79. Frances Harper — Iola Leroy with Dr. Koritha Mitchell

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AMY HELMES: Hi everyone. Welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes. 

KIM ASKEW: And I'm Kim Askew. The novel we'll be discussing today, Frances Harper's Iola leroy was reissued a few years ago by Broadview Press, and we're excited to have Dr. Koritha Mitchell with us today to discuss it.

AMY: Dr. Mitchell edited the edition and wrote the book's introduction. And what I learned from it left me a little gobsmacked and wondering why I had never heard of Frances Harper before. 

KIM: Yeah. I had the same reaction, Amy, and you're right. It's shocking once you understand what a hugely important figure Harper was, not just as a writer, but also as an activist. She was a well-known abolitionist and suffragist of her day, she toured the United States on lecture circuits. And in terms of her writing, she was a prolific and popular writer of poetry and prose for over half a century. Her story, "The Two Offers," written prior to the start of the Civil War, is believed to be the first short story ever to be published by an African-American woman. 

AMY: She earned huge acclaim while she lived, yet it's fair to say Harper has not been as well remembered as she ought to be. 

KIM: The same holds true for her novel Iola Leroy, which is an eye-opening look at what it was like for Black Americans in the midst of, and in the decades following, the Civil War. It also examined society's one-drop principle of racial classification and its implications.

AMY: There's a lot in this book that felt revelatory to me and what's more, it still feels soberingly relevant today, 130 years after it was written. I can't wait to dive into it, so let's read the stacks and get started. 

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today is a professor and literary historian. Dr. Koritha Mitchell, author of the award-winning Living With Lynching, which examines how African-American communities historically used lynching plays as a coping mechanism to combat racial violence. Her second title From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African-American Culture was named a Best Book of 2020 by Ms. Magazine and Black Perspectives. She teaches English at the Ohio State University and she has lent her cultural commentary to outlets such as time CNN, Openly,

Good Morning America, The Huffington Post and NPR's Morning Edition. Korthisa, we are so thrilled and honored to have you here. Welcome to the show.

DR. KORITHA MITCHELL: Thanks so much for having me. It's an honor to join you.

AMY: So African-American literature is a particular specialty of your scholarship, but I want to know how, and when you first actually became aware of Frances Harper and this novel Iola Leroy. 

KORITHA: It's a great question because you know, she's certainly not someone that most people have heard of. And I did not discover her until I was in graduate school. So it was, um, an American women writers class taught by Carla Peterson at the University of Maryland College Park, where I went to grad school. And once I became a professor it was the book that I was most invested in teaching regularly because it covers so much ground and it's ground that determines the current historical moment. So much of what happens in those decades is what we are still living with. And so it was always important to me to expose my undergraduates to a book like that. Um, in other words, earlier than I was exposed to it. 

KIM: Okay. Um, in terms of Harper's life, she was born Frances Ellen Watkins in Baltimore in 1825. Koritha, what can you tell us about her early life and how it might've shaped the public figure she would become?

KORITHA: Yeah. So she was born free. Both of her parents were free, but they also died when she was really young. And she is basically reared by her uncle, Reverend William Watkins, and he runs a school for black children in Baltimore. So she's able to go to school until she's about age 12 when she has to start work at a very young age, but the people she works for, they allow her to read in whatever spare time she has. And in fact, they also have an actual bookstore and so she's able to maximize that exposure to literature very early on, not only from her employers, but also with the foundation that being educated by her uncle created for her.

 As early as 1846, she publishes her first collection of poems. It's called "Forest Leaves." And for many decades scholars thought that that was lost to us, but it was rediscovered in the two thousands by a graduate student, I believe her name is Johanna Ortner. It was a really exciting find because, you know, everyone was convinced that this wasn't available. And so when she found it, it was a really big moment of celebration. 

KIM: How cool. I love that. 

AMY: hidden treasure. Okay, so tell us a little bit about Harper's activism and how she came to be a speaker. I think, in the introduction to your edition it talks about the Fugitive Slave Act and how she got really fired up over that. 

KORITHA: Absolutely. So the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 passes and what happens in 1853 is a black man is punished, violated under that law, and he ends up dying, and she writes to a friend that on his grave, she is just simply committed to abolition as a cause. So shortly after that, in 1854, she has an opportunity to speak. And she's not the renowned orator at that point. She reads one of her poems, and because she's so skilled and because people are mesmerized, um, she gets herself on a speaking podium in the next year. This is early in her career. I believe she's like 28 at this point. The reports are that the crowd is 600 strong. just blows my mind. And it's another reason why, the more I learned about Frances Harper, the more I was like, "Oh my goodness, I need to know more." Just an absolutely astonishing person. She ends up being the first black woman that we know of to be paid for lecturing for an abolitionist cause in the United States, speaking to audiences that are both black and white, both men and women. How is it that we don't know Frances Harper's name as well as we know Frederick Douglas's name? How is it that we don't know her name as well as we know Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B, Anthony? This is ridiculous, right? career spans more than 50 years. Basically every progressive issue that you can think of, she was a part of.

KIM: And it's interesting you mentioned Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, because she was a little bit at odds with them, right?

KORITHA: And see, I wouldn't even put it in those terms. So the rift comes in in terms of the amendment that will give the formerly enslaved black men the right to vote. That's the moment at which Stanton and Anthony kind of stake their claim and say, "If we're going to watch Sambo march into the kingdom first, then I'm out." That's basically what they say, right? They're just like "we good white women have been all about helping the Negro, but now that they're no longer at the bottom does it really make sense for us to let them march into the kingdom first?" Like that's literally the language that's used. And so Frances Harper has to face how much white women are going to choose race over gender. But what I find so compelling about her in that moment, too, is that even as she watches women hold themselves to incredibly low standards, she refuses to do the same herself. She is stunning for the example she gives us that she's going to keep her focus on what she believes is going to make the country better, make society better, make something like a public good. I'm telling you, one of my role models.

KIM: She's inspiring. 

AMY: The strength of her convictions. Um, all right, so we can speak more about Harper's life as we go along , but let's jump into the book right now, Iola Leroy. She wrote it in the later years of her life. It was published in 1892 and it was her first and only novel to be printed in a single volume. So her other three novels were serialized in periodicals. Koritha, do you want to go ahead and give our listeners a little kind of spoiler- free synopsis of the story? 

KORITHA: Sure. So Iola Leroy is about the title character, Iola, and her journey through the United States. She is born to an enslaved woman that she does not know is enslaved and her so-called owner. And so Iola and her brother grow up sure that they are white and the people who were enslaved on their property are nothing like them. It's only after Iowa's father dies and people invalidate her mother's marriage to him that Iola now is considered enslaved. Her brother is considered property, and basically we follow what happens after Iola realizes that her country does not see her as a human being, but in fact, sees her as property. 

AMY: It's just chilling, the idea of not even expecting it and then out of the blue, you're just thrown into slavery.

KORITHA: Well, and what you're describing as chilling is something that Harper highlights, right? She really forces readers to think about how brutally arbitrary slavery is in the first place. It's okay for all of those darker skinned black people to be enslaved until you're the person who's being treated this way. So Harper is brilliant in making the country look at itself through Iola's eyes, I think.

AMY: She has to face her own hypocrisy in the fact that, yeah, she was defending slavery until suddenly it happened to me. 

KIM: Yeah. And then everyone who reads it, you know, would presumably do the same thing. 

AMY: Yeah, exactly. 

KIM: So unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, this book was actually written decades after the Civil War. Could you maybe give some context as to why Harper wrote this book when she did? Who was she writing this book for, and what was her aim?

KORITHA: Part of what she's doing is she's telling a community story. She starts the novel with the enslaved community, and it is only later that we actually meet Iola in the first place. It's giving readers a way to understand and appreciate the enslaved communities and how those communities supported each other through the violence of this country. The other way to answer it though, this idea of who is she writing for and what is she aiming for? As we've said already, this is the first novel that she publishes as a bound book rather than serialized in a magazine. Her other novels that are serialized in the Christian Recorder we might say are focused on the audience of the Christian Recorder for her to put this in a bound book, suggesting that she's willing to reach out to readers who might not be so Christian and they also may not be a Black audience, primarily. She is aiming to reach as many readers as possible. You know, by the 1880s you have what we would call plantation fiction being best-sellers right? So Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, these kinds of denigrating narratives that basically caricature African-Americans and look back to the good old days of slavery. So, you know, here comes Frances Harper by 1892 suggesting that we actually look seriously at not only the brutality of what slavery was, but also the remarkable resilience and intelligence of the people who fricking survived it. She's giving us a way of looking back at the kind of resilience and intelligence of a community that was robbed of everything. And as we look to build a future, how might we account for their brilliance as we march forward? So that's a beginning of an answer. You can see I could go on, but that's the beginning of an answer.

KIM: I love that though, because the story belongs to the people in these communities, in the story. But the story was basically being taken from them and written from a viewpoint perspective of people that it wasn't about. She's taking that back, and it's amazing. And it is kind of an antidote to the other stuff. And then, you know, you keep going forward when you still have Gone With the Wind being a bestseller and a big movie and everything. So, you know, obviously these words were needed. 

AMY: And you can tell, and we'll get into this a little bit later, but you can tell the last chapters of Iola Leroy are kind of like a clarion call for the community, like you said, for like, this is how we need to band together going forward into the 20th century. 

KORITHA: But not just the community, right? The entire nation. Part of it is an indictment of the nation, like, look at how brutal this country is. And can we do better as a country? 

 One of the things I love to say about Frances Harper is that she is a model citizen who could not vote. So one of the things she talks about is the way that she's doing these speeches around the country and meddling in slaveholders' business. Enslavers are the people who have a vote in this country and get to set the agenda for the country, but I'm going to be bold enough to meddle in their business because I have a larger vision for what the country should be about. So the clarion call, I think, is national in scope. And that's the other reason why I think it's her first bound book, because she has that much of an ambition about trying to change the conversation. 

AMY: Okay, love it. So when I started reading this book, it was just a few months after I had watched the Netflix film Passing based on Nella Larson's book. That's the story of a black woman who chooses to pass as a white woman in the 1920s. This book is about a young woman who lives as a white woman, unaware that she is actually biracial. And then once she learns the truth, she's got this identity crisis, you know? Who do I want to choose to be? Because she could proceed as a white woman. She kind of has an option. So can you talk about the significance of her choice once she does learn the truth about herself? 

KORITHA: Yeah. I mean, there's so many angles from which I can address this. I mean, I think the first angle since you mentioned Passing, you know, in African-American literary studies, passing narrative is basically a genre. And that is because this country has decided that the only people who should have benefits and rights are white people. That's still how we do. Ahmaud Arbery is on my mind. We have a country that still does that. One of the scholars that I'm thinking of, as I say this, you know, Gabrielle Foreman talks about Iola Leroy as an anti-passing narrative. I might argue that we only had about 12 years where the country actually tried to, I don't know, treat me as a human. Reconstruction is the only time that, as a nation, we were like, no, we actually ought to be making things more decent for people who are Black. Literally, the only time. So what, 1865 to about 1877. That's it. And so that 12- year period is the only time that it felt like maybe you could have a chance in this country and not be white. And so in that moment of enlarged possibility, people who were light enough to pass, but didn't, we're aggressively suggesting that my so-called African blood is not anything to be ashamed of. And the country was actually affirming them in that, so that being racially- ambiguous actually became a way of arguing for improved conditions for other black people. I think that's part of Harper's investment in offering us a character like Iola, but here's the other thing I have to say. This is the other way to look at it. And this is influenced by, Allison Hobbs's book, and I'm not going to remember the name of it right now, but part of what she makes so clear is that when you study passing in the United States, what she finds is that it's not so much what you pass for, it's what you pass away from. It's what you lose. Harper has given us Iola Leroy as a character who helps us understand what Allison Hobbs found, which is that what you lose, and the connection to family and black community, actually makes it not so worth it to have all of those unearned benefits that the country showers just on the basis of whiteness.

KIM: Beautifully said. I think Harper does an amazing job of making the reader feel really immersed in the fear and doubt and confusion of this era that we're talking about. And even reading it today, there's a real sense of, "Wow, it actually wasn't really that long ago." And you've kind of mentioned how, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same, right? Are there any moments from the first part of this novel that you thought were particularly powerful or effective that you might want to read a passage from?

KORITHA: So I'm going to read the absolute opening of the novel. [reads passage]

KIM: How could you not want to keep reading that book after that opening? I mean, it pulls you in on this meta level, this conversation, but there's this whole idea of rebellion. I mean, you think of Hunger Games, you think of, um, Handmaid's Tale. Like all those things. I just love it. 

AMY: Yeah, it's all just bubbling under the surface, ready to explode, and the coded language that they use to convey this network of communication amongst slaves on different properties. 

KORITHA: That to me is a perfect way of understanding this insistence on Harper's part of beginning with the community. They are violently kept from learning to read and write, and yet they have done what they needed to do to become literate in other ways. All of this is dangerous stuff that they're doing, but she's making it clear that this is something they're invested in doing. The other thing that I think is so fascinating in that opening is the narrator tells us that we're talking about Thomas Anderson, although he was known as Master Anderson's Tom. That's how he's known, but that's not how we're going to talk about him. He's Tom Anderson! So at the very start, Harper is helping us understand the complexity of this community and also the complexity of her language and the language that the characters are using, right? 

KIM: This is a great place to also point out something that you talk about in the introduction to the book, how some of the characters don't speak in standard English. And we wanted to have you maybe talk about the difference in the dialect and what she's doing with that.

KORITHA: Yeah. I mean, what she does is very, um, kind of, I would argue common among black writers who understand that language is always marking power, right? Why am I speaking English in the first place, except for colonization and slavery. This isn't my mother tongue. And so for me, part of what Harper does when it comes to dialect is underscoring that the use of dialect or not is not the marker of intelligence, and I think part of what I find fascinating, too, is even if you have black characters who speak similar dialect, they can have very different outlooks. She kind of marks the diversity within black communities as well. Which of course is just again, honoring their humanity in ways that the system doesn't. The Reason to do a novel rather than nonfiction in this case is because she is interested in those debates and disagreements and interested in painting a community of people. Like they are people, that's why they disagree.

KIM: Yeah. Of course they don't all have the same opinions, you know? They're going to have different ideas of how to do things, so let's actually look at what a real community of people would likely talk about. 

AMY: Reading the book felt to me like going back in time and maybe reading op-eds from newspapers of the time. Yes, there's a plot, but a lot of it is just the talking. Um, you can see that that's the message she wanted to get across. I found the second half of the book to really be the most compelling in a lot of ways. This is after the Civil War has concluded and so you're like, "okay, things are somewhat resolved," but then you see what the freed slaves have to contend with during the years of Reconstruction.

KIM: Yeah. People were trying to reunite with their loved ones and that being a whole aspect of Reconstruction that you don't really hear about. Um, and you actually included a really interesting appendix among many in the book. Um, it lists the actual newspaper notices from emancipated slaves seeking to track down their loved ones. And it's heart-wrenching, as you'd imagine.

KORITHA: That's part of why I was so invested in creating those appendices and especially the one on Black families, both in slavery and in freedom, because what Harper works so hard to do is to show that the country had to brutally lie about how black people are not fully human. Their emotions are not of the same order as white people. So it's no big deal if you separate mother from child, they're just like separating puppies. That is what this country built its wealth on doing. Even in that passage I read where we open up, Robert's mother was sold away from him and for the rest of the narrative you're going to watch him be driven by the impact of that early trauma. Not only did these people do everything they did to try to get from under a brutal system, but then after they got out of that brutal system, that doesn't erase all of what they've lost. And so in one of the examples from the newspapers that I include in the appendix is a brother who is looking for a sister. They hadn't seen each other in 35 years. And so that was one type of historical document that was really important for me to put at people's fingertips. 

AMY: I loved it, cause you're like, wow, this is the real example of what she was writing about. And we should say that Iola has some romantic suitors in the course of the book. There's a little kind of love story. Really the love story in this book is about families reuniting. That's what you're rooting for. That's what you're worried about. I don't care who she winds up married to, to be perfectly honest, but I want her to find that mom, you know? So we don't want to give away any spoilers about her search for her family, but, I think we can say that Harper puts forth some powerful ideas in terms of what sort of future the Black community could and should forge. And one example that really struck me was her argument that mothers were going to play a critical role going into the future. Koritha, can you explain that in a little more detail and why was that important to Harper?

KORITHA: Well, I think this is an opportunity for me to say again, that I really feel like Harper is invested in a kind of, as you put it, clarion call for the nation writ large, not just for Black communities. And so part of the reason why Iola's investment in motherhood becomes important is because she also has been so invested in education. She's a school teacher, she's a nurse. She spends an entire, you know, at least chapter looking for a job. And her uncle is like, "You know, you're going to be okay, you're not going to go hungry if you don't have a job." And she's insisting, "No, there would be fewer unhappy marriages if women were educated." So there's a way in which Harper is really invested in having us think about what are the limitations that are put on people who actually have a lot of potential. But the other thing I wanted to bring up though, in relationship to this, and this is why I'm so invested in thinking about how she makes it a bound book, because she wants to speak beyond the audience of the Christian Recorder. This is one really powerful example toward the end. This is Dr. Latimer, just talking to Iola. So Dr. Latimer is a light-skinned person who could have passed, too, just like Iola, but here's one of the things he says: "To be born white in this country is to be born to an inheritance of privileges, to hold in your hands, the keys that open before you, the doors of every occupation, advantage, opportunity and achievement." A passage like that is so important because we have watched Iola look for a job. And every single time she gets the job based on her demeanor and qualifications, she gets let go the moment that they find out that she has a drop of black blood, right? So Harper is bringing to our attention, what are the arbitrary things that gives you benefits? What gives you rights? What gives you humanity and what doesn't? Here's another passage I just have to read, even if I don't have a good excuse for it right now.

AMY: Go for it.

KIM: Yeah. Please do. 

KORITHA: 

This is when Iola is a teacher. She has started a school: One day, a gentleman came to the school and wished to address the children. Iola suspended the regular order of the school. And the gentlemen assayed to talk to them on the achievements of the white race, such as building steamboats and carrying on business. Finally, he asked how they did it. “They've got money,” chorused the children. “But how did they get it?” “They took it from us.” So she goes on and then here's the narrator chiming in again: The school was soon overcrowded with applicants and Iola was forced to refuse numbers because their quarters were too cramped. The school was beginning to lift up the home, for Iola was not satisfied to teach her children only the rudiments of knowledge.She had tried to lay the foundation of good character, But the elements of evil burst upon her loved and cherished work. One night, the heavens were lighted with lurid flames and Iola beheld the school, the pride and joy of her pupils and their parents, a smoldering ruin.

Cause this is what happens. Black people do something to advance themselves and they are attacked. Very often the racial violence in the post -Reconstruction era, which becomes the lynching era, and when Jim Crow segregation starts to settle in, very often the violence that's happening isn't because Black people have done something wrong or that they're criminals. It's because they're succeeding in some way. And this country says, "Nope, there's a proper place for you. And that's under my foot."

AMY: This novel is just packed with ideas. It really is. She covers so much ground with this book. 

KIM: Yeah, sadly, it's timeless too . 

AMY: Okay. So there's so many lines in this book, but there was another one where Harper wrote: "When we have learned to treat men according to the complexion of their souls and not the color of their skins, we will have given our best contribution toward the solution of the Negro problem." And I'm like, Martin Luther king speech, one of the most famous lines that we remember from his speech. That's almost paraphrased from what she was writing in 1892. 

KORITHA: Well, what I would say though, when these Black people who are laying out the case say something like that, they're talking about how they've never been treated according to their character. That's what they're talking about. But if we were more honest than we would have to see how much we don't treat white people according to their character. They can be despicable and still get the benefit of the doubt. If you're white, you don't get judged by what you do or don't do, you get assumed good. And even when you do something despicable, we will find ways to see your humanity. If you're black or brown, no thanks; never happened. Haven't seen it happen yet. So that, to my mind, is the only way that we could do any kind of justice when people like Harper or Martin Luther king say that. It's actually looking at how the character of white people can be....despicable. despicable.

AMY: That's the first time that's ever been presented to me with the flip side. Cause you're right. We think of it as this shiny, happy platitude: Let's treat everyone great. And It's like, no, let's treat everyone equal in terms of, if you're a jerk, we're going to treat you that way too. I didn't think about it as it works both ways. 

KORITHA: It's never worked both ways, right? And that isn't an accident. It's not an accident that you don't hear what I just said often.

AMY: Right. 

KIM: Yep.

KORITHA: It's not an accident. Everything is set up to say the exact opposite, to make whiteness act like it's just neutral. It's just there. And maybe one day we can treat you a little better, Koritha. No, I'm looking around and I'm seeing how raggedy y'all are. And so I want to just simply be treated according to what you claim you respect, but these are your standards and you don't even live up to them, right? So I have to admit to you, and I'm going to shut up, but I have to admit to you that trying to expose all of the vicious work that treating whiteness as neutral does informs every element in my edition. It's my goal with everything I chose to put in there. I want us to see whenever we act like whiteness is neutral, we are doing great harm. It is not neutral. It is doing harm. 

KIM: Absolutely. Yup.

AMY: Um, I don't know if this was in your introduction or if I saw it somewhere else, but that a hundred years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, Frances Harper did that on a trolley car. Do you know that story? 

KORITHA: Yeah. And actually the truth is Harper tells a story also about, I believe it's Harriet Tubman, about this same kind of violence on transportation. So part of what we have to understand is the way that Black women of the 19th century, especially, are over and over again being treated brutally on public transportation. And as they are being brutalized, white people, including white women, sit there just as comfortable as can be. That is one way to understand the experience of Black feminist thought. Because at the end of the day, we live in a country that acts as if being a woman should include things like, I don't know, dignified treatment, but that's not what happens to me even now. That's not an automatic thing. This country is geared toward making sure that no matter how dignified my presentation, I do not have to be treated that way. And so it makes all the sense in the world that in the 19th century you have Black women who are having the experiences that are not very far removed from what we come to associate with Rosa Parks. That's how Black women's activism so often has operated, that it's very capacious. Black women are always attuned to all of those forces that are unnatural and evil forces, man made forces that have nothing to do with my humanity, nothing to do with any of that, it just has to do with power dynamics, and people's willingness to create systems that take away my life chances. 

KIM: Harper also mentions in this later section of the book the need for Black people to write their own books. When Iola explained to one of her suitors that she aspires to write but isn't sure would do any good, he responds, "Ms. Leroy out of the race must come its own thinkers and writers. Authors belonging to the white race have written good racial books for which I'm deeply grateful, but it seems to be almost impossible for a white man to put himself completely in our place. No man can feel the iron which enters another man's soul."  Koritha, considering the importance of having Black people write their own stories, why do you think Frances Harper isn't better remembered today?

KORITHA: There are so many answers to that question, and I think at the end of the day, what's crucial to remember, especially given the lovely context that you just gave us, is that not being well remembered has very little to do with whether Black people actually did the writing or not. And even earlier than that, even before they're writing books, there's plenty to appreciate and keep record of, so it's not that Black people aren't doing the intellectual and other work to preserve the truth about their communities. It's simply that there are a lot of forces against it. So with Harper as a specific example, part of what I delve into in explaining this in the introduction is that a lot of times she is selling her books at her speaking engagements. So especially for someone who commanded 600 people on the first try, you can imagine you're commanding those kinds of audiences, then the people who are following you know what a big deal you are. It's not until after she passes away in 1911, that there's even a possibility of people not appreciating what she left as a legacy, but sure enough, that starts, and it starts, I would argue, with W E B Dubois. So part of what we can not neglect in this conversation is that it's not just white women who hold themselves to low standards in relationship to other people, namely Black women, it's also Black men who can hold themselves to low standards in relationship to Black women. So Dubois, I would argue, is one of the people who begins the pattern of diminishing what Harper had achieved. And then as the decades move on, I would say that part of what happens is in the Black Power era, there's a way in which Iola Leroy can be discounted because of this light-skinned heroine. In the Black is Beautiful, Black Power era you want someone more chocolatey like me to be the protagonist. And so that's another reason to kind of diminish the importance of Iola Leroy. Part of what's tricky about that, though, is if as a culture we valued periodical literature more than we would have been more attuned to her three serialized novels, at least two of which have dark-skinned heroines. ButI lola Leroy is the bound book that comes to represent her contribution. And so in the Black Power era, that's not so cool. At the same time though, by the Seventies, you're starting to get more in higher education in terms of feminists pushing for, you know, something like Women's Studies. A lot of that is happening through white women who don't think in terms of Black women. So all of these forces, I think, come together to create a scenario in which someone like Harper falls out. So I think that's one way of answering that question. The good news is because people have worked so hard, against the worst odds, to leave a legacy like this, it's here for the kind of recovery that has been happening around Harper for some decades now. And I'm very proud to be a part of that.

AMY: It's crazy to me that when we think back on this time period we think Harriet Beecher Stowe. That's the slave book, right? And I know that book was galvanizing for the Civil War and everything, but to me, this book offers so much more. Why are we forgetting this Black woman writing about the time period and our go-to girl is a white woman telling the story of slaves? It's kind of crazy to me. 

 You're like, 

Amy, what have I been trying to tell you for the last hour and a half? 

KIM: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

AMY: So this is the bound book, as you said, that she's known for. Um, if people wanted to check out any other titles, what would you say would be the next thing that people might want to read? 

KORITHA: Yeah. The two things outside of Iola Leroy that I always hope people will look at would be her 1859 short story, "The Two Offers." And as we talked about that, as far as we know, is the first short story published by an African-American woman. And "The Two Offers" is fabulous to teach because I love for my students to see how in 1859, this Black woman is making a very clear argument about why staying single would be smart.

AMY: Yeah, I love it. 

KIM: That's awesome.

KORITHA: Um, and then the other one that I like to bring up is a poem I actually included in the edition, but it's called "The Slave Mother: a Tale of Ohio." And because I'm at Ohio State University and have been for the last 17 years, I always like to underscore Ohio connections. And that poem, it's the story of Margaret Garner who ran away from slavery and was trying to kill all her children and killed at least one. And that becomes the story that Toni Morrison kind of uses as a point of departure for Beloved. Just the tradition of Black women who have engaged with Margaret Garner' story. "So The Slave Mother, A Tale of Ohio" is a poem I would suggest as well.

KIM: Great. 

AMY: I feel like I wish I could take a course from you or something. I wish I was there at Ohio State.

KIM: You're obviously an amazing professor. 

AMY: Yeah. I mean, we had our sort of line of questioning together for this, but now that I've talked to you, I want to rethink about everything that I thought I knew about this novel, because you've really made me think about it in some different ways. wAnd I hope that our listeners are inspired to go pick up a copy of Iola Leroy too, so they can experience everything we've been talking about. 

KIM: Yes. And we should add that Broadview Press, the publisher, is generously providing a discount code for any listeners who purchase the book between now and the end of April, 2022. Go to BroadviewPress.com and use the code Iola20, that's I-O-L-A- two-zero for 20% off your purchase of the book.

AMY: Thank you, Broadview Press for doing that. And you should really check out some of their other titles while you're at it because they have a lot of other great books by forgotten women writers and Koritha, this has been so fascinating. Thank you for lending us your expertise on Frances Harper.

KORITHA: I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for shining a light on Harper. She is freaking amazing. And so thank you for making sure that gets some attention.

KIM: So that's all for today's podcast. If you enjoyed it, consider giving us a shout out on social media.

It's a really great way to help us find new listeners, but it's also a great way for us to connect with you. Let us know you're out there.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jenni Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Frant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.