Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted
Glossary
"
- "Contrabands" (escaped slaves behind Union lines)
- The wartime legal and popular term for enslaved people who escaped to Union-held territory, technically confiscated as enemy property rather than freed outright — the ambiguous status many of the novel's characters occupy before full emancipation.
- Related: Union Army, Civil War and Reconstruction
A
- Alfred Lorraine
- Eugene Leroy's cousin and closest companion — described as selfish, cold, and calculating in contrast to Eugene's generosity. After Eugene's death, Lorraine is the relative who challenges the legality of Eugene's marriage to Marie, triggering the family's enslavement.
- Related: Eugene Leroy, Marie
- Aunt Linda
- A formerly enslaved woman whose vivid dialect storytelling supplies much of the novel's plantation-era comic relief and folk memory, while also preserving, in her own voice, the everyday cruelties and small rebellions of slavery.
- Related: Uncle Daniel
C
- Captain Sybil
- A white Union officer from Maine who befriends Robert Johnson during his military service and urges him to stop identifying himself as a colored man, since his light skin lets him claim the advantages given to white soldiers — an offer Robert declines, prefiguring the novel's larger argument against passing.
- Related: Robert Johnson, Union Army, Passing
D
- Dr. Frank Latimer
- A young, well-educated Black physician who, like Iola, could pass as white but chooses instead to practice medicine within the Black community. He becomes Iola's second, compatible suitor, embodying the novel's ideal of racial uplift realized through marriage as well as work.
- Related: Iola Leroy, Racial Uplift, Dr. Gresham
- Dr. Gresham
- A white Union Army surgeon who falls in love with Iola while she nurses wounded soldiers and proposes marriage, offering her a life of passing as white. Her refusal of his proposal, choosing instead to identify with the Black community, is one of the novel's clearest dramatizations of its central theme.
- Related: Iola Leroy, Passing, Dr. Latimer
- Dr. Latrobe
- A white Southern physician who appears at a social gathering hosted by Dr. Gresham, visibly uncomfortable at the novelty of meeting educated Black professionals like Robert and Dr. Latimer as social equals — Harper's device for staging postwar Southern racial attitudes directly against the novel's Black characters' accomplishments.
- Related: Dr. Gresham, Dr. Latimer, Robert Johnson
E
- Eugene Leroy
- Iola's father, a wealthy Creole planter's heir who married Marie, a formerly enslaved woman, and raised their children believing themselves white and free. His death triggers the legal challenge to that marriage that results in his family's enslavement.
- Related: Marie, Iola Leroy
F
- Frances E. W. Harper (the author)
- A free-born Black poet, essayist, and one of the most prominent abolitionist and women's suffrage lecturers of the 19th century. Iola Leroy (1892), published when Harper was in her late sixties, is among the first novels published by a Black woman in the United States.
- Related: Racial Uplift
G
- Gundover
- A slave trader/owner referenced in Aunt Linda's storytelling as the man who brought a beautiful enslaved woman 'from de up-country' — one of several minor figures through whom the novel registers the ordinary machinery of the domestic slave trade.
- Related: Aunt Linda
H
- Harry (Leroy)
- Iola's brother, who like her was raised believing himself white and was enslaved after their father's death. After emancipation he, too, faces and refuses the choice to pass, eventually training as a teacher and marrying within the Black community.
- Related: Iola Leroy, Miss Delany, Racial Uplift
I
- Iola Leroy
- The novel's heroine, raised believing herself white on a Mississippi plantation before her father's death exposes her mother's Black ancestry and she is sold into slavery. Her journey from that betrayal, through the Civil War, to her postwar choice to identify with and work for the Black community rather than pass into white safety is the novel's central arc.
- Related: Eugene Leroy, Marie, Dr. Gresham, Dr. Latimer, Passing
M
- Marie
- Iola's mother, a formerly enslaved woman whose marriage to the white planter Eugene Leroy — kept legally uncertain by a relative determined to overturn it — is the hidden fact that, once exposed after Eugene's death, causes the entire Leroy family to be sold into slavery.
- Related: Eugene Leroy, Iola Leroy, Robert Johnson
- Miss Delany
- A college-educated Black woman, a university graduate whom Harry Leroy courts and brings to meet his mother and sister — part of the novel's roster of accomplished Black professional women exemplifying the racial-uplift ideal Harper advocates.
- Related: Racial Uplift, Harry
P
- Passing
- The act of a light-skinned Black person living as white, whether by circumstance or choice. The novel repeatedly stages the option to pass — for Iola, for her brother Harry, for others — and has its principal characters refuse it, making that refusal a deliberate moral and political statement rather than a tragic inevitability.
- Related: Iola Leroy, The "Tragic Mulatta", Racial Uplift
R
- Racial Uplift
- The novel's guiding program, voiced especially through Iola and Dr. Latimer: that educated, prosperous Black Americans have an obligation to use their talents and resources within Black communities — through schools, churches, and marriage — rather than escape into white society by passing.
- Related: Iola Leroy, Dr. Latimer, Passing
- Rev. Carmicle
- A Black minister and intellectual who appears in the novel's Reconstruction-era chapters, part of the emerging class of educated Black clergy and professionals whose social presence unsettles white Southern expectations.
- Related: Dr. Latrobe, Racial Uplift
- Robert Johnson
- Iola's uncle (her mother Marie's brother), separated from his mother in childhood and raised as a favored, literate house slave. He escapes to join the Union Army during the war and becomes a central figure in the novel's second half, eventually helping to reunite the scattered Leroy family.
- Related: Marie, Iola Leroy, Union Army
S
- Salters
- Aunt Linda's husband, introduced in the novel's Reconstruction-era chapters when Robert Johnson returns to the South and reconnects with the formerly enslaved community he grew up among.
- Related: Aunt Linda, Robert Johnson
T
- The "Tragic Mulatta"
- A stock figure from 19th-century abolitionist fiction: a mixed-race woman whose beauty and near-whiteness make slavery's injustice legible to white readers, usually ending in her destruction. Harper invokes the convention's opening premise but redirects it toward survival, marriage, and purposeful work rather than tragedy.
- Related: Iola Leroy, Passing
- The Civil War and Reconstruction
- The novel's historical spine — Iola's enslavement and rescue occur during the war, and the book's second half follows Reconstruction-era efforts (schools, churches, professions) to build free Black institutional life in the South, which Harper presents as the real, unfinished work of emancipation.
- Related: Robert Johnson, Racial Uplift
- The Color Line
- The social and legal boundary separating white and Black Americans that the novel's characters navigate at every turn — in marriage, employment, and social gathering — and that the novel's Black professional characters (Robert, Dr. Latimer, Rev. Carmicle) repeatedly and pointedly cross into white-only spaces.
- Related: Dr. Latrobe, Racial Uplift
- The Union Army
- The Northern military force Robert Johnson joins after escaping slavery, part of the roughly 180,000 Black soldiers who served the Union cause during the Civil War — their service is central to the novel's account of Black agency in achieving emancipation, not merely receiving it.
- Related: Robert Johnson, Civil War and Reconstruction
- Tom Anderson
- An enslaved man belonging to a wealthy North Carolina planter, introduced early in the novel as a source of information about the slave market and plantation gossip, part of Harper's broader network of enslaved characters whose knowledge and communication move faster than their owners realize.
- Related: Robert Johnson
U
- Uncle Daniel
- An enslaved elder who leads secret nighttime prayer meetings held in the woods under cover of darkness, defying the ban on independent Black worship — a portrait of the clandestine religious life that sustained enslaved communities.
- Related: Aunt Linda, Robert Johnson