My eye
was snagged by a Tweet about an novel with an ancient high-tech
civilization in Africa that was written in 1902 by a black woman. I
clicked on the link and investigated right away – and it was a good
thing, because, even though I retweeted it, time has gone by the
social media has been vomiting up stuff for about a week, and I can't
find it! Good thing I've somehow become savvy enough to download the
ePub version from Archive.org with the OCR-generated typos and the
snippets of other stuff from the magazine because this was an
unedited scan.
Even
though it was a static-encrusted signal coming in on a weird fuzzed
out station, I was hooked. I read and enjoyed and otherwise had my mind
properly blown by Of One Blood, Or, The Hidden Self
(yes, the sci-fi is plugged into identity) by Pauline E. Hopkins. It
was only later that I found out it was available in an edited form.
The best
things seem to come to me wrapped up in a weird adventure. Either
that, or I'm just doomed to do everything the hard way.
Of
One Blood was originally
serialized in The Colored American Magazine,
the first African American monthly, "devoted to literature, science,
music, art, religion, facts, fiction and traditions of the Negro
Race," from December 1902 to January 1903. The magazine was
established by Pauline E. Hopkins in 1900. She was the editor until
1904 when Booker T. Washington purchased it in a hostile takeover.
Seems that some folks thought that Hopkins was too much of a radical.
Hopkins
was a journalist, playwright, and historian as well as writer and
editor. She pioneered using what would now be called popular genre
fiction to explore social and racial themes, not just in Of
One Blood, but also in her
other novels:
All four
of which are available in one volume.
Of
One Blood, being over a century
old, has a steampunkish appeal, is proto-Afrofuturist, dealing with
mesmerism, mediumistic powers, a cataleptic trance, and astral
projection (we'd call these paranormal these days, but this was
before the term science fiction was coined) and a fantastic, advanced
lost civilization in the city of Meroe, in Ethiopia.
If
that doesn't sound sci-fi enough for you, there's telepathy-powered
television!
It
begins with Reuel Briggs, “a young medical student
interested in mysticism” who sees Dianthe Lusk, a Negro singer and “the
owner of a mysterious face” and falls in love with her. I hesitate
to tell much of the plot, or identify some characters by race. Some
are identified as white in the beginning turn out be what we'd now
call black. This is a “lost race” story, the subgenre pioneered
by H. Rider Haggard in King Solomon's Mines
and She, but in this
case, the lost race is the entire human race, originating in Africa.
Blacks and whites are all of one blood.
Which
allows a love triangle to turn out to be both incestuous and
interracial.
This was
over a generation before José Vasconcelos published his mestiaje
manifesto La Raza Cosmica.
Of
One Blood is a novel from the
past that can still shake things up in the 21st
century.
For
more information, check out the Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society.
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