DELANY

Today I received THE LIFE AND PUBLIC SERVICES OF MARTIN R. DELANY by Frank A. Rollin (1868). I find it hard to put down. I learned of this book while reading another book, PRIDE OF FAMILY by Carole Ione (2001). Ione's great -grandmother is the author of the first book on Delany, for whom she had worked. She adopted the nom de plume of "Frank," then a custom among women writers and poets to lend credibility , given white male biases. I was pleased to learn that Delany had confirmed during his famous exploration of Africa the descent of his own ancestral family from the Niger region. This was doubtless one of his motivations for his making the journey, in addition to scholarly interests . His maternal grandmother, who lived with his family as a child, had told him stories of his heritage before she died at 107 years old. Delany's Mandingo-Golah mother had reinforced those told to him by his Mandingo grandmother. So, when Delany met up with "Agi," Rev. Samuel Crowther, D. D., Church of England's Bishop of Niger, he received satisfactory proof of his genealogical descent from African royalty who had been captured in war and sold abroad into America. For this reason perhaps Frank A. Rollin writes: "The isolated and degraded position assigned the colored precluding the possibility of gaining distinction, whenever one of their number lifts himself by the strength of his own character beyond the prescribed limits , ethnologists apologize for this violation of their prescribed rules, charging it to some few drops of Saxon blood commingling with the African . But in the case of the individual of whom we write, he stands proudly before the country the blackest of the black , presenting in himself a giant's powers wrapped in chains , and evidencing in his splendid career the fallacy of the old partisan theory of negro inferiority and degradation ." "Introduction, Charleston, S.C. October 19th, 1868."