296 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900starting point for its progress upward, must be the black woman.” “Only the BLACK
WOMAN,” Cooper suggested, “can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet,
undisputed dignity of my womanhood ... then and there the whole Negro race
enters with me.’ ” Cooper subscribed to the contemporary belief in “true woman-
hood,” woman as the conscience of society. “The American woman is responsible
for American manners,” she wrote; “our country’s manners and morals are under
our tutoring.” But she also insisted that the black woman, in particular, had a
pivotal role to play in the regeneration of American society because, as a black
person as well as a woman, she knew with special intensity what was wrong and
needed to be put right. For her, freedom was indivisible. “The cause of freedom,”
as she put it, “is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class – it is the cause
of human kind.” And that the black woman, doubly denied her freedom, was in a
special position to know. “When all the weak shall have received their due con-
sideration,” she asserted, “then woman will have her ‘rights,’ and the Indian will
have his rights, and the Negro will have his rights, and all the strong will have
learned at last to deal justly.” Cooper was a devout believer in equality but not
integration. “The dark man,” she wrote, “wants ... merely to live his own life”; “the
social equality which means forced or unbidden association would be as much ...
strenuously opposed by the circle in which I move as by the most hide-bound
Southerner in the land.” And she argued from the standpoint of gentle feeling and
faith rather than from that of politics or principle. All “our fair land” had to learn,
she suggested, was “the secret of universal courtesy” which was “after all nothing
but the art, the science, the religion of regarding one’s neighbor as one’s self.”
Within these constraints, though, which were partly ones she shared with her
times, Cooper offered a quiet plea for what she called “courteous contact, which is
naught but the practical application of the principle of benevolence.” In anticipating
a time when, as she put it, “race, color, sex, condition, are realized to be the
accidents, not the substance of life,” she aimed to give voice to the voiceless – not
just black women, finally, but “every man or woman who has writhed silently
under a mighty wrong.”
Although he too hoped for a time when his people would be assimilated into a
broader, more benevolent form of American society, Charles Alexander Eastman
was more troubled and conflicted than Cooper. A member of the Sioux tribe, he
was educated in white schools; and living, after that, on the margins of both socie-
ties, he was never really comfortable in either. Although Eastman accepted the
assimilationist ideas of his white educators, his early work is marked by nostalgia
for the simplicities of tribal life. His account of the years before he was sent to
school, Indian Boyhood (1902), was immensely popular. This was soon followed by
several books on Sioux history and folklore, including Old Indian Days (1907) and
Wigwam Evenings (1909). Later work signaled Eastman’s own sense that he was
working on the border between two cultures, trying to bring them closer together.
In The Indian Today: The Past and the Future of the American Indian (1915), he
considered the past and possible contributions of his people to American society as
a whole. In the autobiographical work From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916),GGray_c03.indd 296ray_c 03 .indd 296 8 8/1/2011 7:54:25 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 25 AM