Interrogating the silences: Julia C. Collins, 19th-Century black readers and writers, and the Christian Recorder

In the 1970s, when Tillie Olsen published Silences, her rumination on literary exclusions, she dedicated her book in part to "our silenced people, century after century of their beings consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of maintaining human life. Their art, which they still made--as their other contributions--anonymous; refused respect, recognition; lost" (Olsen n.p.). More recently, historical anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in his book Silencing the Past, has critiqued the way that cultural power has worked in the West to produce historical understandings that silence or trivialize certain peoples' words, deeds, and experiences. Since Olsen's work appeared, and even in the decade since Trouillot's, both historians and literary scholars have worked diligently to redress many of the silences in their respective fields, and to establish broader criteria for understanding the meaning and significance of varied forms of written expression and the people who produced them.

Much of this recent attention to previously silenced writers has been directed toward 19th-century African American women, as the work of this journal and its contributors confirms. Harriet E. Wilson's 1859 autobiographical novel Our Nig, whose republication in 1983 was hailed as a black literary landmark, and the much lauded 2002 edition of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative, a previously unpublished 1850's manuscript putatively written by a female former slave, frame a wealth of scholarship that attests to the importance of the ongoing reconstruction of our understanding of early African American women and their writing. Scholars have focused our attention on the writings and the lives of Maria W. Stewart, Elizabeth Keckley, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Susie King Taylor, Harriet A. Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and others. And now we can add the name of Julia C. Collins to the growing list of early black woman writers.

Until quite recently, of course, most people, including leading scholars in the field, had never heard of Julia C. Collins, let alone incorporated her work into our understanding of black literary traditions. Collins's writings are rarely mentioned in the existing secondary literature, and only now are being formally published for the first time. This inattention is especially striking because, given the largely autobiographical nature of both Our Nig and The Bondwoman's Narrative, Collins's The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride may well be considered the first genuine novel by a black American woman to have appeared in print. Collins's erstwhile invisibility may be due in part to her novel's never having been completed. But it is also related to the forum in which her work appeared: the Christian Recorder, a weekly newspaper published by the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church Book Concern. In this essay, I offer some thoughts about the significance of Collins's writings, with particular reference to the six nonfiction pieces that she published in the Recorder. But I would also like to call attention to the importance of the Christian Recorder itself as a valuable resource for understanding 19th-century African American traditions of reading and writing.

The origin of the AME Book Concern and Publications Department was virtually simultaneous with the founding of the denomination, and its perceived importance was demonstrated by Bishop Richard Allen's assumption of the duties of Book Steward. At first the Book Concern was little more than an agency through which the outside printings of Disciplines, Hymnals, licenses, and Love Feast tickets were contracted. But, as Bishop Daniel A. Payne observed in 1891, by the end of the century the Book Concern had evolved into "an institution, which ... has continued to grow in power and influence" (Payne 17, 18).

Before the 1840s the operations of the Book Concern remained those of a routing agency, and its influence in the denomination was negligible. It was also rather poorly and inefficiently run. The condition of the Book Concern in 1845 was described as "painful" and "in a deplorable state," and the General Book Steward warned that any attempt to publish an AME periodical would prove disastrous to the denomination "unless proper measures are entered into by this Conference" (Payne 189, 190). However, early AME leaders like Rev. M. M. Clark and Bishop Daniel A. Payne stressed the importance of denominational publications as a way to raise the general educational level of both the ministry and the members of the Church. Many Church members viewed the publishing operations at best as a financial drain, and at worst an opportunity for bureaucratic swindling. Clark, however, emphasized the great need not only for Disciplines and New Testaments, but also for biographies of Bishop Allen and other "fathers of our Church, whose lives and labors have perished from the eyes of the Church, but which ought to live on the enduring pages of history for the encouragement of the rising generations ...." He argued that the production and sale of books, as well as subscriptions to a denominational magazine, would make the Book Concern financially solvent and able to fulfill its potential to "prove abundantly useful to our race and Connection" (Payne 191). Thus, very early in the denomination's journalistic experiment, an explicit connection was made between Church publications and the development of a literary and historical consciousness among African Americans. But the widespread illiteracy among the potential readers of AME publications proved an obstacle for many years to come. Problems persisted throughout the century, and the Book Concern was not in a position to cover its own expenses until after 1878, despite being run by Book Stewards and Editors who represented "some of the best cultivated talents that could be found in our denomination" (Payne 192). Indeed, from the 1850s into the twentieth century, editorship and management of the Christian Recorder virtually amounted to a stepping stone toward the bishopric. (1)