Narratives of African American

Women's Literary Pragmatism and

Creative Democracy 1st ed. Edition
Gregory Phipps
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Narratives of African American Women’s Literary
Pragmatism and Creative Democracy
 Gregory Phipps

Narratives of African
American Women’s
Literary Pragmatism
and Creative
Democracy
Gregory Phipps
University of Iceland
Reykjavík, Iceland

ISBN 978-3-030-01853-5 ISBN 978-3-030-01854-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01854-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957692

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For Jessica
 Acknowledgements

This book was researched, written, and edited in several different loca-
tions. For independent scholars and people in the early stages of their
post-Ph.D. lives, ongoing migration is often the norm instead of the
exception. Such experiences can be challenging, but they can also be
beneficial insofar as they afford opportunities to enter into multiple com-
munities and to form relationships with diverse people. It is the commu-
nities I have inhabited and the relationships I have formed over the past
years that have made the present book possible.
I could not have found a better environment for the stretch run of
this project than the University of Iceland. The first person I met here
was Guðrún Björk Guðsteinsdóttir, who answered (and continues to
answer) all of my questions about teaching, research, administration, and
Icelandic culture with warmth and perception. Matthew Whelpton has
been an excellent Chair, colleague, and friend. Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir is
another colleague who has welcomed me with kindness and friendship. I
have enjoyed many conversations about teaching, literature, and sports
with Jay D’Arcy. My deep gratitude also goes to Ásrún Jóhannsdóttir,
Anna Heiða Pálsdóttir, Þórhallur Eyþórsson, Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir, and
Erlendína Kristjánsson for making me feel at home in the Department of
English.
My colleagues in the Faculty of Languages and Cultures have also
contributed in equal parts to my work and well-being. First, I thank
Auður Hauksdóttir for her leadership and hospitality. From inviting me
into her home to helping me tackle an eleventh-hour tax application,

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

she has been nothing short of magnificent as a colleague, friend, and

Director. I also thank my neighbour in Veröld, Birna Bjarnadóttir, who
never fails to make me smile with her humour, encouragement, and
intelligence. For their time and generosity in arranging our Faculty trip
to China, I thank Geir Sigurðsson and Magnús Björnsson. I also owe
thanks to Sebastian Drude and Valgerður Jónasdóttir for their tireless
work as researchers, organizers, and founts of knowledge. Bernharð
Antoniussen has handled all issues pertaining to administration with con-
sideration and an eagerness to help. Finally, to all the people I have met
in Iceland who have welcomed me, offered assistance, made suggestions,
commiserated about the weather, unlocked the beauty of their land,
and indulged my attempts to pronounce the double L and the rolled R,
thank you.
Before I moved to Iceland, I found a temporary home at the
Rothermere American Institute in Oxford, where I received generous
assistance from many people. Michèle Mendelssohn and Lloyd Pratt
offered warm welcomes and enthusiastic responses to my work. Sally
Bayley and Tessa Roynon were ideal officemates—accommodating,
brilliant, and always willing to exchange ideas. Hal Jones was a perfect
Director, attending all talks and events and always finding time in his
busy schedule to exchange a friendly word. Like many others, I also ben-
efited from Huw David’s versatility as Director of Development. Fellow
American Literature scholar Spencer Morrison provided indispensible
feedback on this project. I thank Alice Kelly for the many conversations
about literature, history, the profession, and everything in between.
Benjamin Hennig and Tina Gotthardt were wonderful neighbours; the
sadness of our parting in Oxford was swept away by the joys of our reun-
ion in Iceland. Most of all, I thank the extraordinary librarians at the
Rothermere American Institute, particularly Jane Rawson, Judy Warden,
and Johanna O’Connor. From finding books to arranging the use of
rooms for interviews, they provided all the assistance I could ever ask for
while also displaying a consistent and genuine interest in my work.
The early stages of this book were written in Montreal, where I
have formed the strongest and most lasting relationships of my life. To
my doctoral supervisor, Peter Gibian, many thanks for the continued
friendship and interest in my work. To my friends Joel Deshaye, Paula
Derdiger, Kelly MacPhail, and Michael Parrish Lee, thank you for stay-
ing with me as we have branched off to different places and lives. I also
thank Kelly Phipps and Sarah Beer for their love and camaraderie. Carl
 Acknowledgements    ix

Murphy, Cathy McIninch, Ali Murphy, Emily Murphy, and Paul Lessard
have inspired me through unwavering support and generosity.
During the past couple of years, I have presented excerpts from this
project at various conferences, so I thank those who have honed my
ideas through their feedback. In particular, my thanks to the people at
BrANCA for organizing reading groups, conferences, and for carving
out a space for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American studies
in Britain. Portions of Chapter 4 of this book were published in Volume
49 of African American Review as an article entitled “The Deliberate
Introduction of Beauty and Pleasure: Femininity and Black Feminist
Pragmatism in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun.” I thank the people
at African American Review for granting me permission to republish
this material. Also, parts of Chapter 6 appeared in Volume 42 of English
Studies in Canada as an article entitled “Breaking Down Creative
Democracy: A Pragmatist Reading of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen’s
Quicksand.” I thank the people at English Studies in Canada for permis-
sion to republish this material.
I also thank the people at Palgrave Macmillan for their interest in this
project and for all their hard work in bringing it to publication. Both
Ryan Jenkins and Allie Troyanos have been helpful and informative as
Editors and Rachel Jacobe has done everything to make the final pro-
cess of submission run smoothly. I am also grateful to the two anony-
mous readers who reviewed this book. Their insights, suggestions, and
critiques shaped the current project while stimulating me to work harder
and search deeper.
My parents, Alan and Pauline, have encouraged me over the course
of this project just as they have throughout my life. They have embraced
my decisions, applauded my efforts, and supported my dreams. For this,
I owe them a debt of gratitude that I could never hope to repay in full.
My final thank you goes to the one who has stood at the centre of my
world wherever I have lived and whatever I have set out to accomplish.
She has shared my life in Montreal, Oxford, and Reykjavík and has trav-
elled with me near and far, from Paris to Prague to Athens, from Beijing
to Shanghai to Tokyo. As long as I am with her, each new beginning is
filled with hope, each new adventure is filled with happiness, and each
new day is filled with love. For this, for more, for everything, thank you
to my wife, Jessica Murphy.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Nineteenth-Century Philosophical Pragmatism:

The Black Maternal Archetype and the Communities
of Creative Democracy 35

3 The Narrative of Creative Democracy in the Harlem

Renaissance 77

4 The Search for Beautiful Experience in Jessie Fauset’s

Plum Bun 113

5 Creative Democracy in One Community: Literary

Pragmatism in Jessie Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree 137

6 Breaking Down Creative Democracy: The Cycle of

Experience and Truth in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand 163

7 Securing the Archetype and the Community: Irene

Redfield’s Resistance to Creative Democracy in Nella
Larsen’s Passing 187

xi
xii    Contents

8 “She Told Them About Her Trips to the Horizon”:

Creative Democracy in the Short Fiction of Zora Neale
Hurston 213

9 Conclusion 239

Bibliography 251

Index 269
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This is a book about African American women who create versions of

democracy different from the ones entrenched in state apparatuses,
constitutions, and mainstream discourses. Focusing on narratives writ-
ten by black women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
the book explores how select philosophers and authors offer alternative
visions of the United States as a democratic society. In the narratives of
these women, democracy is not a system of government or a nationalis-
tic brand name; rather, it is a way of life shaped by cultural experiences
that unfold within communities of African American women. From this
standpoint, democracy involves the participation of individuals in an
array of culture-building practices that bring together storytelling, art,
labour, religion, and activism. Democracy equally constitutes a proces-
sual, open-ended, and fluid set of relations among people which breaks
through social barriers, linking together not only individuals within
marginalized communities but also communities themselves. I refer to
this version of democracy as “creative democracy,” a term that should
call to mind John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy.1 However, creative
democracy existed as a set of ideals and narratives long before Dewey
gave it a name, in much the same way that pragmatism existed within
American letters before William James codified it in his 1907 mani-
festo, Pragmatism. James and Dewey belong to one pragmatic tradi-
tion that melds creative understandings of democracy with concepts
like individualism, pluralism, and experience. This book focuses on a

© The Author(s) 2018 1

G. Phipps, Narratives of African American Women’s
Literary Pragmatism and Creative Democracy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01854-2_1
2 G. PHIPPS

different genealogy of pragmatism which developed through the writ-

ings of African American women theorists and literary writers. It is this
genealogy that offers some of the most robust and sophisticated inter-
ventions against the manifold failures (past and present) of institutional
democracy in the United States. Rooted in both personal experience and
long-standing cultural symbols, committed to the unification of theory
and practice, African American women’s pragmatism exposes the dis-
tortions, betrayals, and manipulations of state-sponsored U.S. demo-
cratic idealism while simultaneously creating spaces for new forms of
democracy.
There are many potential starting points for thinking about African
American women’s literary pragmatism and creative democracy, but I
focus on a trajectory that passes through the nineteenth-century philos-
ophy of Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell,
and the interwar literature of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale
Hurston. One reason for choosing this approach and these authors
is that doing so equips us to chart an evolution of black feminism that
features continuity and yet a diversity of perspectives. As critics like
Kristin Waters (366), Beverly Guy-Sheftall (2), and Patricia Hill Collins
have pointed out, the balance between multiplicity and “thematic con-
sistency” (as Collins calls it [“Politics” 395]) has shaped much of black
feminist history. Case in point, the theological works of the first African
American woman philosopher, Maria Stewart, are profoundly differ-
ent, on the levels of both form and content, from the passing novels of
Harlem Renaissance authors like Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, but we
can nonetheless identify recurring subjects and themes across them. For
my purposes, these individuals belong to a black feminist tradition not by
virtue of being black female authors, but by virtue of participating in a
shared trajectory of literary pragmatism and creative democracy. For the
pragmatist critic, building an arc in black women’s writing from the early
nineteenth century to the interwar period involves examining a multi-
dimensional narrative that crosses disciplinary boundaries to find modes
of expression at sites of resistance, struggle, and community formation.
The narrative involves a diversity of voices, times, and places, but it also
features a continuity founded on simultaneously pragmatic and creative
reconstructions of democracy.
I say “narrative” to acknowledge that the genealogy of black fem-
inist pragmatism centres on stories which women have shared among
themselves and passed down across the generations. Black feminism in
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

the United States traces its roots to an array of collective enterprises and
political causes, including abolitionism, anti-lynching campaigns, and
club movements, but it also locates its origins in lineages grounded on
storytelling, art, and cultural symbols. Moreover, the transmission of
knowledge among black women has traditionally revolved around mat-
rilineal narratives, specifically stories that mothers and grandmothers
have told to their daughters. Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Toni C. King, and
S. Alease Ferguson use the term “the motherline” to describe such nar-
ratological lines of descent, a concept that brings into focus the symbolic
and practical role of maternity as an anchor in African American wom-
en’s cultural traditions. In this book, I explore one version of a matri-
lineal narrative that extends across multiple generations and is united
through crosscurrents between practical tenets and literary elements. As
many critics have indicated, the tight unity between theory and practice
(as well as between theory and personal experience) has shaped black
feminism from its inception. So too, this unity defines the pragmatist
approach to creative democracy. Yet the narrative of creative democracy
is built around more than a common methodological approach to polit-
ical struggle. It also includes a series of literary components—­characters,
symbols, settings, and thematic concerns—which bring aesthetic vital-
ity to representations of creative democracy while also capturing how
African American women see democracy working as a communal expe-
rience. Therefore, a literary pragmatic approach to creative democracy
begins with the simple but necessary observation that black women’s
constructions of democracy are and always has been concurrently lit-
erary and pragmatic. In a related vein, the literary pragmatic approach
demands a receptivity to the foundational ties that bind together creative
democracy and black feminist culture, most pointedly the centrality of
maternity and the overarching importance of community life.
What defines a literary pragmatic approach to African American wom-
en’s texts? This approach requires an understanding of the principles that
have tied together the many strains of pragmatist thought as well as an
openness to the way black women have developed pragmatist narratives
that speak to their particular experiences. As I have discussed in previ-
ous work, to my mind, literary pragmatist reading begins with the claim
that pragmatism at large reflects in myriad ways an American national
ethos.2 The first self-identified pragmatist, William James, developed
his conception of the distinctly American ethos of pragmatism in writ-
ings such as Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth.3 At the same time,
4 G. PHIPPS

from the literary standpoint, the American orientation of pragmatism

cannot be located in a common set of ideas that James and others insert
into specific arguments. Rather, the American characteristics of pragma-
tism consist of subtle literary components embedded within a wide array
of novels, stories, poems, and non-fiction texts that cover a range of sub-
jects, from history to metaphysics to biology, from religion to aesthet-
ics to politics. Among the writings of pragmatist philosophers, we find a
variety of commentaries on that most flexible of topics, the relationship
between the individual and society (and, more abstractly, between sub-
jectivity and objectivity); but we also find literary inflections that frame
this relationship in the context of varied locales, time periods, and cul-
tural formations in the United States, from the eighteenth century to
the present day. In the philosophical tradition, pragmatist ideas about
individuality and society work in concert with figurative representa-
tions of pragmatic individuals inhabiting American social settings. Such
representations are built around archetypes, national mythology, and
portrayals of and reflections on U.S. geographical spaces, national insti-
tutions, and sociopolitical transformations.
What emerges through comparative literary analyses of these writings
is not a theory of American identity per se, but a cast of characters and
settings that are products of American society just as much as they are
actors and stages which enliven the fundamental principles of pragmatist
philosophy. These literary components afford multiple portraits of how
theorists incorporate constructions of American culture into their writ-
ing. In the process, these components also provide snapshots of the ways
interactions between the individual and society are delimited by one of
the key tenets of pragmatist thought: the relationship between experi-
ence and truth. Literary pragmatism identifies a reciprocal relationship
between theory (in the widest sense) and literature, exploring how fic-
tion and poetry both enact and revise the themes, characterizations,
motifs, and settings found within pragmatist writing. Literary pragma-
tism is less a lens for reading either theory or literature than a series of
reading practices that track long threads that run across diverse forms of
writing—a method of exploration that does not actively blur disciplinary
boundaries so much as it seeks instances of blurring, opposition, influ-
ence, and synthesis in the narratives that wind throughout the works of
authors, philosophers, essayists, and activists.
Previous critics have examined the writings of black men and
white women in relation to pragmatism, and literary pragmatism has
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

emerged as a field unto itself in recent years.4 Monographs such as

Joan Richardson’s A Natural History of Pragmatism (2006), Walton
Muyumba’s The Shadow and the Act (2009), Lisi Schoenbach’s
Pragmatic Modernism (2011), and Paul Grimstad’s Experience and
Experimental Writing (2013) have joined earlier texts like Richard
Poirier’s Poetry and Pragmatism (1992), Ross Posnock’s The Trial of
Curiosity (1991), and Patricia Rae’s The Practical Muse (1997).5 One
reason for the recent increase in literary pragmatist studies is that prag-
matism itself has grown into one of the most influential schools of
thought in contemporary theory. There are a number of explanations
for the resurgence of pragmatism in the twenty-first century, with anx-
ieties about the current state of American democracy perhaps being
the most poignant of them. Commentaries on the cultural, philosoph-
ical, and political meaning of democracy are deeply entrenched in the
classical pragmatist tradition, not only in the works of foundational
authors like William James and John Dewey, but also in the writings of
thinkers regarded as the forerunners to pragmatism, such as Benjamin
Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Dewey’s works,
in particular, are rightly known for celebrating the intrinsic connection
between democracy and classical pragmatism.6 My book does not revisit
the thematic role that democracy has played (and still plays) in the works
of canonical pragmatists, not least because many critics have already
explored these connections. Rather, the current study seeks to develop
a literary pragmatist approach to a largely ignored narrative of creative
democracy. What is sorely missing in scholarship, I argue, is a compre-
hensive literary pragmatist study of how African American women’s writ-
ing brings forth this narrative.
Aiming to fill this substantial gap, my book works on the premise
that genealogies of African American women’s letters stretching from
the early nineteenth century to the Harlem Renaissance offer some of
the fullest and most provocative representations of how pragmatism
understands democracy creatively. Today this project is more necessary
than ever, for reasons that are both scholarly and sociopolitical (which in
black feminism and pragmatism are not separate domains). In recent dec-
ades, the mechanistic workings of U.S. democracy have steadily degen-
erated into a grotesque menagerie of corporate and institutional status
quos, preservations of racist and misogynistic stratifications, entertain-
ment bonanzas masquerading as public discourses, and rigged elections.
The question of how and when early twenty-first-century American
6 G. PHIPPS

democracy will finally bottom out is an open one, but one positive that
has emerged from the downward spiral is an increasingly fervent grass-
roots resistance to these manifestations of democratic idealism. Following
Donald Trump’s bizarre yet not wholly unexpected victory in the 2016
election, the battle cry among vast numbers of American citizens was
“not my president.” But perhaps a wider and more historical phrase is
required: not my democracy.
To be sure, this is an underlying (and at times explicit) statement
that has found countless modes of expression in the history of African
American women’s letters. The works of nineteenth-century theorists
like Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell empha-
size in a variety of ways the massive disjunctions between the promises
of establishment democracy and the experiences of black women in the
United States. They also give voice to different possibilities of demo-
cratic life, not only showcasing how African American women create
organic, cultural, and flexible experiences of democracy within marginal-
ized communities, but also outlining how their approaches to communal
experience harbour the potential to transform the workings of democ-
racy within U.S. institutions. In the next generation, the literary works
of Harlem Renaissance authors like Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora
Neale Hurston depict young African American women enacting their
own versions of creative democracy through mobility among commu-
nities, the traversal of societal barriers, and interpersonal relationships
founded on shared enterprises of art, labour, culture, and amelioration.
One of the consistent thematic concerns across the philosophical and lit-
erary writings is the notion that, for black women, democracy is an expe-
rience that happens outside of and/or in opposition to the mainstream
appendages of the democratic state. In black women’s literary pragma-
tism, “not my democracy” is less a mantra than one half of an experien-
tial truth that grows for individuals over time; the other half consists of
the realization that creative, artistic, and cultural endeavours within com-
munities do bring value to the concept of democracy.
While the social relevance of creative democracy has steadily evolved
in new ways, black feminist criticism has also expanded over the past
four decades, particularly in conjunction with landmark theories of inter-
sectionality. Barbara Smith’s 1977 article “Toward a Black Feminist
Criticism” signalled a new orientation in scholarship, with Smith arguing
for the importance of looking at the “politics of sex as well as the politics
of race and class [as] crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

women writers” (134). This article helped establish a basis for intersec-
tional approaches to literary and philosophical works of black women
authors—approaches that see race, gender, class, and sexuality as fluid
matrices that always work in tandem.7 For many critics, intersectionality
is an ongoing corrective to the notion that African American women are
caught in a double bind in which they experience racism and sexism as
separate forces.8 Consequently, identifying the specificity and uniqueness
of black women’s experience has long been a guiding objective for crit-
ics in the field. Interestingly for pragmatist readers, the status of both
personal and collective experience remains contested in black feminist
scholarship. Some critics argue that the emphasis on experiential under-
standings of intersectionality forms an overwrought attempt to establish
firm boundaries around the field and repel “outsiders.”9 Other scholars
argue that the validation of African American women’s experience works
productively against the assumption that their literature and theory can
fit readily within discourses that tend to privilege white, male voices.10
At the heart of these ongoing discussions reside lively conflicts regard-
ing the dimensions of African American female experience and the means
through which theory should deploy interpretations of said experience to
bring about social change in the United States and the world.
As conversations and debates surrounding black feminist scholarship
have continued to unfold, new issues and points of focus have emerged
in recent years. Vivian May’s 2015 book Pursuing Intersectionality
argues that intersectional thought has brought innovations to theory but
has also endured subtle distortions and subversions, usually at the hands
of those who profess to understand it. For May, misapplications and mis-
representations of intersectionality are especially troubling, considering
that the movement is grounded on “radical resistance politics, particu-
larly in Black feminist, critical race, and women of color theorizing and
praxis” (2). Now the practical, experiential, and transformative thrust of
intersectionality is at risk of falling into disuse, with the theory serving
either as one more tool for grasping race and gender (in isolation) or as
an “intellectual or political relic” (1). Relatedly, in a 2013 article, Sumi
Cho, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall assert, “Intersectionality
has traveled into spaces and discourses that are themselves constituted by
power relations that are far from transparent” (789), a process that often
leaves these power relations (and their roles in upholding established
modes of interpretation and knowledge production) untouched. So too,
some recent critics have wondered whether intersectionality should be
8 G. PHIPPS

supplemented with or replaced by alternative frameworks, if only because

supposedly the “strictures of language require us to invoke race, gen-
der, sexual orientation, and other categories one discursive moment at a
time” (Carbado 7).11 Within these commentaries, one can discern per-
vasive concerns about the simultaneous entrenchment and diffusion of
intersectionality. This is a trend in which the complex lineage that nur-
tured intersectionality—the writings of African American women, from
the early nineteenth century to the present day—is held increasingly in
abeyance in favour of hermeneutic simplicity and the assumption that all
critical reading shares the same basic premises. As May indicates, inter-
sectionality should remain on guard, in a self-reflexive manner, against
potential collusions between strategies of resistance and dominance.
Literary pragmatism features many ways of entering into contempo-
rary debates about intersectionality and the historical roots of black fem-
inism. In recent years, critics like May, Farah Griffin, Mia Bay, Martha
Jones, and Barbara Savage have renewed calls to recognize the existence
of an African American women’s intellectual tradition.12 In this book,
the starting point in this imperative project is the assertion that geneal-
ogies of African American women’s writing form, in their own distinct
manner, narratives of pragmatist thought that cut across disciplinary,
geographical, and generational boundaries. In other words, pragma-
tism is not merely a method of reading to be imposed onto the works
of black women theorists and authors. Rather, reading their works prag-
matically involves excavating narrative undercurrents, philosophical ideas,
and political interventions that together form the foundations of a prag-
matist lineage. This lineage is shaped by experiential representations of
creative democracy. Other critics have located pragmatic orientations in
the works of thinkers like Stewart and Cooper, usually focusing on their
appeals to experiential understandings of philosophy or their emphasis on
the practical applicability of theory.13 Also, scholars like V. Denise James
have presented black feminist reformulations of contemporary pragma-
tism that speak to ideas of creative democracy.14 However, focusing on
the literary pragmatist aspects of black women’s writing illuminates the
extent to which creative democracy is more than a set of principles or
general orientations in their texts. Just as creative democracy is an expe-
riential way of life that is externalized through cultural practices, it is also
a form of writing that knits together aesthetic, philosophical, theologi-
cal, autobiographical, political, historical, and literary modes of expres-
sion and argumentation. Creative democracy is first and foremost an
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

experience, and the textual articulation of experience entails depicting

and harnessing community-based labours and endeavours that capture
democracy in action.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett state, “Almost as
soon as blacks could write, they set out to redefine—against already
received racial stereotypes—who and what a black person was” (3). From
the early nineteenth century on, African American women have also
used writing to reshape constructions of black female identity, but this
is not to say that their textual representations have been predominantly
reactive. Their narratives set out to express the uniqueness of African
American women’s experiences, a process that necessitated, from the
start, new styles of writing, new theoretical contexts, and on the liter-
ary level, new characterizations and settings. Nineteenth-century think-
ers like Maria Stewart and Anna Julia Cooper did not simply write into
existence revised versions of black womanhood. They also created an
intricate web of textual relations for portraying them, enlisting and sam-
pling a range of cultural practices in order to assemble frameworks that
would be capable of bringing African American women into view. Such
frameworks emerged through revisionary interpretations of biblical his-
tory, cultural archetypes grounded on African traditions, personal experi-
ence, and samplings of music, oral narratives, and domestic art.15 These
thinkers narrativized the rhythms and movements of creative democ-
racy within communities of black women, but they also positioned their
articulations in relation to U.S. democracy—not just in the sense that
they carved out oppositions to the latter, but also in the sense that they
demonstrated how black women’s communal experiences can and should
radically alter institutional democracy. In this way, African American
women’s literary pragmatism is grounded on varying levels of practice.
It draws upon close-knit cultural formations that tie together communi-
ties, but it also demands macrocosmic sociopolitical transformations in
the American state.
A literary pragmatist approach to black women’s writing includes
the observation that their texts are inherently heterotopic and interdis-
ciplinary. Indeed, these structural aspects help encapsulate the cultural
diversity that defines communal experiences of democracy. To put it suc-
cinctly, the form matches the content. At the same time, a literary prag-
matist approach to African American women’s writing identifies not just
shared philosophical ideas and themes across texts, but also recurring
narratological patterns founded on motifs, characterization, and setting.
10 G. PHIPPS

The unity that emerges within the diversity involves literary elements
that intersperse eclectic writings. Furthermore, these elements ulti-
mately emerge as the aesthetic shapes of pragmatist principles, including
the overarching idea that truth develops through experience (and more
particularly, the notion that the truth of democracy, whatever it may be,
only comes to light through communal experience). In this way, writ-
ing about creative democracy entails more than just enumerating a list of
political or theoretical tenets; it also involves activating a series of ideas
and beliefs that acquire definition through textual reflections of the com-
plex characters, settings, and practices that help capture African American
women’s participation in communities. Such reflections are often at their
most intricate in works of literature, including the novels and short sto-
ries of Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston. However, works of fiction coexist
with theoretical, autobiographical, sociopolitical, and theological texts.
From the literary standpoint, the trajectory from nineteenth-century
philosophy to Harlem Renaissance fiction centres on crisscrossing rep-
resentations of the ways that archetypes, settings, and cultural activities
bring creative democracy to life.

Mothers, Daughters, and the Evolution

of the Black Maternal Archetype

What kinds of literary elements form narrative arcs across the writings of
nineteenth-century philosophers and Harlem Renaissance authors? This
question grows out of a literary pragmatist approach to reading, but in
this context, it also directs attention to black feminist and intersectional
modes of analysis.16 Literary pragmatism locates depictions of American
society and democracy in motifs, characterizations, settings, and other
literary components. A literary pragmatic approach to black feminist
texts demands, in turn, a focus on how African American women rep-
resent democracy through literary elements that reflect their experiential
understandings of democracy at the margins of U.S. society. Examining
their writings as narratives requires receptivity to the way black women
have constructed narratives on their own terms. This point brings
us back to the subject of the “motherline.” Scholars have frequently
invoked matrilineal transmissions of knowledge when assembling gene-
alogies of black feminism.17 The model of mothers and grandmothers
passing on stories to their daughters has served as both a literal and figu-
rative template for these genealogies. Relatedly, it is no secret in criticism
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

that maternity has long been a site of self-actualization and resistance for
women in black communities, or that the cultural significance of moth-
erhood traces a history back to slavery18 and, earlier still, to African cul-
tural traditions.19 It is impossible to provide any summarizing assessment
of the roles maternity and matrilineal storytelling have played in the his-
tory of African American women’s letters, if only because the sheer scope
of their symbolic and practical value precludes definitive conclusions.
However, in part because of this wide-ranging value, it is possible to
begin considering how maternity frames a creative democratic narrative
that extends across the works of philosophers like Stewart, Cooper, and
Terrell and literary authors like Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston.
In the context of written and spoken genealogies, we could say
that creative democracy is a narrative that the foremothers of African
American philosophy passed onto literary writers of the Harlem
Renaissance. This is a narrative peopled with depictions of and commen-
taries on cultural activities that set democracy in motion for black women
within communities, but it also includes characterizations of the trans-
mitter of stories, the black mother. In this sense, the narrative genealogy
of creative democracy features not just mother–daughter transmissions of
stories, art, and culture, but also major transitions in how writers frame
the filial relationship. On a rudimentary level, nineteenth-century theo-
rists like Stewart, Cooper, and Terrell are the mothers of literary pragma-
tism and creative democracy while Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston are the
daughters—a formula that fits well with the valorizations of maternity in
the theory and the critical revisions of it in the fiction. Stewart, Cooper,
and Terrell position themselves as maternal figureheads, not least because
they regard motherhood as the ultimate forum for the actualization
of black women’s leadership. On the flip side, the literature of Fauset,
Larsen, and Hurston generally focuses on daughters: young African
American women protagonists who remain productively ambivalent
about the stories and traditions they stand to inherit from their mothers.
At the same time, the narrative of creative democracy is not purely
dichotomous. For one thing, the genealogy linking nineteenth-century
theorists and Harlem Renaissance writers is complicated, non-linear,
and full of dialectical continuities and oppositions. For another thing,
particular instances of both continuity and divergence in the narrative
exceed classifications founded on disciplines (philosophy versus litera-
ture) or time period (the nineteenth century versus the early twentieth
century). For example, in the philosophy and the literature, the figure
12 G. PHIPPS

of the black mother subsists as a nexus of democratic possibilities, oper-

ating as a guide for, manifestation of, and symbol within the movements
of creative democracy. Thus, notwithstanding some general differences
in their representations of maternity, the philosophy and literature both
posit the black mother as an embodiment of creative democracy. Even
within individual texts, this figure appears in complex and multivalent
ways, functioning alternatively as a highly personal (and thus changeable)
model for self-definition, as an archetypal construct with deep roots in
African mythology and black American cultural traditions, and as a devi-
ant stereotype that pushes back against white mainstream caricatures of
African American women.
In the narrative of creative democracy, the figure of the black mother
is a multiply situated presence. The nineteenth-century philosophers
adopt and celebrate maternity, but in doing so, they call upon a larger
presence in black American and African cultural traditions. So too,
authors of the Harlem Renaissance revisit this presence through por-
trayals of daughters confronting their mothers’ and grandmothers’ leg-
acies. Previous critics have invoked a black maternal presence in African
American women’s letters through different names, including Mother
Africa (Omolade), the Great Black Mother (King and Ferguson 12), the
Southern Mother (Baker 3), and the Artist (Walker). I use the term black
maternal archetype, which is intended to invoke two strands in a vast lin-
eage. The black maternal archetype traces its roots to African mythol-
ogy, but it also takes shape (at least in America) through oppositions to
mainstream stereotypes like the jezebel and the mammy. Importantly, it
is less a character than a conglomerate of different ideas, traditions, and
images. The archetype stands for black women’s leadership, not only in
domestic spaces but also in political life. It personifies the transmission
and dissemination of stories, culture, and art. On one side, such trans-
missions occur between mothers and daughters, but on the other side,
the archetype represents the outward reach and growth of black wom-
en’s culture as a force of transfiguration in U.S. society. In this way, the
archetype embodies a number of interactive dualisms that fuel its vitality
and influence. The archetype is Janus-faced, preserving older traditions
while also heralding future sociopolitical transformations. It is personal
yet communal, fictional yet organic, and intergenerational yet contextual.
It showcases how democracy is at once a broadly conceived way of life
for all people and an individual experience that gains meaning through
intimate cultural exchanges in communities.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

We cannot locate static binaries in depictions of the black maternal

archetype, but it should be noted that the structural shift in focus from
mothers in the nineteenth-century philosophy to daughters in Harlem
Renaissance literature does speak to some fundamental changes in con-
structions of the archetype. Explicating these changes reveals one avenue
for exploring the development of an African American women’s narra-
tive of creative democracy. As I discuss in the next chapter, various critics
have considered how Stewart, Cooper, and Terrell call upon maternity
when delineating not just the roles of women in communities but also
their methods of social activism. In the writings of these philosophers,
political engagement works in lockstep with ideals of true womanhood.
Thus, the impact black women have (or will have) on society starts
with the exteriorization of virtue, which (in the words of Cooper) usu-
ally shows itself through their ability to raise “nobler men and women”
(137). On one side, this conception of virtue speaks to Stewart, Cooper,
and Terrell’s efforts to combat racist caricatures that position black
women as devoid of femininity, chastity, and even so-called maternal
emotions.20 In this sense, their textual activism is both self-reflexive and
outward reaching: they build personalized images of black mothers while
also deconstructing racist characterizations. This was no small project,
since such characterizations actively fed justifications for slavery, sexual
assault, and murder. In this context, the black maternal archetype func-
tions as a deviation from prevailing stereotypes: a textual creation based
on historical fact and personal experience that is designed to challenge
mainstream discourse.
At the same time, Stewart, Cooper, and Terrell’s deconstructions and
reinscriptions of black maternity gave rise to new textual interventions
that drew material from legacies and heritages active in their own cul-
tural environments. For one thing, the archetype of the black mother
that unfolds across their texts brings to light some of the complexities of
intersectional identity. For much of the nineteenth century, interweaving
forces of racist, misogynistic, classist, and sexual oppression demarcated
the social status of black women (both inside and outside of chattel slav-
ery) while buttressing popular assumptions and stereotypes. The latter
were essentialist and self-serving, peddling the reductive idea that inso-
far as an individual is black and a woman, she must be immoral, degen-
erate, lascivious, or simply lacking humanity, and by extension, destined
to occupy the lowest rungs of the social order. In Stewart, Cooper, and
Terrell’s theory, the black maternal archetype unbundles this hegemonic
14 G. PHIPPS

matrix, exposing the extent to which it is designed solely for the pur-
poses of devaluing and even dehumanizing African American women.
The archetype symbolizes a confluence of race and gender that taps
into ideals of sexuality while also elevating black women to positions of
authority. In these terms, the common thread in Stewart, Cooper, and
Terrell’s writings is the idea that black women’s unique experiences
(which include confronting intermingling forces of racist and sexist
oppression) have fostered within them new and more complete under-
standings of virtue. That is to say, the category of sexuality is reclaimed
from its place in the intersectional web and redeployed in a fresh set of
nesting matrices: because an individual is black and a woman, she has
undergone experiences that have equipped her to better understand vir-
tue and the importance of conveying it to children.
Insofar as the nineteenth-century theorists inhabit the role of the
black maternal archetype, they access a genealogy of mother–daughter
transmission that emerged from within African American women’s cul-
ture. They take up and revamp the black maternal archetype in order
to convey stories, knowledge, culture, and invectives to their “daugh-
ters”: young and future generations of black women. In other words, in
these writings, the black maternal archetype is not merely an argument
against hegemonic constructions of African American womanhood, nor
is it a stock identity assembled in response to intersectional persecution.
Rather, the archetype embodies a reservoir of collective experience that is
based in equal parts on past genealogies, present oppression, and future
potentiality. The black maternal archetype signifies a versatile amalgam
of experiences that far exceed the horrors of chattel slavery—experiences
that involve communal environments, mythology, art, religion, and tradi-
tion. These are experiences that define a singular understanding of virtue
which harbours the power to change the structures of American cul-
ture and politics. In Cooper’s account, for instance, black women alone
understand how to imbue the workings of American democracy with
virtue, a mission that can and should usher in a “reign of moral ideas”
(112) in U.S. society. The growth of these ideals depends as much on
the preservation of black women’s traditions as it does on the destruc-
tion of caricatures of them in mainstream society.
How does the black maternal archetype evolve within a narrative of
creative democracy? I discuss strategies for tracing the continuities (and
discontinuities) between nineteenth-century philosophy and interwar
literature in Chapter 3, but it is worth noting here that scholarship has
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

often struggled with the interdisciplinary and intergenerational transi-

tion. One reason for this struggle is that Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston
frequently are seen as part of the New Negro Movement, which broke
with valorizations of maternity, true womanhood, and virtue. Another
related reason involves the aforementioned point that the protagonists
of their works tend to be daughters—that is, young women strug-
gling to escape their mothers’ and grandmothers’ expectations and
experiences. However, these transitions also speak to the ways Fauset,
Larsen, and Hurston access and revise creative democratic tendencies
in the ­ nineteenth-century theory through the black maternal arche-
type. Among other things, their literature highlights the extent to
which the archetype embodies dialectical conflicts between virtue and
vice, experience and essentialism, and subjection and power. The inter-
actions between these oppositions catalyze one of the animating princi-
ples of creative democracy: the ideal of growth. In the philosophy, the
growth of virtue outward from communities to mainstream society
is one incarnation of this ideal, but in the literature, growth involves
developments in the lives of individual women: the steady expansion of
artistic opportunities, relationships founded on overlapping interests,
individual expressions of independence, and linkages among communi-
ties. Such processes are not teleological. Rather, they emphasize that cre-
ative democracy is oriented perpetually towards further experiences and
interconnections.
In the fiction of Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston, the presence of the
black maternal archetype works in tandem with individual growth
founded on experience. As a result, the archetype loses its basis in
Christian morality and true womanhood. In this sense, part of what
defines the evolution of the archetype in Harlem Renaissance fiction is
the subtle transition from collective experience and influence to individ-
uality. This is not to say that the archetype therefore becomes a char-
acter in the narratives of Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston. It still exists as
a nexus of mythology, cultural experiences, intersectional power, and
resistances to misogynistic and racist brutality. However, the young pro-
tagonists in Fauset’s, Larsen’s, and Hurston’s narratives individualize the
archetype, internalizing, reimagining, and redeploying it as a construct
that is capable of expressing, to them, their emotional life as it unfolds
both inside and outside of African American women’s communities.
For these characters, the archetype of the black mother straddles a com-
plex terrain between familial and communal expectations and between
16 G. PHIPPS

long-standing cultural legacies and opportunities for new self-definitions.

The protagonists are always revisiting the archetype in their minds, not
least because, in many cases, they contemplate becoming black mothers
themselves. Yet this possibility is not grounded solely on giving birth and
raising children; it also involves setting into motion the symbolic valences
of black motherhood through actions that generate new experiences in
unfamiliar communities. In pragmatic terms, the protagonists imagina-
tively rebuild the archetype of the African American mother in the course
of experience. And thus, speaking pragmatically, the archetype remains
for them fluid and processual, gradually accumulating content through
their actions and the consequences of those actions. The fruitful paradox,
however, is that although the archetype develops through the highly per-
sonal endeavours of individual characters, its meaning evolves for them in
concert with its sociocultural role as an embodiment of black women’s
collective experience.

Existing and Possible Communities

of Creative Democracy

As a transmitter of culture, the black maternal archetype personifies var-

ied levels of leadership that extend from domestic spheres to the U.S.
nation-state. However, in black women’s letters, the forum for the
experience of creative democracy has historically been the community.
The model of mother–daughter transmission may begin with filial rela-
tionships, but in the works of Stewart, Cooper, and Terrell, matrilineal
narratives are disseminated within communities of African American
women. So too, for these philosophers, the black maternal archetype is
first and foremost a representative of such communal networks. Thus,
when discussing the literary components that make up a narrative of cre-
ative democracy, it is necessary to include the community as a context
and setting. As with the black maternal archetype, any literary pragmatic
analysis of “the community” as a textual construct invites considera-
tions of its social, historical, and political status in African American
women’s culture. The community is not merely one aspect of the rela-
tionship between black women’s culture and creative democracy or
a platform for a given maternal exponent of creative democracy (i.e. a
leader like Stewart or Cooper who harnesses the role of the black mater-
nal archetype); rather, the community forms the living shape of the fluid
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

interconnectivity between maternal leadership, black women’s culture,

and creative democracy.
As critics like Darlene Clark Hine, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Kathy
Glass, and Farah Jasmine Griffin have discussed, from the earliest days
of slavery, black women have been building communities outside the
mainstream of American society. In doing so, they have established net-
works of support that provide a sense of belonging and mutual respect,
not to mention safety.21 These communities have often taken the form
of organizations and clubs like the National Association of Colored
Women (NACW), of which Mary Church Terrell was the first president
in 1896.22 Such associations accentuate the degree to which, from the
start, black women’s communities have been more than just enclaves
that afford some protection against intersectional oppression. They have
also operated as springboards for collective sociopolitical action. Given
this dual function, it is not surprising that nineteenth-century theorists
like Stewart and Cooper portray close ties between maternity and com-
munity activism.23 Insofar as motherhood is the channel through which
black women’s experiential virtue can extend into society, a community
of black mothers constitutes the shape of their aggregative identity and
influence.
How does the transition in constructions of the black maternal arche-
type from the nineteenth century to the interwar period parallel evolu-
tions in the historical and textual status of the black female community?
This question brings further attention to the ties between literary prag-
matism and sociohistorical circumstances. Just as Stewart, Cooper, and
Terrell’s theory contains characterizations of the black maternal arche-
type, their works also contain representations of communities. In par-
ticular, the philosophers envisage communities of black women that
straddle divides between the actual and the aspirational—between iden-
tifiable clubs and organizations that flourished in the nineteenth century
and hypothetical communities that might nurture the future growth of
creative democracy. The connecting threads between existing and pos-
sible communities rest on the theorists’ samplings of cultural, artistic,
and religious activities that define the workings of creative democracy.
For example, Maria Stewart adopts the identity of a biblical prophet,
Anna Julia Cooper develops her points through musical imagery, and
Mary Church Terrell juxtaposes artistic media (descriptions of storytell-
ing, paintings, and music) and matrilineal heritage. No mere decorative
18 G. PHIPPS

touch, such samplings provide snapshots of how communities of black

women revolve around shared cultural experiences. By weaving the prac-
tices and activities that shape these experiences into their texts, Stewart,
Cooper, and Terrell accomplish two significant tasks. First, they reinforce
their leadership positions as maternal transmitters of culture, conveying
their own versions of stories, music, art, and religion through theoretical
writing. Second, they illuminate how creative democracy operates within
communal environments, but also how it could operate on an even more
expansive, nationwide scale. Their incorporations of and experimenta-
tions with interdisciplinary facets of black women’s culture emerge as
the building blocks of the communities they imagine through writing—
communities they posit as the indispensable foundations of a future
American society. It is only through the vitalizing influence of black
women’s culture on a mass scale, they suggest, that the United States can
be transformed into a nation where democracy is a genuine lived experi-
ence for all people.
To return to the question of transition, how do the “daughters” por-
trayed in Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston’s fiction carry forward the depic-
tion and construction of creative democratic communities? In the literary
works of these authors, young black women’s communities of origin fre-
quently germinate many of the same intersectional webs of oppression
that congeal within and help sustain the interwar mass democratic state.
At first glance, then, their protagonists’ communities are far from rep-
resenting incarnations of the black feminist environments that Stewart,
Cooper, and Terrell portray and assemble in their texts. One obvious rea-
son for this disjunction involves the intentions of the writers. Whereas
the philosophers imagine communities that could spearhead the future
growth of creative democracy, Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston generally
place their protagonists in fictional versions of 1920s and 1930s African
American communities. These are communities riddled with many of the
hierarchical formations that undergird mainstream white U.S. society.
Whether the protagonists reside in black bourgeois communities situated
within urban environments (as do Angela Murray in Fauset’s Plum Bun
and Irene Redfield in Larsen’s Passing) or in rural black communities (as
do Isis Watts in Hurston’s “Drenched in Light” and Missie May Banks in
Hurston’s “The Gilded Six-Bits”), they all become aware, in their own
ways, of the impact that the larger workings of intersectional persecution
in America produce on their homes and lives. In fact, in the novels of
Fauset and Larsen, the remarkable flexibility and pervasiveness of racist,
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

misogynistic, and classist stratifications become leading factors in young

women’s decisions to leave their homes. For these characters, disavow-
ing their African American communities is seemingly the best means for
loosening intersectional casts that inhibit black women’s experiences of
creative democracy.
Disavowals are often represented through acts of passing, a central
concern in Harlem Renaissance fiction and also in the wider scope of
African American women’s writing. In the context of the passing narra-
tive, the black community is a site of departure—a portal that individuals
must pass through in order to liberate action and enter into ostensibly
more heterogeneous spaces. On one side, acts of passing carry a symbolic
value within the narrative of creative democracy because, in the fiction
of Fauset and Larsen, crossing the colour line frequently entails sever-
ing ties with one’s mother or grandmother. Maternal characters usually
emblematize older cultural traditions, standards of virtue, and intersec-
tional constellations—ideals, values, beliefs, and practices that speak,
somewhat ironically, to how Stewart, Cooper, and Terrell see democ-
racy working as a cultural experience. From this standpoint, insofar as
­nineteenth-century philosophical variations of “the community” subsist
in the literature, they appear to do so through filial ties that inadvertently
contribute to young women’s feelings of entrapment. But this formula is
mistaken because it suggests that communal networks of black women
must be founded on the same unifying elements at all times, such as
true womanhood, virtue, and certain aesthetic forms (biblical prophecy,
nineteenth-century music, etc.). However, for Fauset’s, Larsen’s, and
Hurston’s protagonists, departure does not constitute a response against
creative democracy, but rather an attempt to enlarge the experience of it
through new relationships, ideals, values, and cultural pursuits. Thus, the
daughters portrayed in Harlem Renaissance fiction do not merely enact a
figurative abandonment of their black feminist foremothers through the
literal act of leaving behind their mothers and grandmothers. Instead,
through acts of passing, they reinterpret, revise, and update how philos-
ophers like Stewart, Cooper, and Terrell understand creative democracy
as a communal force. In the process, they also diversify the parameters of
black feminist networks, seeking out their own versions of creative dem-
ocratic communities away from their homes.
As critics have indicated, literary depictions of passing bring out a
whole slew of interacting dualisms and paradoxes between (among oth-
ers) essentialism and transgression, secrecy and revelation, pleasure and
20 G. PHIPPS

danger, choice and entrapment, practicality and trauma, and the sub-
version and reinforcement of status quos.24 In the narrative of creative
democracy, the duality of passing also involves young black female char-
acters’ simultaneous disavowal and preservation of matrilineal genealo-
gies that bind together communities of black women. These communities
are not synonymous with the African American locales into which
Fauset’s, Larsen’s, and Hurston’s protagonists are born. The latter are
defined by institutions, striated spaces, borders, and intersectional hier-
archies. By contrast, communities of black women emerge gradually for
these protagonists as organic examples of creative democracy in action,
taking shape through art, activism, storytelling, and relationships among
women. They often coalesce initially through mother–daughter trans-
missions, but over time the daughters seek out variations of these com-
munities independently—not just to escape the perceived shortcomings
of their mothers and grandmothers’ lives (though this might be part
of their motivation) but also to fulfil the hidden promises of creative
democracy that they find within their mothers and grandmothers’ lives.
The concurrent processes of disavowal and valorization in Harlem
Renaissance fiction illuminate the continuities and ruptures that shape
the textual evolution of the community across black women’s literary
pragmatism. For Stewart, Cooper, and Terrell, communities of African
American women represent models for democratic growth founded on
political causes and cultural and aesthetic practices. The theorists refer
to actual communities in their works, namely identifiable clubs and
organizations, but they also narrativize the idea of the black feminist
community through incorporations of music, art, religion, and story.
By sampling the artistic and literary forms that define creative democ-
racy as a cultural experience, they sketch portraits of the ways commu-
nities take shape for black women while also showcasing how they can
and should develop on a macrocosmic scale. In these terms, the philoso-
phers present creative democracy as a far-reaching catalyst for sociopolit-
ical transformation which is based at heart on the spread and influence of
African American women’s culture. In Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston’s fic-
tion, communities of black women also represent models for democratic
growth, but in their works, creative democracy is an individual experi-
ence. The authors refer to and fictionalize interwar African American
locales, but they also detail young black women’s involvement in crea-
tive democratic communities, which expand through political activism,
art, stories, and shared histories. However, such expansions do not feed
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

into validations of true womanhood, virtue, or decisions to give birth

and raise children; instead, they propagate the desire among the pro-
tagonists to diversify the experience of creative democracy beyond tradi-
tional markers upheld by their (literal and figurative) foremothers. Thus,
while creative democratic communities may emerge for the protagonists
through matrilineal transmissions, they also grow through acts of depar-
ture and passing. In the literature, the proliferation of creative democracy
is not a collective enterprise that occurs through the expansion of black
women’s communities into the wider networks of American society.
Instead, it is an individual venture that fructifies when characters discover
new manifestations of black women’s communities within the wider net-
works of American society.

The Truths of Creative Democracy

Truth develops through experience: this is a thesis that unites many dif-
ferent versions of pragmatism. What are the truths that unfold through
experience for creative democratic characters in the literature of Fauset,
Larsen, and Hurston? In broader terms, how do their experiences speak
to transformations in narrative genealogies of African American wom-
en’s literary pragmatism? It is impossible to contract an interdiscipli-
nary trajectory that stretches from the 1830s to the 1930s down to a
couple of noteworthy transitions, but we can identify general patterns.
As discussed, if we explore the textual construction of black women’s
creative democracy as a specifically matrilineal narrative, we discern a
shift in focus from mothers to daughters—from philosophers who con-
sciously adopt the role of maternal leadership to novelists who depict
young women rebelling against their mothers. This shift dovetails with
a subtler transition from representations of collectivity to individuality.
This is not to say that the philosophy neglects individuality or that the
literature dismisses collectivity. Read comparatively, the texts emphasize
that, in African American women’s writing, individuals and commu-
nities are unified on many levels.25 Moreover, we cannot speak about
shifts in isolation since there are countless ways (disciplinary, genera-
tional, ideological, geographical, etc.) to think about differences between
nineteenth-­ century theorists like Stewart and Cooper and Harlem
Renaissance authors like Fauset and Larsen. Nevertheless, focusing
on collectivity and individuality does allow us to underline an impor-
tant point: when we are receptive to the way black women have built
22 G. PHIPPS

(and are still building) narratives of creative democracy, we can see that
the ­ foundational elements of these narratives consist of those t­extual
­constructs which are the most deeply embedded in African American
women’s sociopolitical circumstances and yet also the most versatile,
fluid, and open to revision across generations of authors, thinkers, and
activists.
In this project, these textual elements consist in particular of the black
maternal archetype and the creative democratic community. In Fauset’s,
Larsen’s, and Hurston’s works, the archetype and the community are
channels for democratic experience, but they are also internalized frame-
works that gain ongoing value and meaning through young black female
protagonists’ quests to bring their ideals to fulfilment. Importantly, the
ideals in question are often encompassing and (from the protagonists’
vantage points) universal, involving wide-ranging concepts like beauty,
love, happiness, and security. However, these ideals are not grounded on
biological essentialism or fundamental assumptions about the place of
women in society. Instead, they are ideals that the characters have them-
selves deemed valuable—in many cases because they see them working
against axiomatic principles of femininity and maternity.
In the literature, the black maternal archetype and the creative demo-
cratic community become detached from concepts that speak to totaliz-
ing assumptions about feminine identity, but I would argue that this shift
elucidates a more significant point: in the narrative of creative democ-
racy, the black maternal archetype and the community are not built
on essentialist ideals. Rather, they are and always have been structured
around interweaving practices of writing, culture, art, religion, commu-
nication, and activism, which spur the growth of diverse ideals and the
consequent acquisition of truth(s) through experience. In this way, any
ideal—whether virtue, love, or beauty—is both a product of and impe-
tus for experiential growth. What the literary works of Fauset, Larsen,
and Hurston do is focalize the pragmatic development of ideals through
select characters. These characters, in turn, individualize the cultural
constructs, practices, and genealogical inheritances that they encounter
within communities of black women. Through these acts of individuali-
zation, they tap into the catalytic oppositions that fuel the very possibility
of growth. That is to say, by pursuing creative democracy on their own
terms, the protagonists excavate some of the underlying dialectics that
work within it.
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

The most pointed example of these dialectics in the philosophy cen-

tres on the thesis that black women’s experiences with immorality in
U.S. society have generated not only richer understandings of virtue
but also the ability to reform society through the dispensation of expe-
riential knowledge.26 However, in the fiction, the truths of ideals like
beauty, happiness, and security are specific to the ways individuals expe-
rience, act upon, and experiment with these ideals in varied settings.
Yet this is not to say that the fictional daughters in Fauset’s, Larsen’s,
and Hurston’s works discard the stories and traditions their mothers
and grandmothers pass onto them, nor is it to imply, on a more met-
anarrative level, that they completely break with the heritage of creative
democracy outlined in nineteenth-century philosophy. The daughters’
quests for experiences away from home usually bring them back to met-
aphoric starting points—not in the sense that they return to the same
communities they have left, but in the sense that they discover new ways
of building communities around relationships among black women. By
doing so, the protagonists readopt collective forms of African American
feminism (including the black maternal archetype) as models for self-­
identification. For these protagonists, experiences of creative democracy
generate their own versions of pragmatic and dialectical truth. The pur-
suit of creative democratic experience may begin as an attempt to break
with a matrilineal genealogy, but the endpoint—the truth of experience,
as it were—often centres on unexpected returns to and perpetuations of
this genealogy.
Part of the purpose of this book, then, is to explore how pragmatic
truth develops in diverse ways. I focus on particular examples of how
philosophy and literature construct and thematize creative democracy,
but it is important to note that these texts fit against a backdrop of inter-
pretations and renovations of democracy, both within and beyond prag-
matism. As I discuss in Chapter 3, other pragmatists like W. E. B. Du
Bois and John Dewey crafted alternative forms of democracy throughout
the early twentieth century while rejecting the mechanistic and hierar-
chical calcification of the mass democratic state. Given Dewey’s prom-
inence in U.S. intellectualism during the 1920s and Du Bois’s leading
participation in the New Negro Movement, their writings will always be
relevant to a project on creative democracy and the Harlem Renaissance.
But African Americans who fall outside the immediate scope of this study
were also involved in recreations of democracy in the late nineteenth
24 G. PHIPPS

century. Such people included Booker T. Washington, Fannie Barrier

Williams, Alexander Crummell, Sojourner Truth, and Ida Wells-
Barnett.27 It would be impractical to fold their competing evaluations
of democracy into a single assessment, but one subject that does come
through when looking at the larger arcs is a prevailing sense of reification
and betrayal—an impression that American democracy in its inception
represented a unique assertion of idealism, which hegemonic implemen-
tations then twisted, distorted, and decimated repeatedly and in different
ways. The basic message is that assertions of democracy are meaningless
without opportunities for individuals to gain experiences that cohere
with them, and such experiences will never grow out of state-sanctioned
policies designed to reproduce status quos and inequality.28
On the topic of wider context, there is also the question of why I have
selected these particular authors and philosophers when there were many
other African American women who produced transformative work dur-
ing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With regard to the phi-
losophy, I have already mentioned some of the other individuals whose
work grew in relation to pragmatism, like Williams, Truth, and Wells-
Barnett.29 Selecting some theorists while leaving others out inevitably
constitutes a statement about the parameters of African American wom-
en’s philosophy, even if it may not be intended as one.30 One reason for
choosing Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell is
that, to my mind, reading their texts comparatively enables us to chart a
narrative that is marked by quite disparate approaches to the overlapping
themes, ideas, motifs, and settings of creative democracy. In fact, the vast
differences among these writers allow the through lines of black feminist
pragmatism to emerge as literary elements. Characterizations of a black
maternal archetype and constructions of black feminist communities
become the links that bring unity and kinesis to defining ideas like the
alliance between theory and practice, the need to reconstruct democracy,
and the significance of experiential knowledge. So too, Stewart, Cooper,
and Terrell afford one snapshot of how black feminist pragmatism forms
an evolutionary dialectic with no set boundaries.
In a way, a term like “nineteenth-century black women’s philoso-
phy” is too confining, especially considering that the texts range from
Stewart’s “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality,” which was pub-
lished in 1831, to Terrell’s A Colored Woman in a White World, which
was published in 1940. African American women’s pragmatism, however,
is less a movement centred in a specific time and place than a genealogy
 1 INTRODUCTION 25

founded on micro- and macro-level interrelations. Motifs feed into large-

scale thematic concerns; recollections of piecemeal experiences coexist
with commentaries on the political importance of experience; aestheti-
cized recreations of select communities reveal how America functions as
a geopolitical setting; and select portraits of a nineteenth-century gestalt
come from different standpoints (including those outside of the nine-
teenth century) that remain critical of the very notion of cultural ethos.
Stewart, Cooper, and Terrell provide a spectrum of viewpoints on these
interactions which, when considered together, highlight the complex
knots and intersections that make up a pragmatic line of descent.
The related question of why the works of Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston
should serve as case studies in literary pragmatism introduces a host of
subsidiary inquiries (including the question of why these authors should
be read together, which I address further in Chapter 3). To stick for now
to the major question: why focus on these three authors instead of, for
example, earlier writers like Phyllis Wheatley, Frances Harper, Harriet
Jacobs, and Harriet Wilson? Or other Harlem Renaissance writers like
May Miller, Angelina Weld Grimké, Anne Spencer, Effie Lee Newsome,
Alice Dunbar Nelson, and Marita Bonner? Aside from the desire to
organize a collection of readings that is small enough to do justice to
each text but diverse enough to provide scope, the rationale for choosing
Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston begins with the thesis that their protago-
nists offer the strongest examples of creative democratic individualism in
action. I have talked about individualism in relation to African American
women’s writings, but the works of Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston also
reflect a shift in canonical pragmatism, which was best exemplified in
the philosophy of the arch-individualist Dewey. In other projects, I have
argued that Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston each flesh out in their own ways
ideas and concerns that define the interwar pragmatisms of Dewey and
W. E. B. Du Bois.31 In this sense, Fauset’s, Larsen’s, and Hurston’s nar-
ratives carry forward a pragmatic legacy in black women’s writings while
also encapsulating a convergence in pragmatism at large. It would be a
mistake to assume that this synchronization simply mirrors the influence
of male thinkers like Dewey, Du Bois, and Alain Locke on black women
authors. Rather, what the convergence reveals is the increasing promi-
nence of creative democracy within mainstream pragmatism. That is,
Fauset’s, Larsen’s, and Hurston’s works offer the richest narrativizations
of interwar creative democracy precisely because they extend a genealogy
of African American women’s pragmatism.
26 G. PHIPPS

Chapter Breakdown
The book consists of seven body chapters, plus the conclusion. The first
main chapter (Chapter 2) outlines the nineteenth-century foundations
of literary pragmatism, focusing on the writings of Stewart, Cooper,
and Terrell. The aim of this chapter is to assemble a narrative of creative
democracy based on investigations of the ways these philosophers depict
interrelationships among experience and truth, and the black maternal
archetype and black women’s communities. Reading their works com-
paratively, we see the evolution of a shared principle: the idea that, for
black women, democracy is an experience that gains meaning and value
within communities that thrive outside the mainstream of U.S. society.
We also see literary and theoretical expressions of creative democracy
within their texts, which develop through, on one side, enlistments of
aesthetic, religious, political, and cultural practices central to the work-
ings of African American women’s communities, and, on the other side,
portrayals and revisions of the long-standing axis of these communities,
the black maternal archetype. In Stewart, Cooper, and Terrell’s theory,
the archetype and community function simultaneously as cultural tropes,
platforms for activism, and textual constructs, ultimately delineating how
these philosophers see black women influencing and transforming insti-
tutional democracy.
Chapter 3 assembles a bridge between nineteenth-century black wom-
en’s philosophy and the Harlem Renaissance. To a degree, this bridge
spans a transition from a feminism couched in ideals of true woman-
hood to one closely wedded to the New Negro Movement. However,
such a perspective also frames the transition in relation to a larger, male-­
dominated movement. An alternative pathway comes to light through
narrative threads that encapsulate black feminist experiential understand-
ings of democracy. Thus, the chapter focuses on strategies for determin-
ing how Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston narrativize and particularize the
black maternal archetype and black women’s communities. In their fic-
tion, internal constructions of the archetype and communities become
the imaginative shapes of young women’s experimentations with differ-
ent modes of creative democracy. The individualistic pursuit of specific
ideals like beauty, love, and security stands at the forefront of the protag-
onists’ stories, but they stitch together these ideals with material gleaned
from community-based genealogies. Furthermore, the constructs at the
heart of these genealogies re-emerge in the characters’ lives, inflecting
the “truths” that grow through experience.
 1 INTRODUCTION 27

Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to the literature of Jessie Fauset, specifi-

cally two of her novels, the well-known Plum Bun (1929) and the largely
neglected The Chinaberry Tree (1931). The chapters examine how char-
acters like Laurentine Strange, Melissa Paul (from The Chinaberry Tree),
and Angela Murray (from Plum Bun) embody creative democratic
oppositions to the routinization of experience. For Fauset’s characters,
encounters with racism, sexism, and essentialism produce cyclical pat-
terns of experience that spawn the same emotions over and over, namely
anger, bitterness, and fear. Angela, Laurentine, and Melissa take varying
measures to liberate themselves from this repetitive process—­measures
that range from passing in predominantly white settings (Angela) to
reassembling intersectional identity (Laurentine) to building com-
munal interconnectivity in a single locale (Melissa). In each case, their
enterprises revolve around the pursuit of beauty, an ideal that remains
in process because of its encompassing importance to them. For these
characters, beauty evolves and gains value through experience, not only
spearheading creative democratic mobility, independence, and reinven-
tion, but also emerging repeatedly as an open-ended product of creative
democracy. At the same time, the characters’ searches for beauty gen-
erate experiences that access diverse legacies of black women’s identity,
destabilizing their individualism. Although creative democracy appears
to involve ceaseless movements among different environments, it actu-
ally concludes with new perceptions of the originary point of departure,
communal relationships among African American women.
Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Nella Larsen’s two novels, Quicksand
(1928) and Passing (1929). These works depict the growth, culmination,
and eventual collapse of creative democracy, providing notably complete
portraits of pragmatic individualism in action. Larsen arguably exempli-
fies the changed status of “the individual” in black women’s pragmatism
more than any other author of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet interest-
ingly, her two novels also end with the destruction of individualism. In
Quicksand, Helga Crane winds up embodying an archaic and sclerotic
variation of the black maternal archetype, enduring repeated pregnancies
in the rural South. In Passing, Irene Redfield (apparently) murders her
friend Clare Kendry just when Clare is about to achieve a new form of
liberation through a return to the African American community. In the
cases of Helga and Irene, the promise that creative democracy holds as a
distinct experience for black women is betrayed through its actualization.
However, the latter represents not the fulfilment of ­community-based
enterprises, but rather a terminal point in increasingly narrow cycles of
28 G. PHIPPS

personal experience and subjective truth. In the end, the more attuned
Helga and Irene become to the permutation of truth through action
and consequences, the more they try to control the fluctuations of expe-
rience. The desire for control manifests itself through resistance to the
most fruitful impetus for genuine creative democracy: communal inter-
connectivity among African American women.
Chapter 8 examines two short stories that Zora Neale Hurston wrote
during the early phase of her career, “Drenched in Light” (1924) and
“The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933). The chapter argues that “Drenched”
and “Gilded” present a cast of characters who enact elements of crea-
tive democracy, including a child, a young couple, and a grandmother.
Through these characters, Hurston builds a portrait of Eatonville,
Florida (her setting of choice) as a place that wavers between a robust
community of aesthetic activity and a place besieged by intersectional
stratifications. On the one hand, Eatonville is founded on amicable rela-
tions and local networks of trade, communication, and art. On the other
hand, prosperous outsiders from urban centres expose the ways dif-
fuse ideals of interdependence buttress status quos that propagate rac-
ism and misogyny. The young black female protagonists in “Drenched”
and “Gilded” find ways to extricate and build upon the local networks,
harnessing them in order to externalize their ideals and fantasies. In the
process, they strengthen their authority by remaking the most versatile
tool of self-definition at their disposal, the black maternal archetype. In
Hurston’s fiction, the archetype resonates with multitudinous signifi-
cance. More so than in any other author’s works, the archetype is a sym-
bol, at once cultural and personal, of aspirations and intentions, ideas
and images, and resistance and power, all of which bind together one of
the inner nexuses of creative democracy: the point at which the individ-
ual and community meet.

Notes
1. Dewey deploys the term “creative democracy” most memorably in his
1939 address, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” a work that
offers a retroactive summation of his philosophical views on democracy.
2. This approach stands at the centre of my previous book, Henry James and
the Philosophy of Literary Pragmatism. Cornel West offers perhaps the
most detailed commentary on this understanding of pragmatist writing
in The American Evasion of Philosophy. West states memorably, “American
 1 INTRODUCTION 29

pragmatism is less a philosophical tradition putting forward solutions to

perennial problems in the Western philosophical conversation initiated
by Plato and more a continuous cultural commentary or set of interpre-
tations that attempt to explain America to itself at a particular historical
moment” (5).
3. James’s most overt attempts to link his philosophy to American culture
occur when he argues that pragmatism forms a “democratic” set of ideas
(Pragmatism 38–9). Throughout his career, he cultivated a reputation
as a quintessential “American” philosopher, an exponent (and critic)
of American social and cultural values. John Dewey helped strengthen
this impression by identifying James’s pragmatism with the arche-
typal figure of the pioneer on the frontier—in the context of Frederick
Jackson Turner’s ideas in The Frontier in American History, the pio-
neer is an emphatically American personification of independence and
self-sufficiency.
4. Monographs that bring together pragmatism and African American
male philosophers and authors include West’s The American Evasion of
Philosophy, George Hutchinson’s The Harlem Renaissance in Black and
White, Ross Posnock’s Color and Culture, Leonard Harris’s The Critical
Pragmatism of Alain Locke, and Walton Muyumba’s The Shadow and the
Act. These critics do include some analyses of women authors, such as
Zora Neale Hurston (Posnock and Hutchinson), but their focus is pri-
marily on men. Charlene Seigfried’s Pragmatism and Feminism supplies
a comprehensive study of relationships between pragmatism and women’s
theory and activism, affording particular attention to the life and work of
Jane Addams. Some scholars who analyse women writers of the Harlem
Renaissance do touch upon pragmatist ideas (though briefly), as Jaime
Harker does in America the Middlebrow.
5. Of course, this list does not include all the earlier pragmatist philosophers
who discuss literature and art or apply pragmatist methodologies to lit-
erary and aesthetic analysis. John Dewey’s 1934 work Art as Experience
is generally regarded as a landmark text among these earlier writings,
though people like Kenneth Burke (particularly in The Philosophy of
Literary Form), Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois (I discuss their writings
further in the next chapter), and Randolph Bourne also helped shape the
development of literary pragmatism in the early twentieth century.
6. In his 1908 article, “What Pragmatism Means by Practical,” Dewey
emphasizes the relevance of pragmatist thinking to all modes of life, stat-
ing that pragmatic methodologies should be “applied as widely as possible;
and to things as diverse as controversies, beliefs, truths, ideas, and objects”
(101). He followed through with this conviction by applying pragmatism
to democracy, the concept that stands above all others in his corpus. The
30 G. PHIPPS

question of the individual, social, cultural, and ontological experience of

democracy is one that he grappled with throughout his career, though he
intensified his focus on creative democracy in particular during the inter-
war period. Disturbed by the increasing ossification of democracy in insti-
tutions, frightened by the vacuity of postwar culture, he set out in the
1920s to articulate a new form of democracy that would help transform
American society into what he called the “Great Community.” At once
an invocation of the pioneering heritage of the nation and a call for the
reformation of postwar society, the ideal of the Great Community envis-
ages America as an interrelated series of communal spheres that foster
interpersonal associations founded on communication, art, cooperation,
and labour. For Dewey, it is up to individuals—specifically artistic, exper-
imental, and independent individuals—to “take possession of the phys-
ical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it”
(Public and Its Problems 350). Individual citizens must create the Great
Community by forming associative ties that traverse social boundaries and
generate “conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good
by all singular persons who take part in it” (328). Creative democracy and
the Great Community thus form reciprocal goals in Dewey’s grassroots
interpretation of democratic life.
7. Black feminist theory has also stressed the ways such categories work
together to devalue African American women. For instance, Ann d ­ uCille
states that the “defining assumption of black feminist theory” is the
notion that “sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression are strange
bedfellows that thrive in each other’s company” (“Short” 42).
8. As Valerie Smith states, “such a formulation erases the specificity of the
black woman’s experience, constituting her as the point of intersection
between black men’s and white women’s experience” (“Black Feminist
Theory” 375). See also Carbado, Crenshaw, Waters (378), and Valerie
C. Cooper (23).
9. Deborah McDowell, for example, grapples with the question of whether
black women are equipped with a “special vision” that distinguishes their
approach to battles against racism and sexism: “I would argue that, while
that struggle must surely set black women apart from their most imme-
diate counterparts—black men, white women, white men—it can take a
variety of forms, depending on the social positions of those in question”
(“Changing” 17). Other scholars like duCille, Valerie Smith, and Hazel
Carby have opposed the privileging of experiential knowledge, mainly on
the grounds that it is impossible to locate a unified reservoir of experience
that binds together black women authors and scholars. Carby, for exam-
ple, writes that black feminist theory should avoid “reducing the experi-
ence of all black women to a common denominator and limiting black
 1 INTRODUCTION 31

feminist critics to an exposition of an equivalent black ‘female imagina-

tion’” (10). For other discussions of the interplay between theorizations
of experience and direct appeals to it in black feminist theory, see Keizer
(164), Collins (Black 15), and Gillman (101–2).
10. Most famously, this point has taken the form of an opposition between
black feminism and poststructuralism. Barbara Christian helped initiate
this discussion with her 1987 article “The Race for Theory,” in which she
lambastes the language and critical approaches of poststructuralists while
also reaffirming the centrality of experience and practice. For Christian,
the danger is that “when theory is not rooted in practice, it becomes pre-
scriptive, exclusive, elitish [sic]” (“Race” 285). For further discussions of
the clash between black feminist theory and poststructuralism, see duCi-
lle (Coupling 7), Keizer (161), Davies (27–8), Alexander-Floyd (2), and
Perpich.
11. As Carbado discusses, some of the alternative terms on offer include
cosynthesis, interconnectivity, multidimensionality, and assemblages.
12. These critics point out that the works of people like Maria Stewart and
Anna Julia Cooper have not always been accepted as theoretical or phil-
osophical writings. May asserts that Cooper, for instance, often suffers
from concomitant forces of “biographical visibility” and “theoretical
obscurity,” meaning that her life and accomplishments are celebrated
while her major contributions to theory (including intersectionality) are
ignored (Anna 4).
13. A number of critics either mention pragmatism in passing or invoke it
through discussions of experienced-based conceptions of truth and/or
the tight interrelationship between theory and practice. See for exam-
ple Marilyn Richardson (18), Giddings (101), Deegan (xxxviii and xliv),
Glass (8), Parker (196), Hine (11), May (Pursuing 20), Martha Jones
(24), and Lemert (41). However, full discussions of pragmatism and spe-
cific African American women authors and philosophers remain rare.
14. See James’s article “Theorizing Black Feminist Pragmatism” and her
chapter “The Hostile Gospel and Democratic Faith.” She argues that a
return to Dewey’s philosophy (and a move away from Cornel West’s)
can tap into those aspects of pragmatism that may speak more to African
American women, including continuity between the individual and com-
munity, social justice as the ultimate end of theory, and a concerted ori-
entation towards the future.
15. For further discussions of the collective impact these aesthetic traditions
have produced on African American women’s intellectual history, see
Christian (“Race”), Baker (9), Conaway and Waters (2), and Griffin
(Flowin’ 111). I talk in more detail about individual practices grounded
on music and religion in Chapter 2.
32 G. PHIPPS

16. There is no set way to define black feminist and intersectional approaches

to interpretation, though some critics have worked to identify longstand-
ing pillars, such as critical awareness of the interconnectivity between
theory and practice, group-centred methods of reading, and a commit-
ment to the struggle against racial and sexual oppression. See for example
Abdullah (329) and King and Ferguson (9–10).
17. Critics who have addressed this point include, among others, Hudson-
Weems, Dunbar, Calloway, Brown-Guillory, and King and Ferguson.
18. See for example Giddings (44), Spillers (227), McElya (196), Pratt (163),
Pennigroth (163–73), and Hicks (126).
19. See Teresa Washington’s fascinating study of Àjé and its role among the
Yoruba people of Southwest Nigeria. Although not directly translatable,
Àjé can be conceived of as a force associated with maternity that endows
women with creativity, power, fertility, and vitality. See also Barbara Moss
for a commentary on the survival and revision of African feminist and
maternal traditions in America, as well as Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The
Signifying Monkey for discussions of the survival of African cultural arche-
types among black Americans.
20. As other critics have discussed, the importance of assembling images
of African American women as virtuous (especially sexually virtuous)
remained an ongoing concern for black female theorists throughout the
nineteenth century. Scholars who have addressed the growth of this line-
age include Ampadu (43), Waters (368), Giddings (102), Roberson (80),
and Hill (24).
21. As Hine indicates, gendered labour within slavery did equip black women
to form communal networks founded on activities such as “spinning,
weaving, quilting, cooking, and attending each other in child birth and
providing health care”: “These female slave networks allowed the women
to forge a common consciousness concerning their oppression as women
while devising strategies for survival” (5). Hine proceeds to argue that
such networks supplied the foundations for the clubs and national organi-
zations that rose to prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries (12).
22. Guy-Sheftall argues that such clubs first emerged as self-help associations
for free, northern black women in the early 1800s, granting them oppor-
tunities for participation and leadership that they failed to find in organ-
izations of African American men or white women. One of the first of
these associations was the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of
Boston, which was founded in 1831. Maria Stewart delivered her first
public lecture to this society in 1832. See Guy-Sheftall (3–4).
 1 INTRODUCTION 33

23. Scholars who have discussed these ties in the nineteenth-century context

include Dunbar (117), Collins (“Shifting” 47), Giddings (50), Glass
(88), and Moody (34–7).
24. See Hobbs (176), Dawkins (52), Moynihan (9), Sollors (250), Harper
(382), Robinson (715), Wald (5), Sharfstein (4), and Nerad (9–10).
25. As one major example, because hegemonic U.S. ideals of individual rights
and citizenship often failed on every level to apply to African American
women, they had to craft their own versions of the relationship between
individuality and citizenship within communities. The community thus
offered a framework for asking questions about what it means for African
American women to be “individuals.”
26. As I discuss in the next chapter, such experiences have always been mul-
tilayered. Stewart, Cooper, and Terrell investigate how immorality is
projected onto black women through propagandistic caricatures and
dehumanizing intersectional configurations in order to justify genuinely
immoral practices, including sexual assault, murder, and the selling of
children.
27. For further reading, see Drake (37), Parker (186), Fannie Barrier Williams
(“Intellectual” 27), Bassard (57), Ivy G. Wilson (1–7), Castronovo
(1–7; 107–10), Ericka Miller (11), Michael West (200–209), and Jeffrey
Stewart. Booker T. Washington makes for a particularly interesting case
study, if only because it is difficult to identify the extent to which he can
be considered either a pragmatist or an advocate for creative democracy. I
discuss his place within pragmatism further in the next chapter.
28. In many cases, the invocation of founding assertions of democratic ideal-
ism is quite deliberate. Fannie Barrier Williams, for example, presents a
direct appeal that outlines the differences between words and practices,
and ideals and experience: “The colored women, as well as all women,
will realize that the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness is a maxim that will become more blessed in its significance
when the hand of woman shall take it from its sepulture in books and
make it the gospel of every-day life and the unerring guide in the rela-
tions of all men, women, and children” (“Intellectual” 27).
29. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Williams and Wells-
Barnett belonged to a network of African American women intellectuals
that included Terrell and Cooper. Mary Jo Deegan comments, “Their
work was characterized by a sociological theory and practice oriented
toward the standpoint of the oppressed.” Together, they developed
an “active cooperative model with an emphasis on fighting for civil and
cultural rights from the viewpoint of feminist pragmatism” (xxxviii).
34 G. PHIPPS

Williams is particularly fascinating in this context. She skirted between

Booker T. Washington’s and W. E. B. Du Bois’s contrasting versions of
pragmatism, but she also developed her own line of pragmatic thought
in her writing, detailing productive clashes between ideals and experi-
ence (“Northern” 6; “Intellectual” 19–20, 27) while also extoling the
uniqueness of black women’s experiential understandings of concepts
like virtue and cooperation (“Club”; “Woman’s”). Then again, she also
tends to base this uniqueness on what she sees as a lack of cultural tradi-
tions and legacies: “I do not think it too much to say that the American
Negro woman is the most interesting woman in this country. I do not
say that in any boastful spirit, but I mean that she is the only woman
whose career lies wholly in front of her. She has no history, no traditions,
no race ideals, no inherited resources and no established race character”
(“Woman’s” 59). This argument deliberately represses the development
of a black feminist genealogy that had already emerged during Williams’s
lifetime.
30. As mentioned, recent black feminist scholarship has worked to advance
the idea that the writings of people like Cooper and Stewart should be
approached as philosophy. The assumption that we can question this
claim because of some rigid demarcation of what constitutes philosophy
should be resisted at every turn. Such assumptions are especially prob-
lematic in the context of pragmatism, which is defined in part by interdis-
ciplinary and flexible approaches to theory. Very few critics, for example,
question whether William James wrote “philosophy,” but much of his
pragmatist thought includes extensive commentaries on biology, psychol-
ogy, spiritualism, politics, and a wide array of other subjects.
31. See “The Deliberate Introduction of Beauty and Pleasure,” which focuses
on Fauset, “Breaking Down Creative Democracy,” which focuses on
Larsen, and “It Takes Its Shape from de Shore It Meets,” which focuses
on Hurston.
 CHAPTER 2

Nineteenth-Century Philosophical
Pragmatism: The Black Maternal
Archetype and the Communities
of Creative Democracy

One of the purposes of this book is to identify how African American

women authors develop a literary pragmatist narrative of creative democ-
racy across diverse texts. Doing so demands black feminist and inter-
sectional modes of reading, which, as discussed in Chapter 1, involve
awareness and receptivity to a number of key foundations in African
American women’s writing: the importance of communities as forums
for the development of black women’s relationships, art, culture, stories,
and political activism; matrilineal forms of transmission and the attendant
centrality of the black maternal archetype as a mythic figure, textual con-
struct, and variable model for self-definition; the unity between theory
and practice; and constant resistance to the interweaving forces of rac-
ism, misogyny, classicism, and sexual oppression. At the same time, it is
also important to chart convergences (and divergences) among African
American women’s pragmatism and other manifestations of pragmatic
thought. Therefore, we must investigate how and why we can identify
certain thinkers and writers as pragmatists. By extension, we must also
question what separates African American women’s pragmatism from
other versions, especially those developed by people like William James,
Charles Peirce, and John Dewey.1
The unifying elements in pragmatism at large hinge on a shared
approach to one of the lodestars of philosophy: the nature, composi-
tion, and delineation of “truth.” In simple terms, pragmatism argues that
truth emerges through experience. For a pragmatist, the truth of any

© The Author(s) 2018 35

G. Phipps, Narratives of African American Women’s
Literary Pragmatism and Creative Democracy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01854-2_2
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 CHAPTER XI
THE PYRAMIDS REVISITED

This is the third time that I have made lengthy visits to the
Pyramids of Egypt. On my first trip I rode to them on a donkey. The
next time I came out from Cairo in a comfortable carriage, and to-day
I passed over the same route on an electric trolley, paying seven and
a half cents for the trip. The street cars to the Pyramids start at the
end of the bridge, opposite Cairo, and pass along the side of the
wide avenue shaded by acacia trees. The cars are open so that one
can look out over the Nile valley as he goes. We whizzed by
caravans of donkeys, loaded with all sorts of farm products, and by
camels, ridden by gowned men, bobbing up and down in the saddles
as they went. There were men, women, and children on foot, and
veiled women on donkeys.
The cars were filled with Egyptians. Two dark-faced men in black
gowns and white turbans sat on the seat beside me. In front was a
yellow-skinned Arab dandy in a red fez and long gown, while just
behind me sat a woman with a black veil fastened to her head-dress
by a brass spool. As we neared the Pyramids we stopped at a café
where American drinks were sold, and a little farther on was a great
modern hotel with telephones and electric lights.
When I previously visited Egypt, the sands about the Pyramids
were almost as smooth as those of the seashore. I galloped on my
donkey over them and had no idea that I was tramping down
innumerable graves.
But now—what changes the excavators and archæologists have
made! I n walking over the same ground to-day I had to pick my way
in and out through a vast network of half-broken-down tombs, from
which the sands had been shovelled, and climb across piles of sun-
dried brick which were made by the Egyptians at the time old King
Cheops reigned. In one place I saw a gang of half-naked, brown-
skinned fellaheen shovelling the earth into the cars in which it is
carried far out in the desert. When the work is in full play an endless
chain of cars of sand moves across this cemetery. There is a double
track with turntables at the ends, and the arrangements are such that
the sand can be taken out at the rate of half a ton per minute. For a
long time seventy-two men were employed, and the result is that
some most interesting historical material has been collected.
Some of the most important archæological work now going on in
Egypt is in the hands of the Americans. Our scientists are making
explorations in Nubia, away up the Nile, and are opening up temples
and tombs in the desert near Luxor. They have already discovered
the burial places of several kings who reigned over four thousand
years ago, and unearthed the tomb of Queen Hatshepsut, whose
sarcophagus is now on view in the museum at Cairo.
Right here two American institutions have a large force of natives
at work and have uncovered a cemetery under the shadow of the
Pyramids of the time when the greatest of them was built. This
cemetery includes the tombs not only of the rich, but also of the poor,
and the relics, statues, and other things found in it enable one to
reconstruct the lives of those who were buried here forty centuries
ago.
The excavations which are being made near the Great Pyramid
are in the interest of Harvard College and the Boston Museum. They
furnish the money and Dr. George Reisner, one of the most efficient
archæologists of the day, has charge of the work. Dr. Reisner came
to Egypt as the head of the Hearst Expedition. He worked for it
several years, making valuable explorations far up the Nile. He
discovered there the flint-working camps of the people of the
prehistoric period, and he explored the quarries which date back to
the time of the Ptolemies. He also unearthed the site of a large town
which was in existence fifteen hundred years before Christ and
excavated a mass of valuable material therefrom. He then came
nearer Cairo and uncovered cemeteries of ancient times, which give
us a new view of Egyptian civilization.
 It was in connection with the Boston Museum that he began his
work at the Pyramids. As it is now carried on, of the share which falls
to the United States the museum gets the art discoveries, while
Harvard receives everything found bearing upon history and
ethnology. One half of all that is unearthed goes to the Egyptian
government and the other half to the United States.
The story of the allotment of the archæological territory about the
Pyramids is interesting. The Egyptian government was anxious to
have the country excavated, and there were three nations ready to
do the work. The three were Germany, Italy, and the United States.
Archæologists came here as representatives from each of these
countries and the whole of the Gizeh Pyramid field was turned over
to them with the understanding that Egypt was to have half of the
discoveries. Then the question came up as to how the site should be
divided. As it was then, it was a great area of sand not far from the
banks of the Nile with the big Pyramid of Cheops and the smaller
ones of Khefren and Mycerinus rising out of it, each being quite a
distance apart from the others. Each nation wished to do
independent work; so the archæologists finally agreed to divide the
territory into three sections and cast lots for them. I am told that Mrs.
Reisner held the straws. In the drawing, the United States got the
tract just north of the Great Pyramid and Germany and Italy the
tracts to the south of it. Our area was thought to be the best of all
and Uncle Sam’s luck has been nowhere better evidenced than right
here. We are making more finds than both the other nations put
together and are bringing new life to the pages of history.
I went out to the Pyramids to-day and called upon the chief of the
American excavation works. I find he has built himself a home under
the shadow of old Cheops. He is beyond the greatest of the
Pyramids, with the sands reaching out for miles away on the north,
south, and west of him. His house is built of stones which probably
came from these ancient monuments. It is a long, one-story
structure, not over twelve feet in height, but large enough to contain
a laboratory, a photographic establishment, and the necessary
equipment of an archæologist.
 One part of it is the living quarters of Dr. Reisner and his family. He
has his wife and baby with him, and as we chatted together his little
daughter, a bright-eyed infant not more than a year or so old, played
about our feet. The baby was born here on the edge of the Libyan
Desert, and her youth and the age of old Cheops, that great tomb of
more than four thousand years ago, were striking in their contrast.
As I looked at the little one I thought of the tombs of the babies which
her father is now excavating.
During my stay we examined some photographs of the recent
discoveries. One represented three statues of a well-to-do couple
who lived here in those bygone ages. They were Teti and his wife.
The faces were life-like and I doubt not that Mr. and Mrs. Teti sat for
them.
There were other photographs of objects found in the cemetery of
the rich, as well as of some found in the cemetery of the poor. The
higher classes of that time were buried nearer the Pyramids, while
beyond them, farther up the desert, were the burial places of the
poor. Each poor person had a little coffin-like hole in the ground built
round with stones. These holes were close together, making a great
series of stone boxes that remind one of the compartments of an egg
crate.
I took a donkey for my ride to the Great Pyramid of Cheops, and
went clear around the huge mass, climbing again up the stones. As I
sat on the top I could see the work going on in the sands below me,
and I repeopled them with the men now being dug up under the
superintendence of our Americans. In my mind’s eye I could see
them as they toiled. I could see them dragging the great blocks over
the road of polished stone, which had been made for the purpose,
and observe the sweat rolling down their dusty faces in this blazing
sun of Egypt as, under the lashes of their taskmasters, the great pile
grew.
Most of the great stone blocks of which the Pyramid was built
weigh at least two tons, while some of the larger ones which cover
the King’s Chamber inside the structure weigh sixty tons. It is
estimated that the Great Pyramid contains nearly ninety million cubic
feet of limestone. This is so much that if it could be split into flags
four inches thick, it would furnish enough to make a pavement two
feet wide reaching over sea and land clear around the globe.
When Cheops completed this great structure he faced the exterior
with limestone and granite slabs. The sides were as smooth as glass
and met in a point at the top. The length of each side was eighteen
feet greater than it is now. Indeed, as the bright sun played upon its
polished surface the Pyramid must have formed a magnificent sight.
As it is to-day, when one views it from afar, the Great Pyramid still
looks like one smooth block of stone. It is only when he comes closer
that he sees it is made of many blocks. The Pyramid is built of yellow
limestone and conglomerate. The stones are piled one on the other
in regular layers. There is no cement between them, but they are
chinked with a rough mortar which has withstood the weather for all
these ages. I dug at some of this mortar with my knife, but could not
loosen it, and went from block to block along the great structure on
the side facing the western desert, finding the mortar everywhere
solid.
And this huge pile was built over forty centuries ago. It seems a
long time, but when you figure out how many lives it means it is not
so old after all. Every one of us knows one hundred men who have
reached forty years. Their aggregate lives, if patched together, would
go back to the beginning of this monument. In other words, if a man
at forty should have a child and that child should live to be forty and
then have a child, and the programme of life should so continue, it
would take only one hundred such generations to reach to the days
when the breath from the garlic and onions eaten by those one
hundred thousand men polluted this desert air.
Indeed, the world is not old, and it is not hard to realize that those
people of the past had the same troubles, the same worries, and the
same tastes as we have. I can take you through tombs not far from
Cairo upon the walls of which are portrayed the life work of the men
of ancient Egypt. You may see them using the same farm tools that
the fellaheen use now. They plough, they reap, and thresh. They
drink wine and gorge themselves with food. In one of the tombs I
saw the picture of a woman milking a cow while her daughter held
the calf back by the knees to prevent it from sucking. In another
painting I saw the method of cooking, and in another observed those
old Egyptians stuffing live geese with food to enlarge their livers.
They were making pâté de foie gras, just as the Germans stuff
geese for the same purpose to-day.
Leaving the Pyramid of Cheops, I crossed over to take a look at
the other two which form the rest of the great trio of Gizeh, and I
have since been up to the site of old Memphis, where are the
Pyramids of Sakkarah, eleven in number. Along this plateau, running
up the Nile, are to be found the remains of a large number of
Pyramids. There are also some in the Faiyum, and others far up the
river in ancient Ethiopia. The latter are taller in proportion to their
bases than the Egyptian Pyramids, and they generally have a hall
with sculptures facing the east to commemorate the dead.
Most of the stones of the Pyramids here came from the plateau
upon which they stand or from the Mokattam hills about twelve miles
away on the other side of the Nile. There was an inclined plane
leading to the river, on which are still to be seen the ruts in the stone
road cut out by the runners of the sledges carrying these great
blocks. There are pictures on some of the monuments which show
how the stones were drawn on sledges by oxen and men. In one of
the pictures a man is pouring oil on the roadbed. On the Island of
Madeira, where the natives drag sleds by hand up and down the
hills, they grease their sled runners, but the ancient Egyptians
greased not only the runners but the roads as well.
I was much interested in the interior of the Great Pyramid. The
mighty structure is supposed to be solid, with the exception of three
chambers, connected with the outside by passageways and
ventilated by air-shafts. These chambers undoubtedly once
contained great treasures of gold and silver, but they were robbed in
the first instance over three thousand years ago and it is known that
the Persians, the Romans, and the Arabs all tried to dig into them to
find the valuables they were supposed to hold.
 It was with three half-naked Bedouins that I climbed up to the
entrance which leads into old Cheops. There is a hole about forty-
five feet above the desert on the north side. Going in here, we came
into a narrow stone passage so low that I had to crawl on my hands
and knees. The passage first sloped downward and then up, and
finally, pushed and pulled by my dark guides, I got into a great
narrow hall. After passing through this, I entered again the room
where old Cheops, the king, rested undisturbed for a thousand years
or so before the looters came.
 The Alabaster Sphinx is one of the evidences of splendour of the ancient city of
Memphis, seat of kings, with streets so long that to walk from end to end was said
to be half a day’s journey.
 Inside the great museum at Cairo are the mummies of Egyptian royalty, which,
with countless relics and records and the new discoveries of the archæologists,
reveal in intimate detail the life of these people of thousands of years ago.

By going back through the hall one reaches another passageway

which slopes downward to the Queen’s Chamber. Below this,
reached by another passage connecting with that I first entered,
there is a subterranean chamber far under the base of the Pyramid
itself. The whole structure is intensely interesting, and if it could be
explored by diamond drills or in some other way, other chambers
might possibly be found in the parts now looked upon as solid.
 CHAPTER XII
FACE TO FACE WITH THE PHARAOHS

How would you like to own an Egyptian mummy princess, perhaps

two thousand years old? On my second visit to Egypt I was offered
one at the museum. The price was just one hundred dollars in cash,
and accompanying it was a certificate showing that it had not been
made in Germany. The excavations going on in the valley of the Nile
had unearthed so many relics that the museum at Cairo had
mummies and other antiques to sell. Hundreds of the ancient dead
were being shipped to all parts of the world, and the ghoul-like
officials added to their revenues by disposing of the surplus bodies
of nobles who lived and ruled ages ago. The lady who was offered to
me, with the usual accompaniment of a certificate of age, lay in the
clothes in which she was buried. She was wrapped around with linen
as yellow as saffron and her black face appeared to smile as I
looked at her. She had been put up in spices, and I could almost
smell the perfumes with which she was embalmed.
There is no place like this Museum of Cairo in which to study the
Egypt of the past. Room after room is walled with the coffins of
monarchs who reigned thousands of years ago, and in other caskets
the bodies embalmed are exposed to view. I looked a long time upon
the face of King Rameses who is supposed to have gone to school
with Moses. The king who built Thebes, Karnak, and other great
cities, was the man who oppressed the Israelites, although not the
one whom the Lord afflicted with plagues thereby causing the
Exodus. He was the Alexander of Egypt, the Napoleon of the Nile
valley three thousand odd years ago. He conquered the countries
about him and was rolling in wealth. “... now lies he there, And none
so poor to do him reverence.”
Rameses is remarkably well preserved. His iron jaw is as firm as
when he uttered commands in his capital, the hundred-gated city of
Thebes. His enormous nose is still prominent. The face, though
black, is wonderfully life-like and the teeth shine out as white as
when he brushed them after his morning tub, something like four
thousand years ago. I noted the silky, fuzzy hair over his black ears
and longed for a lock of it for my collection of relics.
Then I looked up and saw a great curled wig of black hair which
the records state was made for King Rameses, and wondered why
the spiced old gentleman below did not match his wig to his natural
flaxen hair.
Near this casket is one containing Seti I, the Pharaoh who
preceded Rameses, another great warrior and conqueror, who is
said to have made a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea. Not so far
away is the mummy of Meneptah, the tyrant who hardened his heart
against the Israelites and would not let them go. Seti lies in his coffin
with his black arms crossed and his black head cushioned on yellow
grave clothes. His features are as peaceful as perhaps they seldom
were in life and he appears to sleep well.
The dead past became marvellously real when I looked at another
box in which lay a mummied princess with the body of her tiny baby,
not many days old, in the coffin beside her, and when I saw gold
bracelets of the same patterns that our belles wear to-day and
earrings quite as beautiful as those made by Tiffany, I felt that human
nature was the same six thousand years ago as it is now, and that
these people of the past had the loves and hates, the cares and the
vanities of the world of to-day. I wondered what Rameses took for
the colic and whether Queen Akhotupu, who lived before Moses, and
who now lies here, had hysterics. I noted the flowers which were put
in another mummy case beside a king and I could not reconcile the
beautiful teeth and the fine intellectual face of King Seti, whose
daughter is supposed to have found Moses in the bulrushes, with the
fat, bloated fingers, showing that he had the gout. There was as
good living in the days of the Israelites as there is in Egypt to-day,
but then as now, only the rich had fancy cooks and the poor ate
scraps. In the tomb of Ti near Memphis I saw in chambers of granite
down under the sands of the desert, wall after wall covered with
painted pictures of the life of the time when the tomb was made
thousands of years before Christ.
I saw the body of a princess standing upright against the side of
the wall. Her face was plated with gold, and the mummy cloths which
wrapped her round and round were embroidered. One might make a
similar bundle of any modern girl. Another of these ladies had hair
which appeared to have been done up in curl papers, and its colour
was as red as my own.
Many of the mummy caskets are splendid. They are made of fine
woods, painted inside and out with pictures describing the life of the
occupants. Some are covered with carvings and some with heads
which may have been likenesses of those who lay within.
It costs much to die now. It must have cost more then. The
expense of making a first-class mummy was twelve hundred dollars,
and the money of that day was worth ten times what it is now. The
caskets, which were more expensive than any of the coffins we have
to-day, were incased in great sarcophagi of stone or wood, a single
one of which must have cost a fortune.
I have asked the archæologists why the Egyptians made their
mummies. Their reply is that the desire for mummification came from
the religion of the ancient Egyptians, who believed in the
transmigration of souls. They thought that the spirit wandered about
for several thousand years after death and then came back to the
home it had upon earth. For this reason it was desirable to keep the
body intact, for every one looked to his mummihood as his only
chance of re-creation hereafter.
When the art of embalming began no one knows, but it certainly
dates back to the building of the Pyramids. We know that when
Jacob died in Egypt, his son Joseph had him embalmed and the
Bible says it took forty days to do the job properly. It also relates that
when Joseph died the Egyptians embalmed him and put him away in
a coffin. Herodotus, who was one of the best travel writers of all
times, describes how embalming was done and tells the details of
mummy-making. He says the art was carried on by a special guild,
whose members were appointed by the government and who had to
work at fixed prices. The bodies were mummified in three different
ways. By the first and most costly method, the brains were extracted
through the nose by means of an iron probe, and the intestines were
taken out through an incision made in the side. The intestines were
cleaned and washed in palm wine, covered with aromatic gum, and
set aside in jars. The cavity of the body was next filled with spices,
including myrrh, cassia, and other fragrant substances, and it was
then sewn up. After this it was soaked in a solution of natron, a kind
of carbonate of soda, being allowed to lie in it for a couple of months
or more. When it had been taken out and wrapped in fine linen so
smeared over with gum that it stuck to the skin, the mummy was
ready for burial.
The second process, though cheaper, took about the same time.
In this the brains were not extracted and the body was so treated in
a solution that everything except the skin and bones was dissolved.
There was a third process which consisted of cleaning the corpse
and laying it down in salt for seventy days. The first process cost
about twelve hundred dollars; the second, one hundred dollars; and
the third, considerably less.
Other authorities describe different methods of mummification.
Most of the mummies discovered, however, have been preserved by
means of gums of some kind and by pitch and carbonate of soda.
The mummies prepared with gums are usually green in colour with
skins which look as though they were tanned. They often break
when they are unrolled. The bodies preserved with pitch are black
and hard, but the features are intact, and it is said that such
mummies will last forever. In those treated with soda the skin is hard
and rather loose, and the hair falls off when it is touched. The pitch
mummy ordinarily keeps its hair and teeth.
There are mummies of children in this Egyptian museum. There
are some also in London, but I know of none anywhere else. The
children were embalmed for the same reason as the grown-ups, the
parents believing that they could have no union with their little ones
unless they met them in their original bodies after the resurrection.
The faces on some of these are gilded, while the pictures on the
bandages represent the children offering sacrifices to the gods.
Above the feet is sometimes seen the funeral boat, showing the little
child lying upon its bier, and upon other parts of the coffin are tiny
people who seem to be engaged in propelling the boat. This
probably represents the ferry of the dead to their tombs in the
mountains on the banks of the Nile. In other cases the caskets of the
children are beautifully decorated and some are even plated with
gold.
I mused long over two statues as old as any in the world. These
are life-size sitting figures, representing Prince Ra-Hotep and his
wife, the Princess Nefert, who lived something like four thousand
years before Christ, and whose statues are as perfect now as when
they were made, before the Pyramids were built. The Prince has
African features, and his light attire reminds one of the inhabitants of
the valley of the Congo. The Princess is dressed in a sheet, and
looks as though she were just out of her bath. Her husband evidently
cut her hair, and it takes considerable imagination to believe that she
can be so old and still look so young. There is no doubt of her age,
however, for the scientists say that she has seen over six thousand
years, and the scientists know.
One of the most important records of the customs and beliefs of
the Pharaohs concerning the dead has been taken away from Egypt.
This is a papyrus manuscript which is now in the British Museum. It
is known as the Book of the Dead and contains two hundred
chapters. It is written in hieroglyphics, but many of the passages
have been translated. It sets forth that every man was believed to
consist of seven different parts of which the actual body was only
one and the other parts related to the soul and its transmigration.
Upon the preservation of the body depended the bringing together of
these seven parts in the after life. On this account corpses were
mummified, and for the same reason they were hidden away in
tombs under the desert and in the great Pyramids, which their
owners believed would be inaccessible to the men of the future.
This Book of the Dead contains, also, some of the Egyptian ideals
of right living, reminding one of the Psalm which, in Rouse’s version,
begins:
 That man hath perfect blessedness
Who walketh not astray
In counsel of ungodly men,
Nor stands in sinner’s way.
Nor sitteth in the scorner’s chair,
But placeth his delight
Upon God’s law, and meditates
On that law day and night.

The Book of the Dead reads:

I am not a plunderer; nor a niggard; nor the cause of others’

tears. I am not unchaste; nor hot in speech. I am not
fraudulent. I do not take away the cakes of a child, or profane
the gods of my locality.
 Some of the boys at the Asyut college bring enough bread baked in big, hard
cakes to last several months. When they go in to their meals they take this bread
along with them, softening it in buckets of water furnished for the purpose.
 The American College founded at Asyut by the Presbyterians has become an
important training school for young Egypt. Many of its graduates go into
government service as well as business and professional life.

Boys from all parts and classes of Egypt, Moslems and Christian Copts, come
by the hundreds to the American College, most of them paying for their tuition,
some in cash and some in work.
 There is no doubt that the Egyptians believed in the immortality of
the soul. They thought man would live again, and gave the soul the
name of Bai, representing it in the form of a human-headed hawk.
They had their own ideas of heaven which one of their pictures of the
future state represents as follows:

In heaven the dead eat bread which never grows stale and
drink wine which is never musty. They wear white apparel and
sit upon thrones among the gods, who cluster around the tree
of life near the lake in the field of peace. They wear the
crowns which the gods give them, and no evil being or thing
has any power to harm them in their new abode, where they
will live with God forever.

According to one opinion, the Egyptian heaven was situated above

the sky. It was separated from the earth by a great iron plate, to
which lamps were fastened, these lamps being the stars. According
to another theory, the heaven was in the delta, or in one of the
oases. The sky was thought to be a cow, Hathor, whose four feet
stood firm upon the soil; or else a vast face, in which the right eye
was the sun and the left eye the moon. Some thought that the sky
was the goddess Nut, whom the god of the atmosphere, Show, held
aloof from her husband Keb, the earth, on whose back grew the
plants and trees.
The ancient Egyptian idea of creation was that it began with the
rising of the sun, which was brought about by a god, and men and
women came from the tears which dropped from the eyes of that
god. This is somewhat better than the old Chinese tradition of the
world’s making. According to the latter, the god Pwanku chiselled out
the universe, putting eighteen thousand years on the job. At the end
of that time he died, and his head turned into mountains, his breath
became the wind, and his voice the thunder. From his flesh came the
fields, from his beard the stars, and from his skin and hair the trees.
All minerals originated from his teeth and bones. The rain is his
sweat, and, lastly, man was created from the insects that stuck to his
body!
 In examining these gods of the ancient Egyptians as shown in the
relics from the tombs, it is easy to see where the Israelites got their
ideas of the golden calf. The oppressors from whom they were
fleeing revered certain animals. They looked upon hawks as
emblems of the sun, moon, and stars, and at their death often turned
them to mummies. The cat was sacred to one of their gods. They
had also statues of cows, the cow being considered emblematic of
Hathor, the goddess of beauty, love, and joy. You may see her
statues scattered up and down the Nile valley. Sometimes she is
depicted as a cow and at others as a woman wearing cow horns with
the sun hung between them. There is a carving of Queen Cleopatra
decked out in that way.
But the jewels of which the Israelites made that calf! If you will look
up the Bible record in Exodus you will see that Moses advised the
Israelites that every man should borrow of his Egyptian neighbour
jewels of silver and jewels of gold. A little farther on it is stated that
they did so, the paragraph concluding as follows:

And the Lord gave the people favour in the sight of the
Egyptians, so that they lent unto them. And they spoiled the
Egyptians.

In the museums here in Cairo you may see pints and quarts of
jewellery such as the Israelites borrowed and took with them into the
wilderness to melt down to make that golden calf. The place is filled
with great cases containing ornaments of gold and silver taken from
the tombs. Some date back almost to the early days of the Pyramids,
and many were in use before the Israelites left Egypt. Some are
golden snakes with spring coils so that they will fit any arm; others
are solid rings of massive gold. I saw armlets to be worn above the
elbow, golden girdles for the waist, and a chain of gold with a goose
head at each end. Among the finest of these ornaments are those
owned by a queen who lived 600 b.c. and whose mummy came from
a tomb not far from Thebes.