Lois Brown
Three years ago, Lois Brown,
MHC professor of English, was combing through nineteenth-century
newspapers and came across an author she'd never heard of. Susan
Paul, a twenty-six-year-old African American schoolteacher, was noted
as having written and published a biography of a freeborn black child
in Boston. The book was titled in the longwinded style characteristic
of the period: Memoir of James Jackson, the attentive and obedient
scholar, who died in Boston, October 31, 1833, aged six years and
eleven months. Further research led Brown to the discovery of
five extant copies of a simple pasteboard edition first published in
1835 by a Boston abolitionist. Brown initially regarded
Susan Paul as a surprise "literary foremother" of African American
novelist Pauline Hopkins, about whom she was writing and researching
at the time. But she knew Paul's unique contribution to American
letters demanded more than a mere citation in her manuscript on
Hopkins. Brown decided to take a brief hiatus from her work on
Hopkins to write about Paul's memoir and to republish the book for
the first time since its original printing. Harvard University Press
was quick to sign on, and now a new edition of Memoir of James
Jackson has just been reissued, edited and with an introduction
by Brown. The 169-page volume also includes photographs and documents
of the period. The narrative chronicles the brief life of a loving,
well-behaved, and spiritually mature child who, before his premature
death, had begun to read the Bible, sang in Paul's abolitionist
choir, and learned in school about the evils of slavery. It sheds
significant new light on the spiritual and political education of
African American children in the antebellum North. But as Brown points out in
her introduction, unlike the early slave narratives of the 1830s,
Paul's biography was unique in a time when women's writings typically
blended genres of autobiography, essay, and poetry. In addition, says
Brown, the book is notable in "looking at African American life
through the lens of freedom rather than slavery." Furthermore, the
author borrowed from a white didactic narrative tradition of
evangelical juvenilia employed to exclaim the virtues of exemplary
white children and imaginary African American children. "For the
first time," Brown says, "we have an exemplary Christian child, who
is black and real." Paul based her account on her
daily experiences as Jackson's primary school instructor, Sunday
school teacher, and family friend. Brown points out that while
Jackson was the son of a laborer and a working mother, whose lives
focused around the neighborhood church, Paul was the daughter of a
prominent minister of the first Baptist church in Boston. Her mother
was an influential teacher and social activist, and Paul's brother
was the first African American graduate of Dartmouth College. Paul's
commitment to abolition and social reform inspired her to involve her
young pupils in the antislavery movement, and in 1832 she formed a
juvenile choir whose concerts raised funds for the abolitionist
movement and needy ethnic groups that included the Mashpee Indians. Paul interpreted the pious
Jackson boy's death--after a seizure and fainting spell in school and
a three-day fever-- "as a self-conscious deliberate decision to leave
wickedness behind, and to preserve his faith in God," says Brown. The
pious boy, deeply affected by the knowledge of slavery, reportedly
expired after stating, "I must go." Brown sees Paul's dramatic
perspective as fitting for the didactic context. Paul underscored her
protagonist's moral strength while at the same time challenging the
myth that African American enlightenment threatened society and the
nation. For Brown, the discovery and
publication of Memoir of James Jackson has been a poignant
learning experience. "After really immersing myself in this world, I
find their lives truly compelling," she says. "I'm so impressed by
all the details Paul gives. Although we know so much, Memoir
proves that we still have much to learn about New England and African
American life. We know so little. As a teacher myself, this is an
inspiration." Brown was recently awarded a
Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. She will spend the 2000-2001
academic year in Cambridge at Harvard's DuBois Institute for
Afro-American Research and working on her book about Pauline
Hopkins.
photo by Fred
LeBlanc
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