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Printer-Friendly ModeRediscovered author discussed at lecture
April 3, 2006 —
A newly discovered black author was the focus of a lecture on Tuesday in the Rhea Miller Recital Hall, where Mitch Kachun, an associate professor of history at Western Michigan University, presented "Julia C. Collins: A Rediscovered Nineteenth Century African American Novelist."
Kachun discovered Collins' novel "The Curse of the Caste" (also titled "The Slave Bride") in The Christian Recorder while he was doing his doctorate work at Cornell University. The Recorder, the national newspaper for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, featured a serialized version of the novel beginning in 1865. And while Kachun said most readers enjoyed the novel when it was first published, it has been overlooked by historians and literary critics alike until its recent rediscovery.
Later this year, Oxford University Press will republish "The Curse of the Caste" with Kachun as one of the co-editors. The book will also include some of Collins' essays that Kachun discovered during his research.
The rediscovery of the novel, Kachun said, is significant both historically and culturally. Since it was written in the early 1860s, it appears to be one of the first novels written by a black woman. In addition, the novel also seems to be completely fictitious, something not often seen from 19th Century black writers, since many narratives around the time were based on real life experiences. The events in Collins' novel, though, seem quite improbable, according to Kachun, increasing the likelihood that Collins' work was completely original.
Collins' novel tells the tale of a mulatto slave woman who falls in love with the son of a wealthy southern family. Even after the man finds out the woman is a slave, he still cannot deny his love for her and purchases her so that they can be married and she can be free. The remainder of the story takes the reader through the woman's experiences and eventually tells of how her daughter returned to the south and worked for that same southern family.
The ending of the story was never printed, though, since Collins died before the Recorder received the final chapters of the book. While the possibility exists that Collins wrote an ending that has yet to be found, Kachun and his co-editor went ahead and considered the direction the story was taking. As a result, the republished version of the novel will include possible alternate endings the editors had speculated on.
In addition to discussing the significance of the finding, Kachun also discussed some of the struggles he faced during his discovery.
He used sources such as censuses, area libraries, and newspapers to gather as much information as he could on Collins and her family. In the process, Kachun faced struggles with inaccurate or conflicting information and struggled through it for over a decade as he worked to gather the needed information to republish Collins' novel.
