Fugitive Literati: Black Girls' Writing as a Tool of Kinship and Power at the Howard School

Abstract:Teaching black children how to survive on their own was one of the primary goals of the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School (1868–1918) in New York. One skill, penmanship, proved to be particularly important for orphaned girls. "Fugitive Literati" examines an incident involving one of the institution's former residents, a sixteen-year-old black girl domestic, who used her writing to resist being forced to marry a man who may have sexually assaulted her. Using black feminist thought to read the loud silences in the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School's letters, I argue that the girl's case shows how orphaned black girls used the "written word" to navigate power relations in the workplace and actively construct their desired kinship networks for survival. Further, I contend that the silences around the girl's case in the archive tell of a strategy of dissemblance or the unique family-like veil of privacy within the institution.