Charlotte Forten's Civil War Journals and the Quest for "Genius, Beauty, and Deathless Fame"

Forten's initial antebellum entries reveal a young woman oppressed by the high expectations placed upon her -- by others, but most important, by herself Despite the fact that by the age of twenty-one she had read hundreds of books, left home to study in an integrated school system, and become the first African American teacher in Salem, she claims she has "only a wasted life to look back upon," one riddled with "intellectual defects," "want of energy, perseverance, and application," and a "fretful and despondent disposition" (316). Central to her disappointment was the belief that her lack of discipline had precluded her from success as it was defined in the abolitionist community: she had not become an "Anti-Slavery lecturer" (91). Repeatedly, Forten expresses her discomfort with the public modes of expression she desperately desired to master. At age sixteen she complains that "reading one's composition before strangers is a trying task" (91), and ten years later, on her great mission to the Sea Islands, she still laments, "I do not know how to talk. Words always fail me when I want them most. The more I feel the more impossible it is for me to speak" (433). Brenda Stevenson supposes that Forten's negative self-esteem resulted from a subconscious inculcation of popular views of African American inferiority. I would add that Forten's double identification as an exemplary middle-class woman and as an ardent abolitionist left her uncomfortably tongue-tied. She knew that her audience came to both her speaking and writing with prohibitive preconceptions. Frances Smith Foster remarks that African American women "knew that their very acts of writing tested social attitudes toward their intelligence and their historical situation. As black women they knew that their gender and their race infused their words with connotations which were complex, complicated, and difficult to control" (17-18). Public speaking was an even more precarious forum, for the speaker herself was presented as text to the audience, interlocutors such as Sojourner Truth had exploited their cultural marginality in a manner that was surely repugnant to the refined Forten. She would have never appealed to her audience with "folksy" language or used her body as Truth did so audaciously. For example, at an 1858 antislavery meeting, Truth was challenged to strip to the waist in order to prove that she was a woman. Apparently, Truth calmly compiled, informing her audience That her breasts had suckl