To Make Negro Literature

Front matter

ELIZABETH MCHENRY

TO MAKE

NEGRO

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS &§ ix

INTRODUCTION JR I TO MAKE NEGRO LITERATURE

CHAPTER ONE SR 23 “THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK WILL NEVER APPEAR IN SCHOOL HISTORIES”

CHAPTER THREE JR 129 WASHINGTON’S GOOD FORTUNE Writing and Authorship in Practice CHAPTER FOUR sf 188 THE CASE OF MARY CHURCH TERRELL

CODA RR 235 UNDERGROUND RAILROADS OF MEANING

NOTES S 239 BIBLIOGRAPHY S 269

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MY THINKING ON THIS BOOK BEGAN OVER TWO DECADES AGO, WHEN I first came upon Mary Church Terrell’s cache of short stories in her archive at the Library of Congress. I did not know at the time why these stories felt important to me. I only knew that there was something poignant about them, something they wished to communicate that remained unaccounted for in traditional narratives of Terrell’s life and her activism. It was not until I returned to them years later that they began to appear to me as vital elements of an alternative or unwritten aspect of African American literary history. Of this book’s many tentative beginnings, none was more important than the paper on Mary Church Terrell that I delivered at the Print Cultures Symposium at the University of Illinois in 2005. For his invitation to speak about my “new project” and, later, to expand on that paper in print, I thank Gordon Hutner. This book's fourth chapter reflects an earlier form of my thinking on Terrell and her fictional writing that appeared in American Literary History 19, no. 2 (Spring 2007), 381-401; any overlap between the old and new versions appears by permission.

Along the way, as each of the book's chapters took shape, I benefited immensely from the intellectual companionship and impassioned writing of fellow travelers working at the intersection of Black studies, African American literary studies, print culture and book history scholarship, and archival and material studies. Over the years, I have learned from and been inspired by the scholarship of Brent Hayes Edwards, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Eric Gardner, Jacqueline Goldsby, Saidiya Hartman, Laura Helton, Shirley Moody-Turner, Kinohi Nishikawa, and Britt Rusert, as well as by many others in the field of Black print culture. I remain indebted to Frances Smith

Foster, the allure of whose scholarship first drew me to Black print culture and to the archives. Carla Peterson has been a fierce supporter from the beginning, and early conversations with her helped to lay the foundations for this book. Randall Burkett continues to feed my curiosity for what the archives hold, and I am grateful to him for his willingness to think with me about materials that have been dismissed by others. I am especially grateful to those who stepped in when I most needed them. This includes Priscilla Wald, who listened with such great care and, in doing so, helped me to reset the course of this project; Joycelyn Moody, who advocated for me on a moment’s notice; and Kimberly Blockett, who, when the book refused to follow its plan, helped me to muster the patience its writing required.

A fellowship from New York University’s Humanities Initiative (now the Center for the Humanities) in 2012 allowed me write what became the first chapter of this book and more generally provided the time and space to begin to understand the logic of what I wished to do. I am certain that this project would have remained unfinished without the generous support of the American Council of Learned Societies, and I have nyu to thank for a much needed sabbatical leave that, coupled with the acts fellowship, allowed me the true luxury of two full years of writing and revision. I received invaluable assistance from a number of archivists and librarians, including Charlotte Priddle, director of nyu special collections; Amanda Watson, the librarian for English and comparative literature at nyu; and Lynn Farrington, senior curator of special collections at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, at the University of Pennsylvania. Along the way I tested my ideas before many audiences, whose comments, criticisms, and suggestions were critical to moving the project forward. For their invitations to visit, Id like to thank in particular the Center for Literature and the Public Sphere at Seton Hall University, the Grolier Club and the Rare Book School, Yale University’s Program in the History of the Book, the National Humanities Center, and the Black Bibliography Project. Td also like to thank Nyv’s Print Culture Working Group, where a vigorous conversation about genre helped me to come closer to understanding the books sold by subscription that I address in my first chapter. There I connected with Ellen Gruber Garvey, whose generosity in talking with me about this project certainly helped to make it better.

The true constant across the years in which most of this book was written was my students at NYU. Every step of the way, the classroom has been an invigorating place to pursue interests, to try out arguments, and to take in ideas, It has been my privilege to work with an extraordinary group of students x # ACKNOWLEDGMENTS whose love of the archives overlapped with my own. Conversations in particular with Matt Bruen, Jane Greenway Carr, Laura Fisher, Laura Helton, Kristen Highland, Rob Koehler, and Autumn Womack sustained me over the years and certainly enriched this book. Their rigorous engagement with obscure documents, their questions about collecting and archival practice, and their dedication to collaboration and scholarly community inspired me to think more deeply and more productively. Many nyu students have also provided much-needed help as research assistants, and their work— in tracking down sources, organizing references, and making PowerPoint presentations—eased my load immeasurably. In particular I would like to thank Laurie Lambert, whose folder of notes on Daniel Murray I returned to again and again during the writing of this book, and Olivia Howard, who did all that I asked of her and more. Ryan Healey also deserves special mention for working with me to bring order to the endnotes and the bibliography. The English Department at Nyu remains for me an ideal intellectual home, and I am grateful to my colleagues for what feels like a lifetime of camaraderie and support.

Phil Harper remains my truest ally and most loyal advocate, and over the years he has generously given me—in terms of time, openness, and wisdom—more than I can ever thank him for. His careful reading of the earliest drafts of the book helped me to unlock its purpose and its arguments, and I have him to thank for pushing me to take on (rather than shy away from) Booker T. Washingtons authorship. Pat Crain volunteered to read the manuscript in its most inchoate and unruly form, and her insightful comments and vital encouragement gave me the courage to keep going. Sonya Posmentier worked with me to design a road map for my fellowship year and, in doing so, helped me to launch what was the most inspired and enjoyable period of my writing life. She has been a constant source of productive conversation about this book and so much more. Over a series of lunches, Gene Jarrett asked all the right questions about the project and in the process helped me to clarify my vision of it. I am grateful to Lisa Gitelman for listening as I sketched out the final shape of the book, and for telling me, one fall afternoon over cocktails, that the book was done. John Archer was a reassuring presence and an outstanding mentor just when I needed it most. Along the way Tom Augst, Jennifer Baker, Nick Boggs, Chris Cannon, Patrick Deer, Carolyn Dinshaw, Juliet Fleming, Lissette Florez, John Guillory, Lenora Hanson, Isabel Hofmeyr, David Hoover, Alyssa Leal, Wendy Lee, Paula McDowell, Peter Nicholls, Patricia Okoh-Esene, Crystal Parikh, Cyrus Patell, Dara Regaignon, Catherine Robson, Martha Rust, Simón Trujillo, and Greg Vargo provided encouragement in ways small and large.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ¥ xi

Una Chaudhuri, Maureen McLane, and Jini Kim Watson deserve special mention for their warmth and for their willingness to be leaned on, as colleagues, mentors, and friends: their support has made all the difference.

It is my good fortune to have found my way back to Duke University Press and, more specifically, to editor Courtney Berger, who from the start has been dedicated to moving this project forward, My thanks to her for believing in it, and for expertly navigating me through each step of the review process. Britt Rusert and an anonymous reader for the press offered extraordinary feedback on the manuscript: what a privilege to be read so generously, so carefully, and so well. In particular, Britt Rusert dared me to be bolder and more precise in my claims about failure, and her insistence that the manuscript needed to be trimmed helped me to produce a stronger and more focused book. Sandra Korn was a constant source of good advice, and her patience for my endless questions is much appreciated. I am grateful to Lisa Lawley for overseeing the production process, and to Emily Shelton, whose attention to detail and thoughtful suggestions on style made this a better book. Special thanks also go to the marketing team at the press and to Lalitree Darnielle, who generously made it a priority to scan images for me in her home under the most difficult of circumstances. The book's production costs were supported by the English Department at nyu, through its Abraham and Rebecca Stein Faculty Publication Fund. I am also grateful to the nyu Center for the Humanities for a generous TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) grant, which made it possible for this book to be freely accessible online.

I finished To Make Negro Literature in the midst of a global pandemic and at a time when racial violence and anti-Black sentiment has made the precarity of Black lives ever more apparent. The reverberating turmoil and loss that defined the year 2020 has only underscored the importance of friends and family in my everyday life and, certainly, in the completion of this work. I did not always want to be asked, “So, how’s the book coming?” But I fully appreciate the love and the moral support that lay behind the question. To all the communities I call home: thank you for caring for me over the years, in ways large and small. I am especially grateful to Betsy Michel, whose thoughtfulness, kindness, and love epitomize what it means to be neighborly, I am also grateful for the friendship of two extraordinary women who have become like family to me. It is now unimaginable to think about cooking the Thanksgiving bird without Elena Liithi, who approaches this project and all other things with fierce determination and an abundance of good humor. It is equally unimaginable to eat Sunday night dinner without Alison Magruder, whose cheerful presence has brought so much laughter and joy to our lives. My special thanks also go to xii # ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Annie Simmons (all-around champion of everything) and Sonya Browne (for the endless supply of printouts that let me see my words on paper).

In the final two years of writing, the remarkable Vera Keller saw me through countless bumps and bruises: she knows every joy and every frustration that was related to finishing this book. She is a top-notch writing partner whose wise counsel and incisive suggestions (despite the distance that separates us) moved this book forward in incalculable ways. Ashraf Rushdy was sure that this book would be written long before I was, because, he said, the obvious sequel to a book called “Forgotten Readers” is one called “Forgotten Writers.” While I did not adopt his title for this book, he was of course right that those aspects of literary history that had fallen by the wayside would continue to capture my attention and inspire my scholarship. Each word of this book has benefited from Ashraf’s high standards as a reader and his sharp eye for that which must be expanded, deepened, and connected. There was never a time when I lost my way that he was not there to help me to find it, As a scholar, I have gained immensely from his profound commitment to reading, to writing, and to intellectual companionship, but I am also an infinitely happier person for his kindness, his generosity, his sense of humor, and his friendship.

During all the years this book was being written, Alleah Shareef held down our fort, taking care of all of us and making it possible for me to be a scholar and a mother, She has enriched our lives in ways that are impossible for me to enumerate. Nancy Stone and Adelia Moore quite literally opened their doors to me and to our small children, becoming the New York City family we needed. Penelope McDonnell has always embraced me, lifting my spirits and buoying my confidence when I needed it most. It is impossible for me to imagine life in New York City or parenthood without Indra Chitkara, Kim Holden, and Caroline Hubbell, three extraordinary women who have been by my side every step of the way. Electa Sevier, Anja Hanson, Phoebe Brown, Rachel Simons, and Cori Field are my original squad, and our spirited girls’ weekends never fail to leave me refreshed and relaxed. Quick visits and long conversations with Jenny Kelso Smith and small, quiet talks with Monica Thomas at her kitchen counter have restored my equilibrium. Cara McCaffrey never failed to remind me what warmth and generosity feels like. Cocktails “on the orange” with Lee Michel was a ritual that brightened my days. And Susan Chamber's infectious smile and her warm hugs lifted me up and kept me going during my most difficult moments.

This book was quite literally written in the presence of two extraordinary dogs, Blossom and Mabel, whose endless patience and enormous capacity

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ¥ xiii for sleep provided me with good company on even the longest and hardest days. It is a true gift that I was never alone when writing, and I have come to believe that I am incapable of doing my best thinking if Blossom and Mabel are not by my side. My thanks to Laura Cooper Davidson for loving them as much as I do, and for all the joy and beauty she brings to our world.

My family has surrounded me and cared for me from the very start, and their love and support is key to all that I do. I think of my grandparents, Elizabeth and Alphonso Williamson, every day, and each day I gain greater appreciation for what they accomplished as African Americans born in the opening years of the twentieth century. I cannot begin to fathom what they endured, and yet my most vivid memories are of their laughter, their optimism, and their love. Iam a literary historian because of my mother, Mary Williamson McHenry: the example of her daily work, as a teacher and a scholar of African American literature, showed me the value of Black history and literature and of thinking through written words. She also modeled for me how to live a life of adventure, of courage, and of faith. My dad, Donald F. McHenry, is an extraordinary father and grandfather who makes it clear every day that, of all life's accomplishments, family is the most important one. I know that he learned this from his own mother, Dora Brooks McHenry, who died too soon but whose impact was so great; his ardent love for and dedication to us, and his insistence that all our goals are reachable is a tribute to her. His faith that this book would get written helped me to reach the end.

Chrissie McHenry has made everything in my life—from my childhood to my adulthood—better for her presence. In many ways she absorbs all the worst of me: my fears, my frustrations, my disappointments, my sadness. And yet she remains a model of kindness, love, good humor, and true generosity. I am grateful to be her sister, and so fortunate to have her. Sharing in the lives of her extraordinary children, Claire, Caroline, and Daniel Lempres, continues to be one of my greatest joys. Strong, smart, independent, kind, conscientious, and hardworking: each one is destined to do great things and make huge and necessary contributions to this world. To them I owe thanks for sharing so much with me, in terms of adventure, laughter, distraction, fellowship, love, and, of course, computer assistance. I am indebted to them for being always “on call,” to fix weird formatting, to remove strange lines that wouldnt go away, and to catch all the typos that I didn't see.

The most important environment for the creation of this book was the one that I found every day with my husband, Gene, and our two children, Electa and Quinn McHenry-Assaf. Quinn and Electa have truly grown up with this book and their constant presence—first as babies, then as xiv # ACKNOWLEDGMENTS children, and now as teenagers—serves as a daily reminder of what is most important. I cannot imagine my life without Electa’s astute fashion advice or Quinn's basketball wisdom or without their unique ways of seeing the world around them. Electa and Quinn are my greatest gifts and deepest inspirations, and their energy and enthusiasm has sustained me over the long haul. I know that they will be happy to hold this book and see that, yes, it is finally finished. My final and most profound thanks go to Gene Assaf, whose love makes everything possible and infinitely more worthwhile. Gene holds me steady in the most fundamental ways, and what he has done for me, for us, and for this book is inestimable. There are no words that can possibly express all that he means to me. He is an outstanding friend, partner, and father who reminds me each day that the point is not to cross the finish line but to taste, and to remember the taste, of all that is good along the way.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS % xv

Introduction

K

WRITING, LITERARY PRACTICE & AFRICAN AMERICAN AUTHORSHIP

SOMETIME IN THE SUMMER OR EARLY FALL OF 1903, AS HE WORKED to find a balance between his life as a scholar and his aspirations as a civil rights activist, W. E. B. Du Bois quietly purchased a printing office at 163 Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. He did not live or work in Memphis, nor did he have experience in or knowledge of the business of printing, In theory, there were plenty of printing offices in Atlanta that would have been accessible to Du Bois, and as a professor of sociology at Atlanta University, he also would have had some access to the university's printing office. Described in the Catalogue of Atlanta University for 1901-2 as “large and well appointed,’ the printing office was used as a place of instruction, where students learned the printing trade by working on publications for both the school and the larger Atlanta community. But it was also where two monthly newspapers were published: the Bulletin of Atlanta University and a student newspaper called the scrott. It also housed Atlanta University Press, which, beginning in 1896, had produced the proceedings of the annual Conference for the Study of Negro Problems as well as related publications. And yet Du Bois invested his entire life savings—some $1,600—in the Memphis print business, entering into an unlikely partnership with two former students who had recently graduated from Atlanta University. He hoped to make the printing office the home of a national Negro journal and the “basis of a publishing house” that would produce “supplementary reading for Negro schools, text-books, works of Negro authors, etc.” By taking control of a printing press, Du Bois was determined to give voice to Negro writers and artists, who would “be encouraged to write of themselves and depict the things nearest to them and thus speak more naturally and effectively than they usually do”?

These were lofty goals, and, to Du Bois, the printing business represented a significant literary intervention. He used its presses to manufacture a broadside of his own poem “Credo,” which, distributed by Black clubwomen in places like Tuskegee, Alabama, would reach a wider and more diverse audience than it had through its original printing in the Independent in the fall of 1904. He also produced a journal, the Moon Illustrated Weekly, which had a limited distribution in Memphis and Atlanta beginning in December 1905. But the journal never had anywhere near a national readership, or the ten thousand subscribers that Du Bois had estimated he could potentially attract when planning the venture. The Moon's demise sometime in the summer of 1906 went largely unnoticed, except by fellow journalists who took it as an occasion to ridicule Du Bois for what they considered an arrogant effort to venture outside the realm of academia.“ With the pompous air and assumed dignity of a peacock ...the Moon reached its zenith a few weeks ago and has fallen behind the veil,’ wrote a correspondent for Alexanders Magazine, playing on the image Du Bois mobilized in The Souls of Black Folk to theorize the dynamics of race and racism in the United States and across the globe.’ Du Bois himself attributed the demise of the Moon to the mismanagement of his younger colleagues, who, in turn, perhaps recognizing that Du Bois would never see or acknowledge his own “blunder in the matter,’ blamed each other.* Du Bois effectively walked out on the whole Memphis printing enterprise, deserting his partners and threatening them with legal action to recoup his investment in the business.”

I begin with the story of Du Bois’s short-lived experience as the owner of a printing business because it illustrates the sorts of narratives, rarely told about African American literary history, that are the subject of this book. Relatively few critics have focused their attention on this episode in Du Bois’s career, and those who have generally agree that the most we can say about the Moon is that it was a precursor to the Crisis, the highly successful journal for which Du Bois served as the founding editor. This perspective insists that we quickly shift our attention forward, not only to the Crisis, a publication that is more readily accessible and more easily contextualized than the Moon, but also to the familiar ground of the Harlem Renaissance, the historical moment about which we literary critics are perhaps the most well versed. The Crisis was the official organ of the NAAcp, and its primary purpose was to be a political and news publication that broadcast, according to its inaugural editorial, “those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice.” It was launched in 1910, but the Crisis is more commonly associated with the key role it played in the development of Black literary voices during the Harlem Renaissance, the literary and artistic movement of the 1920s. Under the editorial direction of Jessie Fauset, the Crisis celebrated the talents of a generation of young African Americans by publishing their art and their writing. It was a crucial means through which Black literature found cohesion and visibility during a decade that awakened both white Americans and African Americans themselves to the place and purpose of racial art.

But by assessing the Moon as a precursor to the Crisis, we have subsumed its story as well as crucial lessons about how African American literature was made in the first years of the twentieth century into a larger and already written narrative, one that obscures the particularities of the Moon as a product of a specific literary historical moment that remains underappreciated, The years with which I am concerned in this book lie between two cultural heydays that are the subject of a great deal of scholarship, In recognition of the literary ambitions and accomplishments of Black women during the 1890s, we have dubbed this decade the “Woman's Era,’ identifying it as a moment that resulted in an impressive body of literary work appearing in various print formats. The inclusion, in 1988, of a number of texts from the 1890s as part of the set of thirty reprinted and then—newly discovered texts as The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers drew considerable attention to individual authors like Anna Julia Cooper, Frances E. W. Harper, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and Emma Dunham Kelley- Hawkins, while also encouraging scholars to look at and think of these writers as a part of a larger tradition of nineteenth-century African American literature.’ This series was widely celebrated and enticed a generation of researchers to appreciate in new ways the contributions of Black women to intellectual history and to the history of African American literature. Curiously, a Supplement to the series, published in 1991, included several texts by Black women from the early twentieth century; bundled together in a series on nineteenth-century writers, those volumes appear out of context and, as Frances Smith

Foster notes in a review of the series, include no explanation of the “reasons for or the implications of [their] inclusion ...in a series about nineteenth-century literature.’® Scholars are even more likely to subsume the literature of the first two decades of the twentieth century in an extended understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, as do Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Jarrett in their collection of writings from the years 1892-1938, The New Negro. By organizing the collection around the “trope” of the New Negro, they point to a coherent narrative of racial uplift and creativity, refiguring the Harlem Renaissance as the “long New Negro Movement,’ a continuum that runs from the nineteenth century well into the twentieth.” The volume is an important and effective anthology that exposes students to a sampling of how the concept of the New Negro was mobilized over the course of almost four decades. But, like the Supplement to The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers, it only reinforces my observation that the literary projects of the early twentieth century are rarely allowed to claim their own independent space.

In fact, most scholars that address this body of literature do so across a wider “postbellum, pre-Harlem” time frame. This is the case with Dickson D. Bruce Jrs foundational Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Tradition, 1877-1915, which provides an invaluable survey of the fiction and poetry produced by African Americans in the years between the end of Reconstruction and the beginnings of World War I. More recently, Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard’s edited collection Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919 revisited these years, not to survey them but to illuminate the “unresolved contradictions” of the post-Reconstruction era. This volume brought much attention to a number of understudied authors and texts. The novelist Sutton Griggs was barely mentioned in that collection, but since its publication interest in his novels has spiked. His literary career is the focus of a collection of essays, Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs, edited by Kenneth Warren and Tess Chakkalakal, which is dedicated to“mov[ing] Griggs from the margins to the center of African American literary history.’ Another notable contribution to the field is James Smethurst’s The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance, which focuses on the influence of African American artists and intellectuals on the development of literary modernity in the United States."°

All of this notable scholarship is “on” African American literature at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. But none of these studies focus as tightly on the years that surround the turn from one century to another—years that carried great significance for African Americans, as the trope of the New Negro shows—or illuminate the kinds of texts, literary practices, or modes of authorship that constitute the subject of To Make Negro Literature. I am not suggesting that the turn from the nineteenth century to the twentieth should be considered a discrete period, isolated or disconnected from the years that surrounded it. But I do believe that our tendency to group the years from 1877 to 1919, from the end of Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance, has prevented us from identifying the specificity of the intervening years. Without lingering on those years that surround the turn of the century, it is difficult to recognize and come to critical terms with an aspect of literary culture that is all too rarely the subject of study: failure.

Literary history seldom privileges that which is unsuccessful, whether in terms of writers and texts never recognized by publication, or projects that remained incomplete or unfulfilled. But these writers, texts, and projects are no less a part of literary history. The Moon is not just a precursor of the Crisis, where the failure of the former is eclipsed by the success of the latter; it is an event that demands we examine the scope and shape of literary culture at the moment in which Du Bois launched his printing business and conceptualized the Moon, and in which it failed. A more nuanced understanding of the Moon’s content, the specific conditions of its publication and its failure, and the overall history of Du Bois’s ownership of a job printing business is one component of this.

We do well to remember that Du Bois’s printing business, as well as every other aspect of his life and his intellectual work, was supposed to fail: he worked to build what was intended to be simultaneously a Black business and a Black intellectual institution in the midst of what was a veritable assault on Black lives and livelihood. The fact that African Americans were deemed by whites to be incompatible with such institutions serves as a reminder of the queerness of Black life during the Jim Crow era: Black people were, to say the least, “cast out of straight time's rhythm,” to borrow José Esteban Mufioz’s phrasing.” Excluded from American social, cultural, intellectual, and political institutions, African Americans’ literary and intellectual efforts during this time must be seen as a remarkable historical record of the road maps of their rejection of this positioning, In recent years, the idea of success and, more specifically, the attendant category of failure have proven to be a rich site of theorization for scholars of queer studies, My attention to the ways that failure resonates queerly is particularly indebted to