"Face to Face": Localizing Lucy Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light

Were it not for Lucy Delaney's c.1891 narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light; or, Struggles for Freedom, she might not be remembered today. However, as Delaney's preface notes, "[S]o many of my friends have urged me to give a short sketch of my varied life that I have consented, and herewith present it for the consideration of my readers" (vii). Delaney's brief narrative of that varied life actually begins with the false enslavement of her mother before Delaney's birth and then follows Delaney through a range of masters and mistresses of the Berry and Wash families. As she grows, her own family is gradually sundered by slavery—by the sale of her father, the escape of her sister and an attempted escape by her mother, the sale of her mother, and, finally, her own threatened sale and attempted escape (after Delaney clashes repeatedly with her last mistress, Martha Berry Mitchell). Delaney's mother, Polly Wash, though, stumbles on a now little-known set of legal provisions and files suit both for her freedom and, in a separate action, for Delaney's. Most of Delaney's narrative follows the progress of her own freedom suit, through seventeen months in the St. Louis Jail (where her master demanded she be placed for what he considered to be safekeeping), a set of climatic courtroom scenes during which Delaney is represented by Edward Bates (who would later become Abraham Lincoln's Attorney General), and, finally, freedom through a victory in court. Her narrative concludes with the complex juxtaposition of her sadness at the destruction of her family (she is, for example, reunited with her father only to find him unable to return to the life in St. Louis he had lost decades before) and her deep satisfaction at becoming a key figure in St. Louis's Black community.

Delaney's text has attracted only limited notice, though, in part because it seems an anachronism: Delaney was a contemporary of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, and a host of others who published their slave narratives while the American system of chattel slavery was still in full force, but her narrative is a contemporary of the next generation of Black texts, such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's novel Iola Leroy, Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert's history The House of Bondage, the later and more history-centered texts of figures like Douglass and Brown, and the African American "uplift books" published at the end of the nineteenth century.¹

This essay shares new information on the personal and local motivations and contexts behind Delaney's narrative and, in so doing, offers a reading of From the Darkness as a public document designed to participate in the world of St. Louis in the 1890s, even though most of it focuses on events of the 1840s. The essay thus examines a set of intertwined stories. First, it tells the story of how the narrative survived near oblivion and was reborn in the late twentieth century; in revising this story, it draws heavily on the contexts of the book's late nineteenth-century composition and publication. Both of these stories, in turn, intersect with an examination of Delaney's postbellum community (specifically Black Masonic) activism. This set of biographical details identifies the narrative's probable intended audience as, primarily, Black women in St. Louis. Ultimately, all of these stories demonstrate that the central goal of Delaney's narrative was personal legacy-building—specifically, to use the personal to make larger arguments about how the next generation(s) should remember slavery and both represent and understand Blackness. Telling these stories allows the essay to conclude with a rereading of key elements of Delaney's narrative (including some that have baffled previous critics) as well as a rereading of some recent critics' dismissals of some Black women's texts of the 1890s. This rereading asserts both the importance of From the Darkness as an individual text and the broader need to consider the public place(s) of Delaney's story—rather than just her...