"Neither Is Memory Always Thus Avenging": Longing for Kinship in Julia C. Collins's "The Curse of Caste" and the "Christian Recorder"

Written for serial publication in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church's Christian Recorder and published during the final months of the Civil War, Julia C. Collins's unfinished novel The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride struggles to recover and restore to national historiography the painful memories of those whom slavery had dispossessed, as black Americans began to enter the postwar nation as citizen-subjects. The enigma of The Curse of Caste's conclusion, cut short by Collins's illness, leaves, as does Martin Delany's famously unfinished Blake; or the Huts of America, the reader poised on the brink of reconciliation (between father and son) and a reunion (between father and daughter) that is, perhaps appropriately, indefinitely deferred.25 The serial format of the novel's publication heightens the uncertainty of this long sought-after resolution as many black Americans in the Recorder's "Information Wanted" columns began their own genealogical journeys of recovery and reconnection.