Martin Delany's Blake and the Transnational Politics of Property

Abstract

1Martin Delany's picaresque novel, Blake,; or, The Huts of America, tells the story of a black slave, Henry Holland, a.k.a. Blacus, a.k.a. Blake. After his wife is sold away, he escapes from a Mississippi plantation and journeys throughout the South, visiting slaves and clandestinely organizing a future outbreak of black revolutionary violence. After part 1 ends with Henry leaving New York on a ship heading for Cuba where he hopes to find his wife, part 2 picks up with Henry similarly attempting to organize rebellion in Cuba. In Cuba, we learn that Blake is the son of a wealthy mulatto merchant and was tricked into slavery when he mistakenly boarded a slave ship as a young man. There Blake eventually finds his missing wife and, in concert mostly with free, wealthy Cubans of color, continues organizing a rebellion. Delany's novel then unexpectedly breaks off at its most intensely suspenseful moment, just as it seems the coalition of Cuban slaves and free persons of color is poised for a murderous rebellion.' Written by a man who led one of the most varied lives of all nineteenth-century Americans (at different times Delany was a newspaper editor, inventor, African explorer, author, soldier, lecturer, black emigrationist, Freemason, Freedmen's Bureau official, and political candidate), this often formally clumsy novel is now recognized for its fascinating insights into the relationship between the US and Cuban slave economies immediately prior to the Civil War. Over the last decade critics have accordingly offered shrewd transatlantic and Pan-African interpretations of Blake, starting with Paul Gilroy's deeming it a cornerstone text in any theorization of a black diaspora and Eric Sundquist's analysis of the novel within hemispheric-wide discourse on slavery and American expansionism. More recently, Robert Levine