BLAKE or THE HUTS OF AMERICA, a novel
(Beacon Press, Boston, under auspices of Unitarian
Universalist Association of Congregations, introduction by Floyd J. Miller,
Editor: 1970)
By Dr. Martin R. Delany
Book Review—
By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman
Saturday, July 28, 2012
This pre-Civil War novel by the free-born, iconic black
physician, explorer, abolitionist, editor, Union Army Major, and expatriate,
Martin R. Delany, describes the incognito, transcontinental intrigues and escapades
of a peripatetic, fugitive slave, who is the sole organizer of a much-anticipated
slave revolt in the American South and in Cuba, a much-coveted Spanish
slaveholding island colony.
This was the first
novel by a black person to be published in the history of the United States!
That is a rare distinction by itself, apart from its literary merits, which are
considerable!
Sweeping in scope, it takes place on land and on sea,
in Africa, Canada, Cuba, and the U.S. Published
originally in serial fashion in the weekly newspaper, The Anglo-African,
in 1859, it is reputed to be the black man’s reply to Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose 1852 novel, is said to have contributed to the
Civil War. Stowe’s book, which personified slavery in human terms to the “North”
through its melodramatic, empathetic characters, one of whom, “Uncle Tom,” is yet
ingrained—though incorrectly and derisively -- in the black, national subconscious
as a demeaning sycophant. Her book was based upon the earlier autobiography of A.M.E.
preacher, runaway ex-slave, and Canadian emigrant, Josiah Henson, whose The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a
Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (1849), served as the template for Stowe’s bestselling
novel, which even President Abraham Lincoln is claimed to have read and to have
praised.
A detailed
introduction by Floyd J. Miller, Editor, written in
1970, issues a clarion call for the missing, final, six chapters of Blake,
yet to be found, perhaps irretrievably lost. “Henry Blake,” is the Anglicized
surname of the Cuban-born protagonist, “Carolus Henrico Blacus,” the scion of a
well-to-do black Cuban tobacco merchant, who was impressed into slavery, during
his apprenticeship as a seaman. This footnoted novel provides a compelling background
narrative of Delany’s own life in its fictionalized aspiration for Pan-African
liberation, as it tracks his own travels, readings, and life experiences.
Editor Miller piquantly opines, “[A]lthough an author of some ability, Delany
clearly subordinated his writing to his own ideological orientation, and
consequently his only fictional effort marks the artistic epitome of a social
and political position—that is, the creative offering of an activist rather
than the political expressions of an artist... [I]t is this nationalist bent
throughout his career which gave Delany a prominence among blacks exceeded by
few Afro-Americans in his generation.” P.xiii
Delany’s “activism” also manifests itself in
scholarship, as his book, The Principia of Ethnology was published in 1879. The brazen use of the word,
“Principia,” alone, evokes Sir Isaac Newton’s 1687 physics and mathematical classic,
Principia, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy: a very lofty comparative to deign to attain
for any man at any time of any color. Clearly, Delany was no ordinary man!
Nor is his an ordinary book. Part 1 describes slave
life in the United States and Canada, including a harrowing chase, re-capture
and escape via the underground railroad, cross-country, into Canada. Part 2 deals with life at sea, in Cuba, and
in Africa, including color distinctions and differences between Spanish and
American enslavement. The hinge of the book is its compelling, detailed account
of the process of enslavement from the African barracoons— coastal barracks/prisons—through
the fetid, weeks-long trans-Atlantic voyage—the “Middle Passage.” It also
portrays the ensuing sale in the Americas of the “fortunate” survivors, our
ancestors, and their amazing adaptive and coping mechanism rooted in the religion
and faith that produced us!
In that regard, Delany writes: “You must make your religion subserve your interests, as your
oppressors do theirs!” advised Henry. “They use the scriptures to make you
submit, by preaching to you the texts of ‘obedience to your masters’ and
‘standing still to see the salvation,’ and we must now begin to understand the
Bible so as to make it of interest to us….Dat’s gospel talk,” sanctioned Andy.
P.41 Throughout the work, spiritual allusions are ubiquitous, try as he might
to distance himself from its overwhelming, centripetal force.
He also addresses the power and importance of
having money, which is so essential to obtaining and securing one’s freedom. He describes blacks who betray blacks, and
whites who aid blacks. African ship
pilots, he points out, were the norm in African coastal waters and in slave
ports like South Carolina. He recounts tales of Prophet Nat Turner’s “Dismal
Swamp” devotees who cling to the hope of insurrection and freedom, and he makes
reference to Dred Scott and James Somerset, conflicting
Anglo-American judicial decisions which rejected black freedom in America in
1857and after it was initiated in Great Britain in 1772.
That conflict was surely the real cause of the so-called
“American Revolution,” slavery of blacks, as the British Royal Navy enforced
the judicial ban on the African slave trade on the open sea and off the West African
coast, after 1808, which embargo, American slave privateers, including the one
Henry Blake piloted, repeatedly sought to subvert. All these and many other fascinating
things are described most interestingly in the book. Of especial moment are the
“seclusions” those covert insurrection planning meetings all across the country
conducted across the South and in Cuba.
Whatever Delany’s actual ending may have been to
his novel, “the African Freedom War” came, in the guise and form of the
American Civil War and continues to this day “to secure these rights” which
originate in the Magna Carta.
The work is memorable, indeed, unforgettable, and
is commended to all as a true classic, worthy of its name.
#30
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