The act of journaling or keeping a diary has historically never been an inclusive club, keeping out plenty of people who had interesting lives or thoughts worthy of becoming a keepsake. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, literacy, leisure, and access to paper and candles were rare privileges constrained within the boundaries of race and gender, and so it was often intellectual white men who documented the reality of the places they lived in: the social upheaval, educational failures, and perceived injustices. Though men formed the majority of respected writers, women presented their own personal reflections between the pages of their small books, too. Boston native Katharine Greene Amory kept a journal spanning the years 1775–77 in which she wrote about her life in the backdrop of the American Revolution. Her loyalist leanings placed her writings in a space that has since drawn attention from historians and researchers eager for a viewpoint that seemingly went against the grain. Harriet Arbuthnot, a well-known figure in early nineteenth-century English political circles, was a diarist whose entries on figures such as the Duke of Wellington, the Duchess of Kent, and a young Queen Victoria offered a more humane look at people largely beyond public reach. Arbuthnot had almost unfettered access to members of the British elite, and she spent much of her time making observations that she would later candidly record in her diaries. Amory and Arbuthnot were the prototypes setting expectations for the kind of women who kept diaries; as astute as their writings were, men remained the dominant voice.
The diaries and journals of people of color and specifically black women are rarely included in the public discourse. These were people who were often prohibited by law from taking part in history making. In 1780 South Carolina became one of the first states to pass legislation prohibiting the education of African Americans, whether enslaved or free. While one of the tenets of slavery was ensuring the illiteracy of those enslaved, in another part of the world a colonial white minority government left black people with pens and papers as one of the few avenues of resistance. During the forty-six years of apartheid rule in South Africa, educational opportunities and resources offered to black students were limited and subpar, compelling fourteen teenagers from the poor neighborhood of Soweto to write their daily observations in their diaries. From July to October 1982 seven boys and seven girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen meticulously compiled and reported on the realities around them along with the wider effects on their communities. In 1988 their words were published in Give Us a Break: Diaries of a Group of Soweto Children. Yet little is known of the literary journeys of these young archivists before and after the book’s release.
When it comes to posterity, diaries are an intimate approach at grasping testimonies that are both personal and foundational while also being communal. In the world of black women writers, tucked in these small notebooks is their solace, bone-deep longing, and informed examinations of the places they worked hard to thrive in—and a place where they could discard conventional notions and engage with the brutal, fragile, eerie, and unfamiliar.