"The Case Was Very Black Against" Her: Pauline Hopkins and the Politics of Racial Ambiguity at the Colored American Magazine

Abstract

When Pauline Hopkins's short story, "Talma Gordon," appeared in the October 1900 issue of the Colored American Magazine, it ran opposite a photograph of a young smiling African-American boy balancing an American flag across one arm with the other arm raised in a salute (Figure 1). By linking the black child and the American flag, this picture, entitled "The Young Colored American," attempts to align U.S. interests with those of the black community and reflects the magazine's aim to recover the role of African Americans in American history. The figure of the child evokes both a sense of optimism and an historical link to America's infancy. Likewise, the photograph of the "Young Colored American" echoes the revisionist themes of "Talma Gordon," a story which calls into question the hagiography of the American elite and instead celebrates the figure of a mixed-race woman who has been scorned by her white father, a scion of New England society. In this story, Hopkins reflects the Colored American Magazine's mission to "perpetuat[e] . . . a history of the negro race" and re-write the triumphal narratives of traditional American history.1 As I will argue, however, the interweaving of gender and racial politics in the narrative structure of this story both reflects and complicates the politics of the journal itself. Throughout her literary career, Pauline Hopkins (1859–1930) deliberately incorporated politics into her work and claimed a voice for African Americans, particularly African-American women. Rather than publishing in the mainstream literary journals such as Harper's and the Atlantic that dominated the American cultural scene at the turn of the twentieth century, Hopkins wrote for periodicals specifically targeted to the black community, such as the Colored American Magazine. What sets her fiction and journalism apart from that of her female contemporaries—both black and white—is her blunt depiction [End Page 52] of brutality and violence and the explicit link that she draws between violence and social, political, and racial oppression. Her work, Hazel Carby asserts, aimed to re-awaken the "political agitation and resistance of the early anti-slavery movement."2 At the same time, however, her commitment to "racial uplift" appears compromised by the prevalence of light-skinned heroines throughout her work and the consistency with which she argues for romantic reconciliation between black and white characters. This article addresses the apparent contradictions in Hopkins's work by situating her writing within the context of the Colored American Magazine, a journal that mediated between its identity as a "race magazine" and a pragmatic editorial policy of appealing to white, middle-class audiences for economic, social, and political support. Hopkins's short fiction in the Colored American Magazine has received little critical attention, in spite of the fact that stories such as "Talma Gordon" both illuminate and complicate her ideology of racial uplift, as well as the magazine's relation to its audience. I argue that Hopkins negotiates the minefield of early twentieth-century gender and racial politics by drawing on a multiply-embedded narrative structure that both distances the reader from the threat of imminent social upheaval and uncovers a stark vision of the violence suffered by black women. In "Talma Gordon," a tale revolving around racial dispossession and its accompanying potential for violence, Hopkins utilizes a story-within-a-story technique to recount the brutal murder of a white man who has turned against his own daughters after learning that their mother was part black. By creating layers of frame-tales to be stripped away by the reader, the narrative structure explicitly reveals three aspects of social history: first, the historical reality of violence against black women in the United States; second, the extent to which white, upper middle...