Since her forced migration to the United States the African American woman has consciously developed a literary tradition based on fundamental evolutionary principles of mind and body. She has consistently resisted attempts by patriarchs and matriarchs alike to romanticize and redefine that biologicallybased literary heritage. This volume of ten classic texts including such nineteenthcentury writers as Jarena Lee Harriet Jacobs and Angelina Grimk documents for teachers and general readers how African American female selfportraits gradually crystallized over some three centuries of brutality imposed by white men and their surrogates who legally raped and then branded her immoral precisely because she was black and female.