Blake or the Huts of America

Rating:
Summary: One of the most important African American texts ever
Review: When Martin Delany wrote this book, he was along with his sometime collaborator Frederick Douglass, one of the two most prominent African American leaders in the country, and like Douglass his reputation extended beyond the United States to England and other parts of Europe. Unlike Douglass, Delany was even known in West Africa from which he recently returned where he had negotiated with AFrican leaders about with his economic and political plans. Indeed, in the months while Blake was published as a serial in the Anglo-African newspaper, Delany toured the US lecturing on Africa wearing African robes!

Delany's book is one in a series of texts written by African American authors in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Despite Stowe's assistance to this project by writing small poems introducing it,one of the sub texts of Blake is to show the difference between the realities of Slavery and the picture Stowe painted in Uncle Tom. Indeed, Daleny's hero Henry Blake is placed in the exact same place time and position as Uncle Tom, but instead of heroically suffering and dying and inspiring while refusing to physically resist slavery, Henry Blake runs away from slavery to organize an international revolution against slavery.

(To be fair, Stowe admits in Uncle Tom's Cabin her book made slavery seem nicer than it really was because she believed slavery was so awful that the white Northern readers she targeted would be too disgusted to read a book that accurately described it. Moreover, by the time Delany wrote Blake, Stowe's views had become more militant. She had written Dred, a book whose Black hero leads a slave revolt.)

Blake reflects the deep pessimism of the period, ironically only a few years before the end of slavery. In fact, though he was born free and had no fear of the fugitive slave laws, Delany had left the United States and moved to Chatham, Ontario by the time he wrote Blake, so despairing he was of the future of Black men. Delany urged Black people to leave the United States and proposed building an independent Black nation in Central America that could be a base for liberation of the slaves in all of the Americas.

This task is taken upon in fictional guise by Henry Blake the hero of this novel. He escapes and goes on a travel through the slave and free states of the US, in a round based on the travels in Uncle Tom, on an itnerary that had become standard for books about slavery in this period. Blake's conclusion is that the slaves and even well-off freed blacks lack the leadership, culture, or education to lead a revolt of their own.

The solution to this problem is found by Blake when Blake reveals that he is actually Henricus Blaccus, a distinguished, cultured Afro-Cuban captured into American Slavery. He leaves the US for Cuba and rejoins a company of similarly well off, cultured, and artistic Afro-Cubans conspiring to overthrow slavery and Spanish rule and make Cuba into a base for African liberation. What is interesting is that Delany depicts these Afro-Cuba conspirators holding opulent cultural evenings rich with poetry and with artistic playing of the "African Banza." Possession of our own culture, and a distinguished and even aristocratic elite, seem to Delany to be the prerequisites of a successful revolution.

We don't have all of the copies of the Anglo African which published this as a serial. What we have ends when the conspirators appear to be about to launch their revolt in Havana, but we do have a fascinating look at Delany a Black leader of the 19th Century whose ideas and outlook was quite similar to that of Black militant leaders of the late 20th Century.

Besides its message, the descriptions of life under slavery in the US, make this book a central text to truly understand slavery and the AFrican American response. Delany's journalism in anti-slavery publications about Cuba and the Poet Placido who he fictionally places at the head of the Afro-Cuban rebels, indicates he was misinformed about the opportunities for Afro-Cubans, the severity of slavery in Cuba, and the degree to which Placido's poetry identified with his African, as opposed to European, lineage. Yet, Delany's fictionalization of a revolutionary cultural nationalist upheaval launched in Cuba makes his plan for Pan Africanist revolt against slavery seem vivid exciting and unique.

It is also a testament to Delany's leadership, that once the Civil War began, he dropped his belief there was no hope for freedom in the United States. He militantly campaigned for African Americans to join the Union Army. In fact, Delany became a Major in the US Army, the highest ranked African American during the Civil War other than a few doctors who severed in all Black hospitals.