Book excerpt: 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 biologically-based literary heritage. This volume of ten classic texts, including such nineteenth-century writers as Jarena Lee, Harriet Jacobs, and Angelina Grimké, documents for teachers and general readers how African American female self-portraits 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. This anthology also explores how her literary features were further defined during the postbellum era of Jim Crow segregation and civil rights abuses. Readers cannot adequately understand this woman's unique story without learning how and, more importantly, why mental and physical atrocities so gruesome that most people cringe to think of them were inflicted upon her black female self in this land.