"The Hand of Mysticism": Ethiopianist Writing in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood and the Colored American Magazine

Abstract

"The Hand of Mysticism":Ethiopianist Writing in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood and the Colored American Magazine Nadia Nurhussein (bio) Under Pauline Hopkins's editorship, the Colored American Magazine published a significant serialized novel about Ethiopia that could be called a historical fiction, although, as a result of the mysticism at its heart, the text becomes somewhat generically indeterminate or even "generically radical," as Elizabeth Ammons describes it (81). The novel is Hopkins's Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self, published between 1902 and 1903, notably only a few years after the remarkable Italian defeat at the 1896 Battle of Adwa. Ethiopia has long held synecdochic significance for African American writers-alternately referring specifically to the nation, generally to the continent of Africa or to the black race, and abstractly to an imaginary locus of nostalgia, biblical or otherwise-but the Colored American, self-described as "the only first-class illustrated monthly published in America exclusively in the interests of the Colored Race," promoted a documentary interpretation of Ethiopianism in their histories and biographies. Mentions of Ethiopia surfaced frequently in the magazine. In fact, the May-June 1903 installment of Of One Blood, during which the protagonist first meets the inhabitants of a hidden Ethiopian city, was immediately followed by the first installment in a series titled "Ethiopians of the Twentieth Century" (using "Ethiopian" in accordance with the general definition, as the subtitle announces that the piece addresses "Questions Affecting the Natives and Colored People Resident in British South Africa").1 The Colored American's content regarding Ethiopia, including illustrations, biographies, and fictions, conformed with the magazine's general "pedagogic function" (Carby xxxv) and shaped how the community of readers created and fostered by the magazine conceived of a black pride that could be based in modernity. Although the biblical Ethiopia that would "soon stretch forth her hands" would have been familiar to most African Americans, the Colored American presented a more grounded Ethiopia, one of secular contemporary events. If, as C. K. Doreski writes, the Colored American "offered a product-intense, textual world in which even biography and history might become marketable commodities" (72), then this version of Ethiopianism was effectively being sold to the magazine's readers especially through nonfictional narratives. However, where history collided with fiction, producing imaginative histories and historical fictions, the magazine fell back upon a partly imagined Ethiopia. Hazel Carby finds that a "network of relationships between Of One Blood and other, nonfictional articles in the journal indicates . . . the extent of an intertextual coherence achieved under Hopkins's editorship" (xlvii), but I would argue that the confusion produced in the clashing of genres dismantled that seeming coherence, resulting in some [End Page 278] conflicting messages about Ethiopia and its symbolic or exemplary value. Just like Emperor Menelik's claims that he descended from King Solomon, the magazine's collective claims about Ethiopia in these hybrid genres could be entertained by readers precisely because they seemed factual but receded into a mythic, unfocused point in a distant past that was comfortably familiar. The simultaneous specificity and generality conjured a source of pride that didn't need to be-and could not be-absolutely pinpointed and yet was manifest and potent enough to be used in service of racial uplift. I use the word "conjure" here deliberately, as the amorphousness of the idea of Ethiopia inevitably led back to a sort of inventive mythic Ethiopianism. Myth-making was already intrinsic to the ideology of Ethiopianism that was developing as early as the eighteenth century, which, according to Wilson Jeremiah Moses's definition, "involved a good deal more than mere allusions to Ethiopia in the songs, sermons, and folklore of the African peoples. It was a historical mythology, presenting an exalted view of the black race and its cosmic messianic mission" (113). In the Colored American's documentary myth-making, the editors produced a paradoxical condition in which the idea of Ethiopia was presented to their readers as both familial and alien. The alien aspects of Ethiopianness often acquired an air of mysticism which the nonfictional texts in the magazine attempted to rein in. Of One Blood is a good example of a fictional text...