Information Wanted': Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Serialized Minnie's Sacrifice in the A.M.E. Christian Recorder

Also serialized in the A.M.E. Christian Recorder, the novel Minnie’s Sacrifice (1868) by the poet, novelist, and orator Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), and a prototype for her best-selling Reconstruction-era... [ view full abstract ]

Also serialized in the A.M.E. Christian Recorder, the novel Minnie’s Sacrifice (1868) by the poet, novelist, and orator Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), and a prototype for her best-selling Reconstruction-era fiction Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892), intervenes in this textual environment to act as an anecdote to the seeming hopelessness of African American families in their desperate search for loved ones displaced by slavery. The novel enters into conversation with the “Information Wanted” feature of the Recorder, which routinely published inquiries of those searching for missing loved ones and demonstrated how  reunion was paramount for many formerly enslaved persons. Edlie Wong’s reading of these featured advertisements for loved ones has highlighted how they “offer[s] a stunning sense of how urgently freed people struggled for reconnection and kinship in the wake of racial enslavement.” This urgency informs Harper’s first serialized novel, in which these very advertisements cohere its themes and influence its characters.  Minnie’s Sacrifice both reflects and subverts the advertisements’ avowed purposes of reconciling challenges of loss and connection in post-Civil War black communities.