58. Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins

I discovered this at Drawn & Quarterly.  I'm ideologically opposed to trade paperbacks but this design by Seth definitely caught my eye and I'll make an exception for books that would be impossible to find in a traditional paperback format.  It is a truly interesting historical document, though the reading of the first two-thirds is quite slow going.  It picks up in the end in a sudden frenzy of narrative and plot craziness but I can't recommend it if you are looking for thrills.  

It's the story of a young doctor, Reuel Briggs, extremely good-looking, smart and conscientious but brooding, his soul weighted down by something.  It really takes us a long time to get anywhere, but we learn that he is well-liked and respected by his peers, but poor because he dabbles in only obscure sciences, including paranormal studies. He is entranced by Dianthe the lead singer of an African-American (the word "Negro" is used in the text) show as he had seen her in previous visions.  Soon after she dies in a train accident, but he realizes that as her body is not damaged she isn't truly dead and can be revived using some of the skills he has been studying.  He succeeds in bringing her back, but much of her memory is gone, including the knowledge that she herself is black.  This was the age of "passing" and we also soon learn that the protagonist himself is also black.  

We are already halfway through the book at this point and nobody has even mentioned going to search for a lost civilization in Africa, as we were promised on the back cover.  The story was originally serialized in in 1903 in The Colored American Magazine of which Hopkins was the editor. You can see how reading it as the issues came out would have made fora more satisfying read, as the writing has a lyrical quality and there are interesting ideas, especially about race (hints and suggestions at first but much more explicit near the end).  However, in book form, it feels very meandering and the reader does not always feel on sure footing.  I think much of that is also due to the style of the times in which it was written, with references to Milton and abrupt jumps in location and changes of pace.

Eventually we get to a love triangle, as Briggs' close friend and sponsor Aubrey Livingston, scion of a wealthy, white previously slave-owning family falls for Dianthe and tricks Briggs into going off on an expedition to Africa.  Once Briggs is out of the way, Livingston arranges a canoe accident where his fiance drowns and at first we think he and Dianthe also drown but instead he makes it shore and squirrels her away.  From here things get quite gothic and crazy.  Dianthe dies at least 3 times.  There is a real muddying of contemporary ethics (she feels super guilty about being married twice) and racial issues. I get the feeling that Hopkins had to rush the conclusion.

I'm glad I read it for several reasons. It's a seminal piece of science fiction that I had not known about. The racial issues are fascinating, both to see how they are treated in the behaviour in the book (seems like 1903 was weirdly less racist then today in some social ways, yet clearly super duper racist) as well as some of the foundations of ideas that are prevalent in later black crime fiction in the second half of the twentieth century.

This is part of MIT Press's Radium Age book series, celebrating early science fiction that bridges the classics of the 19th century and the big boom that we call the Golden Age in the second half of the 20th.  It has an aggressive and informative forward by Minister Faust which helped put a lot of the African mythology in the book in context.

Pauline Hopkins was a badass and
yet sadly neglected by history.