, and read carefully and closely, at least once. For years I rued the absence of texts by black authors in this series, and longed to be able to make even a small contribution to the diversification of this astonishingly universal list. I watched with great pleasure as titles by African American and African authors began to appear, some two dozen over the past several years. So when Elda Rotor approached me about editing a series of African American classics and collections for Penguin’s Portable Series, I eagerly accepted.

  Thinking about the titles appropriate for inclusion in these series led me, inevitably, to think about what, for me, constitutes a “classic.” And thinking about this led me, in turn, to the wealth of reflections on what defines a work of literature or philosophy somehow speaking to the human condition beyond time and place, a work somehow endlessly compelling, generation upon generation, a work whose author we don’t have to look like to identify with, to feel at one with, as we find ourselves transported through the magic of a textual time machine; a work that refracts the image of ourselves that we project onto it, regardless of our ethnicity, our gender, our time, our place. This is what centuries of scholars and writers have meant when they use the word “classic,” and—despite all that we know about the complex intersubjectivity of the production of meaning in the wondrous exchange between a reader and a text—it remains true that classic texts, even in the most conventional, conservative sense of the word “classic,” do exist, and these books will continue to be read long after the generation the text reflects and defines, the generation of readers contemporary with the text’s author, is dead and gone. Classic texts speak from their authors’ graves, in their names, in their voices. As Italo Calvino once remarked, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

  Faulkner put this idea in an interesting way: “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means, and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” That, I am certain, must be the desire of every writer. But what about the reader? What makes a book a classic to a reader? Here, perhaps, Hemingway said it best: “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you, and afterwards it belongs to you, the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.”

  I have been reading black literature since I was fifteen, yanked into that dark discursive universe by an Episcopal priest at a church camp near my home in West Virginia in August of 1965, during the terrifying days of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles. Eventually, by fits and starts, studying the literature written by black authors became my avocation; ultimately, it has become my vocation. And, in my own way, I have tried to be an evangelist for it, to a readership larger than my own people, people who, as it were, look like these texts. Here, I am reminded of something W. S. Merwin said about the books he most loved: “Perhaps a classic is a work that one imagines should be common knowledge, but more and more often isn’t.” I would say, of African and African American literature, that perhaps classic works by black writers are works that one imagines should be common knowledge among the broadest possible readership but that less and less are, as the teaching of reading to understand how words can create the worlds into which books can transport us yields to classroom instruction geared toward passing a state-authorized, standardized exam. All literary texts suffer from this wrongheaded approach to teaching, mind you; but it especially affects texts by people of color, and texts by women—texts still struggling, despite enor-mous gains over the last twenty years, to gain a solid foothold in anthologies and syllabi. For every anthology, every syllabus, every publishing series such as the Penguin Classics constitutes a distinct “canon,” an implicit definition of all that is essential for a truly educated person to read.

  James Baldwin, who has pride of place in my personal canon of African American authors since it was one of his books that that Episcopal priest gave me to read in that dreadful summer of 1965, argued that “the responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.” But surely Baldwin would have agreed with E. M. Forster that the books that we remember, the books that have truly influenced us, are those that “have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet ourselves.” Excavating the known is a worthy goal of the writer as cultural archaeologist; yet, at the same time, so is unveiling the unknown, the unarticulated yet shared experience of the colorless things that make us human: “something we have always known (or thought we knew),” as Calvino puts it, “but without knowing that this author said it first.” We might think of the difference between Forster and Baldwin, on the one hand, and Calvino, on the other, as the difference between an author representing what has happened (Forster, Baldwin) in the history of a peo
ple whose stories, whose very history itself, has long been suppressed, and what could have happened (Calvino) in the atemporal realm of art. This is an important distinction when thinking about the nature of an African American classic—rather, when thinking about the nature of the texts that comprise the African American literary tradition or, for that matter, the texts in any underread tradition.

  One of James Baldwin’s most memorable essays, a subtle meditation on sexual preference, race, and gender, is entitled “Here Be Dragons.” So much of traditional African American literature, even fiction and poetry—ostensibly at least once removed from direct statement—was meant to deal a fatal blow to the dragon of racism. For black writers since the eighteenth-century beginnings of the tradition, literature has been one more weapon—a very important weapon, mind you, but still one weapon among many—in the arsenal black people have drawn upon to fight against antiblack racism and for their equal rights before the law. Ted Joans, the black surrealist poet, called this sort of literature from the sixties’ Black Arts movement “hand grenade poems.” Of what possible use are the niceties of figuration when one must slay a dragon? I can hear you say, give me the blunt weapon anytime! Problem is, it is more difficult than some writers seem to think to slay a dragon with a poem or a novel. Social problems persist; literature too tied to addressing those social problems tends to enter the historical archives, leaving the realm of the literary. Let me state bluntly what should be obvious: writers are read for how they write, not what they write about.

  Frederick Douglass—for this generation of readers one of the most widely read writers—reflected on this matter even in the midst of one of his most fiery speeches addressing the ironies of the sons and daughters of slaves celebrating the Fourth of July while slavery continued unabated. In his now-classic essay “What Is to the Slave the Fourth of July” (1852), Douglass argued that an immediate, almost transparent form of discourse was demanded of black writers by the heated temper of the times, a discourse with an immediate end in mind: “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed…. a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” Above all else, Douglass concludes, the rhetoric of the literature created by African Americans must, of necessity, be a purposeful rhetoric, its ends targeted at attacking the evils that afflict black people: “The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.” And perhaps this was so; nevertheless, we read Douglass’s writings today in literature classes not so much for their content but to understand, and marvel at, his sublime mastery of words, words—to paraphrase Calvino—that never finish saying what it is they have to say, not because of their “message,” but because of the language in which that message is inextricably enfolded.