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

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 neededGriffin, Farah Jasmine is the author of 'Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854-1868' with ISBN 9780345408549 and ISBN 0345408543.