Rynetta Davis’s “National Housekeeping: (Re)dressing the Politics of Whiteness in Nineteenth-Century African American Literary History” considers how nineteenth-century Black women writers contested and revised representations of traditional Black domesticity. Moving outside of the home and beyond traditional forms of domestic work, Elizabeth Keckley, Julia Collins, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper suggest that Black domestic work exceeds the home space. Davis thus examines a range of domestic print practices and sensibilities in ways that highlight gender, gendered spaces and work, and print possibilities surrounding such. In this, her chapter considers just what “domestic” citizenship might look like.

The December 25, 1920, Chicago Defender features a “New Book on Market” review that praises Chicago-based writer Zara Wright's Black and White Tangled Threads, labeling it “a most remarkable book,” noting that “[t]o read this story will be a convincing proof that as a writer Mrs. Wright is unexcelled” (8). This review was not the only glowing endorsement of Wright's literary debut. Positive reviews marketing Wright's novel continued to appear in the Chicago Defender throughout the 1920s. A December 3, 1921 review titled “Gift Book Supreme” acknowledges that Black and White Tangled Threads had been “Endorsed by press, pulpit and public,” and that the book's author tells a “story that will stand as a monument of greatness in the future years” (5). Similarly, an advertisement in the December 10, 1921, Chicago Defender boasts that the novel is “Unquestionably the best book ever written by one of our own authors…No home should be without this wonderful book” (4). Moreover, Black and White Tangled Threads appears on a “Survey of Negro Life in Chicago: Books You Should Know and Read” list that promotes the most important books by “Negro” and white authors (Fig. 22.1). Wright's name appears alongside prominent black writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, and Angelina Weld Grimké. Wright's portrait also appears in John Taitt's 1925 Souvenir of Negro Progress.