Of One Blood

by Pauline Hopkins

  Series Volumes of

  Haunted Library of Horror Classics:

  The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (2020)

  The Beetle by Richard Marsh (2020)

  Vathek by William Beckford (2020)

  The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (2020)

  Of One Blood: or, The Hidden Self by Pauline Hopkins (2021)

  The Parasite and Other Tales of Terror by Arthur Conan Doyle (2021)

  The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (2021)

  Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M. R. James (2021)

  The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (2022)

  …and more forthcoming

  First published in 1902–1903 by The Colored Co-operative Publishing Company.

  Introduction © 2021 by Nisi Shawl

  Additional supplemental material © 2021 by Eric J. Guignard and Leslie S. Klinger

  Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design and illustration by Jeffrey Nguyen

  Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Originally published as a serial in 1902–1903 in The Colored American Magazine, published by The Colored Co-operative Publishing Company in Boston, Massachusetts.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hopkins, Pauline E. (Pauline Elizabeth), author. | Shawl, Nisi,

  writer of introduction.

  Title: Of one blood : or, The hidden self / Pauline Hopkins ; with an

  introduction by Nisi Shawk.

  Other titles: Hidden self

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Poisoned Pen Press, 2021. | Series:

  Haunted library of horror classics | Originally published as a serial in

  1902-1903 in The Colored American Magazine, published by The Colored

  Co-operative Publishing Company in Boston, Massachusetts. | Includes

  bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020040157 (paperback) | (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: African American medical students--Fiction. | Blacks--Race

  identity--Fiction. | Americans--Ethiopia--Fiction. | Ethiopia--Fiction.

  | GSAFD: Occult fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS1999.H4226 O36 2021 (print) | DDC 813/.4--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040157

  This edition of Of One Blood: or, The Hidden Self is presented by the Horror Writers Association, a nonprofit organization of writers and publishing professionals around the world, dedicated to promoting dark literature and the interests of those who write it.

  For more information on the HWA, visit: www.horror.org.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction to the Novel: Occult Blood

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  About the Author

  Suggested Discussion Questions for Classroom Use

  Suggested Further Reading of Fiction

  About Series Editors

  Back Cover

  Introduction to the Novel:

  Occult Blood

  OVER THE WINTER OF 1902 TO 1903, The Colored American Magazine (which Pauline Hopkins edited) published chapters of a work that seemed to blend two popular late-Victorian literary forms: “society” novels of the doings of the upper classes, and lost world adventures such as H. Rider Haggard’s She. Though it really belongs to a third genre of “problem” books because of how it focuses on contemporary racial issues, Of One Blood begins in the style of the society novel/drawing room drama. A Boston medical student falls in love with the (white-appearing) soloist of a touring (“colored”) choir, proposes marriage, and is accepted—but the machinations of a rich rival drive him from his wife’s arms to take part in an Ethiopian archaeological expedition.

  Here the lost world narrative takes over. Hopkins’s hero, Reuel Briggs, himself hiding his own African heritage, discovers a hidden kingdom of which he turns out to be the prodigal king. Unlike the imaginary countries of most of this genre’s exemplars, however, its inhabitants are Black. Not only Black, but proud of that Blackness.

  Hopkins has an official of this proto-Wakanda lecture American-born Reuel that from Black civilization came “all the arts and cunning inventions that make your modern glory.” That’s heady thesis, especially for the time in which the book was published—less than forty years after the end of the U.S. Civil War. It’s still a marvelous assertion today, and offers her readers a thrill just as audacious, just as mentally invigorating, just as cosmologically expansive in its implications as ever.

  Hopkins is in some ways the foremother of Octavia E. Butler, and Tananarive Due, and many of today’s leading science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors—primarily because she’s another African-descended woman using a popular genre to write speculatively about hard philosophical questions, surprising truths, and the wonders of the occult.

  That word, “occult,” appears often throughout Of One Blood, and its synonym “hidden” is part of the book’s subtitle: The Hidden Self. While these days we tend to identify the term occult with nonscientific traditions, that’s all it means. Hidden. And while these days we tend to identify spiritualism, clairvoyance, and hypnotism—or “mesmerism,” as it was called then—with the nonscientific, they were thought quite scientific at the time of this novel’s publication. Like Mary Shelley creating Frankenstein nearly a century before Of One Blood’s publication, like Margaret Cavendish creating The Blazing World nearly a century-and-a-half before that, Hopkins drew on and hewed to the scientific teachings of her day. That makes what she wrote science fiction—convenient mysterious birthmarks, biblical quotations, clairvoyance, ghostly apparitions, and all.

  The science fiction, fantasy, and horror Pauline Hopkins’s heirs write address the future and the unknown—the “occult”—in the same brave, pioneering terms she did. Yet although I’ve noted the more obvious connection between Hopkins and those sharing her gender and African descent, there’s another connection, a level at which the relationship between her and all of us steeped in imaginative fiction is also deep: the level on which we share with Hopkins her visions, her dreams. We are all he
r audience. We’re linked to her by the fanciful stories she tells. When we read and reread and analyze Of One Blood, when we take it inside our heads and our hearts, we reaffirm that.

  Multiple meanings attach to this novel’s title and subtitle. “The hidden self” refers both to Reuel’s secret identity and to the astral travel abilities of the “soul,” while the phrase “of one blood” refers in part to the book’s complicated incest subplot and also to the falsity of racial divisions.

  Race is an artificial construct—though as author Steven Barnes points out, it’s an artificial construct that can kill you. But biologically speaking, race has no genetic markers. And sociologically speaking, it’s a category whose boundaries can sometimes be overridden by the boundaries of others: class, religious beliefs, friendship, aesthetic inclination. Occupation. Family.

  In this novel, without directly referencing the ridiculous “one-drop rule” instituted across the U.S. during her lifetime (a rule stipulating the legal Blackness of anyone proven to have the slightest admixture of Black ancestry), Hopkins points out how family ties undermine the definition of race and subvert racial categorization. Quoting the God of her bible, she declares in the novel’s final line: “Of one blood have I made all races of men.”

  And Of One Blood are we who read this book.

  Nisi Shawl

  August 25, 2020

  Seattle, Washington

  CHAPTER I

  THE recitations were over for the day. It was the first week in November and it had rained about every day the entire week; now freezing temperature added to the discomfiture of the dismal season. The lingering equinoctial1 whirled the last clinging yellow leaves from the trees on the campus and strewed them over the deserted paths, while from the leaden sky fluttering snow-white flakes gave an unexpected touch of winter to the scene.

  The east wind for which Boston and vicinity is celebrated, drove the sleet against the window panes of the room in which Reuel Briggs sat among his books and the apparatus for experiments. The room served for both living and sleeping. Briggs could have told you that the bareness and desolateness of the apartment were like his life, but he was a reticent man who knew how to suffer in silence. The dreary wet afternoon, the cheerless walk over West Boston bridge through the soaking streets had but served to emphasize the loneliness of his position, and morbid thoughts had haunted him all day: To what use all this persistent hard work for a place in the world—clothes, food, a roof? Is suicide wrong? he asked himself with tormenting persistency. From out the storm, voices and hands seemed beckoning him all day to cut the Gordian knot and solve the riddle of whence and whither for all time.

  His place in the world would soon be filled; no vacuum remained empty; the eternal movement of all things onward closed up the gaps, and the wail of the newly-born augmented the great army of mortals pressing the vitals of Mother Earth with hurrying tread. So he had tormented himself for months, but the courage was yet wanting for strength to rend the veil. It had grown dark early. Reuel had not stirred from his room since coming from the hospital—had not eaten nor drank, and was in full possession of the solitude he craved. It was now five o’clock. He sat sideways by the bare table, one leg crossed over the other. His fingers kept the book open at the page where he was reading, but his attention wandered beyond the leaden sky, the dripping panes, and the sounds of the driving storm outside.

  He was thinking deeply of the words he had just read, and which the darkness had shut from his gaze. The book was called The Unclassified Residuum, just published and eagerly sought by students of mysticism, and dealing with the great field of new discoveries in psychology. Briggs was a close student of what might be termed “absurdities” of supernatural phenomena or mysticism, best known to the every-day world as “effects of the imagination,” a phrase of mere dismissal, and which it is impossible to make precise; the book suited the man’s mood. These were the words of haunting significance:

  “All the while, however, the phenomena are there, lying broadcast over the surface of history. No matter where you open its pages, you find things recorded under the name of divinations, inspirations, demoniacal possessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, miraculous healing and productions of disease, and occult powers possessed by peculiar individuals over persons and things in their neighborhood.

  “The mind-curers and Christian scientists, who are beginning to lift up their heads in our communities, unquestionably get remarkable results in certain cases. The ordinary medical man dismisses them from his attention with the cut-and-dried remark that they are ‘only the effects of the imagination.’ But there is a meaning in this vaguest of phrases.

  “We know a non-hysterical woman who in her trances knows facts which altogether transcend her possible normal consciousness, facts about the lives of people whom she never saw or heard of before. I am well aware of all the liabilities to which this statement exposes me, and I make it deliberately, having practically no doubt whatever of its truth.”2

  Presently Briggs threw the book down, and, rising from his chair, began pacing up and down the bare room.

  “That is it,” at length he said aloud. “I have the power, I know the truth of every word—of all M. Binet asserts, and could I but complete the necessary experiments, I would astonish the world. O Poverty, Ostracism! Have I not drained the bitter cup to the dregs!” he apostrophized, with a harsh, ironical laugh.

  Mother Nature had blessed Reuel Briggs with superior physical endowments, but as yet he had never had reason to count them blessings. No one could fail to notice the vast breadth of shoulder, the strong throat that upheld a plain face, the long limbs, the sinewy hands. His head was that of an athlete, with close-set ears, and covered with an abundance of black hair, straight and closely cut, thick and smooth; the nose was the aristocratic feature, although nearly spoiled by broad nostrils, of this remarkable young man; his skin was white, but of a tint suggesting olive, an almost sallow color which is a mark of strong, melancholic temperaments. His large mouth concealed powerful long white teeth which gleamed through lips even and narrow, parting generally in a smile at once grave, genial, and singularly sweet; indeed Briggs’s smile changed the plain face at once into one that interested and fascinated men and women. True there were lines about the mouth which betrayed a passionate, nervous temperament, but they accorded well with the rest of his strong personality. His eyes were a very bright and piercing gray, courageous, keen, and shrewd. Briggs was not a man to be despised—physically or mentally.

  None of the students associated together in the hive of men under the fostering care of the “benign mother”3 knew aught of Reuel Briggs’s origin. It was rumored at first that he was of Italian birth, then they “guessed” he was a Japanese, but whatever land claimed him as a son, all voted him a genius in his scientific studies, and much was expected of him at graduation. He had no money, for he was unsocial and shabby to the point of seediness, and apparently no relatives, for his correspondence was limited to the letters of editors of well-known local papers and magazines. Somehow he lived and paid his way in a third-rate lodging-house near Harvard square, at the expense of the dull intellects or the idle rich, with which a great university always teems, to whom Briggs acted as “coach,” and by contributing scientific articles to magazines on the absorbing subject of spiritualistic phenomena. A few of his articles had produced a profound impression. The monotonous pacing continued for a time, finally ending at the mantel, from whence he abstracted a disreputable looking pipe and filled it.

  “Well,” he soliloquized, as he reseated himself in his chair, “Fate had done her worst, but she mockingly beckons me on and I accept her challenge. I shall not yet attempt the bourne. If I conquer, it will be by strength of brain and will-power. I shall conquer; I must and will.”

  The storm had increased in violence; the early dusk came swiftly down, and at this point in his revery the rattling window panes, as well as the whistle a
nd shriek of gusts of moaning wind, caught his attention. “Phew! A beastly night.” With a shiver, he drew his chair closer to the cylinder stove, whose glowing body was the only cheerful object in the bare room.

  As he sat with his back half-turned to catch the grateful warmth, he looked out into the dim twilight across the square and into the broad paths of the campus, watching the skeleton arms of giant trees tossing in the wind, and the dancing snowflakes that fluttered to earth in their fairy gowns to be quickly transformed into running streams that fairly overflowed the gutters. He fell into a dreamy state as he gazed, for which he could not account. As he sent his earnest, penetrating gaze into the night, gradually the darkness and storm faded into tints of cream and rose and soft moist lips. Silhouetted against the background of lowering sky and waving branches, he saw distinctly outlined a fair face framed in golden hair, with soft brown eyes, deep and earnest—terribly earnest they seemed just then—rose-tinged baby lips, and an expression of wistful entreaty. O how real, how very real did the passing shadow appear to the gazer!

  He tried to move, uneasily conscious that this strange experience was but “the effect of the imagination,” but he was powerless. The unknown countenance grew dimmer and farther off, floating gradually out of sight, while a sense of sadness and foreboding wrapped him about as with a pall.

  A wilder gust of wind shook the window sashes. Reuel stared about him in a bewildered way like a man awakening from a heavy sleep. He listened to the wail of the blast and glanced at the fire and rubbed his eyes. The vision was gone; he was alone in the room; all was silence and darkness. The ticking of the cheap clock on the mantel kept time with his heart-beats. The light of his own life seemed suddenly eclipsed with the passing of the lovely vision of Venus. Conscious of an odd murmur in his head, which seemed to control his movements, he rose and went toward the window to open it; there came a loud knock at the door.

  Briggs did not answer at once. He wanted no company. Perhaps the knocker would go away. But he was persistent. Again came the knock ending in a double rat-tat accompanied by the words: