Waiting vs. Action in Blake: Or, The Huts of America

As I read Martin Delaney’s Blake: Or, The Huts of America, I noticed an interesting tension between the characters waiting and being active. Early in the novel after Henry discovers his wife has been sold, Daddy Joe says, “God moves in a myst’us way His wundahs to pehaum”, to which Henry replies “He moves too slow for me, Daddy Joe; I’m tired waiting so—” (21). Henry then reappropriates Christianity for his own purposes, arguing, “‘Now is the accepted time, today is the day of salvation.’ So you see, Daddy Joe, this is very different to standing still” (21). After this conversation, Henry takes action by running away and traveling all over the South in hopes of inciting rebellion. His actions are repeatedly referred to with an agricultural metaphor of preparing a field for harvest: “after sowing seeds from which in due season, he anticipated an abundant harvest” (73). However, this metaphor, while it shows Henry as an active player fomenting rebellion, contradicts Henry’s earlier comments about being tired of waiting. Although he’s spreading word and talking to people all over the South, Henry recognizes that now is not the time for rebellion, rather he is “sowing the seeds of future devastation and ruin to the master and redemption to the slave” (83, emphasis mine).

When Henry meets a slave who wants to spring into action and rebel immediately, Henry even says, “You are not yet ready for a strike; you are not yet ready to do anything effective” (105). He further explains, “You must know what, how, and when to do. Have all the instrumentalities necessary for an effective effort, before making the attempt. Without this, you will fail, utterly fail!” (105). Henry’s “action” of traveling across the South talking to various slaves about rebellion seems to be undercut by his contradictory message to wait until the right time to rebel. Although he isn’t just putting trust in the Lord like Daddy Joe in their earlier conversation, he seems to take on the role of Daddy Joe, arguing for the importance of waiting and biding time. The novel never shows any attempt at revolution by the slaves in America, so we cannot see if Henry’s travels served any real purpose in the U.S. However, as he asks questions and serves as a spectator to the horrible condition black slaves are in, the reader too becomes a spectator and can see the evils of slavery. Henry’s role as spectator waiting to act continues even after he leaves the U.S., for example when he’s in Cuba and watches a slave woman who is forced to whip her child: “To all this, Henry was a serious spectator, having twice detected himself in an involuntary determination to rush forward and snatch the infernal thing of torture from the hand of the heart-crushed mother” (170). Henry’s inaction parallels the inaction of many white readers at the time this book was written. By making Henry a spectator who waits to rebel, Delaney can show the reader that, by not doing anything, they are complicit in all of the violence and injustice against black slaves.

Despite the contradictory tension between action and waiting that I saw in Henry, I do not want to be too critical of him. He did try to do something to help his fellow black sufferers, and after reading the secondary sources for this week I better understood why he had to leave the U.S. behind without any sort of rebellion being fulfilled. Dr. Doolen explains,

From within a national model, the very act of opposing the nation tended to reinforce its authority and ideology. The very binarism of antislavery opposition could reinscribe the normativities of white nationalism that it was attempting to negate, since black appeals to natural rights or condemntations of tyranny harkened back to the white nationlist project of the revolutionary era. (156)

Slave rebellions in the U.S. ironically reinforce the American revolutionary rhetoric that excluded black slaves from the freedoms that whites fought for. For this reason, Henry’s slave rebellion needs to cross borders and move to Cuba to have the desired effect of undermining U.S. ideology. As Dr. Doolen cogently argues, “this transnational shift enables Delaney’s narration of a black historical experience that does not refer ultimately to white revolutionary ideology” (157).

 

John Carlos Rowe also makes an important point about why Delaney chose to have Henry move away from the U.S.: “Delaney’s plans for colonies in the American tropics and then in Africa…were designed to serve the political goal of hastening an end to United States slavery by demonstrating the potential economic self-sufficiency of African Americans and reconnecting them with their cultural roots” (86). Delaney’s belief in the potential for blacks to be self-sufficient and in the importance of Pan-African connections is revealed in the second half of the novel, especially when Placido explains to Madame Cordora why anyone of black descent is implied in the term Ethiopian. He even claims,

in Africa their native land, they are among the most industrious people in the world, highly cultivating the lands, and that ere long they and their country must hold the balance of commercial power by supplying as they now do as foreign bondmen in strange lands, the greatest staple commodities in demand…and that race and country will at once rise to the first magnitude of importance in the estimation of the greatest nations. (261)

While Delaney could have had any character in the U.S. make this argument, it has much more force in Cuba, a country that serves as the intermediary between Africa and the U.S. and that is largely populated by people of African descent, many of whom are free and wealthy. In fact, the wealthy quadroon Madame Cordora responds, “I never before felt as proud of my black as I did of my white blood” (262). Cuba becomes a place for black pride in a way that the U.S. cannot. I agree with Ifeoma Nwankwo, who argues, “The point that Delaney makes through his depiction of Cuba is that people of African descent in this hemisphere, regardless of their status, color, or national location, should share in a collective desire for freedom” (586).

 

At first I was annoyed by the lack of a conclusion in Delaney’s novel, but Dr. Doolen’s article made me realize that there is probably no better way it could have ended. Delaney’s conclusion very likely would have ended in failure for Henry and the rebels because antebellum literature “conditions us for the suffering and death of the defiant rebel, for the subsequent translation of the body into a martyr to the broken promise of American liberty and equality” (Doolen 174). Although we are still left waiting for something big to happen at the end, just as I argue we are left waiting from the very beginning, at least “Delaney’s extant novel breaks the affective chain that links the martyr’s suffering and death to political renewal in a U.S. context” (Doolen 174). The novel ends on a hopeful note for the black rebels, and it hints at action that is finally about to occur in Gondolier’s final words that resemble a battle cry: “Woe be unto those devils of whites, I say!” (313).