Rethinking Delany’s Blake

Martin Delany’s Blake was at once the most important and the least consequential work of fiction published by a black writer in the nineteenth century. Most important, because of the intellectual scope of its representations, least consequential because it caught the attention of almost no one for nearly one hundred years after its publication.¹

Consider first of all its importance. No work of American fiction proposed a more ambitious investigation of the history and vicious social conditions that kept driving the emergent American Empire in the nineteenth century, wracked as it was by its original racist sin of slavery. But while we now recognize Blake as “one of the more profound novels of the entire ante-bellum oeuvre,” that view has been a long time coming (Horne 13). Some of the reasons for its neglect are easy to see. It was only published in serial form in two ephemeral black periodicals. Delany himself broke off the publication of the first serialization (in 1859) after some two-dozen chapters, and historical misfortune stepped in to truncate the second, which survives in only a single copy (at the Library of Congress). Besides, just at the moment of its second serialization, 1861–1862, the Civil War broke out. A long eclipse settled over the intellectual war that Blake was bringing to transnational racism.

Blake was written and published when one of racism’s last and greatest dominions, American slavocracy, was struggling to secure itself against “the continual increase of liberal principles” that were a growing threat to its power (Blake chapter 1). In this respect, Blake is part of the movement that for decades had been working, unsuccessfully if not ineffectually, to terminate what was daintily called “that peculiar institution.” Delany was one among an inspiring company of black men and women who struggled against it. They founded newspapers and periodicals to raise black and white consciousness, they organized regular meetings and conventions to form common policies for practical action, they spoke, they wrote, they worked in their localities and neighborhoods and traveled far to build community solidarity. In every one of these endeavors Martin Delany was not only active throughout his life, he was a commanding figure and recognized as such.

The ideas, scenes, and arguments presented in Blake all reflect that rich life experience. He founded two newspapers in his lifetime, one early and the second late, and he co-founded, with Frederick Douglass, the legendary North Star. Besides Blake, he published six other major books as well as a handful of less substantial works. He was a practicing physician and a recognized scientific author. He worked closely with nearly every single important black activist of the period and helped John Brown as he was forming his plans and marshaling his forces for the attack at Harper’s Ferry. A recognized black intellectual with an unusually—perhaps uniquely—broad range of skills and interests, he sought to realize his ideas in the real world of society and politics.

Blake clearly reflects his conviction that intellectual commitments require practical action. Like Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–1857) or Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Blake was written to bring about actual social change. Its core ideas had been maturing in Delany’s mind since at least the late-1830s, and he had been promoting them ever since in both fact and print. It was the appalling Dred Scott decision (1857), however, that finally drove him to write what would be his only work of fiction. Blake represents the polemic of an exasperated imagination, reflecting the longue durée of a tormented history that did not end with the end of the Confederacy. For the racist past is not dead, as Faulkner almost said. It’s not even past, as old names and recent events keep reminding us to this day: Charleston, SC; Ferguson, MO; Baltimore, MD.

Blake imagines escaping that history through a vision of black redemption. And its imagination, it seems to me, is successful. But sown with that success, like tares among the wheat, is the history of Blake’s unsuccess, its nearly one-hundred-year disappearance...