A First with No End.
Detail from the book's cover.
by Margarite Nathe
The Curse of Caste. By Julia C. Collins. Edited by William Andrews and Mitch Kachun. Oxford University Press, 224 pages, $22.00.
A black woman marries a white man. Then death during childbirth, a heartbroken father, and an orphaned baby girl who grows up knowing nothing of her black ancestry or the circumstances of her mother’s end. Fast forward through the years, and under the employment of her oblivious and racist grandfather, she attracts the affections of a white European aristocrat intended for another woman. Would the dashing count propose? Would she accept? Would her family tolerate an interracial marriage? She—
And that was where the story ended on September 23, 1865.
Julia C. Collins, a black woman whose readers were mainly African Americans, died of tuberculosis just as her novel reached its climax. Readers had devoured over thirty installments of The Curse of Caste before the column disappeared.
Bill Andrews believes that Collins’s serialized story is the first novel ever written by an African American woman. For decades, English professors have taught that Our Nig (1859) was the first, but, Andrews says, research has proven that Harriet Wilson’s book was almost entirely autobiographical. Harriet Jacobs also wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) more from her life than from her imagination, he says. Although these books are staples in English classes today, not many of Wilson or Jacobs’s contemporaries ever saw their work.
An accidental discovery
At Cornell University, historian Mitch Kachun was wading through old issues of The Christian Recorder on microfilm when he happened on Collins’s story. After several years of investigating Collins’s life, Kachun brought his findings to Andrews, a literary scholar, who immediately realized they had something special. “It’s hard to know how many people may have come across Collins’s story at one time or another while doing historical research on The Christian Recorder,” Andrews says. Dozens of historians may have skimmed over The Curse of Caste because they were searching for historical facts, not fiction. “If someone had come across Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, reading through the Recorder,” Andrews says, “they would have said ‘Oh, I know who she is,’ and then they might have paid more attention to her work.” No one knows the name Julia Collins, he says, so she’s been invisible for decades.
The Curse of Caste may never have seen the light of day if Collins had approached a publisher to distribute it for her, and she may have foreseen that. She may have also known that self-publishing, as Harriet Wilson struggled through when she wrote Our Nig, would be expensive and difficult. When she decided to serialize her novel in The Christian Recorder, the official newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Collins most likely knew that black readers across the country would find her words, and that the story would get farther than she could ever push it by herself.
Who was this woman? Where did she come from? And what gave her the audacity to think that she could write a successful novel in 1865?
Kachun dug through property records, probate records, tax records, birth and death records, and countless newspapers. “I found a couple of scattered references that don’t tell us much,” he says. We do know that Collins was from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and that she was one of about five hundred African Americans in a rapidly growing city of ten thousand people. We know that Collins was her married name, and that she was literate. And we know that she had a strong social conscience and cared passionately about the education of women.
In 1865, most white readers approached literature with certain assumptions, Andrews says. Their perception of women of color was that they weren’t really interested in or devoted to marriage the way white women were. But unlike white authors of that time, whose work was most of what people read, Collins presented her female characters as being utterly committed to their marriages—a breath of fresh air to her readers.
Julia Collins, Andrews believes, was extremely ambitious. “She was trying to present the character of African American women in a way that would put them at the front of the stage instead of at the back. She did that in a way that doesn’t just make them objects of pity, doesn’t just present them as victims. Collins was determined to honor the love of African American women by showing them committed to the institution of marriage, regardless of caste barriers designed to limit their choices.”
And now, almost 150 years later, we can decide how the story should have ended. The Curse of Caste will appear in book form for the first time this October. Because Collins never finished her novel, Andrews outlined two alternate endings: one happy, one tragic. This edition, which will include the proposed endings, should promote discussion and debate in many African American literature classes, he says.
Readers wrote to The Christian Recorder after The Curse of Caste disappeared from the front page, pleading for a conclusion and the whereabouts of the writer. Collins’s readers, Andrews says, had no doubt that hers was the first story of its kind. “They must have thought, ‘Here is a black woman’s voice like none we’ve ever heard before.’” 
William Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at Carolina. Mitch Kachun is Associate Professor of History at Western Michigan University. Kachun discovered Collins’s work while researching his book, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915. The Curse of Caste by Julia Collins will be available from Oxford University Press in October 2006.
