Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 283Magazine: one of a number of important black periodicals of the time that included
imaginative writing, journalism, scholarship, and political commentary. Hopkins
published a large body of work in the Colored American, including short stories,
biographical articles, and historical sketches. What has secured her reputation,
however, are her four novels, three of which were serialized in the Colored American
and one of which, Contending Forces: A Romance of Negro Life North and South
(1900), was published by the press that issued the magazine, the Colored Co-operative
Publishing Company. These novels are remarkable for the use of established popular
genres to explore the themes of race and gender. In Winona, A Tale of Negro Life in
the South and Southwest (1902), for instance, a love story about a beautiful, tragic
mulatta becomes a means of exploring the contentious issues of slavery and racial
and sexual oppression. And in Of One Blood; or, the Hidden Self (1903), Hopkins
produces an early example of black science fiction writing, using an imaginary
underground African city as an imaginative site for exploring the racial mixing of
blacks and whites. Most notable of all, in Contending Forces, Hopkins takes on a wide
canvas and the mainstream literary genres of domestic and historical romance. The
setting ranges from Bermuda in the 1790s to Boston in the late nineteenth century.
Thrilling episodes involving endangered heroines and lecherous villains are
juxtaposed with scenes of domestic bliss. Tragic misunderstandings and melo-
dramatic coincidences are mingled with scenes of marriage and motherhood. And,
throughout all this, Hopkins presses upon the issues of racial injustice and sexual
oppression, as her black women are violated, and her black male characters brutalized
and killed, by the domestic whites.
At the center of Contending Forces is a character called Sappho Clark. Sold into
prostitution by her white uncle at the age of 14, she has a son who was conceived
during the period when she was effectively a sexual slave. To a degree, she is the con-
ventional romance heroine, the tragic mulatta. Perhaps exploiting the prejudices of
the time, but more probably reflecting them, Hopkins even attributes to Sappho the
conventional beauty of the white heroine. Sappho is “tall and fair,” the reader learns,
“with hair of a golden cast, aquiline nose, rosebud mouth, soft brown eyes veiled by
long, dark lashes which swept her cheek.” So far, so conventional: Hopkins is not
above subscribing to racial stereotype. Particularly, she is not above stereotyping
lower-class black characters, who seem to have a virtual monopoly on dialect, “wild
vivacity,” a tendency toward easy morality, and the provision of comic relief. But
Sappho is more than meets the eye. For a start, Sappho is not her real name. She has
adopted it to disguise her identity, and it is a clear allusion to the ancient Greek poet
who created a school of women’s poetry and music on the island of Lesbos. The
portrait of Sappho Clark, beneath its conventional veneer, has a definite political
agenda. Her personal story exposes what Hopkins, in her preface to the book, refers
to as a history of “lynching and concubinage,” a series of “monstrous outbreaks” of
injustice “under a government founded upon the greatest and brightest of principles
for the elevation of mankind.” Her character and stoicism, in turn, are meant to
inspire admiration, and so contribute to what Hopkins saw as the ultimate aim of
the book: “in an humble way,” as she puts it, “to raise the stigma of degradation fromGGray_c03.indd 283ray_c 03 .indd 283 8 8/1/2011 7:54:23 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 23 AM