Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins (1825-1911) is an African American writer and antislavery, women’s rights, and temperance activist. Harper aimed at the upliftment of African Americans, and in particular African American women in the diverse ways that she could. Her campaigns at promoting the same has rendered her “one of the best-known and most respected black women of the 19th century.” She has restricted her literary capabilities to the causes she stood for: abolition of slavery, racial equality, suffrage and women’s rights.

The poem “I Wear an Easy Garment” is given the alternative title ‘Free Labour.’ This echoes the theme as the free labour comes across to the onlookers as an easy garment the average labourer wears. The garment may be the smile he adorns that is taken for granted by the capitalist class he works for. The speaker thus protests against the practice of slavery practiced amongst free African Americans. The garment does not project the tears of anguish over the years that the toiling slave registers. He does not exhibit the tears during the whole of his lifetime, and even during his passage to the grave. The tears are hopeless, as the slave is. He has no hope to live, for, hope is the primary requisite for those who aspire to live.…