Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins

Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins (November 11, 1863 – October 22, 1938) was an American writer, and author of the novel Four Girls At Cottage City. An earlier novel, Megda (1891), was published under her maiden name of Emma Dunham Kelley and the pseudonym "Forget-me-not." Her father was Isaac Kelley, a sailor; her mother was Gabriella A. (Chase), and she had an older sister and younger half-brother. Kelley-Hawkins married Benjamin A. Hawkins, a civil engineer, in 1982 and had two daughters. Kelley-Hawkins and her work, which focused on themes of religion and gender, fell into obscurity before her death in 1938 as well as many years following. She later rose to prominence following the rediscovery of her works, with many focused on her racial identity.

Biography On November 11, 1863, in Dennis, Massachusetts, Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins was born the youngest of two children to Isaac Kelley, a sailor, and Gabriella A. (Chase) Kelley. On April 4, 1863, her father alongside her uncles, Johial Chase and Captain Hersey Crowell, were declared dead after disappearing off the coast of Rhode Island. Kelley-Hawkins and her older sister, Alice, were then left under the parentage of their widowed mother.

She and her family remained in Dennis until at least the year 1865, before departing for New Bedford, where they would stay with her aunt, Emily (Chase) Bryant. Not long after, on July 14, 1892, she married a civil engineer, Benjamin Arnon Hawkins. Her body of work consists of two novels: Megda (1891) and Four Girls at Cottage City (1895). A third novel, to be a sequel to Megda, was drafted but never published. Later, in 2006, further genealogical research published indicated that Kelley-Hawkins was, in fact, white or identified herself as white. (National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Volume 94, No. 1, March 2006). Speculation has been made, assuming Kelley-Hawkins may have even descended from Irish immigrants.

During the reconstruction of lost or forgotten African American literature, Kelley-Hawkins's race, alongside others whose biographies and identities were unknown, was assumed based on what clues scholars could gather. No evidence, however, aside from a photograph pointed to her African heritage. In fact, through numerous examinations of US and state census records of Massachusetts and Rhode Island as well as her ancestral towns of Dennis, Yarmouth, Harwich, and Chatham, it has been discovered that neither Kelley-Hawkins nor her family members have ever identified as anything other than white. There were no traces of African heritage in her ancestry.

Much scholarship has attributed the case of her racial misidentification to the frontispiece of her first novel, Megda, which for many, had served as indisputable evidence of her classification as African American. The first case of her labeling as African American has been traced back to her inclusion in A Century of Fiction by American Negros 1853–1952: A Descriptive Bibliography (1955), when Maxwell Whiteman assumed Kelley-Hawkins was of African descent based on the frontispiece, classifying her as a "Negro author" in her bibliography annotation. Subsequent compilations and bibliographies followed suit as she was later included in Charles L. Blockson's bibliography of African American literature and served as inspiration for the 1988 Schomburg Collection of African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth-Century series.

For fifty years, Kelley-Hawkins has been solidified as a trailblazer in Black women's writing and an unquestionable contributor to the African American literary tradition. Many scholars have studied the lack of race in her novels, notions of raceless characters, racial passing, and so on, viewing her works as a tool to advance Black causes. In wake of her discovered racial identity, however, many were left debating whether or not Kelley-Hawkins should be removed from the African American literary canon and possibly added to the Anglo-American literary canon.