Of print and primogeniture, or, the curse of firsts.

When asked if I would share few thoughts on Julia C. Collins's The Curse of Caste, both about the novel itself and the recent spate of commentary on said book, I agreed without much hesitation. As a scholar of 19th-century black literature, I see my day job as contextualizing and interpreting works from long ago. And in this case, particular consideration of the novel's place in the firmament of African American literature seems called for, in light of the renewed and recent debates over what constitutes lineage, and genre, in early black American literature.

Published serially between February and September 1865 in the African Methodist Episcopal church's Christian Recorder, Collins's novel spins a story of two generations of star-crossed lovers--the near-white, once enslaved wife and her orphaned, now grown daughter who relives "the curse of caste" that doomed her parents' marriage. Aficionados of the era know of another serially released novel, Martin Delany's Blake, or the Huts of America (published in the Anglo-African Magazine and the weekly Anglo-African), which precedes The Curse by several years; it too lacks its final chapters. (1) Collins, a school teacher and occasional essayist, is thus bested in the effort to write the first serialized fiction by an African American. Furthermore, if we are to continue on this path of primogeniture in print, William Wells Brown's Clotel and Frank Webb's The Garies and Their Friends both appeared in the 1850s. Thus part--and only part--of The Curse's current significance lies in a contested primacy of black female authorship, an inaugural position hailed by both its publisher, Oxford, and its editors, William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun. We should, they say, pay due acknowledgement to its being the first novel written by an African American woman. Yet to some that accolade appears a veritable act of heresy.

If Julia C. Collins can be placed in the role of "first African American woman novelist," where does that leave Harriet E. Wilson? Her status as such was accorded to the New Hampshire writer following the republication of her work Our Nig in 1983, under the aegis of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and acclaimed by countless others since. Not long ago, Bernard Bell, in The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, could refer without further explanation to Our Nig as fiction based in fact. Wilson's most recent editors, P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald H. Pitts, detail their historical research and documentation to demonstrate clearly that the novel is based on Wilson's own early life. None of these scholars, however, discards the genre designation of novel for Wilson's text. Perhaps we should interrogate what is meant by the term "novelized autobiography," to question the implication of the claim that Our Nig is only a disguised "true tale."

Displacing Wilson from her position of first black woman novelist can appear somehow disrespectful, although the work of newcomer Collins has been available on microfiche for 10 years. Questioning whose work comes first strikes me as less of a critical issue than the query twinned along with it: is one text "truth" and another "fiction"? To question primacy casts The Curse of Caste as a work of the imagination, and Our Nig as truth-telling--with all the nuance of creativity and originality, or lack thereof, that such a distinction implies. I admit myself somewhat concerned that the contention demeans Wilson's long-ago, and for so long nearly forgotten, efforts at authorship. Does Collins's serial fiction, drawing as it does on the 19th-century's popular romantic novels, attain a novelistic "firstness" not only for its publication date but also for an apparent lack of autobiographical material? What, then, do we make of the ironies of Wilson's narrative, the sarcastic asides and recognizable voice, qualities not foregrounded in Collins's novel? What indeed does it mean to be proclaimed a fictionalized autobiography, and what relation does such a tale hold to an autobiographical fiction? The answers to such question are more than academic, for they go to the core of the project of African American literary history.

Such unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, queries bring to my mind the equally interesting dust-up over Olaudah Equiano's birthplace. If the supposedly West African Equiano was indeed New World born, as some evidence appears to indicate, does that prove his text is not an autobiography or slave narrative, but rather a... what? If Equiano is not telling his own personal life story, then his storytelling opens the door to the intriguing possibility that he was instead another first: an 18th-century black novelist drawing on the tradition of the picaro. So should we not read him with Defoe, as well as with Douglass? The surprising nature of Equiano's narrative may be to show the flip side of Wilson's text: said not to be telling the whole truth, he must therefore be making things up; shown to be drawing on her own life, she must not be creating a fictional universe. To say that Wilson's book is not the first novel by a black woman or that Equiano's autobiography may not be wholly the story of his own life--both of which statements may be valid--may still be to miss a crucial point. With such assertions, we dismiss their author-ity.

Let me return to our supposed controversy, those pen-swords clashing over Wilson's place as first black woman novelist being vaulted over by that of Collins's. While I do not think we should leave ourselves open to the charge of focusing on arcane chronology, some importance adheres in the matter of being first: as a literary historian, I like to chart a historical record (or at least to attempt one), to construct a timeline and a lineage of black authorship in the United States, and to understand the ways that--and when--black writers utilized genre. Understanding who wrote what when, and why (not to mention how and where), helps this scholar discern the warp and the weft of black American writing. To debate the origins and parameters of our tradition is not to diminish or negate those writers whom we have already, comfortably, canonized; we can be advocates of more than one school, acolytes of more than one author. For literary histories are rewritten with every generation.

Nevertheless, the identity of the first black woman novelist continues to tease us. (May I point out that I cannot even attempt here to join the conversation about Hannah Crafts and The Bondswoman's Narrative, a manuscript long known only to the most assiduous scholars, and only recently published and edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) Black authors, male and female, remain undiscovered. Treasures still lie ahead, be they as close as a local library's stacks or much further away. Primacy of publication is not the only notable aspect of Wilson or Collins. For all that we in the United States debate that first place position, we remain Anglophonic when it comes to "American." The Norton Anthology of African American Literature tacitly acknowledged this centricity when the editors offered an English translation of Victor Sejour's French language story "Le Mulatre" (1837); Foreman and Pitts alerted me to the existence of the Brazilian Maria F. dos Reis and her novel published in the same year as Our Nig. Our sense of the uniqueness of African American literature comes from our nation's history, is integral to it, but that story is but part of a hemispheric African diaspora. That we struggle still with building an African American literary tradition, searching ceaselessly and sometimes querulously for its first novels, first poems, and first autobiographies, shows us that, like the two-story white house north, slavery's shadows fall even here.

Notes

(1.) Chapters 1-23 of Miller's edition were first published serially in the inaugural volumes of The Anglo-African Magazine in 1859. Later, chapters 29-31 of the novel appeared serially in 1861-62 in The Weekly Anglo-African. Floyd J. Miller edited the first bound (albeit incomplete) volume of Blake for Beacon Press in 1970. Not coincidentally, the first chapters of Delany's novel.

Rafia Zafar is Professor of English, African and African American Studies, and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her scholarly publications include We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870. In the spring of 2007, she will hold the Walt Whitman Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands.