History/Academia/Religion/Culture/Politics/Jazz
Mode for Caleb Caleb McDaniel

Scott McLemee's newest column at Inside Higher Ed discusses the recent discovery by a Brandeis graduate student (go, grad students, go!) that Emma Dunham Kelly-Hawkins, long presumed to be a turn-of-the-century African American novelist, may have been white. Other good posts on the subject can be found at Crooked Timber, Easily Distracted, and The Reading Experience. Ralph Luker also asks whether there is a history scandal here somewhere.

Most of what I would say about this news has been covered in these places, but there are a few tangents that I haven't seen raised elsewhere.

First (and maybe I'm sticking my neck out for saying this), there seems to have been an enormous rush to judgment that the evidence provided by Holly Jackson, the Brandeis graduate student aforementioned, is straightforward proof about Kelly-Hawkins' race. [P.S. The preceding was a sloppy sentence. See comments for clarification.] But it's interesting to me that almost all of the evidence for her "whiteness" hinges on nineteenth-century census records.

This is not the only evidence, of course: there are documentary records at the end of Kelly-Hawkins' life, along with family memories that identify the family as white. But this later evidence could be explained, conceivably, by the family's conscious adoption of "whiteness," a not uncommon attempt in American history to erase African American ancestry from the family tree. Jackson considers this possibility -- that the family was "passing" -- but rejects it on the slender hypothesis that they could not have fooled the census-takers in a small Massachusetts town, where Kelly-Hawkins' family had lived for more than one generation when she was born.

Before accepting this hypothesis [P.S. Another sloppy phrase; imagine reading the sentence without it. See comments for clarification.], I'd like to know more about the way the census was taken in Massachusetts at the time. In Maryland, for instance, my understanding is that the census was usually recorded in the antebellum period by hired census-takers, who went (more or less) from door to door, asking for names and ages. Presumably, they sometimes also asked for "race," since there was a column on the census for recording this, usually "W" for white, "B" for black, and "M" for "mulatto." But the column was usually labelled "color," not "race," and it's highly probable that white census-takers often simply identified a person's "color" with their own eyes. That is, if a person looked white, the census taker could mark down his "W" and move on, regardless of the person's own identification of himself or herself.

Again, I don't know whether this was the way the census was taken in Kelly-Hawkins' case, but it's a question worth raising. [P.S. The preceding sentence gets closer to the main point I wanted to make.] I also don't know whether census takers necessarily knew the locals, as Jackson seems to assume. But my main point here is to question how easily many people still seem to take the census as a final arbiter of vital statistics or racial identities, when the census itself was a document shot through with ambiguity and power relationships. (Martha Hodes at New York University had an excellent article on these subjects two years ago in the American Historical Review, "The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race." The link will only work if you have an individual or institutional subscription to the History Cooperative.)

Here I would echo Burke's post that "race" itself is a cultural construction, a marker of identity rather than a signifier of determinate reality. Maybe I'm going out on a limb again by saying that there may have been some value in the scholarship that has tried to deal with Kelly-Hawkins' literature on the assumption that she was a black woman. Most of that scholarship has wrestled with figuring out the "aggressive whiteness" (to use Jackson's phrase) of Kelly-Hawkins' characters. This is the kind of scholarship that has helped us shake free of the idea that "whiteness" is a simple fact that inheres essentially in a person. Rather, "whiteness" could potentially be "aggressive," which means that it is a fluid and shifting concept that can be adopted, to various degrees, by individuals and even groups. Race is, to use Hodes' word, "mercurial." It would be a shame if somehow these new documents about Kelly-Hawkins undid that valuable insight. It would be a step backwards, rather than a step forwards, to reify race again, and make Kelly-Hawkins' (or anyone's) race a simple matter of reading letters in a column.

Second, I agree with McLemee that this new evidence does not mean (as Henry Louis Gates seems to have suggested) that Kelly-Hawkins' mediocre novels are no longer worth studying. McLemee points out that these novels are still worth studying as embodiments of the "banality of evil" and racism at the end of the nineteenth century. I would add, however, that we should not simply assume that because an author was white, he or she had no influence on contemporary African American writers. That seems to me to be a larger problem with the project of constructing a vacuum-sealed canon of African American literature: it assumes that the only tradition that matters for understanding black writers is the tradition built by black writers. Jackson writes, for instance, that Gates originally introduced the series in which Kelly-Hawkins appeared by saying that he had found, in these obscure black writers, "the literary ancestors of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison."

That way of tracing literary ancestry seems to me misguided. Is there any evidence that Alice Walker read Kelly-Hawkins? Probably not. It seems at least more plausible that Kelly-Hawkins' black contemporaries, like Frances E. W. Harper, might have read her work. That would at least be a good question for research. To find out that an author was white does not immediately prove her work's irrelevance to the African American canon, because black authors read white authors, and vice versa. Dickson Bruce has argued, for instance, that the real question for scholars of African American literature is to "investigate the historical conditions for an African American literary enterprise," and that means figuring out the "process in which black and white writers collaborated in the creation of what I call an 'African American literary presence.'" Even if Harper had not read Kelly-Hawkins, her novels probably had to deal in complex ways with the portrayals of African Americans in them. More evidence would be needed to show that Kelly-Hawkins had any influence, whether direct in Gates' sense or indirect in Bruce's sense, on the development of the African American canon. To show that she was white does not automatically prove she had no influence at all.