Melville House Books

Turn of the century novelist Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins has long been celebrated as a pioneer of African-American women’s literature. In fact, when Henry Louis Gates discovered one of her books, Four Girls At Cottage City, he was inspired to track down other “lost” texts by African#150;American women to put together the 40-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers for Oxford University Press. Still, as Holly Jackson observes in a Boston Globe article, “despite continual scholarly interest in Kelley-Hawkins as an important voice of the period, the woman who Gates credits with inspiring the Schomburg Library has never fit comfortably within the African-American canon. Most puzzling has been the apparent whiteness of her characters, who are repeatedly described with blue eyes and skin as white as ‘pure’ or ‘driven’ snow . . . .” Now, Jackson herself thinks she’s found the answer: Kelly-Hawkins was white. Which leads to another problem: As Gates puts it, “I’m intrigued by the idea. . . that so many scholars have concluded that this woman was black, and it certainly will be interesting for us to figure out why.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.