Contending Forces
Pauline E. Hopkins (1859–1930), 1897
A vital look at the complex realities of life for African Americans at the turn of the century, exploring the tension between oppression and ambition. The voice is plain and defiant, with a philosophical curiosity that slows the pace and opens out into society.
Feels like defiance, curiosity and dread. About freedom, society and identity.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you want a nineteenth-century novel that takes Black ambition, community and oppression seriously. The 1897 prose is often rhetorical and long-breathed, and its discussions of lynching and sexual violence are direct and unsettling.
Why read it
It gives you a clear-eyed view of turn-of-the-century Black life and the arguments that shaped it, in a voice that is both social and defiant.
Pages from the book
The irony of seeking justice while perpetuating deep systemic violence.
“Lynching was instituted to crush the manhood of the enfranchised black. Rape is the crime which appeals most strongly to the heart, of the home life. Merciful God! Irony of ironies! The men who created the mulatto race, who recruit its ranks year after year by the very means which they invoked lynch law to suppress, bewailing the sorrows of violated womanhood! The dangerous calculus of power when survival is stacked against systemic violence.
“Time will tell. You don’t expect to succeed in keeping us out of employment, shoved in a corner to starve and to be burnt alive, without getting square sometime, do you? There would be some satisfaction in throwing you fellows out and putting others in, if a new party is the outcome of the issue, and seeing some of you, who have your pockets filled with the salaries which the Government has heaped upon you, shoved out of a job and your vast schemes for growing richer, at the expense of the lives of just such poor unfortunates as the Negroes you are allowing the South to burn in order to keep in power, blown to the devil. We can at least do that much.” How does a woman build a powerful world from the confines of a room?
Trivialities are not to be despised. Inborn love implanted in a woman’s heart for a luxurious, esthetic home life, running on well-oiled wheels amid flowers, sunshine, books and priceless pamphlets, easy chairs and French gowns, may be the means of developing a Paderewski or freeing a race from servitude. It was amusing to watch the way in which she governed societies and held her position. In her hands committees were as wax, and loud murmurings against the tyranny of her rule died down to judicious whispers. If a vote went contrary to her desires, it was in her absence. Thus she became the pivot about which all the social and intellectual life of the colored people of her section revolved. No one had yet been found with the temerity to contest her position, which, like a title of nobility, bade fair to descend to her children. Pauline E. Hopkins.Hopkins was an author and activist who helped bring the struggles and intelligence of her Black characters to the mainstream literature of the era.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Contending Forces for me?
- You may like it if you want a nineteenth-century novel that takes Black ambition, community and oppression seriously. The 1897 prose is often rhetorical and long-breathed, and its discussions of lynching and sexual violence are direct and unsettling.
- What is Contending Forces like?
- The voice is plain and defiant, with a philosophical curiosity that slows the pace and opens out into society. Feels like defiance, curiosity and dread. About freedom, society and identity.
- What should I read after Contending Forces?
- If you liked Contending Forces, try Clotel (William Wells Brown), Notes from Underground (Fyodor Dostoevsky) and Discourses on Livy (Niccolò Machiavelli).
A taste of the feed
The injury that lasts longer than a blow: being looked through.
I was standing by the billiard-table and in my ignorance blocking up the way, and he wanted to pass; he took me by the shoulders and without a word—without a warning or explanation—moved me from where I was standing to another spot and passed by as though he had not noticed me. I could have forgiven blows, but I could not forgive his having moved me without noticing me.
Notes from Underground · Fyodor Dostoevsky
What it would be to look at the world without wanting anything.
Everything, in contemplation, that is personal or private, everything that depends upon habit, self-interest, or desire, distorts the object, and hence impairs the union which the intellect seeks. By thus making a barrier between subject and object, such personal and private things become a prison to the intellect. The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge—knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain.
The Problems of Philosophy · Bertrand Russell
She is being offered a palace, and she is thinking about a voice.
When the war is over I intend to search the country for my mother. Doctor, were you to give me a palace-like home, with velvet carpets to hush my tread, and magnificence to surround my way, I should miss her voice amid all other tones, her presence amid every scene. Oh, you do not know how hungry my heart is for my mother! Were I to marry you I would carry an aching heart into your home and dim its brightness. I have resolved never to marry until I have found my mother. The hope of finding her has colored all my life since I regained my freedom. It has helped sustain me in the hour of fearful trial.
Iola Leroy · Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
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