By Mary Ann Zehr, contributor
A monthly column in 2025 by a local teacher and reader about connecting with books and taking in Harrisonburg’s literary scene.
~ Newman Sr., George A. A Miserable Revenge: A Story of Life in Virginia. Edited by Mollie Godfrey, Brooks E. Hefner, Evan Sizemore, and Jeslyn Pool. James Madison University Libraries, 2025. ~
I wasn’t sure how to approach reading a novel released this year but written nearly 150 years ago by a black man who lived through the Civil War.
So I read the companion pieces first.
I’m talking about A Miserable Revenge: A Story of Life in Virginia, which George A. Newman Sr. wrote in his early twenties while living in Harrisonburg. Newman was a prominent educator, civic leader, and minister. His home in Harrisonburg is being restored.
Local literary scholars, a historian, an education professor, and others have written essays to highlight insights in the novel, like a guide giving a planetarium show points out constellations. The essays are included in the print copy of the novel that I checked out of Massanutten Regional Library.
A Gift of the Author’s Papers
A Miserable Revenge and other short literary works by Newman are now in the public eye because Ruth M. Toliver, his granddaughter, preserved his papers and donated them to James Madison University in 2021. Toliver, in her nineties, wrote a preface to the novel and contributed audio interviews to an impressive portal of digital resources.
Toliver conveys family knowledge that Newman attended an academic school in Washington, D.C., and could “read, write, figure, and reason.” She describes her grandfather as “a man ahead of his time.” She writes, “The world was not ready for him, but he felt he had a purpose and he tried to fulfill it despite the odds.”
Newman was born in 1855 in Winchester, Virginia, to free black parents. He moved to Harrisonburg in 1875. He was the principal of two early Harrisonburg schools for African-Americans, according to JMU literary scholars Mollie Godfrey and Brooks E. Hefner. Newman was a leader of Harrisonburg’s prominent African-American civic and political organizations. He was the first black person in the region to be appointed to federal positions–as US Storekeeper and US Marshal.
The dating of the paper on which Newman penned his novel and other methods reveal that he likely wrote it in 1876 and 1877. Godfrey and Hefner identify the novel as an early African-American novel and the earliest known example of a “white life” novel, a work with white protagonists written by an African-American.
The novel’s narrator refers to enslaved and free black people as “our minor characters–our kitchen characters.” One of the free black characters is named George. Aunt Sally, an enslaved character, resents George, calling him lazy, until she is promised by her owner that she will be freed. The novel contains some negative stereotypes about black people and Native Americans. But in other ways, note Godfrey and Hefner, the author defies stereotypes in his portrayal of black characters, such as showing how Jack, an enslaved person, acts as a black folktale trickster character, talking himself out of a beating by his owner.
The novel is packed with melodrama: attempted murder by knife and pistol, actual murder, theft, attempted suicide, long-lost lovers reuniting, long-lost family members reuniting, and romance between so many people it’s hard to keep track of all of the couples. Some plot threads are not plausible, such as how one character lapses into typhoid fever caused by the shock of a near-fatal knifing. A central character is Detective Kent. The narrator and some characters say that Detective Kent’s skills are impressive, but a modern avid reader of mysteries would not view the detective as a talented investigator. For a good portion of the novel, for instance, he suspects a certain character of having attempted a murder merely because that person has left town. The detective gathers his clues mostly by eavesdropping in a stable loft.
Men and women unquestionably fall for each other; many of the romances are free of complications. Take the romance of characters Bertie and Mattie. The author writes: “Our Bertie came every day to see his lady-love. It was his only real source of enjoyment.”
Asides by the Narrator
At the same time, the narrator’s metacognitive observations drew me into the novel. Sometimes, the narrator comments on the story’s pacing. For example, the narrator says the following about one conversation: “They talked a good while, perhaps upon subjects that would not interest the Reader. So we will not rehearse them.” At another point, the narrator notes that the full contents of a report by Detective Kent given to the characters will not immediately be shared with the reader: “We will give our Readers a copy of it in a more convenient season, and in a way they will never dream of hearing it.”
Sometimes the narrator digresses from the story’s action. One digression is a commentary on slavery: “Any person may say slavery is right–they may say it is right, but they would rather be free. A great many persons say it is to the slave’s advantage to be a slave. I can’t see it in that light. A slave has not the advantages of education, and it has been asserted that education is necessary as a learned profession. We all know that.”
I have many questions about this passage. Is Newman expressing his view or an aspect of his perspective about slavery in some of the words of the narrator? Why does the narrator use the first-person “I” in this passage when in all other observations in the novel, the narrator uses the third-person or first-person plural? Who is “I”? Who are “a great many persons”? Who is “we” in the last sentence of the passage?
The novel stirred many wonderings. My lack of knowledge about the antebellum South–the novel’s setting–is an obstacle to my understanding of the story. In addition, some pages of the original manuscript are missing. The last page of the manuscript has disintegrated so that only about half of its words can be deciphered.
A Window into Reconstruction
The novel’s release provides a rich opportunity to learn about a talented black leader and the black community during Reconstruction in Harrisonburg. In 1880, the population of Harrisonburg was 38.4 percent black, the highest ever in the city’s history, according to Mark Metzler Sawin, a history professor at Eastern Mennonite University who wrote a historical context essay for the novel.
Newman wraps up the novel plot with a forgiveness fest among characters who have wronged each other.
Metzler Sawin observes that the novel’s optimistic ending was penned during a window of time after the Civil War when blacks made considerable progress in gaining rights. It was a time of hopefulness. Metzler Sawin writes that Newman “was working hard to bring about a better world for his Black community, and in a period when things were moving forward and getting better. This optimism is reflected in his story.”
However, by 1900, Jim Crow laws and “separate but equal” laws had reversed progress toward equality, the historian writes. The optimism that Newman communicates in his novel is absent from his later short literary works released along with A Miserable Revenge.
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