[In the following excerpt, Gayle presents an overview of The Condition and Blake, concluding that Delany's rejection of the tradition of the Black novel that existed in America up to his time took away the foundation for later Black writers.]

… [Delany] was firm in his conviction that “the man who has suffered the wrong is the man to demand redress—the man struck is the man to cry out—We must be our own representatives and advocates.”¹ Only men of such stature, those capable of thinking for themselves and believing in unity of race and purpose, are able to understand the historical forces arrayed against them and move forthrightly in the cause of liberation. It is no accident of history that men from Caesar to present‐day Americans have considered those who think long and hard about their conditions to be dangerous men.

Such men, and many are named throughout the book, do not want to become like the Americans, realize that like other national and racial groups, black people constitute “a nation within a nation,” and that “A child born under oppression has all the elements of servility in its constitution; who, when born under favorable circumstances, has to the contrary, all the elements of freedom and independence of feeling.” Realize these truths and understand why black men from that time to this have dreamed of erecting the new Canaan, far from American shores.

Chapter by chapter, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States reveals the mind of a courageous man, who flinches neither from raising his voice against the detractors in his own race nor against those, professed friend or foe, whose actions and pronouncements denigrate his people. Delany is willing to address himself to the conditions under which black people live honestly and forthrightly; yet, he refuses to think of the race in terms of such categories as class and caste. He realizes the great diversity of color and stratification within the group—blacks, mulattoes, poor people, middle class, house slaves and field slaves—yet he knows that what is necessary to ensure liberation for all is unity, perseverance, diligence, and determination to learn skills useful in serving the black community now in its infancy: “… We desire accomplishments, but they must be useful.”

After a people have acquired skills, the exodus to another continent might be undertaken, and they and their offspring might become rulers of their own lands and create not only the nation‐state, but a nation in which such terms as justice, freedom, and morality can be defined anew, a place in which the term “man” is earned only after passage through the dark night of existential struggle. Such a nation would produce the moral state and serve as an example for the rest of the world. This message fell upon deaf ears. Delany became little more than another casualty of historians and academicians who remained oblivious not only of his works, but of his existence, until the Black Power revolt of the nineteen sixties focused interest upon the black past. With the exception of Douglass, he is the first black intellectual, more of a thinker than either Webb or Brown, equally as pragmatic as Douglass, able like Walker to hold the romantic vision, to postulate the existence of the promised land. When he turned his hand toward fiction he left a document as important and impelling as the prose work. Of greater importance, however, Blake; or the Huts of America (1859) provides a sharp contrast to, and departure from, the works of Brown and Webb.

It is a sprawling, cumbersome book, the first picaresque novel by a black writer. Held together more by the actions of its central character than by any single thread connecting one plot to another, we learn much about Henry Blake, through narration and from the character himself. Born in Cuba, christened Carolus Henrico Blacus, at the age of seventeen, he leaves on a ship bound for the West Coast of Africa. The ship turns out to be a “slaver” and Blake finds himself in a difficult position. He is numbered as one among slaves, destined to sail, not back to Cuba, but to America, there to be sold with the ship's other cargo into bondage: “The last cargo was taken to Key West, where Franks [Colonel Franks] was waiting, when final settlement of the affairs resulted in my being taken to the United States, and held there as a slave. …”²

On Franks's plantation, Blacus marries Maggie, mulatto daughter of the slaveowner, and assumes the name Henry Holland, one of the three aliases used throughout the novel. The sale of Maggie by Franks provides the conflict around which Delany structures two distinct plots. The purchasers, Judge and Mrs. John Ballard, employ Maggie as a maidservant, and she accompanies them to Cuba. Enraged by the betrayal of his master, Blake engineers his escape and dedicates himself to fomenting revolution among others: His search for his wife takes him back to Cuba, where, in league with the poet, Placido, he lays the groundwork for revolution in his South American country.

Part One deals with the exploits of the enraged Holland. After his escape from bondage, the search for his wife leads him along the route once traveled by the author himself, into Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. At each way station, he brings the message of revolution! “Clasping each other by the hand, standing in a band together, as a [pledge] of their union and fidelity to each other, Harry said, ‘I now impart to you the secret; it is this: I have laid a scheme and matured a plan for a general insurrection of the slaves in every state, and the successful overthrow of slavery.’”³ Deliverance of the word consumes much of the action of Part One. After Holland rescues the slaves of his former master during a raid on the old plantation, the keynote of the novel is suggested in his parting remarks, made after leading the group to freedom in Canada “… Nothing can separate you; your strength depending upon your remaining together.” The discovery that his wife has been taken to Cuba propels the black revolutionary back to his native land, where, in Part Two, he attempts her rescue and joins in an attempt to destroy white rule in the Spanish colony.

Blake; or the Huts of America remains a fragment, and this is partly responsible for the implausible plot sequences and the overall episodic quality. Despite these flaws, however, and despite inept characterization and stilted dialogue, the novel is the most important by an African‐American before Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio, published in 1902. More so than the number of tracts, poems, and books rushed into rebuttal against Mrs. Stowe's portrait of Uncle Tom, Blake is a more telling attack upon the former author's caricature. In contradiction to the pious Tom, whose character is, in part, defined by his obsession with Christianity, Blake has contempt for this white man's religion: “… I'm not only losing but I have altogether lost my faith in the religion of my oppressors. As they are our religious teachers, my estimate of the thing they give is no greater than it is for those who give it.”⁴

Unlike Tom, he understands the true meaning of Christianity, knows that the scripture forces black men to submit to arbitrary authority, demands obedience in the name of a higher power—white. Therefore, he argued for a black religion to serve the interests of the slave as a white religion served that of the master. Nor was he, like Tom, ignorant of the enormous debt owed him by the master: “I have … taken by littles some of the earnings due me for more than eighteen years' service to this man Franks, which at the low rate of two hundred dollars a year would amount to sixteen hundred dollars more than I secured, exclusive of the interest, which would have more than supplied my clothing, to say nothing of the injury done me by degrading me as a slave. ‘Steal’ indeed: I would that when I had an opportunity, I had taken fifty thousand instead of two.”⁵ Not only is he the first black counterimage to Uncle Tom in literature, but he serves a similar function in relation to the mulattoes. What is most important about Blake is not that he is courageous, brave, and determined, but that he is “a black—pure Negro—handsome, manly, and intelligent. …”

The first black revolutionary character in black fiction, he symbolizes black bravery and courage and gives the lie to white writers, historians, and politicians alike, who equated Blacks with the thousands of fictional aunties, uncles, and Sambos concocted to rationalize the practice of slavery. Attack Mrs. Stowe for her portrait of Blacks as many did, still whites were more comfortable with the Toms than the Blakes, did not want to know that black history offered more examples of the latter than the former. For the Blakes of America were angry men, who, deprived of liberty, began by striking out as a result of personal maltreatment and discovered later that no such treatment was peculiar only to them, that others awaited the coming hour of revolt, danced not the dance of joy but the dance of war. Such men were legion: Cinque, on the ship Amistad, angry, hostile, rebellious, leading men in revolt, knowing before Lord Byron, that he who would be free must himself strike the first blow; Denmark Vesey of the state of South Carolina, having seen the lash fall upon the naked black bodies of men, women, and children, gathering arms and men, planning to usher in the day of rebellion; Gabriel Prosser, recruiting an army from among the wretched of the earth, selecting only those whose bitterness equaled his own, moving to achieve the liberation of a people; Nat Turner, the most celebrated of black revolutionaries, moved by the words of the Calvinist God, knowing intuitively that in a land ruled by the sword, slaves must utilize the weapons of war, teaching his gospel of defiance and revolution, moving forward in rebellion to a certain Armageddon; Shields Green, one of five black followers of old John Brown, standing on that next to fateful day of the raid at Harpers Ferry, staring into the eyes of the great Douglass, his mind transgressing past and present, remembering the horrors he had witnessed, black men hung by the neck, women and children branded and maimed for life, families destroyed, separated; remembered and turning from Douglass, speaking those words which stand as monuments of black strength and bravery, “I guess I'll go with the old man.”

Such are the images of black men suggested by Blake; or the Huts of America, and it is not surprising that publication in novel form does not occur until the twentieth century. Those who published the poetry of Wheatley and Hammon and the novels of Brown and Webb were not anxious to publish the exploits of a black revolutionary, not willing to publish a work which went so far toward destroying negative symbols and images of black men. For what, at this propitious moment in history, would such a book avail? In 1858, while Delany labored over the final pages of Blake, even the most ambivalent Southerner knew that war was but a short distance away, that the nullification policies of John C. Calhoun could not endure, that somewhere in this century the decision would be made as to whether America would be all slave or all free.

If war came—and that it must come was inevitable—what would confront black people in its aftermath? What specters of the past would still haunt the country? What would be the fate of those who, heretofore, had danced the dance of joy in the slave quarters? The proposition all slave was intolerable to such Blacks as Douglass, Garnet, and Delany. Had Douglass not already sanctioned guerrilla warfare? The proposition all free placed great responsibilities upon North and South, demanded that men find an answer to the question, What is to be done with the Blacks, those unassimilable elements, whose very existence was a reminder of the most bestial chapter in the book of Euro‐American man?

What is to be done with them? Delany's plan was untenable. Black men, united, working in the interests of their own race, could not be tolerated. Yet, Blacks are not, in the words of Samuel Sewall, to be welcomed into the body politic, not in the words of Jefferson and Lincoln, assimilable within the society. Neither are they free to unite, to produce a new nation from among their ever‐increasing numbers. The answer to the question was one with which sane men agreed, though none voiced it aloud; do nothing, allow the present course of action to continue and, in the event of emancipation, move with increasing vigor to codify the existing metaphors, symbols, and images, and accentuate the divisions between one Black and another. If the proposition—all free—is accepted, institute quasi slavery.

Blake; or the Huts of America is the only novel in the nineteenth century which addresses itself to such problems. Racial unity instead of racial division, rebellion instead of passive resistance, nationalism instead of assimilation—these are the alternatives left men with no bargaining position on matters concerning their own fate. Come what may, Delany averred, freedom won by our own hands, or freedom gained at the expense of war, the job of black resurrection will have just begun. New men, imbued with the determination and faith of old, must begin the task of rebuilding racial unity and debrainwashing a people of the propaganda that argued their inferiority. Like The Condition, Blake, a merging of several disciplines—literature, sociology, and history—was written to accomplish these ends.

Yet, the novel had minimal impact upon the black thinkers of the age, who were, in most cases, men of mulatto background, who had sanctioned racial division in the past. Delany's attacks upon the group did not help. Have they not, he thundered from magazine article and public rostrum alike, accepted the thesis that the drop of white blood in their veins differentiates them from their fellows? Were they not the major vehicle for dissemination of corrupt images and symbols concerning black men in general? Had they not made their own peace with the Euro‐Americans? The attacks were justifiable. Due to the colorphobia inflicting Blacks and whites, mulattoes were in positions to profit from racial division. Their major roles would be played upon the stages of coming centuries, when, usurping the mantle of leadership of the race, they would do almost as much to ensure quasi slavery based upon the word, as much to validate the false symbols, images, and metaphors as Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Dixon, and Thomas Nelson Page. To such men, Blake and its author were anathema—both preached racial unity when the survival of such men depended upon racial division.

Delany emerges, therefore, as a man alone, and almost alone, this doctor, pamphleteer, editor, and novelist warred against the controllers of language. Never content to allow white men the right to interpret the ways of black men, he fought the war of the mind, knowing, long before the birth of Don L. Lee and Carolyn Gerald, that to control the image was not only to be where the action was but also to determine the fate of a people. He is the first black novelist to attempt the debunking of the phenomenological world constructed by those who forced their own language system upon Africans, the first writer to argue that Blacks were more African than American.

Compare Blake with Clotel and The Garies and Their Friends and we know where the black novelist might have gone, are aware of the tradition that might have been. Had Henry Blake become the symbol of black men instead of Mr. Walters, Bigger Thomas and his cousins would not have been necessary. Native Son is most important as a novel and Bigger Thomas relevant as a character because each succeeds in cleansing black fiction of such mainstays as Clotel and Walters. The inability of the black novelist to build upon the foundation laid down by Delany meant that no viable literary tradition was possible until after Native Son. And yet, it is in the former, not the latter novel, that the characters, themes, and ideas to which the African‐American writer must return are to be found. Move to the novelists of the twentieth century—to John A. Williams, Ernest Gaines, and John Killens, and note the distance traveled from Richard Wright—back two centuries to arrive at the position of Martin Delany.

Notes

1. Dorothy Sterling, The Making of an Afro‐American: Martin Robinson Delany 1812‐1885 (Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday & Co., 1971), p. 95.

2. Martin R. Delany, Blake; or the Huts of America (Boston, Beacon Press, 1970), p. 194.

3. Ibid, p. 39.

4. Ibid, p. 155.

5. Ibid, p. 31.