“Kno’ You’re Wally”: Reinventing Slavery, Family, and Nation in Pauline Hopkins’sPeculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad

Abstract

Pauline Hopkins’s Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad (1879) is a musical drama about a fugitive family transitioning from bondage to freedom. In her first theatrical piece produced, an ambitious Hopkins appropriates multiple performative and literary traditions – concertized spirituals, blackface minstrelsy, melodrama, the anti-slavery novel, slave narratives, and so-called Lost Cause literature – to reimagine enslavement experience. This essay examines how a young artist–activist blends and balances competing artistic forms while also pursuing the personal and national politics of gendered and generational transformations. On a personal level, Hopkins’s drama explores how a male fugitive discovers his value within family, how female fugitives reconsider popular archetypes like “Mammy” and “Topsy,” and how “new” citizens articulate individual conceptions of national belonging. Writing during the “radical” phase of US Reconstruction, Hopkins also interjects her fugitive family into national debates on how to memorialize the past, reconcile in the present, and reconstitute for the future.