A passing doctor, a hidden city, and an argument about who built civilization.

Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self

Pauline E. Hopkins · 1902

Of One Blood is one of the earliest works of Black speculative fiction in American letters — a novel that starts as a story about racial passing and reviving the dead in Boston and ends in a hidden African city descended from ancient Meroe. Hopkins, serializing this in the Colored American Magazine she edited, uses the conventions of the era's romance and adventure fiction — mesmerism, mistaken identity, a lost civilization — to make a direct, scholarly-researched argument: that African civilization was ancient, sophisticated, and the true wellspring of the achievements the era's racial science tried to claim for whiteness alone. Reuel Briggs's passing plot and his journey to Telassar are the same argument told twice, once in the register of realism and once in the register of romance.

24 chapters · 52,558 words · ~4 hr read