Blake or The Huts of America

by Martin R. Delany

  Delany’s Freedmen’s Bureau career was not one of consistent radicalism. In part this must have been due to the insecurity engendered by Fullerton’s charges (an insecurity well warranted in the light of the replacement of the abolitionist Rufus Saxton as assistant commissioner of the Bureau for South Carolina and Georgia by Robert Scott, who–although perhaps not as partisan toward ex-Confederates as Johnson might have preferred–lacked the commitment to racial equality which marked Saxton’s tenure.) In addition, Delany’s attitudes toward radical economic change were, at best, ambivalent. He was, after all, committed to nineteenth-century capitalism; his continual espousal throughout his career of self-help views and of the necessity for Afro-Americans to develop commercial aptitudes prevented him from wholeheartedly endorsing the “proletariat economics” necessary for meaningful economic and social restructuring beneficial to the freedmen. For instance, when, in December, 1865, and January, 1866, Delany investigated what proved to be unfounded rumours of insurrectionary activity among the Sea Island freedmen, his response, while sympathetic to the freedmen, fell far short of endorsing their demands for the confiscation of the planters’ lands. Rather, Delany reiterated his “triple alliance” plan in which capital (from the North), land (belonging to the white South), and labor (provided by the freedmen) would divide profits equally. However, Delany hoped that the freedmen could accrue sufficient capital to purchase land from the planters. In this expectation, he established an agency to act as an economic intermediary between cotton merchants and the freedmen. Although charged with irregularities in October, 1866, Delany was cleared when it became obvious that he was attempting to insure that the freedmen received a fair price for their cotton while also teaching them efficient business practices.[17]

  Delany also embroiled himself in another controversy, one revealing the ambivalence of his attitudes toward the new political equality blacks were then laboriously constructing (imperfectly, as events would prove) in both North and South. In 1867, after Wendell Phillips had proposed the Republican Party nominate a black man for vice-president, Delany wrote The New York Tribune to express his opposition. Neither whites nor blacks were ready for a black vice-president, he argued, resting his rationale largely upon a gradualist philosophy which stressed familiar nineteenth-century homilies: education, moral rectitude and economic self-sufficiency.[18]

  Delany’s residence in the South did not end with his departure from the Freedmen’s Bureau. After an unsuccessful attempt to secure the post of Minister Resident and Consul General to Liberia in 1869, he remained active in South Carolina politics throughout the remaining years of Reconstruction. His role here again was contradictory. At times, especially in the early 1870s, he supported black political participation and the election of black officeholders within the framework of the dominant Republican party.[19] In 1874, however, he bolted from the party and ran for lieutenant-governor on an independent ticket which was supported by dissident (although not necessarily reform-minded) Republicans and some white conservatives. Defeated in a close race by the black incumbent, Richard Gleaves, Delany returned to the Republican party in 1875 and was appointed a trial-justice in Charleston County. Removed later that year in the midst of charges of petty theft committed several years earlier (a charge which although substantially accurate was minor and was motivated by the political ambitions of his detractors), Delany turned to the “redeeming” Democratic party and Wade Hampton in the ferociously-contested gubernatorial election of 1876. His apostasy–from the point of view of most blacks–led to virulent hostility and sparked the Cainhoy riot in September, 1876. After Hampton’s victory, Delany was again appointed a trial-justice in Charleston. As the more moderate elements within the state’s Democratic Party lost sway, Delany became expendable. He was removed from office in 1878 at which time, powerless and apparently destitute, he turned toward Africa once again.[20]

  The story of the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company and its ill-fated ship, the Azor, has been told before. Briefly, the company was formed by a group of Charleston-based blacks as an outgrowth of “Liberia fever” which was developing in South Carolina in the summer of 1877. Early in 1878 the company purchased the Azor, whose maiden voyage in the spring was a disaster for both the emigrants and the company. To what extent Delany, at one time the treasurer of the company, was responsible for the debacle is impossible to determine and probably of little pertinence. Nevertheless, after his most serious attempt at “black capitalism” had failed, he spent his remaining years attempting to secure a federal appointment as minister to Liberia (he was turned down, largely because of his advanced age); campaigning for John Dezendorf, a white Republican congressman in Virginia; and lecturing. He also published, in 1879, a brief and revealing work on ethnology; here he reversed the arguments of racist theorists and also maintained the pure-blooded African to be racially superior to the mulatto. In January, 1885, having returned to his family in Xenia, Ohio, the previous month, Martin R. Delany died at the age of 72.[21]

  Blake; or the Huts of America represents the culmination of Delany’s prewar thinking. In a sense “culmination” is a misnomer; “accumulation” being more accurate, since the novel includes bits and pieces drawn from diverse experiences dating as far back as 1840 and focuses upon specific political concerns (for instance, Southern interest in the annexation of Cuba) which were not of uniform importance to Delany throughout the antebellum period. The novel’s larger, ideological concerns are more omnipresent; yet the very persistence of certain themes also indicates an accumulation of commitment toward particular stances.

  Exactly when Delany began Blake must remain conjecture; however, the earliest date in the novel is November 29, 1852, and it is likely he began formulating his story–in mind, if not on paper–sometime late in 1852 or in 1853. At this time, Delany’s short career at Harvard Medical School had run its course: he had attended the school during the fall semester of 1850 and left sometime in the winter of 1851, probably at the close of the term. In addition, his The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered had placed him at odds with most white and black abolitionists. [22] Probably the most significant factor, however, in Delany’s decision to write Blake was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s runaway success with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. Although Delany never claimed Blake to be an answer to Mrs. Stowe’s best seller, in theme and content, he is clearly writing the antithesis to Mrs. Stowe’s picture of a mulatto hero (Delany preferring a black protagonist), slave docility, Christian endurance and Liberia as the ultimate destination of the successful fugitive slave. (This point has been recognized by Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee in The Negro Caravan when they dispute Vernon Loggins’ description of The Anglo-African Magazine’s fragmentary version of Blake as “among the numerous analogues of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”[23]) In addition, Delany resented Mrs. Stowe’s prominence as an interpreter of the Afro-American slave experience to both whites and blacks. This resentment surfaced in the spring of 1853 in several letters to Frederick Douglass’ Paper in which Delany criticized Mrs. Stowe for her colonizationist sentiments as well as for her prospective role in founding an Industrial School for blacks. [24] The latter proved to be abortive.

  If, however, Delany began Blake sometime in 1852 or 1853, it is also obvious that he wrote part of the novel much later. He refers to the Dred Scott decision of 1857 at one point (although he subsequently reverts to an 1853 date). Still later in the novel there is evidence that Delany either wrote or reworked a section dealing with the African coast he had seen on his trip in 1859 and 1860. Most likely, however, Delany wrote most of the novel while in Canada from 1856 to 1859, and probably his desire for funds to finance his expedition to Africa motivated his interest in publishing Blake as his letter to William Lloyd Garrison suggests.

  The story concerns Henrico Blacus, later to be known as Blake, a pure black West Indian who, under false pretenses, is pirated away from h
is home and brought as a slave (renamed Henry Holland) to the Red River region of Louisiana. There he marries another slave, Maggie, fathered by her owner, Colonel Stephen Franks. After Maggie is sold to the wife of a Northern judge who takes her to Cuba, Henry escapes from the Franks plantation and makes a whirlwind tour of the South during which he spreads his plan of unified rebellion against the Slave Power. Henry then returns to the Franks plantation and aids several slaves in escaping and in following the North Star safely to Canada. At this point, Delany veered away from what was, in part, a conventional story of the breaking-up of a slave family, escape and the long trek north. (The plotted rebellion, of course, was far from conventional.) In Part II, Henry sails to Cuba as a manservant of an American entourage, finds Maggie, and buys her freedom. Now emerging as Blake, he becomes General of a black insurrectionary force and, with the constant aid and poetic encouragement of Placido, the Cuban poet-rebel, plans the overthrow of the Cuban government and the repulsion of Americans intent upon precipitating the annexation of the island by the United States.

  As a montage of personal observations and experience, contemporary political debate and incidents drawn from slave narratives, Blake is a much more complex (and truthful) rendering of mid-nine-teenth century black experience than either Uncle Tom’s Cabin or William Wells Brown’s Clotel Much of Part I (which traces Henry Holland’s peregrinations through the South and Southwest) was drawn from a trip Delany made to Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas in 1839-1840. The character of Henry himself may have been inspired in part by the fourteen-year-old Jamaican boy, Alexander Hendrickure, who was kidnapped and brought to Pittsburgh where he was rescued by Delany and several other blacks in May, 1853. Finally, Delany’s description of the difficulties in traveling through Ohio was also based upon personal experience. He had, on several occasions, lectured in Ohio and while in Marseilles, Ohio, as part of his tour for The North Star in 1848, he was mobbed, but escaped without injury.[25]

  Some of the specific plot devices in Blake may have been drawn directly from the slave narratives. During Henry’s escape from the plantation he carried a bridle enabling him to claim he was searching for his master’s horse; this was almost identical to the strategem used by Henry Bibb during one of his many flights from slavery. The plotted slave revolt in the South has some similarities to a much smaller rebellion led by Lew Cheney in Louisiana in 1837 which Solomon Northrup recounts in his Twelve Years a Slave. [26] Moreover, the Red River region of Louisiana, which Delany used as the locale for his intensive examination of plantation conditions, serves as an important backdrop for detailed accounts of the functioning of slavery as an institution in Northrup’s and Bibb’s narratives as well as Brown’s Clotel. Other incidents in Blake show that Delany was well acquainted with several of the existing narratives as well as the fugitive-slave lore which circulated widely within both abolitionist circles and the abolitionist press.

  It is, however, Delany’s expansive treatment of Cuba which is the most unusual section of the novel and where he breaks with the more traditional abolitionist concerns. Based entirely on whatever reading about Cuban history and society he was able to do, Delany’s treatment of Cuba reflects an uncanny accuracy in portraying Cuban slavery and the complex racial composition of Cuban society as well as the interrelationships between Cuban political developments and the interests of both Southern expansionists and Cuban exiles such as Narciso Lopez, who was garroted by Spanish authorities after leading an unsuccessful attack upon the western coast of Cuba in late summer of 1851. Many of Delany’s own attitudes regarding the Southern threat to Cuban independence (and to the emancipation of slaves in Cuba) were outlined in a series of articles he wrote for The North Star in 1849. In these articles Delany recognized what he would incorporate into fictional form in Blake: the fear of both Southern annexationists and Cuban exiles that Spain would, by liberalizing restrictions upon blacks and concurrently restricting the freedom of slaveholders, eventually “Africanize” Cuba. [27] (The liberal policies of Captain General Juan de la Pezuela in 1854 represented to Southerners and many Cuban slaveholders the most serious of the “Africanization” threats.[28]) In Blake, as in his North Star articles, Delany turned these fears on their heads and argued that Cuban blacks should take charge of their own revolution–that is, free themselves–and implicitly suggests that a black Cuba will lead to the downfall of slavery in the United States. (Delany and many others argued a similar position concerning the prospective role of a black nation in Africa: that an independent African nation, by the demonstration of its capacity for independence and self-elevation, would lead to the eventual downfall of Southern slavery. The agent here, of course, was to be cotton: the development of an alternate source of cotton in Africa would undercut traditional dependency upon the South’s cotton supply.)

  Although his picture of Cuba is generally accurate in broad outlines, Delany juggled some of the details to fit his own narrative and ideological purposes. For example, his clearly didactic portrayal of the Creoles subordinating their own biases for the greater good of a black-led rebellion is at variance with the large numbers of Creoles who in actuality feared “Africanization.” Moreover he uses actual events and people anachronistically to draw the dynamics of Cuban society more sharply than would otherwise be possible. Thus Placido becomes the muse of a rebellion set sometime in the 1850s, although the real poet-rebel was executed in 1844. Furthermore, Delany’s treatment of Southern annexationists, Cuban exiles, and the colonial government compresses into a short period developments occurring over almost a decade.

  But Blake is more than merely a socio-historical account of Southern slavery and Cuban society in the 1850s. It serves, as Delany obviously intended it to do, as the vehicle for the expression of a racial philosophy as radical today as it was when originally conceived. Central to the novel is a racial consciousness which is expressed in a variety of ways. First, there is Delany’s antiwhite posture in which “candlefaces” and “alabasters” appear to be equivalents of contemporary “honkies” and in which Blake declares: “I am for war-war upon the whites.” Equally significant is the affirmation of blackness which is expressed through the use of a pure black as the protagonist and in a persistent attack upon those mulattoes who, by following the racist practices of whites, degraded and abused pure-blooded blacks. Consequently, Delany depicts a mulatto slave-owner, discusses the antiblack practices of the mixed-blood Brown Fellowship Society of Charleston and shows on two occasions mulattoes attempting to capture Henry.[29]

  Racial consciousness, however, meant more to Delany than direct and indirect affirmations of blackness. It clearly involved a self-consciousness conceived in terms of self-reliance and self-elevation. As a Cuban of mixed blood tells Placido: “I never before felt as proud of my black, as I did of my white blood. . . . How sensibly I feel, that a people never entertain proper opinions of themselves, until they begin to act for themselves.” More explicitly, the slave-owner Albertis speaks in terms strikingly similar to many of Delany’s pronouncements of the 1850s when he comments on the possibility of England providing aid to rebellious blacks: “The English must see that something is done before they’ll recognize the doer. Until the Negro does something, the English will let him remain as he is . . .”[30]

  This emphasis upon the necessity for blacks to demonstrate their independence and initiative is even more overt in Delany’s treatment of religion. Reiterating ideas which he had developed earlier, Delany argues through Henry that blacks have too often confused physical and spiritual concerns, waiting for divine intervention in secular affairs rather than assuming full responsibility themselves for alleviating their condition. In discussing Southern slavery, Delany uses Henry to argue that the Christianity of the slaves is also that Christianity of the masters and shows what William Wells Brown and others also depicted: that slaveholders relied upon a bastardized form of Christianity to indoctrinate slaves with servility and docility. These religious (or antireligious) themes are maintained thr
oughout the novel. There is, however, a certain amount of ambivalence: Henry does pray for divine guidance in time of crisis, and the necessity for religious faith is from time to time affirmed. Yet the dominant tone admonishes blacks from relying too heavily upon the religion of their masters.[31]

  As Delany sees religion destroying the independence and self-reliance of blacks, he also recognizes in Blake the potentially crippling effects of slavery. This is not to say that he would agree with Stanley Elkins’ portrayal of the “samboized,” docile slave who had internalized his master’s expectations. Rather, while conscious of the debilitating effects of servitude, Delany also recognizes what the historian Sterling Stuckey has recently expressed: “that slaves were able to fashion a life style and set of values–an ethos–which prevented them from being imprisoned altogether by the definitions which the larger society sought to impose.”[32] In sum, Delany’s portrayal of slavery in Blake encompasses both Nat Turner and Sambo: he is aware of the possibility of “samboization” while also perceiving the potential for rebellion within every slave.