Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854-1868.

Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854-1868. Edited by Farah Jasmine Griffin. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Pp. xiv, 303. $26.00, ISBN 0-679-45128-5.)

For her boldly conceived study Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends, Farah Griffin selected and juxtaposed two nineteenth-century black women's letters from the Primus family papers in the Connecticut Historical Society. The articulate Rebecca Primus corresponded with her middle-class Hartford family during her sojourn in Maryland to teach freedpeople between 1865 and 1869. Griffin correctly observes that "Primus's letters reveal her confrontations with southern prejudice, her struggles to educate the newly freed blacks, [and] her descriptions of Reconstruction-era politics ..." (p. 4). Addie Brown, a domestic servant living in the households of her employers in New York and New England, wrote to Rebecca Primus between 1859 and 1868. Brown's letters reflect little formal education but portray the social and economic conditions that challenged black female wage earners and provide glimpses of the varied community life of northern black people.

Of particular import, Griffin contends, is that "Brown's letters reveal a close romantic friendship between the two women" (p. 4). Griffin allows that Brown's explicit avowals of love for Primus and expressions of effusive hugs and kisses correspond to nineteenth-century norms of female emotional bonding. She cites historians "[Carroll] Smith-Rosenberg and Lillian Faderman [who] have shown that nineteenth-century white women often slept together and were openly affectionate with each other. Both speculate that some of these relationships may have been sexual as well" (p. 6). Although Griffin acknowledges that, without Primus's letters, "we are left to surmise Primus's responses to Brown" (p. 4), and that "we may never know the full extent of their relationship" (p. 6), she nevertheless categorizes the Brown-Primus friendship as sexual. "If we are to believe Addie's letters," Griffin writes, "her relationship with Rebecca was not simply an affectionate `friendship' or sisterhood. Several of Addie's letters have fairly explicit references to erotic interactions between herself and Rebecca," and solely on the basis of those letters, Griffin infers that "it seems clear that the passion and love were mutual" (p. 6). Without corroborating evidence, however, Griffin can at best merely speculate that a sexual relationship existed.

Other aspects of Griffin's work also prove problematic. The most explicitly erotic portions of Brown's letters, refer to her own thoughts, dreams, or feelings, and they suggest no compliance or reciprocation on Primus's part. Brown's allusions to actual physical contact, beyond kisses and embraces, involve women other than Primus. Griffin characterizes both Primus and Brown as "complex, intelligent, sensual, and multidimensional women committed to both each other and black liberation" (p. 5) and as "extraordinary human beings ... not in spite of but because of the relationship they shared with each other" (p. 7). The very different women reflected in their letters, however, do not support Griffin's common characterization. Primus's letters substantiate neither sensuality nor commitment to Brown; they contain more numerous and affectionate references to her male cats than to Addie. Brown's letters substantiate her sensuality, but, despite Griffin's repeated assertions of Brown's intellectual capabilities and maturation, they do not show a commitment to black liberation.

In bringing these previously obscure documents to light, Griffin makes an important scholarly contribution. In focusing on the alleged sexual nature of their relationship, however, Griffin neglects sufficient treatment of Rebecca Primus's perceptive responses to her Maryland experiences and cogent analysis of the conflicting attitudes, values, and behavior of the intriguing Addie Brown. Ultimately, Griffin does not realize her goal "to remain true to the integrity of each woman's voice" (p. xii). And Griffin's commentary lacks the nuanced discussion of nineteenth-century concepts of love, friendship, family, and sexuality that Smith-Rosenberg, for example, demonstrated in 1975 [Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs, I (1975), 1-29].

DIANE BATTS MORROW

University of Georgia