The panel “Black Women’s Biography” took place at 3:45 p.m., on Friday, May 13, during the BIO Conference. Moderated by Carla Kaplan, author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (Doubleday, 2002) and Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance (Harper, 2013), among other books, the panelists were: A’Lelia Bundles, author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (Scribner, 2001) and the forthcoming The Joy Goddess of Harlem: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance; Ashley D. Farmer, author of Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (The University of North Carolina Press, 2017) and the forthcoming Queen Mother Audley Moore: Mother of Black Nationalism (University of North Carolina Press); and Soyica Diggs Colbert, whose most recent book is Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry (Yale University Press, 2021).

Kaplan began by giving each speaker five minutes to introduce themselves and their work. Farmer explained that she is working on the first full-length biography of Queen Mother Moore, who lived from 1898 to 1997. She further explained: “If you study Marcus Garvey’s UNIA [Universal Negro Improvement Association], you’ll find her as a dues-paying member 50 years after the organization is done. If you look at the Communist Party, you’ll see her on street corners and at the ballot box as a member and a promoter of Black women’s issues there. If you study Black nationalism or the civil rights movement, you’ll find her writing telegrams [to] everybody from King to JFK, to mentoring Malcolm X, to talking to Louis Farrakhan, and if you study the global Black freedom struggle, you’ll find her meeting everybody from dictator Idi Amin to Julius Nyerere.” With the richness of the project, however, have come challenges said Farmer. She continued, “She had a third grade education. She often was a street-corner speaker. She has no [established] archive as it were—that doesn’t mean she wasn’t a prolific collector of things herself, but there’s questions of where this alleged [undiscovered] archive is. It’s kind of like a little bit of a national treasure hunt.”

A’Lelia Bundles, the great-great-granddaughter of Madame C. J. Walker and the great-granddaughter of A’Lelia Walker, explained that when she was growing up in Indianapolis, her mother was the vice president of the Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, and she would accompany her mother to work. Bundles said her family encouraged her to follow her own passion—journalism—rather than also step into the family business. When Bundles arrived at Columbia University to attend journalism school, the only Black woman on the faculty, Phyllis Garland, recognized the name “A’Lelia” and figured the student must have a connection to the Walker family. Bundles said, “Even after I gave her some very clichéd topics [that I wished to write about], she looked at me and she said, ‘No, you’re going to write about your family. That’s what you’re going to write about.’ And that really put me on a journey in the fall of 1975 that’s led to four books. . . . I had a detour to a 30-year network television news career, but always on the side I was doing research and writing.”

Concerning finding her way to her subject, Lorraine Hansberry, Soyica Diggs Colbert said, “My first book is on African American theater and any scholar of African American theater cannot avoid—nor should they want to avoid—Lorraine Hansberry.” While Hansberry is most associated with her play A Raisin in the Sun, Colbert wanted to broaden the lens and focus on Hansberry’s significant contributions during her short life to both the arts and society more broadly. She said, “One of the things that I try to establish in my biography is that Hansberry was multifaceted—that she was an activist, an artist, a spokeswoman, and an intellectual—and that all of those aspects of her are readily available, and so to ask the question as to why we just focus not only on her as a playwright but her as the author of this one play.”

While Kaplan began the session by acknowledging the “seeming explosion” of biographies about Black women, she added that it “feels more like a necessary correction, and indeed we’d like to see much more of an explosion . . . in Black women’s biography.” The archives available to base those stories on vary widely in terms of accessibility and organizational status, as evinced by the panelists’ reflections. For instance, Farmer said of her subject, “I like to kind of think of Moore’s archive as not necessarily one of absence but . . . what I call ‘disorderly distributed,’ meaning that it is scattered in all kinds of places literally all over the world and it kind of makes for a discordant story, because it’s not neatly categorized [and] put into a finding aid, and one cannot flip pages from one page to the other and make a decent accounting of her life.”

Farmer also told the story of how, when speaking about Moore at events, audience members “stand up and swear that they are wearing her old outfits, her old headdresses, her old bangles . . . so perhaps the archive is spread that way.” The problem with this, Farmer said, is that “this disorderly distribution of this archive may come to stand in for the idea of Moore herself. It’s kind of made her seem as though she is disorganized, that her ideas and ideologies are not coherent, and therefore she’s not been worthy of a biographical treatment.”

Bundles responded, “While Ashley is having to piece together really shards of things, I almost have too much information. We’re really fortunate that between my family and the employees of the Walker [Manufacturing] Company, we have tens of thousands of documents, many of which have now been digitized, and then of course there are other people’s papers and newspapers.” While Bundles has had the benefit of an abundant archive in the present day, she spoke of how the nature of research has changed over the 50 years she’s been pursuing her family’s history. She said of the pre-internet age, “If I wanted to see the Chicago Defender, I had to go to Chicago to go through microfilm. If I wanted to see The New York Age, I had to come to the Schomburg [Center for Research in Black Culture] to go through the materials. But it’s so different now. . . . Now [these are available at] newspapers.com and ProQuest and Genealogy Bank, [where] I find so many tidbits.” The wealth of information presents Bundles with different kinds of challenges. For instance, because she is so well versed in the extensive materials available on her family, it often falls to her in her writing to set the record straight on harmful stereotypes or rumors that less-informed writers have perpetuated for years. She said, “It’s been important to me to think [about] either what information do people have when they were writing those things, or what was the lens [through] which they were evaluating her?”

Colbert had a still different experience. She was not a relative of her subject, but her subject did have an extensive archive—maintained by a stringent estate. She said, “One of the early challenges that I faced as a writer was really thinking about an archive that had been primarily cultivated by Hansberry’s then ex-husband. As I was writing the book, I really had to think about what it meant that, one, Hansberry left her papers to her ex-husband, and then, two, that he had been the primary curator of the archive, which was then passed to his second wife and now is being managed by his stepdaughter. So part of my work was figuring out how to navigate the . . . gaps in the archive, particularly as they pertain to Black women and . . . what was left out.” Colbert spoke of how many portions of the Hansberry archive are only viewable via special permission. “I was really curious about thinking about those restrictions and what was allowed and what was disallowed but . . . ultimately, they were very supportive of my work and they gave me access to, and allowed me to write about, all of the aspects of her archive that I requested, and so I’m grateful . . . that I had a chance to work with the Hansberry Trust. They were very, very generous in giving me access.”

Another challenge for the biographers of Black women is the dissembling of their lives many Black women felt compelled to engage in and how that might have impacted the quality or the number of interviews, curated materials, or holographic material left behind by the subjects. Colbert elaborated on this topic, saying that while it was common for women of previous generations to participate in such dissembling due to potentially controversial aspects of their personal lives, such as their sexuality, the women written about by all of the panelists present also had to maintain some semblance of privacy as a result of extensive government surveillance. “The FBI followed her [Queen Mother Moore] for the better part of 60 years. These FBI files of Hansberry and other folks are voluminous, and that offered a level of surveillance that didn’t allow for them to have private lives. So I also think there’s a little bit of . . . I don’t want to say dignity, but of secrecy allowed, in not assembling a life” in a traditional archive, Colbert said.

One of the questions Kaplan fielded from the audience was, “Do you think that the growing concern as to who has the right to tell someone else’s story, particularly biographies of someone of a different gender or race than the writer, has changed who gets to write biographies of Black women?” Farmer ceded her time to Bundles, who said, “Each case is different. People who really feel an affinity for the person they’re writing about, you know . . . I would not close that door, that just if you’re not the same race or gender or whatever that you can’t write about somebody. So that that would not be my personal position.” Colbert, closing out the discussion, said, “I would agree that . . . there shouldn’t be barriers to who could write about what subject matter . . . but I do think that we all need to have a rigorous investigation of the work and be cognizant of the context that the figures we’re writing about were living in and through, as we’re endeavoring to tell their stories. And so, having a sensitivity to those dynamics I think is important no matter where you’re positioned in relationship to the subject.”

by Sara Day

I spent my career and early retirement engaged in historical and genealogical research in U.S. institutions, such as the Library of Congress (where I worked for 14 years), for many books and exhibitions. Thus, I had no idea what an obstacle course I was facing when deciding to address my long-deferred curiosity about my father’s Anglo-Irish ancestors’ three centuries in Ireland. I knew that a focus on Protestant landlords of Cromwellian descent in predominantly Catholic County Tipperary, long famed for its intense nationalism, would be an unpopular project in many quarters. However, I believed that it could contribute to the more nuanced and inclusive history being taught in Ireland today.

 Not Irish Enough is not a standard family history. I followed the advice of Rolf Loeber, a scholar and author in Pittsburgh, who had made a rich collection of Irish documents and books during numerous research trips to Ireland with his wife. After telling him what I had found so far, he advised me that I could make a far more important contribution if I widened the scope of my project beyond mere family history. I decided to use anecdotes from the five separate landowning branches of the family; the legal, military, and episcopal careers of their younger sons; and the circumscribed lives of their wives and daughters to illustrate the historical events and sociocultural circumstances they lived through.

Dublin’s archival collections beckoned, but it was a shock to discover that the essential records of 700 years of the British administration of Ireland were destroyed in the burning of the Public Record Office in Dublin’s magnificent Four Courts Building at the beginning of the bitter Irish Civil War, in June 1922. There went censuses, wills, and far far more. An additional hurdle was and is the continuing closure to historians and other researchers of the vast records of the Irish Land Commission (1843–1999), which was tasked with overseeing and managing the transfer of lands from landlords and remaining estates to tenants and landless men and women. I would have to draw on surviving alternate sources for the story I needed to tell.

Following three valuable research trips to County Tipperary and Dublin in the early aughts, I postponed my Irish research for seven years to write and promote my book based on the 3,000 coded love letters between two Bostonians—the liberal Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale (1822–1909) and the remarkable and previously unknown Miss Harriet Freeman (1847–1930). That delay turned out to be a blessing in disguise. In the meantime, digitization of surviving Irish archival records and national and local newspapers had moved apace, all subject searchable through subscriptions to Findmypast.com and Irishnewsarchive.com. For example, newspapers recorded the failing finances, bankruptcies, estate sales, boycotting (ostracizing), and violence afflicting various members of the family. To my astonishment, I was able to verify my father’s memories of family scandals by studying digitized documents. Gratifyingly, the saga I uncovered during years of dogged research has been praised by leading Irish historians. Perhaps, after all, there is something to be gained by starting from a blank slate.

Sara Day moved to the United States from the United Kingdom in 1969 and has lived in Washington, D.C., with her husband for forty years. Not Irish Enough: An Anglo-Irish Family’s Three Centuries in Ireland was published in August 2021 and her previous book, Coded Letters, Concealed Love: The Larger Lives of Harriet Freeman and Edward Everett Hale, in 2014, both by New Academia Publishing. 

Location: Malden, the Netherlands

What is your current project and at what stage is it?

I am writing a biography of Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989), American literary critic, historian, poet, editor, publisher’s advisor, writers’ confidant, and “middleman” of letters. Best known as chronicler of the “lost generation” (Exile’s Return, 1934/1951; A Second Flowering, 1973), literary editor of The New Republic (1930–1940), and the critic whose Portable Faulkner (1946) helped pave the way to Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize, Cowley was at the center of an extensive web of literary, political, and intellectual relations and played a crucial role in 20th-century American culture, most publicly in the interbellum and Cold War years. As critic, editor, and publisher’s advisor for Viking Press, he promoted the canonical standing of his cohort (Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Cummings, Hart Crane, Dos Passos) and expedited book publication for numerous younger writers (among them John Cheever, Jack Kerouac, Tillie Olsen, Ken Kesey). My biography will be both a sequel to my earlier Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years (University of Georgia Press, 1993) and a stand-alone biography focused on Cowley’s years of greatest impact and influence, from the 1930s through the 1970s. Together with my edition of Cowley’s letters (The Long Voyage, Harvard University Press, 2014), it will complete my triptych on Malcolm Cowley.

Who is your favorite biographer or what is your favorite biography?

I admire Blake Bailey’s bio of John Cheever (2009), for its imaginative empathy, comprehensiveness, and superb style; John Loughery and Blythe Randolph’s Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century (2021), for combining succinctness and trenchant depth; Ruth Franklin’s life of Shirley Jackson (2016), for unearthing an undeservedly neglected author; and Carl Rollyson’s two-volume life of Faulkner (2020), for its enviable scope and narrative momentum. Richard Kennedy, Townsend Ludington, and Scott Donaldson have been illuminating early mentors and models, both to imitate and move beyond.

What have been your most satisfying moments as a biographer?

I was lucky to have known Malcolm Cowley during the last 10 years of his life, and to have gained his trust and encouragement. Memories of our meetings, conversations, and correspondence have been an ongoing source of inspiration. As a biographical researcher, my most intense pleasure has come from exploring the immensely rich archives Cowley left behind, and from interviewing many of his literary consorts, friends, and relatives.

What have been your most frustrating moments?

Pleasure and frustration have been two sides of the same coin: the embarrassment of archival riches has also been a bane, a humungous challenge, not only to persistency but also to the discipline of form, to critical selectivity, to narrative pace.

One research/attitudinal tip to share?

Do not be an archival glutton: there is such a thing as gathering too much material. And don’t procrastinate: there is no perfect moment to begin writing, so you might as well start. Think of it as a craft.

If you weren’t a biographer, what dream profession would you be in, and why?

I have spent most of my professional life teaching university students in the Netherlands to appreciate and cherish American literature and culture. To quote Cowley: “I found a seed and planted it.” May it flourish. What better dream?

What genre, besides biography, do you read for pleasure and who are some of your favorite writers?

I enjoy reading (and discussing) fiction. A recent novel I have tremendously enjoyed and can heartily recommend is the debut novel by Cowley’s granddaughter: Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace.

 

Hans Bak is emeritus professor of American literature and American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is the author/editor of two books on Malcolm Cowley, and has published widely on U.S. and Canadian literature.

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Location: Maryland, United States

What is your current project and at what stage is it?

A biography of Helen Brooke Taussig (1898–1986), pioneering children’s heart doctor and 20th-century global patient advocate. It will be published in 2023 by MIT Press. A gracious but willful Bostonian, Helen took the best job available for a woman doctor in 1933, caring for dying children. The observations she made in her Baltimore, Md., children’s heart clinic culminated in modern heart surgery. She didn’t stop there. Her story unfolds amid world wars, the rheumatic fever era, and the rise of data and technology to replace the doctor’s touch. Compassionate and contentious—saint and holy terror, intimates labeled her—Helen’s goal was to prevent unnecessary suffering.

Who is your favorite biographer or what is your favorite biography?

Robert Caro. His habit of returning again and again to primary sources and situating himself in the subject’s environment to glean meaning or truth reveals his respect for his subject and makes him a great storyteller. Biographies I most admire are Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff and American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic by Victoria Johnson.

What have been your most satisfying moments as a biographer?

• Meeting the brother of the first surviving “blue baby,” and finding letters from Helen in boxes of memorabilia that he had saved for decades.
• Learning that Helen’s strict methods for rheumatic fever patients, including repeated blood tests and months and even years of bed rest, actually worked. Treatment in the pre-antibiotic era was largely futile, but by matching names on thank-you notes Helen received in the 1970s to decades-old patient records, I was able to show that some patients who followed her dictums lived nearly normal lifespans.
• Interviewing women doctors who knew Helen and who led their own remarkable lives.

What have been your most frustrating moments?

Framing the book for a general audience. I tried using the story of a controversial portrait of Helen by the artist Jamie Wyeth that her friends hid for nearly 50 years. I envisioned parallel stories of the search for truth by scientist and artist. The structure collapsed under the weight of the portrait. Happily, Helen’s last surviving close fellow, a woman doctor a generation removed who unveiled the portrait, emerged as the ideal person to help tell her story. After much cajoling, she agreed. The biography begins in her living room.

If you weren’t a biographer, what dream profession would you be in, and why?

I had a dream profession! It fed my interest in biography. As a journalist at newspapers that supported long-form narratives, I spent months and sometimes years developing stories that illustrated a public good or problem. At The Baltimore Sun, I also wrote short biographies—profiles of the famous as well as the unknown. I could ask questions and share what I learned about how the world works. Why would a farmer clone his cow? Why did a 21-year-old woman shoot her father? How did a tired mother discover she needed brain surgery? For someone who could not afford grad school, the life of a journalist was a cheap substitute for what I really wanted: the life of a history professor.  

What genre, besides biography, do you read for pleasure and who are some of your favorite writers?

During the pandemic I re-read favorite poets like Walt Whitman (Song of Myself) and discovered new ones, Wisława Szymborska (View with a grain of sand) and Marie Howe (What the Living Do). I generally read novels and books on the creative process. I’m interested in the structure of everything. I admire Magda Szabó (The Door; Abigail; Iza’s Ballad); Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go); John Williams (Stoner; Butcher’s Crossing); and Isabella Hammed (The Parisian). For Helen’s biography, I read Portrait & Persons (Cynthia Freehand); On Photography (Susan Sontag); and James Lord’s amusing account of his 18 days posing as the artist’s subject, A Giacometti Portrait.

 

Patricia Meisol is a writer and health policy expert. A former feature writer and business reporter for The Baltimore Sun and former staff writer for the St. Petersburg Times, her narratives have also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media.