Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
comprising the Underground Railroad. And she published poetry, rst in antislavery
newspapers, then in a collection entitled Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects
(1854). William Lloyd Garrison wrote its preface, endorsing her poetry, and the
book sold so well that Harper published an enlarged and revised edition in 1857.
She wrote consistently about the black experience in slavery, black resistance
to slavery, education, women’s rights, and the dangers of intemperance. Her poetry
is marked by its emotional intensity, lyricism, and Biblical allusions and language.
It made a strong appeal to readers and was strongly appealing to them. She also
wrote short stories, essays, and four novels. In The Anglo-African Magazine,
she published “The Two Oers” (1859), a work that many consider to be the rst
short story published by an African American. In 1872, she published Sketches of
Southern Life, in which she introduced the elderly Aunt Chloe, a free slave strong
on reading and morality, particularly Christian morality.
In 1860, she married Fenton Harper. He died four years later, leaving Harper
to care for his three children and their child Mary. Harper continued to publish
highly successful books of poetry and worked as a paid lecturer, traveling not only
in the North but also in the South. She worked with important social reformers for
equal rights for blacks and for women, including Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells
(1862–1931), and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906). She joined white-majority
organizations such as The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the American
Woman Surage Association, and the National Council for Women, to give their
causes her support while reminding these groups to support blacks.
Her last novel, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892), tells of a mulatto
woman who reunites her family after the Civil War, refuses to pass for white,
and remains true to herself and her own goals even within marriage. It speaks
of a mutually-supportive black community that communicates amongst itself in
messages of which and to which whites remain unaware. With Harriet Tubman
(d. 1913), Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954), and Wells, Harper helped found the
National Association for Colored Women in 1896.
4.25.1 “The Slave Mother”
(1854)
A TALE OF THE OHIO.
I have but four, the treasures of my soul,
They lay like doves around my heart;
I tremble lest some cruel hand
Should tear my household wreaths apart.
My baby girl, with childish glance,
Looks curious in my anxious eye,
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