Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 163traditions, as they tell the story of a woman who worked to gain a cabin for herself
and her family and to help build schools and churches for the community. They are
at once the autobiography of a former slave and a vernacular history of slavery,
emancipation, and reconstruction. Iola Leroy is a novel with a complex plot. The
earlier part of it, set in the antebellum period and during the Civil War, assaults the
pro-slavery myth of the Old South, by describing the fierce desire of the slaves for
freedom, then celebrates the bravery of black troops. The later part concentrates on
the search of Iola Leroy and her brother for their mother, and the decision of Iola, a
very light-skinned African-American, not to marry a white man. Instead, she accepts
the proposal of an African-American and dedicates herself to building up the black
community. “I intend to spend my future among the colored people of the South,”
she tells the white man, when she rejects him; “I don’t think that I could best secure
my race by forsaking them and marrying you.” Iola Leroy in effect reverses the
character stereotype of the tragic mulatta and the traditional narrative device of a
black person “passing” for white. Iola is in no sense a victim, and she actively refuses
to take on the role of a supposedly “white” woman married to a white man: “the best
blood in my veins is my African blood,” she declares, “and I am not ashamed of it.”
It also dramatically negotiates a range of issues that were to engage later African-
American women writers in particular: the separation and longing of mother and
daughter, the relationship between the sexes as a cooperative, coequal one, the search
for the right kind of work, role, and life for a woman. Harper continued to link the
cause of African-Americans and the cause of women until the end of her life. “Today
we stand on the threshold of woman’s era,” she proclaimed in “Woman’s Political
Future” (1894). “O women of America!... It is in your hands ... to demand justice,
simple justice, as the right of every race.” She believed in what she called “the com-
bined power of an upright manhood and an enlightened womanhood” to change
the character of America. And she worked in virtually every literary genre available
to her to promote that belief.
Harper made an important contribution to African-American writing; she was
not, however, the first African-American to publish a novel or longer fiction. In
March 1853, Frederick Douglass published his novella The Heroic Slave in his paper
The North Star. And, in the same year, William Wells Brown (1814?–1884) published
a full-length novel, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter. Douglass’s narrative was
based on an actual mutiny on board the slave ship Creole in 1841. Douglass knew
little about the leader of the mutiny, Madison Washington. “Curiously, earnestly,
anxiously, we peer into the dark,” he wrote in his introduction to the story, “and wish
even for the blinding flash, or the light of northern skies to reveal him. But alas! He
is still enveloped in darkness.” So, weaving together what he called various “possibles”
and “probabilities,” Douglass used his imagination to create an embodiment of
heroic rebellion. Like the slave narrative, The Heroic Slave uses white mediation to
tell a black story. The hero is Madison Washington, but the narrator is a white
Northerner called Listwell. From the start, Listwell listens well (a fairly obvious pun)
to the voice of Washington, overhearing him lamenting the terrible contradiction of
being a human being and disposable property. “What, then, is life to me?” ListwellGGray_c02.indd 163ray_c 02 .indd 163 8 8/1/2011 7:54:41 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 41 AM