One of the most interesting and frequently overlooked features of Frances E.W. Harper's 1892 novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted is its dual climaxes. The first climax is the rural church meeting in Chapter XX that brings together Iola, Robert, and their mother/grandmother Harriet in a culmination of the family reunification plot that drives the novel. The second climax, Chapter XXX's conversazione, marks the apex of Iola's rise from abject slave to race leader and announces the establishment of a vital African-American bourgeois intellectualism. These climaxes offer significant contrasts. The church meeting takes place in a Southern rural setting; the conversazione is a Northern, urban event. The church meeting features primarily dark-skinned exslaves; the conversazione is dominated by light-skinned, educated blacks. The church meeting's tones are of profound sadness and joyful exuberance; the conversazione's atmosphere is marked by deep seriousness and the rhetoric of self-improvement. For all their diff erences, however, the two scenes share an essential and persistent orality. They consist almost wholly of verbal performances and exchanges, thus functioning as fitting climactic moments for a novel dominated by dialogue, discussion, and debate. The various voices and rhetorical strategies that circulate through these climactic moments--and through Iola Leroy as a whole--reveal much about the often conflicting and conflicted purposes of an African-American author who attempted, like many of her contemporaries, to portray post-war black society and construct a fin-de-siecle blueprint for the future of the race. Specifically, it is Harper's portrayal of an internal speech difference, a divide between African-American dialect and English spoken by African Americans, that reveals most about the conflicts she faced. The dual climaxes highlight this difference: The first climax includes dialect speakers; the second doesn't. The particular importance of this division between dialect and standard speech stems, as I argue in this essay, from its reflection of class and cultural divisions within the black community. While Harper, like many other nineteenth-century authors, represented dialect- and standard-speaking black characters for a variety of rhetorical reasons, the majority of these representations reflect and in turn contribute to a cultural conception--held by both whites and blacks--that the broad dialectical differences within black speech signal broad social differences. Speech types mark clusters or networks of educational, behavioral, economic, and racial attributes; in other words, voice marks class affiliation. The dialect voice generally locates a speaker in folk culture and measures a distance from the essentially middle-class qualities that whites promoted as the badges of full humanity: refined deportment, economic independence, education, and white skin. The voices of standard-English-speaking black characters, on the other hand, implicitly claim a range of attributes approximating bourgeois ideals. [2] In Iola, then, as in many black- and white-authored texts before and since, black speech differences are synecdochic means of representing an educated, standard-English-speaking bourgeois class and a dialect-speaking subaltern class. As dialect and speakers talk to one another, as the voices and the classes they represent are given and are denied space and authority in a text whose purpose is to reconfigure Reconstruction, competing visions of a race future come into focus. On the one hand, Harper envisions a future that offers an important role for the subaltern, whose culture and courage she admired; and on the other hand, she expresses some concern that the largely rural, uneducated, dialect-speaking subaltern blacks might drag down the race in the new century. [3] Harper's own experiences underlay these contradictory visions. A Northern bourgeois woman herself, she was active in such middle-class, progressive organizations as the American Association of Education of Colored Youth, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the American Woman's Suffrage Association, and the National Council of Women (Foster, Introduction, Harper xxvii). …