Writing over Haiti: Black Avengers in Martin Delany’s Blake

On February 4, 1862, Senator Charles Sumner introduced the bill by which the United States of America would officially recognize the existence of Liberia and Haiti. Both countries had been central to political debates about and within black American communities since their inception. It had been the American Colonization Society’s plan to send freed African slaves and free U.S.-born blacks to Africa. Thus was born Liberia, a version of black autonomy palatable to mainstream white America and backed by Quakers and Southern slave owners alike.¹ By contrast, since its enslaved and free colored population had risen in 1791, the French colony of Saint-Domingue had been an example of black self-determination and the fulfillment of a slave owner’s worst fears. Reaching independence as Haiti in 1804 had also led to a diplomatic impasse, as the major world powers, including the United States, refused to officially acknowledge that slave rebellion could lead to the birth of a nation.

Ostracized among the nations, Haiti nevertheless remained a beacon of hope for some. On the eve of Civil War, Haiti still seemed a viable alternative to living in the United States or emigrating to Liberia for many among the U.S. black population. In 1860, Haitian President Fabre Geffrard launched an aggressive new campaign to encourage U.S. black emigration. The scheme had its detractors, among them activist and writer Martin R. Delany, who was active in a media campaign opposing the efforts of journalist and publisher James Redpath, Geffrard’s agent in the U.S.

As Sumner’s bill was being discussed in Congress, the Weekly Anglo-African serially published Martin Delany’s novel Blake; or, the Huts of America (1861–1862). The massive, organized black uprising presented in Blake’s plot is connected with—if not rooted in—the Haitian Revolution. Yet Haiti is mentioned all but twice in the entire novel, only once by name. Blake mentions it indirectly at a meeting of the revolutionary Grand Council, when he states that “the like of tonight’s gathering, save in a neighboring island years before any of us had an existence, in this region is without a parallel.”² That the island was Haiti would have been obvious to a mid-nineteenth century reader. This notoriety was part of the problem Delany meant to remedy. Delany hoped to replace the Haitian tale of collective black heroism with a new, fictional one rooted in historical and current fact. With Blake, Delany meant to write over Haiti.

Haiti was better known for its massacres than the complexity of its politics. That blacks could kill confirmed their alleged savagery; that they could be organized enough, efficient enough, political enough to foment a revolution and build a new country remained—to use Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s term—unthinkable. This notion “was based not so much on empirical evidence as on an ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants… Although it left room for variations, none of these variations included the possibility of a revolutionary uprising in the slave plantations, let alone a successful one leading to the creation of an independent state.”³ Trouillot does not describe how this ontology came to be; but I will argue here that the “unthinkability” of the Haitian Revolution owed in no small part to the extensive treatment of black revolt—or failed revolution—in Western literature and art.

Slave revolt was a constant—if generally unsuccessful—threat to slave colonies throughout the Americas throughout the modern era. It provided the backdrop to what I call the trope of the black avenger.⁴ The trope developed as the Atlantic slave trade became central to European economies, in the wake of Aphra Behn’s seminal novella Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave (1688). Early black avenger variations systematically play up the individual against the mass, the courageous prince against the cowardly common slave, emphasizing the hero in order to deflate the collective. On the eve of the Haitian Revolution, black revolt—though a tangible menace⁵—was presented as more of a narrative plot than...