Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self

An Edwardian-era mash-up of an Anne Rice-esque Gothic melodrama and an emphatically hotep Wakanda. Can I say that this is a good book? No. No, I cannot. I can't even say that it's coherent. It's a queasy mix of some accurate social/historical observations with an awful lot of colourism and misogyny. And then there's all the double bigamous incest? (Incestuous bigamy?)

But I can say that I never could predict what Pauline Hopkins was going to throw at the reader next. Which I guess is something.

It's not the weirdest book I've read, but it's close. Reuel Briggs is a mixed-race medical student and scientist passing for white who falls in love with a black singer, who dies. Through his understanding of early-20th-century pseudopsychology, he's able to revive her, but she's lost her memory. So he tells her she's white and they get married. Unable to find a job in the United States, he goes to Africa as the medical advisor on an expedition, where he finds out that he's actually the king of a long-lost civilization that is the progenitor of the rest of the world... and that the queen of said civilization is identical to his wife. Things only get weirder from there. The book is never quite coherent-- it was serialized, and parts show more don't join up in a way that makes me think it was written from month to month-- and very rarely good, but it is entertaining. Its racial politics are complicated and not entirely understandable, but mostly progressive. And, to interest me, there's a lot of nutty stuff about the early history of psychology going on. show less

While not the greatest of novels Hopkins' "Of One Blood" does just enough (I won't say right, but I'll at least say well) that it warrants itself a read. The prose is gorgeous (though given the pulp-y kind of story Hopkins decides to tell it almost comes off as funny in some respects) and story itself, while definitely overwrought, is not without importance given the zeitgeist out of which Hopkins was writing. I won't go to far with this review simply because I don't have much else to say about the novel. I won't call it a trifle or a bauble of American literary history as it is far more important than that. But I will say that this is an unexpectedly engaging (if at times soap opera dramatic) telling of something that, in a lot of show more ways, really feels like it prefigures the likes of Flash Gordon, Tarzan, and much else of the pulp genre. Worth a look for its history and its prescience (though more as regards literary genre conventions than its own troubled history, just my two cents). show less

On the back it's advertised as being "the story of Reuel Briggs, a medical student who couldn't care less about being black and appreciating African history, but finds himself in Ethiopia...to raid the country of lost treasures," but instead ends up learning "the painful truth about blood, race, and the half of his history that was never told." In actuality, the book, written by an African-American woman in 1902, starts off with Briggs' experiments in spiritualism, incorporating fantasy/science fiction themes, then moves on to an Ethiopian lost world and finishing with a gothic climax. While the main point of the novel is illustrating the lack of difference between the races, it uses an odd, hodgepodge assortment of themes to do so.

Reuel Briggs is a medical student. He is hiding his background. He is interested in the mystical. When he travels to Africa he discovers a hidden society. And of course he is the rightful king. There is lust, love, betrayal, murder and retaliation.

3.75/5