This chapter provides background information about the literary mode known as regionalism and explains what is queer about New England regionalism. It analyzes White-authored New England regionalist fiction from the 1865-1915 period, using Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel Deephaven as its primary example, to argue that White-authored New England regionalism imagines independent, queer lives for White women characters, living outside of the heteronuclear family. The chapter then turns to examine the underacknowledged African-American women’s tradition of New England regionalism, a tradition that reworks conventions of the earlier, White-dominated one. This African-American tradition begins in the nineteenth century and extends well into the twentieth: Harriet Wilson, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Dorothy West, and Ann Petry all limn the contours of New England life for Black women, engaging and claiming an inheritance of defiant, queer New England character while exploring the limitations and violence of that inheritance when understood as only available to White people.

Watch Night began when enslaved and free African Americans kept vigil, to sing and pray, on December 31, 1862, as they awaited news in the morning of the Emancipation Proclamation. Their optimism gave way to the nominal freedoms and rights of citizenship that African American families and communities experienced in the wake of emancipation and during Reconstruction. African American writers of these decades introduce descriptions of African landscapes, customs, values, and histories as metaphors for the uncertain status and tentative futures their people confronted after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. They associate the African continent with a variety of meanings: the brutal history of slavery; the erasure or dismissal of influential cultures and intellects; a persistent legacy of resistance to oppression and rebellion against bondage; the fugitive status of African Americans in their own country and as exiles abroad; and the precarity of racial progress even as Black schools, churches, and other self-sufficient institutions are established by formerly enslaved Black southern communities.