Book Of The Month

BLAKE OR THE HUTS OF AMERICA
By

MARTIN DELANY

This 19th century novel is important because it characterizes the first, to our knowledge, Black Nationalist revolutionary during the enslavement era in America. Written by a free Black man, Martin Delany, who worked on the North Star newspaper with Frederick Douglass, this novel captures many of the unspoken or unwritten realities of American enslavement of African American, men, women, and children. The protagonist Blake also known as Henry has his wife sold away from him, while he was on business taking care of his owner’s horses. The theft and selling of his wife, a violation of a promise made to him by his master and mistress caused Blake to abhor bondage, more deeply, to the point that he conjured up a plan to eradicate the buying and selling of African people. His masquerade and travels across the country to a variety of plantations cryptically engaging in revolutionary thought and action is entertaining and inspiring. Delany himself is someone you should know because in real life he distinguished himself as a critical thinker and doer, traveling to Africa to entice leaders there to provide land and assistance to Blacks to return to their homeland. Also Delany mapped out a plan to get land in South America for enslaved people to build a Black nation there in order to break the bonds of chattel slavery. (I must add that I do have an issue with this updated version of Delany’s book. It is now characterized as “Black Science Fiction” Science Fiction is Star Trek, et al., not a Black revolutionary Brother who spreads knowledge of insurrection to his brethren) Martin Delany’s story Blake was serialized in the Anglo-African magazine from 1861-1862. And in salute to Bobby and Huey, there is a use of the panther in scenes that blew my mind.