(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.
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