Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest
Glossary
"
- "Mulatto" and "Quadroon"
- Period terms of racial classification that recur through the novel: "mulatto" for a person of mixed Black and white parentage, used of Winona's late mother, and "quadroon," a finer fractional gradation meaning a person of one-quarter Black ancestry, which Ebenezer Maybee uses of Winona herself. Hopkins deploys this vocabulary of her era not as her own final word on her characters, but as the language the surrounding white world insists on using to sort people by blood — and, in Winona's case, to appraise and eventually price her.
- Related: Winona, The Fugitive Slave Law
A
- Allen Pinks
- A soft-spoken young mulatto nurse who cares for Warren Maxwell through his delirium in the Missouri jail, said to have worked as a cook and waiter on a Missouri River steamboat before being taken up on suspicion of being a fugitive slave. Allen shows unusual devotion to the sick prisoner and unexpected knowledge of the plans being made for his rescue, and Maxwell repeatedly feels he has met this nurse somewhere before without being able to place the memory. Later chapters reveal more about who Allen Pinks really is.
- Related: Warren Maxwell
B
- Bill Thomson
- Colonel Titus's overseer and closest confidant at Magnolia Farm, a man neighbors admit has "a head on him" beneath his notorious cruelty. He is given charge of Judah, whom he resents for his intelligence and bearing, and he organizes and drills armed companies of men to fight for the pro-slavery cause in the escalating Kansas conflict.
- Related: Colonel Titus, Magnolia Farm, Judah
- Bleeding Kansas
- The violent contest, beginning in the mid-1850s, between pro-slavery and Free-State settlers for control of Kansas Territory, fought with ballots, arson, and murder as each side tried to determine whether Kansas would enter the Union slave or free. Hopkins grounds the second half of the novel in this real conflict, quoting Colonel Titus's own inflammatory rhetoric and setting much of the story's later action against the atrocities being committed on both sides of the territorial line.
- Related: Colonel Titus, John Brown, The Rangers (Kickapoo Rangers)
- Buffalo and the Niagara Borderland
- The novel opens in the early 1850s on the American-Canadian border near Buffalo, New York, in what Hopkins calls a "mixed community of Anglo-Saxons, Indians and Negroes," close enough to Canada that the roar of Niagara Falls is a constant presence. She identifies Buffalo as "an anti-slavery stronghold,—the last and most convenient station of the underground railroad," a detail that establishes the book's central geography of danger and safety: freedom can be a few miles, or a lake crossing, away.
- Related: The Underground Railroad, White Eagle
C
- Colonel Titus
- The English-born owner of Magnolia Farm outside Kansas City, a widower devoted to his invalid daughter Lillian, who has become one of the most outspoken pro-slavery voices in the Kansas conflict despite his own nationality. His 1854 speech at St. Joseph, urging settlers to vote "at the point of the bowie-knife" and show no mercy to Free-State sympathizers, establishes him as one of the novel's chief instruments of the violence spreading through the territory.
- Related: Magnolia Farm, Bleeding Kansas, Bill Thomson
E
- Ebenezer Maybee
- The blunt, big-hearted proprietor of the Grand Island Hotel near Buffalo, who also serves as local justice of the peace and constable. Introduced when Winona and Judah come to him for help the night their father is shot, he speaks in a broad, folksy dialect that half-conceals a humane and principled man — one who, Hopkins tells us, "did not hesitate to use the methods of the Underground railroad when he deemed it necessary."
- Related: Warren Maxwell, White Eagle, The Underground Railroad
J
- John Brown
- The historical abolitionist, dismissed by pro-slavery characters as "an old lunatic," whom Ebenezer Maybee has left his hotel and his wife to join as a volunteer fighter for the Free-State cause in Kansas. Hopkins folds the real John Brown into her plot as a leader of hard, righteous purpose to whose camp Free-State conductors like Parson Steward send fugitives for safety — a figure the novel treats throughout with open admiration.
- Related: The Rangers (Kickapoo Rangers), Bleeding Kansas, Ebenezer Maybee
- John Brown's Camp
- A fortified encampment in a ravine near the hills outside Lawrence, Kansas, where John Brown gathers armed Free-State fighters and the fugitives they protect. When Winona, Judah, and their rescuers first reach it under cover of night, they find sentries posted, fires burning, and a rough but genuine welcome — the camp's women immediately take Winona in. It becomes the base the fugitives return to after each new danger through the rest of the novel's Kansas chapters.
- Related: John Brown, Winona, Judah
- Judah
- A boy of African descent, born to a mother who died attempting to reach freedom on the Underground Railroad; White Eagle adopted him as an infant and raised him alongside Winona as a free child of the woods, skilled with a canoe, a gun, and a fishing line. When two white hunters visit the island and size him up frankly as valuable property, it is an early, chilling sign of the danger both children are in despite having been born free.
- Related: White Eagle, Winona, The Fugitive Slave Law
M
- Magnolia Farm
- Colonel Titus's plantation a few miles outside Kansas City, Missouri — a picturesque estate of roses, magnolias, and cotton fields worked by enslaved laborers under Bill Thomson's supervision. It is here, two years after their capture, that Winona and Judah are held: Winona as maid to the Colonel's invalid daughter Lillian, Judah as assistant overseer prized for his skill with horses.
- Related: Colonel Titus, Bill Thomson, Winona, Judah
P
- Parson Sampson Steward
- A Free-State preacher and Underground Railroad conductor in Kansas who keeps a loaded rifle as close at hand as his Bible, having already survived one mob attack on his congregation and expecting another. He shelters Winona, Judah, and Warren Maxwell on their flight toward John Brown's camp, and defends his readiness to meet armed men with armed resistance in the same breath as his faith, citing Scripture for both mercy and self-defense.
- Related: John Brown, The Underground Railroad, Ebenezer Maybee
S
- Sentimental Romance and Adventure-Serial Conventions
- Hopkins builds Winona out of the popular fiction forms of her day: the sentimental romance, with its persecuted heroine and devoted hero, and the dime-novel adventure serial, with its storms, ambushes, disguises, and last-minute rescues. She uses these familiar, page-turning shapes to carry serious historical material — slavery, the Fugitive Slave Law, the violence of the Kansas border war — to readers who might not otherwise pick up a history lesson, a strategy shared by other Black writers of the era working in popular genres.
- Related: The Colored American Magazine
T
- The Carlingford Inheritance
- The confidential legal mission that brings Warren Maxwell to America: locating the missing heir to an English baronetcy after a family tragedy years earlier left one brother, Lord George, dead, and the other, Captain Henry Carlingford, convicted of the killing and fled to America as a fugitive from justice. The dying Lord George Carlingford wants any children Henry may have had in America to inherit, and has sent Maxwell to find them before it is too late.
- Related: Warren Maxwell
- The Colored American Magazine
- Winona was first serialized in the Colored American Magazine, the Boston-based, Black-owned literary and political monthly that Pauline Hopkins edited during the years she wrote this novel. The magazine's mission — to give Black writers, history, and political argument a serious public platform — shapes the book's frequent departures from the plot into direct historical and moral commentary, addressed to a readership Hopkins could assume shared her stake in the story.
- Related: Sentimental Romance and Adventure-Serial Conventions
- The Fugitive Slave Law
- The federal law, newly strengthened by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that allowed enslavers or their agents to reclaim escaped enslaved people from free states and territories, overriding local objections and giving the accused almost no legal defense. It is invoked in the novel to devastating effect: because "the child follows the condition of the mother," two men claiming to have owned White Eagle's late wife and Judah's late mother use the law to seize Winona and Judah as property, even though both children were born free.
- Related: The Underground Railroad, Judah, Winona
- The Rangers (Kickapoo Rangers)
- The pro-slavery militia company that Bill Thomson leads and drills at Magnolia Farm, one of many such bands terrorizing Free-State settlers across the Kansas-Missouri border. Ebenezer Maybee's account of the Rangers' conduct — the torture of a farmer's wife, the killing of a surrendered prisoner, Thomson's own desecration of a dying man — gives concrete, unsparing shape to the border violence the novel has been building toward.
- Related: Bill Thomson, Bleeding Kansas, John Brown
- The Underground Railroad
- The informal network of safe houses, guides, and sympathizers that helped enslaved people escape to free states and Canada, introduced in the novel's opening pages as part of what draws free Black settlers to Buffalo's streets. Both Winona's mother and Judah's mother reached the island community by this route before their deaths. The network resurfaces later in the story as an active, dangerous undertaking carried out by ordinary people risking their own safety, not merely a fact of the setting.
- Related: Buffalo and the Niagara Borderland, The Fugitive Slave Law
W
- Warren Maxwell
- A young English lawyer sent to America by his firm on a confidential errand — to trace the lost heir to the Carlingford estate — who is caught in a violent storm near Buffalo and takes shelter at the Grand Island Hotel. Roused at midnight by Winona and Judah's cries for help, he examines their dying father and is the first to recognize that White Eagle has been shot, not injured by accident. His decision to stay involved in the orphaned children's fate, out of compassion rather than duty, sets the rest of the novel in motion.
- Related: The Carlingford Inheritance, Ebenezer Maybee, White Eagle
- White Eagle
- A white man who lives among the Seneca on a small island in Lake Erie, revered as a healer after he once saved the life of the chief Red Eagle and was adopted into the tribe. He has built a home there with his adopted son Judah, a rescued child of a fugitive-slave mother, and his daughter Winona, and he guards his past closely, never speaking of who he was before he came to the island. His evident wish to stay hidden from "his equals, meaning white men," hints at a deeper story yet untold.
- Related: Winona, Judah, Buffalo and the Niagara Borderland
- Winona
- The daughter of White Eagle and his late wife, a well-educated woman of mixed Black and white ancestry who had escaped slavery by the Underground Railroad before her death. Winona is raised in freedom on her father's island, moving easily between Seneca custom and her father's teaching, and is devoted to him and to her adopted brother Judah. Her father's sudden death, and what follows it, will test her in ways her sheltered childhood never prepared her for.
- Related: White Eagle, Judah, "Mulatto" and "Quadroon"