The chapters name “sectional prejudice”—and imply class division—as forces that may be stronger than racial solidarity. Working class distaste for the emerging black bourgeoisie (dubbed here “the colored 400”) manifests itself through a competition for the accouterments of middle class domesticity (183). The fair’s contests, conceived to raise money to pay the church’s mortgage, reward the individuals who sell the most tickets and refreshments with tokens of the bourgeoisie, including a piano, silver set, diamond pin, and ten dollars (184). Two camps or factions arise and compete. One, led by Mrs. Robinson, is “down on the aristocracy” and suspects “high-toned colored folks” of laziness and putting on airs, leading Mrs. Robinson to threaten
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As a victim of and subject constructed from white male rape, Sappho is marked with the “lack of virtue” and “illegitimacy” that Langley seeks to capitalize on for his own satisfaction. The fundamental question that the novel asks us to consider, relative to race, class, and gender identity, is how a woman like Sappho can break from the overdetermined black female identity that dominant white, patriarchal culture assigns her and instead serve as an alternative, transgressive, true/New Woman. While readers are initially encouraged to read Sappho within a white New Woman paradigm—she is a stenographer, a single woman living in a Northern city, and a politically engaged charity worker—as the layers of false identity that Sappho has claimed to hide her past fall away, so too does the significance of these qualities. Shifting the concerns of the New Woman away from the individualistic white New Woman, Hopkins does link Sappho with some elements of the New Negro Women, chiefly in her commitment to racial uplift. But while Washington’s New Negro Woman is restricted to the home, dedicated to her family, and linked to the community only as it pertains to “domestic” considerations, Hopkins introduces a class dynamic this equation that allows the “family” of her New (revised) Negro Woman to extend beyond the confines of biological relation. What Hopkins presents through Sappho, then, is not simply a heroine who challenges dominant racial and gendered stereotypes, but an African American subject who moves from a place of silence and pain about her traumatic past to one of revelation and transcendence through community activism and
As a victim of and subject constructed from white male rape, Sappho is marked with the “lack of virtue” and “illegitimacy” that Langley seeks to capitalize on for his own satisfaction. The fundamental question that the novel asks us to consider, relative to race, class, and gender identity, is how a woman like Sappho can break from the overdetermined black female identity that dominant white, patriarchal culture assigns her and instead serve as an alternative, transgressive, true/New Woman. While readers are initially encouraged to read Sappho within a white New Woman paradigm—she is a stenographer, a single woman living in a Northern city, and a politically engaged charity worker—as the layers of false identity that Sappho has claimed to hide her past fall away, so too does the significance of these qualities. Shifting the concerns of the New Woman away from the individualistic white New Woman, Hopkins does link Sappho with some elements of the New Negro Women, chiefly in her commitment to racial uplift. But while Washington’s New Negro Woman is restricted to the home, dedicated to her family, and linked to the community only as it pertains to “domestic” considerations, Hopkins introduces a class dynamic this equation that allows the “family” of her New (revised) Negro Woman to extend beyond the confines of biological relation. What Hopkins presents through Sappho, then, is not simply a heroine who challenges dominant racial and gendered stereotypes, but an African American subject who moves from a place of silence and pain about her traumatic past to one of revelation and transcendence through community activism and