Reviews

This story is certainly unusual! And challenging! In multiple ways. It was originally published in 1902 and is set shortly after the Civil War and emancipation. The writing is dense and at times incoherent. There's like (at least) three completely different stories going on and they definitely don't flow! I liked the Frankenstein vibes at the beginning and some of the other story elements but it's written in a weird and confusing way.

'The manuscript had spoken of dangers - he would seek them.'

ergative's review against another edition

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1.5

‘Yes, but is it good?’ This response is one of those ear-grating reactions that you tend to hear a lot when you mention a book that is notable for something related to wokery (aka the radical idea that people who are not like you are, nevertheless, also still people, and entitled to the same rights and respect you accord people who are like you). Any book can be notable for any characteristic that is itself neutral with respect to quality of execution: This book is a retelling of Vanity Fair but in a modern day tabloid newspaper office! This book reimagines the life of Hilary Clinton if she hadn’t married Bill Clinton! This book explores what the universe would be like if the speed of light were not constant and a planet of shape-shifting aliens needed to develop space travel very fast. All of these books have hooks or conceits that can be well or poorly executed, but you don’t tend to hear people follow up with ‘Yes, but is it any good?’ It’s taken for granted that these books are as likely to be good as any other book that is recommended for its plot or conceit or foundational premise.

‘Woke’ books are not granted this assumption. When the plot or conceit or foundational premise engages with race or identity in some way that irritates dominant groups who dislike the appearance of non-dominant groups in their previously reserved sandbox of prestige, that’s when people start asking, ‘Yes, but is it good?’ A book about a trans superhero? Well, that’s clearly only worth noting because it engages with trans issues, so it’s a tokenism book, not a real book, so I have to ask: is it any good? A book written by a Black woman, 120 years ago, 60 years before Wakanda first appeared in the pages of Marvel Comics, and it’s about a hidden country in Africa, peopled by Black people who possess wealth and learning and astonishing technology? YeS, bUt iS iT aNY goOd? The very premise of the question is rooted in bigotry.

And yet! And yet and yet and yet. A stopped clock is right twice a day (analogue, at least; a digital clock flashing 88:88 is never correct). A book that is as likely to be good as any other book is also as likely to be bad as any other book. And in the case of Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood, a book featuring a hidden country in Africa, peopled by Black people who possess wealth and learning and astonishing technology, it is very, very bad. It is just a bad book. It is not bad because of any of the quite awesome Wakanda-ish bits (indeed, those are the best bits it has to offer). It is not bad because its treatment of race and politics and identity is didactic or overblown. Rather, it is bad independently of those features. It is bad in the same way that any other ‘non-woke’ book could be bad. The plot makes very little sense, and indulges in absurdly melodramatic flourishes. The treatment of women is appallingly misogynistic. (yes! Even though it is written by a woman!) Hell, even the treatment of race is problematic. (yes! Even though it is written by a Black woman!)

The plot follows the actions of one Reuel Briggs, a medical student in Boston who is very broody about—well, it’s not really clear about what. Just vibes, I guess. He’s big into mysticism, too—never entirely clear how he got into it or why—but it does lead him to develop a tendency to see floating lady ghosts all over the place. The ghost ladies eventually become plot-relevant, in a way, but to be honest the whole mysticism ghost-vision stuff never really ties in with the rest of the events in any satisfying or thought-out way. In truth, it just feels more like that late-19th/early 20th century obsession with mediums and seances making its way into the book. Like glitter on crafting day, mysticism has a tendency to show up everywhere in books of that era. The Dorothy Sayerses of the literary world incorporated it with healthy skepticism (see Strong Poison), but unfortunately it seems that Pauline Hopkins took it seriously.

Reuel’s friend Aubrey shows up and takes him to a musical concert, which features a troupe of recently freed Black slaves who are singing the songs of their people to the privileged white folks up north, bringing home to them in a more personal and immediate way how horrifying slavery was, and the extent of the evil that was done to them. This is all done very powerfully:

Some of the women in the audience wept; there was the distinct echo of a sob in the deathly quiet which gave tribute to the power of genius. Spellbound they sat beneath the outpoured anguish of a suffering soul. All the horror, the degradation from which a race had been delivered were in the pleading strains of the singer’s voice. It strained the senses almost beyond endurance. It pictured to that self-possessed, highly-cultured New England assemblage as nothing else ever had, the awfulness of the hell from which a people had been happily plucked.

pg 15

Melodramatic, sure, but not in a bad way. I was fully on board here.

The singer in the above excerpt is one Dianthe Lusk, who happens to have the face of one of Reuel’s floaty vision ladies. Later, in one of his visions, she tells him that he’ll be able to help her in some way. Then, the next day, Dianthe Lusk shows up at Reuel’s hospital, dead, from a train accident. Except, not dead! Because, as Reuel explains, ‘As I diagnose this case, it is one of suspended animation. This woman has long and persistently subjected to mesmeric influences, and the nervous shock induced by the excitement of the accident has thrown her into a cataleptic sleep.’

In vain do his fellow doctors make the quite reasonable point that rigor mortis has set in and she’s most definitely dead. No no, it’s mesmeric catalepsis, Reuel insists, and because he is the main character, he is correct, and he manages to revive Dianthe from her rigorously mortised sleep. Except when she awakens she has lost her memory.

So far, so goofy. More turn-of-the-20th century melodrama, yes? Except, in another melodramatic twist that has aged VERY POORLY, Reuel decides not to tell Dianthe anything about what he knows of her identity and not to look for any of her friends or family (Aubrey does a bit of research, but very quietly, so that doesn’t absolve Reuel for neglecting it.) Instead, he installs her in the household of Aubrey’s fiancée, who looks after her as an act of charity.

But then he falls in love with her and asks her to marry him. His patient! His patient who has no memory or sense of identity, his patient who is entirely dependent on him for survival. He asks her to marry him! And here’s her reaction:

She was conscious that he loved her with his whole most loving heart. She winced under the knowledge, for while she believed in him, depended upon him and gathered strength from his love, what she gave in return was but a slight, cold affection compared with his adoration.

pg 62

But she agrees to marry him, of course, because, remember, she is dependent on him. She does not have the freedom to say no, regardless of what she feels for him.

Now, at this moment you might be saying, ‘But, Ergative, isn’t the book engaging with this? Isn’t it making it clear that she has no power to say no, even though she doesn’t love him?’ And, at the time, I thought so too. I was enraged, but I was enraged at Reuel, not at the author. Because I thought the author was doing a Discourse about power imbalances in romantic relations, and how women aren’t as free to say no as they should be. But then I got to lines like this, where Dianthe tells Reuel that she’s beginning to get fleeting glimpses of her previous life:

With a laugh he kissed away her anxieties, although he was dismayed to know that at most any time full memory might return.

pg 71

At first glance, this looks like a bit of complication in Reuel: a good doctor, the hero of the book, and yet subject to unworthy impulses, such as the desire to ensure that his wife remains a compliant amnesiac. And yet, that’s not what Hopkins is doing here. First, remember that Dianthe is a Black woman, first introduced as a member of the traveling troupe of freed slaves. But she is very pale-skinned, so pale in fact as to be white-passing. This is why she’s welcome in her new home: everyone except Reuel and Aubrey think she’s white. The danger about her memory returning, according to Hopkins, is not that it would give her the full knowledge of her self and her history and her wants and desires, and maybe lead her to think twice about this marriage. No, the danger of her memory returning is that it will reveal to her that she is not a white woman, but in fact a Black woman passing as white among a white family.

This is what Reuel is so worried about: ‘What if memory suddenly returns?’ he frets at one point. ‘Is it safe to risk the unpleasantness of a public reawakening of her sleeping faculties?’ Aubrey gives him some line of bullshit about deception being necessary for the sake of science, and Reuel returns, ‘Is deception justifiable for any reason? Somehow it haunts me that trouble may come from this. I wish we had told the exact truth about her identity’ (pg 45).

See? It’s about race. It’s only about race. Hopkins is so caught up with the question of race and passing—which, to be fair, is a very important conversation to have—that she ignores the fact that her hero is trying to have sex with a woman under his care, who lacks sufficient information to make an informed choice about whether she wants to consent to have sex with him.

‘But, Ergative,’ you might say, ‘What about intersectionality? Can’t Hopkins be talking about race and passing and also make a point about power relations and gender?’

And, I mean, she can, but she isn’t. Because remember that bit where Dianthe definitely doesn’t love Reuel romantically? You know why that is? It’s not about women being forced into marriages because they lack the power to say no.

It’s because she’s his sister.

(Also Aubrey’s his brother, and a villain, but that’s not the point here.)

So, even though Reuel and Dianthe get married, they don’t have a chance to consummate the marriage before Reuel has to go off to Africa for Reasons, which are entirely contrived to ensure that the siblings don’t accidentally fuck. Phew! But also, that‘s why Dianthe doesn’t love Reuel. At least, not like that. So in the end, Hopkins isn’t actually making any type of goddamn point about power imbalances in marriage when she has Reuel conceive this passion for his medically fragile patient. Rather, she’s just taking care to make it clear that Dianthe hasn’t got any yucky incestuous feelings for her brother. As far as Hopkins is concerned, the problem with the whole marriage thing isn’t anything to do with medical ethics and informed consent; it’s because Reuel and Dianthe are secretly Luke and Leia. If Dianthe hadn’t been Reuel’s sister, the whole marriage would have been A-okay.

Ew.

Moving on, now, let’s follow Reuel to Africa, where he’s travelling with a group of English archaeologists as a medic. With him comes Charlie, a white man who serves as the white perspective on the whole adventure. Upon learning of the grandeur of ancient Babylonia, and the works of Nimrod the Ethiopian, Charlies responds, ‘Great Scott! You don’t mean to tell me that all this was done by niggers!‘ (pg 112) And here, as with the introduction of the traveling singers, Hopkins does some very good things with race. See, the chief archaeologist is English, and so his outlook is not so poisoned by the history of slavery as Charlie’s is. For this reason, he has no difficulty pursuing the evidence that leads him to conclude that Black Africans (not the Egyptians, who are sort of Black-lite in the eyes of the general European/American establishment, but in fact Ethiopians) have a foundational claim on civilization and architecture and culture and history. And so, through the legitimacy and prestige that comes from the mouth of a white English professor, Hopkins is able to present her point, that African history is actually not just the traces of a bunch of jungle savages*, but its own mighty civilization, built by cultured, educated, skilled people.

*Or maybe desert savages. There’s a lot of wonky ecosystems here. Lions and leopards roam the Sahara freely, which is not something I ever saw on David Attenborough.

Later, when the expedition eventually meets the secret descendants of these mighty ancestors, hiding in Wakanda the city of Telassar, they challenge Charlie about American racism. ‘There are people who count it a disgrace to bear my color; is it not so?’ asks Ai, a government official. And Charlie thinks, ‘Great Scott Is it possible that the ubiquitous race question has got ahead of the expedition! By mighty, it’s time something was done to stoop this business.’ Yes, the people of Telassar are too woke for Charlie! But fortunately, he has just the response for them: ‘My venerable and esteemed friend, you could get there all right with your complexion in my country. We would simply label you Arab, Turk, Malay, or Filipino, and in that costume you’d slide along all right; not the slightest trouble when you showed your ticket at the door’ (pg 174).

So here again, we have this question of passing: how Black is too Black? Dianthe is not too Black. Ai is not too Black. But Jim Titus, a former slave traveling with them as a servant, has dark skin and crisp hair, and he is too Black to get along all right in America.

And here we get to the bit of this book’s treatment of race that bothers me profoundly. See, for all that this book is about how Black people are mighty and powerful too, there seems to be an awful lot of colorism. Dianthe is ethereal and exquisite and beautiful, and she’s so pale as to be white-passing. Reuel, too, the hero of our book (and also the lost king of Telassar, because melodrama) is, like his sister, so pale as to be white-passing. Ai, a powerful government official in Telassar, but still below the white-passing Reuel in rank, is pale enough to be ‘Arab, Turk, Malay, or Filipino’. And Jim Titus? Well, he’s a former slave who still likes to serve his ‘massa’, and part of that service involves murder. Then, when he and Charlie run afoul of some snakes, Charlie lives and Jim dies.

It’s not a great look, Hopkins! Colorism is a thing!

There are other, various plot-related problems. Remember how Reuel is the lost king of Telassar? How did that come about? What happened to break the line of kings? It can’t be colonialism and slavery, because Telassar is hidden from all white knowledge, so instead we just get some hand-wavey something something pride and sin and divine punishment something something. But that whole divine punishment is, itself, very odd, because on pg 143 we get this, as Ai explains why Reuel must be the king, and also his name is Ergamenes, because apparently the name his mother gave him doesn’t count.

By divine revelation David beheld the present time, when, after Christ’s travail for the sins of humanity, the time of Ethiopia’s atonement being past, purged of idolatry, accepting the One Only God through His Son Jesus, suddenly should come a new birth to the descendants of Ham, and Ethiopia should return to her ancient glory! Ergamenes, all hail!

pg 143

So far, so Christian. Very Christian. Much Jesus. So why, then, on pg 148, do we have Ai explaining the religion of Telassar, which leads Reuel to ask,

‘Have not your Sages brought you the need of belief in God’s Son?’

Ai looked somewhat puzzled. ‘We have heard of such a God, but have not paid much attention to it. How believe you, Ergamenes?’

‘In Jesus Christ, the Son of God,’ replied Reuel solemnly.

pg 148

Ai, dude, buddy, you just explained your FOUNDATIONAL GOVENRMENT PROPHECY five pages ago, and it was very Jesusy. Do you not remember how Jesusy it was? Do you not recall that the order of events was first accept Jesus, and only then do you get the new birth of Ergamenes? Have you been struck by a touch of Dianthe’s amnesia? Do memory problems run as a genetic inheritance through the people of Telassar?

I’m skipping over a lot. There are disappearing plot threads; there’s casual misogyny that I haven’t mentioned here; there’s more colorism; there’s more really, really dumb melodrama involving Aubrey. There’s more ghosts and mysticism.

Yes, but is it good?

No. No, it is not good. But fuck you for asking.

jimgibreads's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

delmarche's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark funny mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

i’m crying, pauline hopkins is fr the original hotep

gotossmycausticsalad's review against another edition

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3.0

Didn't really get on with this, found the writing very old fashioned (not too surprising, given when it was written), found myself skimming rather than reading it, and I thought the plot towards the end was a bit melodramatic.

angelicasreads's review

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2.0

I read this for my American Literature class. Honestly, as my rating will tell, I didn't like it. The plot became crazy and the characters were all irritating. I am not looking forward for the rest of the books I am going to have to read for this class. They all seem so boring, and this was just the first of nine. Nine boring books for a boring class that I need in order to graduate. How fun.

thequeeraunt's review against another edition

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4.0

When you see this book classified as "horror," I think it might be a little bit misleading by today's understanding of the genre. Think about Of One Blood in the context of its time - horror was less about supernatural or paranormal or fantastic elements creating tense or terrifying situations and more about the darkness within human individuals and the capabilities of seemingly-ordinary people to inflict despair upon one another. It reads much more like an adventure story with strong themes of revealing hidden knowledge and making connections that seem nearly impossible. I suppose the elements of spiritualism present a paranormal element, but at the time Hopkins was writing Of One Blood, spiritualism was a popular scientific field of study.

While I didn't find it to be particularly suspenseful or spooky, I enjoyed reading Hopkins' adventure. There was plenty to keep me guessing and I was entertained for the duration of a 3 1/2-hour plane ride. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys classic horror/adventure, and those with an interest in historical Black novelists.

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