A Black woman editor smuggles radical politics inside a dime-novel romance.

Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest

Pauline E. Hopkins · 1902

In 1902, Pauline Hopkins had almost no path to publishing an overt political argument about slavery and Black political action — so she built one inside the popular genres editors and readers already trusted: sentimental romance, frontier adventure, a mystery of hidden identity. Winona, serialized in the Colored American Magazine that Hopkins herself edited, carries a real historical figure, John Brown, and the violence of the Kansas Free Soil struggle into a story of a formerly enslaved boy, a woman of mixed race, and the inheritance mystery that entangles them with an English lawyer. Recovered from near-total obscurity, it has been read by only a handful of scholars in the century since — most readers coming to it now will be among the first in a hundred years to do so.

17 chapters · 43,985 words · ~3.3 hr read