Rebecca Primus was the daughter of a prominent black Connecticut family who was sent south during Reconstruction by the Hartford Freedmen's Aid Society to teach newly freed slaves. Addie Brown was a domestic servant in Connecticut and New York City--as well as Rebecca's best friend and romantic companion. These two spirited, intelligent women wrote letters in this astonishing, historically priceless volume. Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends breaks the long silence surrounding the lives of black women in America and reveals an amazing world until now unknown. "I have today put my second class into the third Reader," wrote Rebecca from the school in Maryland's Eastern Shore that was later to bear her name. "I hear the President Johnson expect to be in Hartford the 26th," exclaimed Addie. "I wish some of them present him with a ball through his head." Shared passion, ambitions, frustrations, politics, gossip, all the fascinating minutiae of daily life, give these unique letters extraordinary flavor and richness--and offer us an unprecedented piece of American history.

Farah Jasmine Griffin is a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of "Who Set You Flowin'?": The African-American Migration Narrative, and the coeditor of A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. She lives in Philadelphia. From the Hardcover edition.

Acknowledgments

xi

Preface

xiii

Introduction: ``Beyond the Silence''

3

(6)

Part One: The Early Years

9

(18)

``I've Lost a Day'' 1854-1856

15

(3)

``If you was a man...'' 1859-1860

18

(9)

Part Two: The Civil War Years

27

(50)

``Like meat to a hungre wolfe'' New York, 1861

31

(24)

``Call you my sister'' 1862-1864

55

(22)

Part Three: The Reconstruction Years

77

(190)

``There is great excitement about putting money in the bank'' 1865

81

(18)

``Justice, impartial justice...'' Winter/Spring 1866

99

(28)

``I am pleased to hear of the success of those freedmen'' Summer/Fall 1866

127

(30)

``We must have a school house'' 1867

157

(78)

``The people are quite cheered up & hopeful once more.'' 1868

235

(22)

``And all nature is coming forth and clothing herself in beauty and fragrance.'' 1869

257

(10)

Afterword

267

(4)

Appendix

271

(8)

Rebecca Primus in Later Life

279

(6)

David O. White

Bibliography

285

(2)

Notes

287

(8)

Index

295

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Introduction

"Beyond the Silence" Silences. Loopholes. Interstices. Allegory.
Dissemblance. Politics of respectability.

These are but a few of the terms that black women scholars use to help
make sense of the silence that surrounds black women's lives and
experiences. Such terms refer not only to black women's literal silence
around issues of personal importance to them but also to gaps in the
broader historical record of the American experience.

Given the historical and political contexts in which African American
women have lived, and given their own desire to shape and influence
these contexts for the benefit of all Americans, it is understandable
that they often felt it necessary to present highly censored "positive"
images to an often hostile public. Thus many have kept the most personal
aspects of their lives as well as the full range of their thoughts
secret. Furthermore, until very recently, scholars did not think it
important to search for evidence of black women's lives and activities.
Fortunately, since the civil rights, black power, and feminist
movements, a growing number of people have devoted themselves to
pursuing and revealing the complex history of black women.

For years, we have been led to believe that ordinary black women left no
evidence of their historical existence. We were told that they did not
keep diaries or journals and that they did not write letters. However,
black women historians, committed to writing black women into American
history, suggested otherwise.

For over sixty years, Rebecca Primus's papers have been housed in the
Connecticut Historical Society. Primus, the daughter of a prominent
black Hartford family, was one of many women, black and white, who
traveled south after the Civil War to establish schools and teach the
newly freed men and women. The Hartford Freedmen's Aid Society sent
Rebecca Primus to Royal Oak, Maryland, where she helped to found a
school later named in honor of her, the Primus Institute. The sixty
existing letters from Primus to her family provide a rare glimpse into
the life and thoughts of a nineteenth-century New England black woman.
Primus's letters reveal her confrontations with southern prejudice, her
struggles to educate the newly freed blacks, her descriptions of
Reconstruction-era politics, as well as her joy in being surrounded by
more African Americans than she had seen in all of Hartford. Filled with
compassion, humor, and courage, the letters also tell of Primus's
growing political and racial consciousness.

In addition to Primus's letters to her family, the collection houses
approximately one hundred fifty letters from Addie Brown to Rebecca
Primus. Brown was a domestic servant who lived in the households of her
various employers in Hartford, Farmington, and Waterbury, Connecticut,
and in New York. Her letters cover the period from 1859 to 1868. Because
she was not formally educated, Addie writes as she would speak.
Throughout the course of the correspondence she acquires greater
literacy. Her letters tell a story of a bright, intelligent, and
personable young woman who struggles to make a living under very
precarious economic circumstances. Brown's letters paint a portrait of
the lives of northern blacks in New England and New York. Finally,
Brown's letters reveal a close romantic friendship between the two
women.

Together, the letters of Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown tell us a great
deal about nineteenth-century black Hartford, Reconstruction in
Maryland, and the personal and public lives of two black women.
Unfortunately, I have been unsuccessful in my attempts to locate Rebecca
Primus's letters to Addie Brown. Therefore, we are left to surmise
Primus's responses to Brown.

The Brown-Primus correspondence provides material needed for moving
beyond both the silence in the historical record and black women's
self-imposed silence about their inner lives. The letters differ from
the historical documentation of the public lives of well-known black
women such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet
Tubman. Also, unlike the slave narratives of women like Harriet Jacobs
or the postbellum novels and stories of writers such as Harper or
Pauline Hopkins, Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus are not concerned with
publication or with a white audience. As such, their letters provide a
rare glimpse into the day-to-day activities of two ordinary black women.

Primus and Brown take black humanity for granted; thus their letters do
not censor their opinions about the diversity and complexity of black
life or their feelings about white people. They openly discuss their
intolerance of and resistance to racism, community scandals relating to
unwed pregnancies, and, in Brown's case, her love for Rebecca and her
courtship with Joseph Tines, the man she eventually married. Both women
reveal their thoughts about books, politics, friendship, and family.

Finally, the letters broaden our current conception of
nineteenth-century black women as either southern slaves or northern
abolitionists. Addie and Rebecca were neither slaves nor famous
abolitionists, although they shared much with these two groups of women:
they were victims of American racism and active agents in the struggle
against it.

But, "In dreams begin responsibilities." The Brown-Primus
correspondence poses the challenge of remaining sensitive to the
concerns of many black women that their private voices might be used
against them in the service of sexism and racism. For years, black women
have battled against stereotypes that label them as promiscuous harlots
or asexual but nurturing mammies. In order to combat such images,
nineteenth-century African Americans sought to offer counterimages of
pristine Victorian black ladies. Brown and Primus are neither
promiscuous harlots, nurturing mammies, nor one-dimensional Victorian
ladies. They are complex, intelligent, sensual, and multidimensional
women committed to both each other and black liberation. The letters
challenge us to rise to the occasion of reading them, to defy any
element of the negative stereotypes about black women that we may have
internalized, and to accept these women in the context of their times
and their communities.

In their totality, the letters prove to be about the full extent of
Brown's and Primus's ambitions, desires, frustrations, and membership in
a black community committed to racial uplift. But they also chronicle
more intimate lives: these women's intense friendship and even romantic
partnership, as well as their lives with men. In light of this, the
letters reveal the contours of relationships between black
women--mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, and romantic partners.

The friendship between Brown and Primus is an example of what feminist
theorist Patricia Hill Collins identifies as one of the "primary focal
points where Black women's consciousness has been nurtured and where
African American women have spoken freely in order to articulate a
self-defined standpoint." While Collins asserts the dominance of such
friendships in fiction by black women as evidence of their dominance in
black women's lives, the correspondence between Addie Brown and Rebecca
Primus is proof of the importance of sister-friendships in life as well
as in fiction. For these two women, letter writing was a means of
creating community, of gathering and expressing their thoughts, of
seeing themselves through each other's eyes and thereby seeing
themselves as something much more than society would have either of them
believe. Addie Brown's open expression of love for Rebecca does not
differ from that in many other letters of nineteenth-century women.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's pioneering article of 1975, "The Female World
of Love and Ritual," first identified this aspect of women's
correspondence and uncovered the "abundance of manuscript evidence" that
demonstrates the emotional ties between women and the development of
same-sex friendships that were accepted in nineteenth-century American
society.

Historians such as Smith-Rosenberg and Lillian Faderman have shown that
nineteenth-century white women often slept together and were openly
affectionate with each other. Both speculate that some of these
relationships may have been sexual as well.

If we are to believe Addie's letters, her relationship with Rebecca was
not simply an affectionate "friendship" or sisterhood. Several of
Addie's letters have fairly explicit references to erotic interactions
between herself and Rebecca. While there are major differences of class
and education between the two women, Addie was not in any way forced
into these situations. In fact, she often seems to have been the
assertive and insistent one. Without Rebecca's letters, we may never
know the full extent of their relationship. From Addie's responses to
what appear to be Rebecca's concerns, comments, and queries, it seems
clear that the passion and love were mutual. Nonetheless, it is not
insignificant that though Addie frequently asks Rebecca to visit her in
New York and though she requests that Rebecca send for her to come to
Royal Oak, neither seems to have happened.

In order to suggest the difference between Addie's letters to Rebecca
and those between other women of their peer group, I have included in
the appendix two stray letters that I found in the Primus collection.
The first was written to Rebecca by her friend and colleague Josephine
Booth. The second was from the oft-mentioned Carrie of Rebecca's
letters, written to Rebecca's younger sister Bell. While both letters
share the writer's affection and admiration for the recipient, neither
of them matches the intensity of Addie's letters to Rebecca. A third
letter comes closest in its expressions of love and devotion. It is
written to Addie. There is no date, and the last page is missing, so
there is no signature. However, it appears to have been written to Addie
by her husband, Joseph Tines.

During a time when our society continues to posit black women's
sexuality in a negative light and when we continue to suffer from
homophobia, the Primus-Brown letters are important documents because
they reveal the complexity of the two women and their relationship to
each other. Furthermore, they provide a historical example of women who
loved each other romantically and who were no less committed (in fact,
were more committed than most) to the struggle for black freedom and
progress. Finally, Addie and Rebecca were the extraordinary human beings
we come to know not in spite of but because of the relationship they
shared with each other and with others who nurtured, supported, and
loved them. We cannot underestimate the historical significance of these
documents.

The Primus-Brown correspondence provides a missing link between the
historical documentation of the public lives of well-known black women
and their unknown private lives. In selecting the letters available to
compose a coherent volume, I hope to encourage others to pursue further
such research. The letters demand a rewriting of the history of black
New England, the history of black women in America beyond those who were
exceptional, middle-class, and famous, and a history of free urban black
women whose experience differs from slave women and their rural
descendants. As such, the letters add to the work of scholars such as
Frances Foster and Carla Peterson by encouraging us to consider the
experiences of northern free black women in our construction of history.
Also, this correspondence encourages us to broaden our conception of
black women writers to include letter writers in addition to novelists,
poets, journalists, speech writers, and diarists. But most important,
they are a gift of friendship and love for all of us.

Here we have the stories of two nineteenth-century African American
women, Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown: stories about their lives,
ambitions, struggles, and dignity; their politics, reading, and
community; their commitment to black equality and to each other. It is a
story that moves us beyond the silence.

Excerpted from Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854-1868
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