The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins

Chapter Four: Finding Mother Africa: Of One Blood and Hopkins’s National Vision

131 chapter four FINDING MOTHER AFRICA Of One Blood and Hopkins’s National Vision Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine. —W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk In Hagar’s Daughter, when the title character discovers that the child she thought she had lost is alive, she pleads with her husband: “I beseech you, lose not a moment, bring her to me—bring my Jewel, my daughter, to my arms” (279). Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self similarly imagines a mother longing for her children, but rather than a personal, biological mother like Hagar, it is the National Mother—Mother Africa—who pursues her children and draws them to her. This novel provides an appropriate conclusion to this study. Motherlessness and the recovery of the pre-oedipal and National Mother are most explicitly depicted in Of One Blood, Hopkins’s last complete novel.1 The missing mother is strangely present, a ghostlike force who guides her children and actively draws them to her. Making explicit the quest motif that more subtly appeared in Hopkins’s previous novels, Of One Blood reaches highs and lows heretofore unseen in her novels. It imagines the pinnacle of Stuart Hall’s notion of a “glorious past” featuring Ethiopianism—the belief that Ethiopia is the true source of Western civilization—as the backdrop for its plot in which the protagonist rediscovers the African National Mother and is crowned king of Ethiopia. 132 The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins Motherless Child Set in the 1880s, Of One Blood tells the story of Reuel Briggs, a medical student passing for white. Reuel’s gift in the arts of mysticism and mesmerism enables him to restore the beautiful soprano Dianthe Lusk to consciousness after her apparently fatal injury in a train wreck. He marries Dianthe and then sets off on an archaeological expedition to Africa in order to earn money to support his bride. While there, he discovers the thriving lost city of Meroe, evidence that Ethiopia is the true source of civilization. Meanwhile, Reuel’s duplicitous friend, Aubrey Livingston, uses his own gifts of mesmerism—along with blackmail—to seduce Dianthe . Hearing of Aubrey’s betrayal, and learning that he, Dianthe, and Aubrey are all siblings—the offspring of the slave, Mira, and her master , Aubrey Livingston Sr.—Reuel returns to the United States to save Dianthe, but too late. Having poisoned Dianthe, Aubrey takes his own life, and Reuel returns to Meroe to marry Queen Candace and fulfill his destiny as king.2 As we have come to expect of Hopkins’s oeuvre, in its focus on the search for the missing mother, Of One Blood’s governing ethos is motherlessness , located primarily in the novel’s protagonist, Reuel Briggs. A morose character, Reuel distances himself from his fellow medical students, who speculate on his origins and find him mysterious with “apparently no relatives” (444). The key missing relative is, of course, his mother. By passing, Reuel has followed the oedipal directive of denying his mother, Mira, a former slave and the source of his “black blood,” in hopes of identifying with the National Father of dominant white society. Denying his personal mother, he thereby also denies the National African Mother. Outwardly he distances himself from his heritage, expressing to Aubrey his “horror of discussing the woes of unfortunates, tramps, stray dogs and cats and Negroes” (449). He seeks instead identification with the National Father, indicated by his longing for the approval of the medical men at Harvard. When Dianthe arrives at the hospital, critically injured in a train accident, Reuel eagerly desires to help the injured woman, yet his desire is not entirely altruistic. He recognizes this as an opportunity to demonstrate to his colleagues and superiors his ability to “reanimate” the patient whom all Of One Blood and Hopkins’s National Vision 133 doctors agree to be beyond hope (464). He runs the reanimation session much like a magic show, asking each doctor present to “individually examine the patient” and offer a diagnosis before he restores Dianthe’s consciousness , to the amazement of his audience (467). His performance has the desired effect. Word of his success spreads quickly through the white medical community: The scientific...