Frances E. W. Harper and the "Quest for a Usable Past" Kate Adams The quotation in my title is borrowed from Frances Smith Foster's classic 1993 study, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Foster herself takes the phrase from the second edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, where it references, in turn, the original source: Van Wyck Brooks's 1918 essay about the need for literary output and literary criticism that excavate the nation's cultural past for new imaginative resources. She uses it to evoke two aspects of historical literary recovery that both Brooks and the Norton editors overlook. One is the practice of writers like Frances E. W. Harper, who used their poetry and prose to recover African American experiences from obscurity and from obfuscating "literary stereotypes" (132–33). The other is the work done by literary scholars like Foster, who search out, interpret, and recirculate such writing. I want to think about both kinds of quests in relation to Harper's 1857 poem "Free Labor," a work that enacts recovery as resistance in part by resisting modes of recovery that threaten to erase it from the outset. Whenever I teach Harper's works, my students also read scholarship by Foster. In addition to using Foster's insights to guide our own interpretive approach, we talk about how her recovery projects have transformed the field of nineteenth-century US literature. And we talk about what that means for us. Many students, I now find, have read some nineteenth-century African American writing before they arrive in my class. Few, however, can name an early black woman writer other than Harriet Jacobs or Phillis Wheatley. So I ask them to consider how encountering Harper reconfigures their conception of early US literature and history (constituted upon an assumed absence). How do their narratives—about past and present, about silence, voice, and especially progress—have to change with knowledge of Harper's life and career, her large black readership and publishing venues, her impact on white readers and writers? I want them to experience the usable past as dynamic, generative, disruptive, and susceptible to disruption—as a resource we "discover" but also "invent," in Brooks's formulation (339). I want them to recognize historical literary recovery as vital activism. [End Page 263] Of course, we also talk about Harper's dedication to making her work usable for activist purposes in her own time. Written for the free-produce movement, her poem "Free Labor" calls upon antebellum consumers to boycott slaverygrown cotton and support a free-labor alternative. "I wear an easy garment," explains the speaker, O'er it no toiling slaveWept tears of hopeless anguish,In his passage to the grave. And from its ample foldsShall rise no cry to God,Upon its warp and woof shall beNo stain of tears and blood. (lines 1–8) The free-produce movement has been largely forgotten, according to historian Carol Faulkner, because its membership was primarily African American and female and it was derided by powerful white men like William Lloyd Garrison (378–79). Here, then, is some usable past: a poem written for use then in political and economic resistance, that leads us now to recover a neglected history of radical activism. But, looking more closely at "Free Labor," the phrase "usable past" also raises crucial questions about how we approach recovery. It pairs somewhat uneasily with a poem about people—like the cotton workers who haunt Harper's lines—who were subordinated to use by US slavery. What does it mean to seek (or invent) literary and political value from those whose "soul value," as Daina Ramey Berry puts it, was shrouded by "monetary value" in the antebellum racial imaginary (6)? Theorists of racial capitalism assert that efforts to recover its victims—into view, into voice—always threaten to reproduce that system's protocols of erasure and exploitation. Lindon Barrett, for example, argues that, as subjects of the slavery-based political economy, European consumers of sugar and cotton were constitutively incapable of recognizing Africandescended people; they required the imagined subhumanity of "the slave" to sustain their own subject formation within...