162 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865even more marked a year later, when she inaugurated her career as a public speaker
with a speech on “The Education and Elevation of the Colored Race.” The lecture
tour she then embarked on was grueling. But she managed to produce more poems
and essays, and to publish Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), which effectively
began the tradition of African-American protest poetry. A good example of such
protest poetry is “The Slave Mother.” There is a striking tension here between the
artifice of the form and the realism of the subject. A conventional metrical form,
emphatic rhymes and rhythms, elaborate images, and a melodic, repetitive rhetoric,
are all put at the service of a devastatingly simple account of how a slave mother has
her small son torn from her.
In 1859 Harper published her first significant fiction, the short stories “The Two
Offers” and “Our Greatest Want.” “The Two Offers,” the first short story published by
a black person in the United States, is concerned with the condition of women. It
tells the tale of two cousins, one of whom suffers an unhappy marriage, and the
other of whom, learning from her cousin’s fate, decides to remain unmarried.
Turning from marriage, as one of only several options available to a woman, the
second cousin dedicates herself to “universal love and truth” – in other words,
abolitionism and other reform movements. “Our Greatest Want” deals in more
detail with the question of race, suggesting that, while the acquisition of wealth is
necessary for African-Americans, their development as “true men and true women”
is more important. Both stories are characteristic, in that they are elaborately
artificial in tone and sternly moral in tenor: “true happiness,” “The Two Offers”
concludes, “consists not so much in the fruition of our wishes as in the regulation of
desires and the full development and right culture of our whole natures.” And,
together, they reflect the overriding commitments of Harper’s life and work: to
racial and sexual equality. That commitment was also reflected in Harper’s first
serialized novel, Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869). This book also developed its author’s
belief in the redemptive power of women, and black women in particular. Harper
participated with many others in the nineteenth century in what has been called the
cult of true womanhood, a set of convictions that celebrated the superior piety,
domesticity, and rectitude of the Christian woman. But she added to this her sense
that it was up to black people generally, but black women especially, to “consecrate
their lives to the work of upholding the race.”
Among Harper’s many other published works were a free verse narrative, Moses:
A Story of the Nile (1869), two novels dealing with temperance (Sowing and Reaping:
A Temperance Story (1876) and Trial and Triumph (1888–1889)), and a newspaper
column, first called Fancy Etchings and then Fancy Sketches, in which she explored
contemporary issues and moral dilemmas through the conversations and activities
of various regular characters. Her two most important later works, however, were
Sketches of Southern Life (1872) and Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892). At the
heart of Sketches is a series of poems narrated by an Aunt Chloe. Sixty years old,
Aunt Chloe tells the reader how she learned to read, take an active interest in politics
although she cannot vote, and try to make sure that the men are “voting clean.”
Unlike most of Harper’s other poetry, these poems exploit African-American oralGGray_c02.indd 162ray_c 02 .indd 162 8 8/1/2011 7:54:41 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 41 AM