Blake or The Huts of America

by Martin R. Delany

  “I will never submit–I will never submit to the base and degrading restrictions! I’ll die first!” indignantly exclaimed Madame Montego as she sat with other ladies at the bedside of the disabled and suffering Placido.

  “We will not,” replied Madame Carmino. “We are Creoles, and, take our people generally, are the most numerous part of the population. I don’t see why we should be put down by a set of intruders.”

  “We will not submit!” added Carolus Blacus. “This, ladies, you may depend upon.”

  “Thank God,” exclaimed Madame Montego, “there is yet some hope!”

  Blake during the whole of these scenes was grave and sober, having nothing to say; Montego was thoughtless with determined look, while Gondolier occasionally gave his head a significant nod to one side which all present comprehended.

  That evening the seclusion met in Council against the most intense sensation. The bedside of Placido was visited by every member again and again, with sighs, tears, prayers and expressions of vengeance by Gofer Gondolier, who had no scruples in assuming to himself this particular duty of political dispensation. The Council sat the whole evening, the members dispersing after daylight the next morning.

  That day early in the afternoon Ambrosina Cordora, the daughter of Madame Montego, and Seraphina Blacus took a promenade through a portion of the Almeda. When in a thronged part of the thoroughfare, Ambrosina accidently came against a lady with whom there was a gentleman. Politely bowing she made acknowledgements for the balk, which the lady acknowledged with a bow and passed on. The man, however, gave her a rude push with an oath and other hard language.

  On returning she passed by a store (a fancy dry goods shop) in which sat the man whom she had encountered with the lady, who proved to be the proprietor of the shop. Snatching up a horsewhip, which seems to have been secured for the purpose, running out and seizing her by the breast of the dress rending it in tatters, he dealt upon her person over the arms, neck, head, and face the most cruel punishment, to the sad disfiguring of her features for the time. Her cries brought no white persons to her relief–the blacks dared not have attempted it.

  With the clothes half torn from her person, the distressed young woman made as hasty retreat as possible to her home, rushing into the house, falling upon the neck of her mother with a screech, as that lady sat in the drawing room in conversation with a number of others, just then recounting their sufferings as a class.

  “O! My God, my God!” screamed the mother. “What does all this mean?”

  “I see it! I see!” exclaimed Madame Sebastian, “’tis but a continuance of the outrages commenced on Placido. O gracious Heavens, is there no remedy for this!”

  “If this is the way we are to be treated, ” said Maggie Blake, who was then residing in the Montego family, “for my own part I would rather be dead at once! O, must I again become a slave! Is there no mercy in Heaven for us!”

  “O! This is dreadful, dreadful!” exclaimed Madame Blacus, wife of Carolus. “In God’s name what’s to become of us!”

  “God only knows!” responded Madame Barbosa, throwing herself carelessly upon a sofa.

  “Lord have mercy on us!” implored Abyssa Gondolier, clasping her hands, the tears streaming down her cheeks as she looked upon the tattered, torn, and abused beautiful girl, still clinging to the neck of her distressed mother. “Have mercy on——”

  “Ef He don’t I will!” interrupted Gondolier who just entered in time to catch the exclamation of his wife, he having learned of the outrage previously in the streets.

  “I wish I was dead, so I do!” sobbed the poor girl, amidst the most distressing weeping.

  “God–!”

  “Stop, Gondolier, don’t blaspheme! Remember upon whom we depend for aid,” interrupted Madame Montego as he stood with eyes fixed upon her maltreated child. “Offend not Him who gave us being.”

  “Thank you, Madame, for the advice; I won’t! All honor and praise be to God! But we have a race of devils to deal with that would make an angel swear. Educated devils that’s capable of everything hellish under the name of religion, law, politics, social regulations, and the higher civilization; so that the helpless victim be of the black race. Curse them! I hate ’em! Let me into the streets and give me but half a chance and I’ll unjoint them faster than ever I did a roast pig for the palace dinner table.”

  “Yes, Gondolier, I know your desires; but we must be prudent and use no rashness at such a time as this especially. ‘He that killeth with the sword, will be slain with the sword,’ remember,” admonished Madame Montego.

  “Madame Montego, your gospel talking is very good,” replied Gondolier, “but the same book tells me, ‘whosoever sheds man’s blood shall his blood be shed.’ As they shed the blood of our brother two days ago by dashing him on the pavement, and the blood of our sister here today by a horsewhip, I would like to shed theirs with a knife,” replied he.

  “We must not exasperate, nor even aggravate the whites, Señor Gondolier,” remarked Madame Barbosa, “as we must guard against making bad worse.”

  “I wish I was a man, I’d lay the city in ashes this night, so I would,” retorted Ambrosina.

  “Stop, my child,” admonished the mother, “if you were a man suited to such an undertaking, you would have better sense than to attempt it at an improper time.”

  “Yes, yes, my child, you must think of these things and not desire that which would only precipitate us into more trouble,” added Madame Blacus.

  “One thing I do know, if our men do not decide on something in our favor, they will soon be called to look upon us in a state of concubinage; for such treatment as this will force every weak-minded woman to place herself under the care of those who are able to protect them from personal abuse. If they have no men of their associations who can, they must find those who will!–O, my God, the thought is enough to drive me distracted–I’ll destroy myself first!” said Ambrosina, startling every person present.

  “You speak rationally, my child, regarding yourself, that is just what white men desire to do, drive colored women as a necessity to seek their protection that they may become the subjects of their lust. Do you die first before thinking of such a thing: and let what might come, before yielding to such degradation as that I would be one of the first to aid in laying the city in ashes!” replied the mother.

  “What say you to this, General?” exclaimed Gondolier, pointing at the girl, who renewed her lamentations with those of her mother, as Montego, who hearing of the circumstance had hastened to the mansion and just entered the room.

  “By yonder blue heavens, I’ll avenge this outrage!” said Montego, embracing the mother and daughter as they sat wailing.

  “I thank God, then there is still some hope! My lot is cast with that of my race, whether for weal or woe,” exclaimed Ambrosina, with brightened countenance; when Gondolier, rejoicing as he left the room to spread among the blacks an authentic statement of the outrage:

  “Woe be unto those devils of whites, I say!”

  *A similar circumstance really transpired in Wheeling, Va., between a white man called a “gentleman” and a black man.

  Notes to Text

  1 Natchez-under-the-Hill was also renowned as a center for gambling and prostitution and housed a transient population of boatmen, wagoners, and professional gamblers. These activities, however, were in decline by the 1830s. See D. Clayton James, Antebellum Natchez (Baton Rouge, La., 1968), p. 169.

  2 “Hut” is Delany’s equivalent of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Cabins.” Solomon Northrup, however, had previously described slave quarters as “huts” in his Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn, N.Y., 1853; reprint ed., Baton Rouge, La., 1968), pp. 6, 188. Delany may also have been influenced by the name “The Hut” given the small cottage in which he lived at Chatham, Canada West, in the late 1850s. (My appreciation to Victor Ullman for this information, which Mr. Ullman received in an interview with Stanley J. Smith, Ingersoll, Ontario.) See also Delany’s letter to the
Rev. James Theodore Holly from the “King Street Hut,” Chatham, January 15, 1861, in the Chatham Tri-Weekly Planet, January 21, 1861, p. 3.

  3 This attitude was shared by at least two of the many ex-slaves who wrote narratives. See Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave and Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave–both reprinted in Puttin’ On Ole Massa, edited by Gilbert Osofsky (New York, 1969), pp. 147, 166, 215.

  4 Compare this song with Harriet Tubman singing “Farewell, oh farewell’ as she began her flight from slavery. Sarah H. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Auburn, N.Y., 1869), p. 18.

  5 Ballard is referring to the Dred Scott decision of 1857 in which the Supreme Court held blacks not to be citizens of the United States and which also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional. Ballard’s final statement–“that persons of African descent have no rights that white men are bound to respect”–is almost a direct quotation from Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s opinion. The distinction between suffrage and franchise was one Delany frequently drew. See, for instance, the report of a lecture he gave in Monrovia, Liberia, July 27, 1859, in The Weekly Anglo-African, October 1, 1859, p.2.

  6 The original version of this chapter, as it appeared in The Anglo-African Magazine, read “little Joe.” Delany corrected this for the serialization of the complete novel in The Weekly Anglo-African.

  7 An incident of this sort was not merely the product of Delany’s imagination, as the narratives of Solomon Northrup and Peter Still indicate. However, Harriet Beecher Stowe claimed the kidnaping of free blacks was not common. See her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston, 1854; reprint ed., New York, 1968), p. 345; Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn, N.Y., 1853; reprint ed., Baton Rouge, La., 1968); and Kate E. R. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, Being the Personal Recollections of Peter Still and His Wife, Vina . . . (Syracuse, 1856).

  8 Fort Towson was located about seven miles from the Red River in Oklahoma, then Indian Territory, in 1824 and was abandoned in 1854. It was a mile east of Doaksville, which was the trading center, site of the Indian Agency, and, in the 1850s, the capital of the Choctaw Nation. The Choctaws first moved to this area in early 1831 after having been pushed from their lands east of the Mississippi by white settlers in violation of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The Chickasaws ceded their lands east of the Mississippi to the United States in 1832, and in January 1837, the two tribes signed a treaty at Doaksville by which the Chickasaws purchased a tract of land from the Choctaws for $530,000 and in turn secured citizenship within the Choctaw nation. Friction developed as a result of the Chickasaw’s minority status within the ostensibly united nation, and the two tribes separated in 1855. Some of the Choctaws had been slaveholders in Mississippi, and a few of the leaders brought their slaves to the large cotton plantations they established upon their new lands along the Red River. Both the Choctaws and the Chickasaws were strong supporters of the Confederacy during the Civil War. See W. B. Morrison’s paper, “Fort Towson,” in Chronicles of Oklahoma, III (June 1930), pp. 226-227, 231; Angie Debo, The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (Norman, Oklahoma, 1934), pp. 59-60; Grant Foreman, A History of Oklahoma (Norman, Oklahoma, 1942), pp. 13-14, 24, 36; and Annie Heloise Abel, The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist (Cleveland, 1915), pp. 155-157.

  9 Culver is referring to the Seminole Wars of 1817-1818 and 1835-1842 in which blacks and Seminoles fought side by side in Florida. See Kenneth W. Porter’s paper, “Negroes and the Seminole War, 1817-1818,” in the Journal of Negro History, XXXVI (July 1951), 302-322, and his “Negroes and the Seminole War, 1835-1842,” in the Journal of Southern History, XXX (November 1964), 427-440.

  10 Delany probably was referring to Chartres Street in New Orleans.

  11 Delany had previously recognized the extent of black and mulatto participation in New Orlean’s commercial life in his Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (Philadelphia, 1852; reprint ed., New York, 1968), p. 109. For more recent accounts of the fluidity and relative “openness” of New Orleans ante-bellum society, see Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., “Early New Orleans Society: A Reappraisal,” in the Journal of Southern History, XVIII (February 1952), 32-36; and Roger A. Fischer, “Racial Segregation in Ante Bellum New Orleans,” in the American Historical Review, LXXIV (February 1969), 926-937, esp. pp. 928-930, 934.

  12 Delany may have been the first to comment on the sorrowful songs of the Mississippi boatmen. Compare this description with that given by W. E. B. Du Bois in his essay, “Of the Sorrow Songs,” in The Souls of Black Folk (originally published, 1903; paperback ed., Greenwich, Conn., 1961), pp. 181-191-especially p. 183, where Du Bois writes that spirituals and other black music “are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.”

  13 This may not necessarily be a derivation from Stephen Collins Foster’s “Old Folks at Home,” first published in 1851. Since Foster (1816-1863) grew up in Pittsburgh and married the daughter of Dr. Andrew McDowell, a local physician under whom Delany began his study of medicine in the 1830s (Frank A. Rollin, pseud., Life and Public Service of Martin R. Delany, . . . [Boston, 1868], p. 46), it is conceivable that Foster learned the song from Delany, or that both drew upon a common source.

  14 Delany’s portrait of the Brown Fellowship Society, organized in Charleston in 1790, is essentially accurate. See E. Horace Fitchett, “The Traditions of the Free Negro in Charleston, South Carolina,” in the Journal of Negro History, XXV (April 1940), 139-152. Delany’s antagonism toward mulattoes who practiced color prejudice persisted throughout his life. See his letter to The North Star, June 22, 1849, p. 2, in which he denounced “Quadroon Societies” and “Dead-Head Societies” as “ridiculous feints at superiority of descent” and as emanating “from slavery, ignorance and arrogance.” After the Civil War, he repeated this attack, claiming the societies to be “a relic of the degraded past.” The New National Era, August 31, 1871, p. 3.

  15 Following Nat Turner’s rebellion of 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia, there were reports of large numbers of fugitives hiding out in the Great Dismal Swamp which ran from Southampton into North Carolina. See Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1943), p. 308; and Edmund Jackson, “The Virginia Maroons,” in The Liberty Bell: By Friends of Freedom (Boston, 1852), pp. 143-151. Delany’s remembrance of Nat Turner as a symbol of slave resistance was not unique. See Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York, 1969), pp. 128-129, 235; and The Weekly Anglo-African, October 29, 1859, p. 3.

  16 Charleston and Charlestown were both in that part of Virginia which is now West Virginia. John Brown was hanged at Charlestown on December 2, 1859, following his unsuccessful raid at Harper’s Ferry. The raid had been preceded by a Provisional Constitutional Convention at Chatham, Canada West, in May 1858, at which Delany was active. See the Chatham Tri-Weekly Planet, November 5, 1859, p. 2. Delany’s description of Charlestown above is equally appropriate for nearby Harper’s Ferry.

  17 Abolitionist forces in Kentucky made an unsuccessful attempt to elect to the 1849 state Constitutional Convention candidates favoring gradual emancipation. Although abolitionists retained some support in Kentucky, gradual emancipation remained an unfulfilled goal. J. Winston Coleman, Jr., Slavery Times in Kentucky (Chapel Hill, 1940), pp. 314-317.

  18 Didacticism of this sort was not untypical for Delany. Moreover, his emphasis on the North Star as the guiding light for the fugitive slave was not unusual as a cursory glance at slave narratives demonstrates. See the narratives of Henry Bibb and William Wells Brown in Puttin’ On Ole Massa, edited by Gilbert Osofsky (New York, 1969), pp. 131, 133, 146, 205, 217.

  19 A similar stratagem was depicted by William Wells Brown in Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter (London, 1853; reprint ed., New York, 1969), pp. 168-170, and in a speech
by Brown to the New England Anti-Slavery Convention reported in The Liberator, June 4, 1858, p. 2.

  20 This is almost identical with the song Harriet Tubman and a group of fugitives were reported to have been singing while approaching the Suspension Bridge leading from New York State into Canada. See Sarah H. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Auburn, N.Y., 1869), pp. 32-33.

  21 As the “mulatto gentleman” is a minister (see text, pp. 155-156), Delany could well be describing the Rev. William C. Monroe, a black Episcopal minister in Detroit who was active in Delany’s emigration movement in the 1850s and who sailed with Delany in 1859 to Liberia, where he died a few months after arrival. See also, pp. 188-189 of the text.

  22 Compare this scene with Henry Bibb’s comment concerning the importance of the marriage ceremony for fugitive slaves. This is in Bibb’s narrative in Puttin’ On Ole Massa, edited by Gilbert Osofsky (New York, 1969), p. 78.

  23 This is clearly Phillip A. Bell. See text, p. 188, where Delany uses the initials “B.A.P.” as further identification. Bell ran an intelligence office (which was both a mail drop and an employment office) in New York in the early 1850s. Delany included a brief sketch of Bell in The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (Philadelphia, 1852; reprint ed., New York, 1968), pp. 102-103. Bell served as an editor of The Colored American in New York in the late 1830s, and during the Civil War he edited The Pacific Appeal in San Francisco.

  24 Albertis is referring to the process of “coartacion” by which the slave was given the right to purchase his freedom with funds earned outside of his master’s jurisdiction. Although more difficult on the plantation than in urban areas, coartacion, in the words of Herbert S. Klein, “was never seriously challenged and it steadily fed energetic and able Negro slaves into the free colored population.” Klein, Slavery in the Americas; A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago, 1967), pp. 98-99, 154, 196-200; quotation on p. 199.