Jessie Redmon Fauset’s “Ghosts and Kittens” in The Brownies Book
The tenth post in our series on Black New York, 1921, for Black History Month
One hundred years ago today… Jessie Redmon Fauset’s short story “Ghosts and Kittens” appeared in the February issue of The Brownies Book, the monthly magazine for Black children, which Fauset edited along with W.E.B. Du Bois and Augustus Granville Dill; according to Erica Lorraine Griffin, Fauset did “the majority of the editing work” (64)
Note: we highlighted The Brownies Book about a year ago, in our February 12, 1920 post.
The Brownies Book, February 1921. Library of Congress.
Fauset, born in 1882, educated at Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, spent years as a teacher and librarian in Washington, D.C. before she moved to New York in 1920 and began her ascent into the highest levels of influence of what was to be the Harlem Renaissance (Levering Lewis 121-2). Eventually, she would become known as a novelist, for example of There Is Confusion (1924), perhaps her best-read work. In 1920-21, Fauset was literary editor of The Crisis, to which she also contributed frequently. She frequented the literary circles centered on Harlem’s 135th Street Library where Catherine Allen worked, and helped spur the careers of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neal Hurston, among others.
Jessie Redmon Fauset. Undated. Library of Congress.
“Ghosts and Kittens” is one of four stories Fauset wrote for The Brownies Book. The others are “Turkey Drumsticks” (November 1920), “Merry Christmas to All”(December 1920), and “Cordelia Goes on the Warpath” (May 1921).
The Brownies Book, February 1921. Library of Congress.
It is an odd entry into the catalog of children’s literature. Perhaps a rewriting of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, it chronicles a campaign by children to scare off one housekeeper with fake ghosts and thus force their mother to bring back the beloved predecessor. The story hints at more adult problems, from the personal–tension between the parents, the mother’s jealousy over her children–to the social: prejudice over skin color within Black communities.
Read the entire story within the February 1921 issue of The Brownie Book here.
References/Works Cited
Griffin, Erica Lorraine. “"The living is (not) easy : inverting African American dreams deferred in the literary careers of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Dorothy West, 1900-1995.” (2002).
Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
– Jonathan Goldman, February 22, 2021
TAGS: African American literature, Black women writers, fiction, race, children, youth, print