"Kin' o'rough jestice fer a parson": Pauline Hopkins's 'Winona' and the politics of reconstructing history.

It was a terrible struggle between the two great forces - Right and Wrong. Drunken with vile passions, the Rangers fought madly but in vain against the almost supernatural prowess of their op[p]onents; like the old Spartans who braided their hair and advanced with songs and dancing to meet the enemy, the anti-slavery men advanced singing hymns and praising God. (Winona 412)

Such diametric oppositions between good and evil as the one cited above would seem to forecast clear-cut resolutions, but Pauline Hopkins's Winona (1902) is an unresolved novel, affirming means of resistance against racist oppression which range from spiritual transcendence to organized violence. Serialized from May to October 1902 in the Colored American Magazine, Winona is set in the besieged Kansas of 1856, where anti-slavery forces, led by John Brown, and pro-slavery forces vie for control of the State. As Hazel Carby has argued, such an historical setting allows Hopkins to justify the need in 1902 for the kind of organized resistance to racist violence led by the anti-slavery leader John Brown in 1856 (Reconstructing 154). Yet Hopkins also recognizes and appears to condone other seemingly contradictory forms of resistance. Indeed, while Hopkins foregrounds the need for organized resistance, she also sanctions escape, endurance, spiritual transcendence, and personal vengeance as possible responses to racist oppression. Moreover, Hopkins employs an apparent double standard for what constitutes justifiable retaliation to racist violence for her white and her African-American characters.

Not the least of the important questions which this narrative provokes is why Hopkins chose to displace contemporary political debates onto such an historical framework. Why does Hopkins re-envision Brown's controversial ordering of the executions of five pro-slavery men at the Pottawatomie River, rather than Brown's martyrdom at Harper's Ferry? Why is Judah, the most militant black hero in her fiction to date, chastised when he tries to enact his seemingly justifiable revenge against his former slave owner and torturer, while John Brown's executions are hailed as an act of God? Why is Hopkins's novel named after Winona, who is only one of several major characters in the narrative and participates only peripherally in the dramatic action?

These questions underscore the complexities of Hopkins's position as an African-American woman writer and editor for the nationally circulated Colored American Magazine, one-third of whose readership was white.(1) Creating agency for herself and her African-American readers while encouraging her white readers to agitate would seem to require contradictory rhetorical strategies. Even though Winona allows space for proponents of diverse political views in order to emphasize common goals, it demonstrates Hopkins's growing frustration with Booker T. Washington's accommodationism. In his Atlanta Compromise speech (1895) and his autobiography Up From Slavery (1901), Washington espoused a doctrine of self-help, moral virtue, industrial education, and social segregation as a means to race progress. Likely inspired by the work of anti-Bookerites such as William Monroe Trotter and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Hopkins rejects much of Washington's platform and refigures his "uplift" ideal by calling for more vehement public protests against the escalating mob violence endorsed by Jim Crow culture.(2) Her stance may well have contributed to her eventual removal from the magazine. After the magazine was sold in 1903 and moved to New York, editorial control shifted to Booker T. Washington supporters John C. Freund and Fred R. Moore. Hopkins was ousted in 1904, reportedly because "her attitude was not conciliatory enough. As a white friend said: 'If you are going to take up the wrongs of your race then you must depend for support absolutely upon your race. For the colored man to-day to attempt to stand up to fight would be like a canary bird facing a bulldog, and an angry one at that'" ("Colored" 33).(3)

To the degree that Hopkins tempered her criticism of Washington, she was in accord with the professed editorial goals of the magazine. While in the Colored American Magazine's first issue, founding editor Walter Wallace claimed that "no philanthrophical [sic], political, sectarian, or denominational clique, in any way influences, directs or controls this management," he also assured readers of his tacit support for Washington: "We of New England can, with credit to ourselves, forbear the spirit of criticism and lend him our encouragement in every method of work he may undertake" ("Editorial" 62). Certainly Wallace was aware of the potential rewards accorded to those who supported Washington. In the capital-intensive world of magazine and newspaper publishing, Washington offered a wellspring of financial support. By 1900 he supported and controlled Alexander's Magazine and the Colored Citizen of Boston, the New York Age, and the Colored American of Washington (Johnson 3). When the Colored American Magazine suffered financial difficulties a year after its inception due the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company's decision to publish books (among them Pauline Hopkins's novel Contending Forces), Walter Wallace wrote confidentially to Washington requesting funds (Wallace 184).

In its early years, nonetheless, the magazine did publish some work by well-known anti-Bookerites. In 1900 it published a vehement attack on Washington by George W. Forbes, who later joined William Monroe Trotter as co-editor of the Boston Guardian in 1901. The magazine profiled the achievements of the National Afro-American Council (1890-1908), which was, in its first few years at least, a militant protest organization in which anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett attacked the accommodationist policies of Washington.(4) While Hopkins praised Washington in a 1901 installment of her "Famous Men of the Negro Race" series, she also applauded the achievements of Mary Church Terrell, the President of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, Frances Harper, and Mary Shadd Carey, all advocates of suffrage and more or less vocal anti-Washingtonians.

If Hopkins's veiled criticism of Washington in Winona positioned her at odds with the editorial direction of the magazine and suggested an assertion of authority beyond that which women were readily accorded, then the marginalization of her eponymous female protagonist may reflect the cost to Hopkins of that stance. According to William Stanley Braithwaite, a literary critic, poet, anthologist, and contributor to the Colored American, Hopkins felt she deserved more authority over the affairs of the magazine than she was granted. In a retrospective sketch of the magazine's history, Braithwaite criticized Hopkins for thinking too highly of her own literary capabilities: "As a novelist Miss Hopkins regarded herself as a national figure, in the company of Charles W. Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar and as such felt free to impose her views and opinions upon her associates in the conduct of both the book and magazine publications" (25). Hopkins apparently had little faith in the aesthetic judgment of founding editor Walter Wallace and "resented bitterly" white publisher Robert Elliott's "veiled authority" (25).(5) Both Claudia Tate and Kevin Gaines have speculated about the sigNificance of Hopkins's decentering of her female protagonists in her later magazine fiction. As Hopkins's serial novels "abandon the woman-centered discourse of female development," according to Tate, they signal the "dissolution of the 'heroine's text' of black female authority as an effective pedagogical strategy for stimulating social reform during the early years of the twentieth century" (208). While Gaines doesn't specifically discuss Winona, his analysis of Of One Blood suggests that the relatively small role given to the female protagonist reflects the ways in which the author herself was compelled to defer to male authority within a black elite culture. Adopting patriarchal family norms, Gaines notes, was one way to garner "respectability" in a racist culture which associated blacks with licentious immorality.(6) Indeed, on April 6, 1906, in a letter to black nationalist journalist John E. Bruce, Hopkins expressed her frustration at not being taken seriously as a political agitator: "'Being only a woman [I] have received very small notice on matters of import to the race'" (qtd. in Gaines, "Black" 434).(7)

In 1902, however, Hopkins, who was already one of the magazine's foremost contributors, had just been promoted to literary editor. While I don't want to minimize the pressures Hopkins was under in crafting her political fiction at this point in her career, I do contend that she grants her female protagonists a considerably more important role than has been considered. Careful to distinguish her own goals from what she perceived as the more gender-polarizing struggles of white "new women," Hopkins adopts the rhetoric of the black women's club movement while refiguring the dominant overplot of sentimentalism to suggest that black women were in a unique position to direct strategies for political resistance.(8) Despite the fact that Winona is seldom at the center of the dramatic action, she does serve not only as the spiritual and moral leader of the race devoted to communal liberation but also as the tacit leader of a nation committed to ideals of progress. Like Dianthe Lusk in Of One Blood, Winona represents both the legacy of sexual violence against black women and the refusal to be mere tragic figures under the weight of that history. Hopkins claims for her heroine and herself an agency sanctioned by a past and present history imbued with divine significance. While naming Dianthe Lusk after John Brown's first wife - a woman who reportedly inspired men by her religious devotion - Hopkins gives Winona the responsibility of both planning the dramatic rescue and sanctioning her male companions' retaliation.(9) In so doing, Hopkins suggests that black women's earned moral authority should entitle them to a much broader scope of influence, albeit indirect, in a black resistance movement gaining increasing fervor at the turn of the century. As the leader of the race, Winona "manages" her men while serving as an emblem of national promise.

Part western, sentimental romance, detective story, and sensationalist adventure, Hopkins's third novel is her first to take place in an entirely antebellum setting. Winona follows the paths of Judah, the orphaned son of an escaped slave, and Winona, his quadroon stepsister, as they are remanded into slavery and subsequently escape with the help of John Brown. They live happily with their father White Eagle (Winona's biological father and Judah's step father) on Seneca tribal land near Lake Erie. Unbeknownst to his children, White Eagle is not a Seneca but instead the rightful heir to the Carlingford estate. When White Eagle is mysteriously murdered, the children are befriended by a halfhearted abolitionist, Ebeneezer Maybee, and a naive, young British lawyer, Warren Maxwell, who has been enlisted to find the lost heir of the Carlingford estate. Maxwell promises to take the children back to England, but before he can make arrangements to do so, he is called away to Virginia. His absence enables the treacherous Colonel Titus and Bill Thomson, with the backing of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, to force the children into slavery on Thomson's plantation near Kansas City, Missouri. With the help of Maybee, Maxwell, and a few accomplices, Judah and Winona engineer an escape and meet with John Brown in Kansas, where much of the drama of the subsequent narrative ensues.

Hopkins links the fates of Winona and Judah to the Seneca tribe because both races are witnessing the erasure of their history as they suffer a diaspora, the possibility of cultural and racial genocide, and pressures to assimilate. While the members of the tribe Hopkins describes "embraced Christianity" and adopted "the arts of civilized life," they "still clung to their tribal dress of buckskin, beads, feathers, blankets and moccasins, thereby adding picturesqueness of detail to . . . the busy streets of the lively American city" (287-88). For Hopkins, this scene establishes both the lost possibility of interracial harmony, where "picturesque" differences belie a spiritual commonality, and refutes popular ethnographic assertions of intrinsic racial characteristics. On this borderland between Canada and the United States, "Anglo-Saxons, Indians, and Negroes" live together in such a configuration that the world may "stand aghast and try in vain to find the dividing line supposed to be a natural barrier between the whites and the dark-skinned race" (287). In her depiction of this utopic community, Hopkins prefigures the overtly Afrocentric vision of racial origins which she would foreground in Of One Blood and in "The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century" series for Voice of the Negro, the last installment of which features the ethnographic history of the North American Indian. While stressing the effects of environment on cultural production, Hopkins systematically refutes the logic of evolutionary theorists' racial hierarchies: "The African race and its descendants are divergent and undeveloped, ethnically considered, yet stand in close relationship to other races on the broad, indisputable plane of a common origin and a common brotherhood" (461).(10)

Colonel Titus and Bill Thomson enter this world evincing all "the sluggishness of the cold materialist" and thereby embodying for Hopkins the real impediment to American progress ("Dark Races" 463). They are introduced into the novel after shooting an eagle, a forecast of other liberties they will destroy. When the pro-slavery leader Colonel Titus exhorts his followers to abandon their "qualms of conscience as to violating laws, state or national," and take up arms, the narrator responds:

With the memory of recent happenings in the beautiful Southland, against the Negro voter, engraved upon our hearts, these words have a too familiar sound. No, there is very little advancement in that section since 1854, viewed in the light of Gov. Davis' recent action. The South would be as great as were her fathers "if like a crab she could go backward." Reversion is the only god worshiped by the South. (317)(11)

In this exchange, Hopkins evokes Thomas Dixon's apology for Klan violence in his popular revision of Reconstruction history The Clansman (1901). Instead of striving to preserve the chivalric ideals of Southern civilization from a supposed black male aggressor, this mob leader's call to violence, like "Gov. Davis' recent action," is mere power mongering. The Southern appeal to a higher law in justifications of white supremacy is ultimately unveiled as a devotion to Mammon. Hopkins explicitly reminds her readers that, as all of her protagonists' suffering under slavery parallels that which African Americans currently experience under Jim Crow, that system represents a fundamental affront to a nation committed to ideal of progress.

Progress within this novel is defined as good management - a definitive sign of the new corporate economy-rather than the mere accumulation of wealth. Bill Thomson and Colonel Titus, then, are both "evil" and anachronisms because they are more concerned with asserting their dominance than with exploiting Judah's talents. At Titus's Missouri plantation, Thomson takes a bet that he can tame a wild horse, "a perfect demon" (321). On the point of giving up, Judah, "a living statue of a mighty Vulcan," boldly volunteers and proves his mastery by breaking in the wild horse. Judah's mastery over the "beast" - with the help of the "hypnotic eye . . . practiced among all the Indian tribes of the West" - refutes popular racist arguments such as Charles Carroll's in The Negro a Beast (1900), where African Americans are apes rather than human beings, making miscegenation the worst of all possible evils. As George Fredrickson points out, viewing the "Negro as Beast," whose lascivious and criminal nature would further deteriorate as time went on, effectively justified mob violence. The "beast" is now the savage in the horse and in Thomson, who, following the horse-taming, has Judah brutally whipped to teach him "his place." For Judah, the wrenching shift in environment produces a "logical" shift in attitude - "every stroke of the merciless lash was engraved on his heart in bleeding stripes that called for vengeance" - proving the folly of Thomson's "management" tactics (327-28). Within the social/evolutionary context of the novel, however, Judah's "logical" shift in attitude signifies his susceptibility to reversion - vengeance connotes "primitive" selfishness - and he must subsequently be "managed" by his more refined quadroon stepsister.

Hopkins's white protagonists, by contrast, don't need to be managed, but spiritually inspired. They undergo a series of spiritual transfigurations before they develop the communal consciousness necessary to fight the pro-slavery men. Locating the force of change in personal rather than institutional religion, Hopkins expresses frustration at the inability of organized religion to enact fundamental social change:

If Christianity, Mohammedanism, or even Buddhism . . . did exercise the gentle and humanizing influence that is claimed for them, these horrors would cease now that actual slavery has been banished from our land. . . . Until we can find a religion that will give the people individually and practically an impetus to humane and unselfish dealing with each other, look to see outward forms change, but never look to see the spirit which hates and persecutes that which it no longer dare enslave, changed by any other influence than a change of heart and spirit. (385)

While the implied author's longing for a "change of heart" might imply a more conciliatory approach to Jim Crow legislation and mob violence, her subsequent cautionary note warns otherwise: "The liberties of a people are not to be violated but with the wrath of God. Indeed, we tremble for our country when we reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever . . ." (385-86).

With God as the agent rather than individual men, Hopkins legitimates potentially violent resistance. Before battling the pro-slavery Kickapoo Rangers, all of the male characters, with the exception of John Brown, move from relative complacency to militant resistance.(12) After learning of the atrocities committed at Osawatomie, Mr. Maybee adopts John Brown's ethic, a "maybe" no longer. Parson Steward, a Kansas advocate of Free Soil, directs the spiritual and political transfigurations of the major characters. Shot by the pro-slavery Kickapoo Rangers and left for dead, the Parson miraculously recovers from his wounds and attributes his resurrection to his Christian faith, which he declares" 'has never failed me'" (420). As a member of the "army of the living God," shouting passages of the Parson's scripture to his opponents, Mr. Maybee becomes even more zealously committed to John Brown's struggle (412). Even the evil Thomson, who along with Colonel Titus had abducted Winona and Judah and had led the subsequent Southern Rangers' attacks on the Free Staters, is led to a transfiguration by the Parson. After being shot in the back by Judah, Parson Steward encourages the dying Thomson to confess his legacy of murder and deception, a confession which leads to Thomson's final redemption.

At one point, Maxwell asks Parson Steward how his religious beliefs concur with his militancy as a Free Stater. Referring to a bloody battle in defense of, his church, the Parson replies, "'When I beheld them round about us and heard their savage cries, when I saw the terror of the women and children and bethought me of their fate if perchance, the men were all slain, I girded up my loins and taking a pistol in each hand, I led forth my elders and members against the Philistines . . .'" (350). By renaming the savage as atrocious deed rather than inherent racial trait, Hopkins legitimates the use of violence for community defense. Because the Parson's actions are not merely personal vendettas but rather a divinely sanctioned defense of his parishioners and more generally an attack on the behalf of all slaves' suffering, he is able to bring the skeptical Maxwell to his world view.

Soon after their discussion Maxwell is forced to confront the "demonic" of which the Parson spoke. In retaliation for helping Winona and 'Judah escape, Maxwell is captured by the Rangers and nearly burned at the stake, sparking the novel's most dramatic spiritual transformation. At the moment when he is sure to face death, as the pine kindling burns beneath him, Maxwell takes on the likeness of Christ:

Warren was conscious of a deep sense of pity for the infants whom ignorance tortured from childhood's simple holiness as cruelly as the mob was about to torture him. There came to him then a realizing sense of all the Immortal Son must have suffered on His way to Golgotha to die a shameful death through the ignorance and cruelty of a heartless world. (369)

That Maxwell, and not Judah, undergoes this transfiguration into a compassionately passive Christ is significant not only because it indicates Hopkins's refusal to rewrite another Uncle Tom, but also because it reveals the limitations of such a position for her white character. Maxwell's Christ-like aspect is self-immolating; nearing death, he must be rescued by Judah and John Brown. While we might have assumed that Maxwell would take on the position of God the Father, the Old Testament God of Wrath, because he had assumed custody of the two children, he is made here a physically disempowered Christ. Judah now takes on the paternal role.

Maxwell's Christ-like aspect must be transformed from sympathetic detachment into active engagement in the struggle to help the fugitives reach freedom. Maxwell achieves this final transfiguration after he witnesses the seeming resurrection of Parson Steward, who was long believed to have been murdered - proof it would appear that God is indeed on the Parson's side. With proof of the legitimacy of Parson Steward's world view thrust before him, Maxwell proves victorious in his subsequent hand-to-hand combat with "the snarling demon" in the guise of Ranger Gideon Holmes, one of his former torturers (411). Significantly, however, Maxwell appears motivated in his violent resistance by personal vengeance; whiteness allows him the privilege of less self-restraint.

Judah, however, is a much more ambivalent figure in the novel and reveals the difficulty which Hopkins has in applying a similar code of violent resistance to a full-blooded African-American character. Judah's shooting of Thomson is criticized as a personal vendetta. Winona prevents him from making the final fatal shot by crying," 'You shall not! You make yourself as vile as the vilest of them - our enemies,'" thereby saving the life of the man who had enslaved and raped her (422). Maxwell reaffirms Winona's plea for restraint. Hopkins privileges restraint here both to counter racist arguments that black men in power would enact a horrific revenge on white citizens and also to establish Winona as the leader of the race. With this act of compassion, Winona claims a moral authority far beyond that of any other character.(13) As Winona and Maxwell restrain Judah, however, they demonstrate that he needs such restraint. Hopkins invokes the very racist rationale for Jim Crow culture she seeks to refute.

Yet Judah's anger cannot be contained within the sentimental paradigm of text. He feels tremendous resentment at failing to secure Winona's love, a failure he attributes to her race prejudice, and remarks to himself," 'The white man has the advantage in all things. Is it worth while struggling against such forces?' "(357). The bitterness of Judah's question suggests the extent to which the legacy of racism remains unexamined by those with light-skin privilege. As the daughter of a soon-to-be-discovered wealthy Englishman, Winona accepts her caste privilege and happily returns to England with Maxwell, both apparently abandoning the abolitionist struggle. The last we hear of Judah, he too is living happily in England, but once again under a refined woman's "management." After he "entered the service of the Queen . . . [h]is daring bravery and matchless courage brought its own reward . . ." (435). While the fugitives escape and the battle is won, their victory leads to an opting out of the struggle.

"The two great forces - Right and Wrong" in Winona seem, then, to be increasingly murky (412). For the most part, in order for violence to be sanctioned, personal vendetta must become altruistic wrath. John Brown's summary killing of all the captured Rangers, as it is disinterested, becomes an act of God. The guilty receive their just deserts: "Guilty soul joined guilty soul in their flight to Eternity" (429). Brown is seemingly justified in these murders because he acts not in a desire for personal retribution but out of a fundamental belief that his actions are directly sanctioned by God. Yet Judah's attempted killing of the man who had sent him into slavery, tortured him, participated in the killing of his father, and raped his sister makes him "vile as the vilest of them." For Judah's violent acts of resistance to gain legitimacy in Winona, they must appear disinterested to the dominant white community. As a representative of the race, Judah cannot indulge in the "rough justice of the times" (423). The "civilizing" gaze of Winona and Maxwell help insure that.

Pauline Hopkins's source for much of her rendition of the sack of Osawatomie and John Brown's subsequent executions at Pottawatomie Creek is Franklin B. Sanborn's laudatory biography The Life and Letters of John Brown: Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia (1885), from which she quotes several passages directly. A good friend and avid supporter of John Brown, Sanborn helped Brown raise money for the defense of Kansas and the later incursion into Virginia. Hopkins uses Sanborn's work to recall the atrocities committed by the proslavery Kickapoo Rangers in Lawrence, Kansas, and to justify the retaliatory Pottawatomie massacre, in which Brown ordered the killing of five proslavery men. Sanborn assures his readers that the source of Brown's "greatness and the motive of his public conduct were essentially the same, - an impression that God had called him to a high and painful work, and that he must accomplish this even with bloodshed and at the loss of friends, life and reputation" (247). For Hopkins, allegiance to John Brown means a commitment to the struggle against disenfranchisement legislation in the South. After describing the torture and murder of R. P. Brown (no relation to John Brown) by the Rangers, the recently converted abolitionist Mr. Maybee notes bitterly:

"Them's our leetle ways o' doin' things in free Ameriky, Mr. Britisher, when other folks talks too free or dares to have opinions o' thar own without askin' our permission to so think contrairy agin us. Yes, sir, I'm a John Brown man. I go with Brown because I can do as I please - more independent-like than as if I was with Jim Lane . . . . "(339-40)

According to Sanborn, "the offense the murdered man had committed was, first voting, second, defending the ballot-box from drunken ruffians who tried to break up the elections" (226).(14)

Benjamin Quarles notes that most African Americans at the time did not blame Brown for the Pottawatomie massacre, but rather viewed the murders as of little consequence when compared to the daily violence they experienced in slavery. To many African Americans and to abolitionists like Thoreau, Emerson, and Whittier (whom Hopkins profiled in 1901), Brown's execution at Harper's Ferry made him a martyr. Emerson referred to Brown as "The Saint, whose fate yet hangs in suspense, but whose martyrdom, if it shall be perfected, will make the gallows as glorious as the Cross" (Ruchames 296). African-American mourners proclaimed the day of his hanging "Martyr Day" (Quarles, Allies 125). By making Brown a martyr, his spirit becomes communal property to be invoked and re-invoked as sign of a Divine Will in action. In addition, the history of Brown's appeal to an American literary elite would be important to Hopkins because it gave her voice - a voice which she continually had to affirm against racist and sexist assumptions concerning her intellectual capabilities as a black woman - an authority through association.

John Brown's martyr-appeal seems to have lost little of its power by the turn of the century. George Washington Williams, a prominent black historian and contemporary of Hopkins, wrote in the late nineteenth century that "John Brown is rapidly settling down to his proper place in history, and 'the madman' has been transformed into a 'saint'" (Quarles, Blacks 69). In 1881 Frederick Douglass, whose achievements Hopkins heralded a year before the appearance of Winona, wrote, "History has no better illustration of pure, disinterested benevolence. It was not Caucasian for Caucasian - white man for white man; not rich man for rich man, but Caucasian for Ethiopian" (Quarles, Blacks 61). In 1896, The Woman's Era journal announced the plans of the National John Brown Memorial Association of Women to erect an "industrial training school and home for indigent colored boys" as a memorial to Brown ("Constitution" 13). A year later the journal reported the efforts made by the Women's Era Club of Boston to locate the only daughter of John Brown and to assist her financially. During the first decade of the 1900s, many John Brown observances were held to mark the anniversary of his birth, and on May 9, 1900, in Los Angeles, T. Thomas Fortune, the militant editor of the New York Age, defended Brown's use of retaliatory violence (Quarles, Allies 176).

Yet the victories John Brown helps to orchestrate in Winona remain obscured. While Winona, Judah, and Maxwell leave for England, ensconced in personal, political, and monetary bliss, and John Brown leaves for Harper's Ferry, the crime scenes still remain. If altruism has won over personal grievance, personal comfort appears to have won over altruism. As a mulatto heroine, Winona is a mediating figure in the text and the fact that she returns to England with Maxwell would seem to signify the novel's renunciation of the John Brown ethic in favor of the dominant sentimental ethic of disengagement. The rewards of active engagement seem to be the promise of blissful disengagement. Yet Judah's question - "Is it worth while struggling against such forces?" - and John Brown's martyrdom persist. If Warren Maxwell and Winona are the embodiment of a New Testament theology of forgiveness, while John Brown and Judah represent an Old Testament God of Wrath, then Hopkins seems to be mandating a combination of the two - a kind of religious socialism devoted to the material and spiritual.

In part Hopkins's theology of resistance comes from her work participating in and documenting the activities of black women's clubs at the turn of the century. Hopkins was vice-president of the Women's Auxiliary to the Young Men's Congressional Club and a member of the Woman's Era Club of Boston, to which she read portions of her first novel, Con tending Forces (1900). Founded by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin in 1893, the Woman's Era Club was composed of approximately 100 women who worked on committees devoted to literature, civics, philanthropy, domestic science, and race work (Cash 79). In the June 1900 issue of the Colored American, Hopkins describes her editorial position on the objectives of women's clubs: "We believe it to be the club woman's task to 'little by little turn the desire of the world from things of the flesh to things of the spirit. She must make the world want to do things that raise it higher and higher'" ("Women's" 121). Such concerns allow a greater authority to enact change in all environments. Hopkins envisions "new avenues of work and an outlet for thoughts that breathe" for those middle-class black women committed to work "in the name of God and humanity." Such a commitment to new career opportunities for middle-class, African-American women, however, was tempered by concerns that club women not become too "ambitious," a mere veneer of "fuss, feathers, fine dress, and posing for public admiration" (121).

Winona's name, in fact, would have likely reminded readers of The Winona Club, a men's social club in Cincinnati which was profiled anonymously two months prior to the serialization of Hopkins's novel.(15) Formed after a group of young men "gave a small house party in honor of one of their young lady friends," the club was devoted to improving its members intellectually and financially through lectures, discussions, and readings (316). Winona, likewise, serves both to inspire and to organize men when she develops the plans for Maxwell's rescue:

As was the fashion in those days, the women listened but did not intrude their opinions upon the men, being engaged in performing the part of Good Samaritan to the widow and orphans. But long after the meeting had broken up Winona crept into the woods not to weep, but to think. She leaned against a tree and her hopeless eyes gazed down the darkening aisles; she prayed: "Help me to help save him!"

In the morning she sought an interview with Captain Brown. (380)

Winona's prays not merely for Divine Will, but for tactical advice, advice which is readily accepted by the devout John Brown.

Hopkins's commitment to indirect influence was also apparent in her position on suffrage, a more conservative position than that expressed by those female contemporaries she profiled, such as Frances Harper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Josephine Ruffin. Hopkins advocated limited suffrage on issues concerning a woman's personal and property rights, children, and public school but rejected full suffrage, in part because she feared that black women's moral authority, an authority continually attacked in popular racist texts, would be compromised by the vagaries of political life:

Physically, women are not fitted for the politician's life; morally, we should deplore seeing woman fall from her honorable position as wife and mother to that of the common ward heeler hustling for the crumbs meted out to the "faithful" of any party in the way of appointments to office. ("Women's" 122)

Hopkins reminds her readers that full suffrage for all women would mean that white women would have further opportunity to oppress black women: "If we are not the 'moral lepers' that the white woman of Georgia accuses us of being, then we ought to hesitate before we affiliate too happily in any project that will give them greater power than they now possess to crush the weak and helpless" ("Women's" 122).

Hopkins's position reflects her seeming concern that sexual solidarity may disrupt racial solidarity. She may have recalled a parody of the New Woman in the first issue of the Colored American by the Young Men's Congressional Club, the women's branch of which Hopkins was vice-president. In the proceedings of a parodic mock divorce trial, the attorney of Mr. Wiregrass accuses his client's spouse of being "one o'dese hear 'New Women'" who "just because he didn't think as she thunk - she was chasing him around de room wid a red hot poker" (144). Certainly, the strategy of expediency of the National American Women's Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in the late nineteenth century-arguing that suffrage for white women would bolster, rather than undermine, the power of a white-dominant class afraid of African-American and immigrant domination - also fueled Hopkins's ambivalence (Giddings 124).

As an unmarried African-American woman writer, editor, and lecturer, Hopkins was certainly aware of those criticisms - aggressive manhater, androgynous or manly, traitor to her race or sex - levied at other professional white and black women, and potentially levied at her. To avoid this censure as well as attacks on the intellectual capabilities, chastity, and refinement of African-American women in general, Hopkins first claims for her quadroon protagonist some of the privileges of "true womanhood" - specifically its glorification of piety and purity-long denied black women (see Carby 32). And as Claudia Tate has demonstrated, to the extent that the black women's post-Reconstruction novels focused on the marriage plot, domesticity, civility, and middle-class prosperity, they allowed black women to claim a subjectivity hitherto denied them ("Allegories" 106). Yet, as Tate notes in Domestic Allegories, Winona is a departure from earlier black women's domestic fiction. Home and family are not the center of Winona's activity. Rather than "displac[ing] the text of female development," however, the interracial romance suggests the very extent of Winona's development as the tacit race leader (203). As alternately a "true woman," an object of desire, and a savvy tactician, Winona both inspires and mobilizes men.

Indeed, the extent of Winona's "development" is evidenced by the strategic way in which she claims or relinquishes a "true woman" identity. Under slavery, Winona is the educated and beautiful woman threatened with sexual violence; later she passes as a young boy to nurse the suffering Maxwell in prison. After she takes up a gun to defend the camp from the advancing pro-slavery contingent, Winona moves from a "true woman" to a "true abolitionist," divinely sanctioned and inspired to enact or direct resistance. When Hopkins described the white women's club representative Kate Lyon Brown protesting against the exclusion of the Woman's Era Club from the General Federation of Women's Clubs, she hailed Brown for standing with "the fortitude of a martyr or, what is synonymous, an old-time abolitionist" ("Famous Women . . . Club" 276). While Hopkins reminded her readers of the North's capitulation to Southern racist demands, she assured her readers that "where we have found one Kate Lyon Brown we shall find more because God lives, and we trust Him" (277).

Hopkins, then, revised white women's sentimental paradigms of the nineteenth century by rejecting the sentimental ethic of ultimate self-sacrifice. While Winona affirms a sentimental world view where "human events are organized, clarified and made meaningful by spiritual realities," her personal and spiritual struggle is already completed; her work is to mobilize others (Tompkins 133). While white women's sentimentalism offers self-abnegation as a means of transcending the worldliness and transience of bodily existence, Hopkins's world view retains a vital commitment to personal and social lived experience. Her eschatological vision is not one of personal transcendence but of communal liberty. If sentimentalism privileges only one moment - when the soul leaves the body - Hopkins's work grants the possibility of many moments open to intervention.

With her independence, Christian virtue, and commitment to racial uplift, Frances Harper's Iola Leroy likely served as the model for many of Hopkins's mulatta heroines. Like Iola Leroy, Winona is initially neither aware of her racial identity nor of the racism she would have to confront if and when that identity is exposed. As mulattas, both characters are granted an intrinsic moral and theological authority which is further enhanced by their suffering. Hopkins shared Harper's conviction that Christianity provided the only hope for national recovery from the lingering evils of slavery - "the Law of Liberty was the Law of God" - and their female characters most readily embodied that law. Two months before the appearance of Winona, Hopkins commended Harper's generosity in support of John Brown's struggle in pursuit of that higher law: "When the John Brown episode was agitating the nation, no one was more deeply affected than Mrs. Harper. To John Brown's wife she sent a letter saying: 'May God, our God, sustain you in the hour of trial . . .'" (368). Praising Harper's lectures, which stressed the importance of "morals and general improvement" to newly freedwomen, Hopkins hailed Harper as one "working and preaching as did the Master - for the love of humanity" ("Famous Women . . . Literary" 368).

Unlike Harper's Iola Leroy, however, Hopkins's Winona privileges the love relationship between a mulatta and a white hero - a scenario for which Hopkins was criticized by one angry white subscriber who proclaimed, "The stories of these tragic mixed loves will not commend themselves to your white readers and will not elevate the colored readers" (Condict 399). More recently, Dickson Bruce has viewed this relationship as evidence of "the depth of [Hopkins's] assimilationism" (151). I argue, on the contrary, that it represents the extent of Maxwell's transfiguration. Convinced that "the heart" determines character, rather than the skin, Maxwell demonstrates his commitment to the fundamental John Brown ethic: "He hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth" (405, 374). For Hopkins this "blood" has its origins in Africa, making Maxwell's marriage to Winona an affirmation of their ultimately shared African racial roots. At the same time, the relationship rejects the dominant history of miscegenation in the white press, a history of black men raping white women. Judah's resentment of Maxwell is grounded in the history of white men raping black women: "He knew the worth of a white man's love for a woman of mixed blood; how it swept its scorching heat over a white young life, leaving it nothing but charred embers and burnt-out ashes" (357-58). The fact that Judah's anger is never satisfactorily resolved in the novel and that he is allowed no alternative love interest further taints the interracial romance. When Judah exclaims," 'It's this cursed slavery that's to blame' "for Winona and Maxwell's relationship, Maxwell's love for Winona carries with it the history of rape.

As both Maxwell and Judah grapple with this historical legacy, they demonstrate the intervention of the Divine. Hopkins defines history as "an account of the deeds of men who have been the models and patterns for the great mass of humanity in past centuries even from the beginning of the world" (qtd. in Carby, Reconstructing 162). In her tribute to Toussaint L'Overture, the black leader of the resistance against the Napoleonic invasion of Haiti, Hopkins calls for a history which will reveal the "God in Man":

In contemplating the positions held by different races in the world in point of intelligence, integrity, the capability of receiving culture and becoming useful members of society, the mind . . . passes from the altitude reached by the Anglo-Saxon to . . . the supposed inferiority of the Negro, and groping blindly in the darkness that envelops all that pertains to him, seeks for the ray of light in history that reveals the God in man; the divine attribute that must exist in the Negro as well as in other races, or he sinks to the level of the brute creation. In the history of this island - the sole possession of the Negro race in America - we find what we seek: the point of interest for all Negroes, . . . for all students of the black race. The voice of history is the voice of God. (10)

As in such slave narratives as Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a theological vision of historical agency allows black leaders to seek divine intervention to effect change.(16) A sense of divine mission rather than formal education, family connections, or personal wealth takes precedence in determining one's qualifications to bring about this change. The "voice of God" may be in Toussaint L'Overture's professed principle of "no retaliation," a principle which Hopkins declares was "no small evidence of Toussaint's greatness," or it may in his call to arms against the French army: ". . . God gave us liberty; France has no right to take it away. Burn the cities, destroy the harvests, tear up the roads with cannon, poison the wells, show the white man the hell he comes to make!" (22). The Biblical origins of Judah's name - -signifying a tribe, region, and individual - suggest his greater purpose as a "model" for others to follow. When Jacob blesses his sons, he foretells Judah's future as tribal leader: "Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies; thy father's children shall bow down before thee" (Gen. 49: 8). Judah's anger resonates more than Maxwell's romantic success.

So if the state imposes a secularized order in the form of Jim Crow legislation, Hopkins's Christian ethic allows one to act to resist that paradigm by appealing to Divine law. As Hopkins displaces turn-of-the-century racist violence onto slavery, the "demonic" is even more powerfully constructed as an antagonistic, "unnatural" relationship between the races. By making slavery inherently and structurally evil, Hopkins not only negates the argument that a benevolent slave owner may participate in the uplift of the race, but also reminds her readers that as slavery exists in a contemporary form, it is only a reshaping of a present "evil." Hopkins's eschatological vision looks toward the time when that "evil" may be removed by changing those oppressive social codes in which it is manifest.(17) The work of an "evil" character in Hopkins's fiction is always enhanced by the support of an equally "evil" legal or social code.

This view of history as it foregrounds struggles between divinely inspired liberators and demonically inspired oppressors was quite different from that espoused in Booker T. Washington's A New Negro for a New Century. Published in 1900, A New Negro is an anthology of African-American histories, slave narratives, biographical sketches, and articles celebrating the performances of black soldiers in various battles. According to publisher J. E. MacBrading, the New Negro is committed to bourgeois progress and self-determination, "in every phase of life far advanced over the Negro of 30 years ago" (3). If one is truly committed to progress, then, one should de-emphasize a history of past oppression. As Henry Louis Gates notes, "This aspect of 'the past' is not only forgotten in A New Negro, it is buried beneath all of the faintly smiling bourgeois countenances of the Negroes awaiting only the new century to escape the recollection of enslavement" (139). For Hopkins, such a commitment to autonomy or personal well-being at the expense of historical consciousness is merely arrogant self-aggrandizement or shallow liberalism - i.e., those characters are in favor of abolition as long as it doesn't impose an undue burden on themselves. In either case this advocation of individual well-being must be either exposed or transformed into a less self-serving ideology.

With the ending of the novel, Hopkins, in fact, reaffirms her commitment to engaged political struggle. The narrative ends with Aunt Vinnie, the caretaker of Maybee's hotel, in Buffalo, New York, as she speaks to her white and black neighbors with all the authority of the Parson. Aunt Vinnie concludes with a "short sermon on the fate of her race" and a hymn, suggestive of those sung by "anti-slavery men [who] advanced singing hymns and praising God," which bears citing in its entirety (412):

"Ole Satan's mad, an' I am glad, Send de angels down. He missed the soul he thought he had, O, send dem angels down. Dis is de year of Jubilee, Send dem angels down. De Lord has come to set us free, O, send dem angels down." (437)

Aunt Vinnie offers readers, in effect, an encapsulation of the preceding events. "Ole Satan" and "De Lord" move freely out of their realm to affect hers. Since "De Lord," rather than black men and women, acts as liberator, the threat of militant resistance is masked; Aunt Vinnie does not or cannot openly advocate such resistance in the presence of her white listeners. By ending with Aunt Vinnie, Hopkins both reaffirms the African-American struggle under Jim Crow, which threatened to become inconsequential with the principal characters' removal to England, and reaffirms the power which Aunt Vinnie and the narrator have as black women. Not only do these two female characters describe events in which divine intervention occurs, but they also forecast, forewarn, and hail other moments of divinely sanctioned resistance.

Aunt Vinnie also reminds readers that the preceding events should be read primarily as "the story of Winona's strange fortunes" (436). While Hopkins sanctions diverse strategies of resistance, she gives African-American middle-class women the authority to monitor, shape, or curtail that resistance. In a March 1902 essay hailing the achievements of African-American female literary workers, Hopkins writes, "Upon the Negro woman lies a great responsibility, - the broadening and deepening of her race, the teaching of youth to grasp present opportunities, and, greater than all, to help clear the moral atmosphere by inculcating a clearer appreciation of the Holy Word and its application to every day living" ("Famous Women . . . Literary" 277). While such sentiments may seem to inspire disengagement, they also remind readers of past struggles when the "Holy Word" was invoked and may be invoked yet again. How exactly to apply that "Holy Word" to everyday living is what Hopkins's heroines seem best able to determine. For Hopkins, then, Winona, Maxwell, and Judah may leave for England, but "dem angels" are still coming down.

Notes

1. Out of a total circulation of 15,000-16,000 issues a month, approximately 5,000 were purchased by whites (Wallace 185).

2. In Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, Kevin Gaines defines the uplift ideal as it was promoted by black elites as a commitment to bourgeois morality, patriarchal authority, and self-improvement (2-3).

3. To date, Lois Brown provides the most detailed biography of Hopkins in her dissertation "Essential Histories/Determined Identities: Images of Race and Origin in the Works of Pauline Hopkins." (For a history of Hopkins's association with the Colored American Magazine, see 36-50.)

4. Even though Washington was working to control the Council in 1901 and 1902 and secured the presidential election of his former foe, now supporter, T. Thomas Fortune, Washington was not able to stifle all dissent in the organization (see Meier 172-74).

5. While Braithwaite says little about Elliott's management ideology or style, he does stress the extent to which Elliott was concerned that the magazine be a profitable venture, which may indicate an unwillingness to alienate Washington: "A quiet, and on the surface a rather agreeable fellow, he quickly sensed an opportunity that might be profitable for himself in this association with a pioneer venture and soon began to exert a dominant influence in the affairs of the magazine" (23).

6. Referring specifically to Of One Blood, Gaines argues that, "in a departure from her previous work, Hopkins . . . exchanged the 'feminine' form of domestic fiction, with its American setting and substantial female presence, for the 'male' persona of a scientific expert on the darker races, claiming an influence within the male-dominated realm of imperial power. . . . She also found it necessary to defer to the black community's assumptions of male leadership that tended to marginalize Hopkins's contributions as a black woman intellectual" (434). Much the same argument might be made about Winona, since as a western the novel is certainly a departure from traditional domestic fiction and the female protagonist appears to have little voice.

7. See also Hopkins's letter to William Monroe Trotter on April 16, 1905, in which she complains of white editor John C. Freund's patriarchal authority (in Brown 47-50).

8. For an overview of the dominant white women's sentimental overplot, see Baym.

9. I am indebted to Teresa Faden for pointing out the origin of Dianthe Lusk's name. For a brief history of Dianthe Lusk's courtship and marriage to John Brown, see Oates 15-16. For Hopkins's likely source on Dianthe Lusk, see Sanborn 33-34.

10. In the recently published collection of essays on Hopkins, Elizabeth Ammons argues that in Winona Hopkins creates a "new origins myth for North America that renounces European cultural values in favor of Indian and African American ones. . . . Winona radically rewrites the primary, romantic, American myth of our great (white) 'founding fathers,' making their representative in this fiction an opponent of white authority" (216). Hopkins's renunciation of "European cultural values," however, is selective. As I have mentioned, tribe members "embrace Christianity" and "the arts of civilized life," which suggests their commitment to racial uplift.

11. Hopkins's reference to "Gov. Davis' recent action" may refer to what biographer Raymond Arsenault claims was Arkansas Governor Jeff Davis's "most spectacular Negrophobic escapade of his career." In early May of 1902 (Hopkins's reference appeared in June of that year), Davis pardoned a black convict serving a three-year sentence in the state penitentiary for "assault with intent to kill" with the following message: "'Having just returned from the North and having heard many expressions of sympathy by the citizens of Massachusetts for what they were pleased to call the poor, oppressed negro of the South, and desiring that they shall have an opportunity to reform a certain portion of the negro population of our state: Therefore, I, Jefferson Davis, Governor of the state of Arkansas, by virtue of the constitution and authority vested in me by the constitution and laws of Arkansas, do grant unto Andrew Thompson, a negro, full and free pardon on condition that he become within the next thirty days a citizen of Massachusetts'" (qtd. in Arsenault 168). Immediately after the release of his statement, Davis became a Southern celebrity, and the incident was widely reported throughout the country.

Hopkins could also be referring to an incident some months earlier in Davis's campaign against rival Democrat Elias Rector. In a widely reported series of charges, Davis accused Rector of supporting "negro guards" at the state prison camp in England. During an inspection of the camp, Davis reported witnessing the following scene: "'Negro guards lay a white man face down on the ground and while one stood on his neck another held his feet and a third whipped him on the bare back'" (145). Rector counter-attacked with charges that suggested Davis himself participated in events undermining white supremacy.

12. Hopkins's previous work prefigures this debate in Winona concerning the nature and legitimacy of different forms of resistance by suggesting imminent violent resistance to come. In "A Dash for Liberty," Hopkins tells the story of Madison, a freedman, who returns to the South to rescue his wife, a beautiful octoroon, from slavery. On board the slave-carrying ship Creole, he leads a mutiny and rescues his wife, Susan." 'Every act of oppression is a weapon for the oppressed. Right is a dangerous instrument: woe to us if our enemy wields it'" (247).

13. Hopkins's work shares Frederick Douglass's commitment to personal restraint and his sanctioning of violence only when for the greater good of the larger community. As Maggie Sale points out in her analysis of Douglass's short story "The Heroic Slave" (1853), the protagonist, Madison Washington, leads a mutiny aboard a slave ship for "Liberty not malice." Hopkins heralded Douglass as one of the "messengers of God" in the November 1900 issue of the Colored American Magazine.

14. Hopkins also alludes to Eli Thayer's formation of the Emigrant Aid Society, which encouraged free-soil emigrants to settle in Kansas and "vote to make it free." See Thayer's History of the Kansas Crusade (1889) and Sandborn 380-84. By supporting Thayer's call to "emigrate into bleedin' Kansas an' fight it out," Hopkins also suggests her own support for the black migration - again putting her at odds with Washington (338).

15. According to Lois Brown, Hopkins applied for copyright of a five-act play entitled Winona in 1878. To my knowledge this play is not extant.

16. In God of the Oppressed, James Gone writes, "Liberation as the fight for justice in this world has always been an important ingredient in black religion. Indeed black religion's existence as another reality, completely different from white religion, is partly related to its grounding of black faith in the historical struggle of freedom" (141).

17. See Cone's Black Theology and Black Power for a broader discussion of black empowering visions of eschatology.

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Martha H. Patterson is currently a lecturer at the University of Michigan, where she teaches American literature, women's studies, and composition. She is at work revising her book manuscript tentatively titled "Revisioning the American New Woman, 1895-1913."