Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self
Glossary
A
- Ai
- The noiseless, phantomlike guide who welcomes Reuel into Telassar, dresses him in royal silks and a jewelled dagger in place of his revolver, and shows him the city's public buildings and prophetic traditions — including the legend of Ergamenes's promised royal descendant, whom Ai gradually reveals Reuel himself to be.
- Related: Telassar (hidden Meroe), Reuel Briggs, Ergamenes
- Aubrey Livingston
- Reuel's wealthy college friend and rival, called 'a sight for gods and men' for his good looks, who covets Dianthe and orchestrates a ruthless scheme — including hiring Jim Titus to sabotage Reuel's Ethiopian expedition — to remove Reuel and claim her for himself. His true parentage and villainy are exposed by the novel's end.
- Related: Dianthe Lusk, Jim Titus, Molly Vance
- Aunt Hannah
- An elderly woman living in a one-room cabin near the Livingston estate, known among the servants as the most noted 'voodoo' doctor or witch in the country. Dianthe is drawn to her cabin and falls under her uncanny influence, one of the novel's several intersections of the occult with the plot's unfolding secrets.
- Related: Dianthe Lusk, Mesmerism and the Occult
C
- Charlie Vance ("Adonis")
- Reuel's wealthy, good-natured college classmate, nicknamed 'Adonis' by his friends for his striking looks, whose family estate hosts much of the novel's early Boston-society action. He joins Professor Stone's Ethiopian expedition alongside Reuel and Aubrey.
- Related: Molly Vance, Aubrey Livingston, Professor Stone
- Cush
- The Biblical and ancient name for the Nubian/Ethiopian kingdom, invoked by an Arab source cited within the expedition's research as the progenitor of Telassar's hidden royal line — one of several ways Hopkins ties her fictional lost city to real Biblical and historical genealogies of African civilization.
- Related: Ergamenes, Meroe, Telassar (hidden Meroe)
D
- Dianthe Lusk
- A singer with the Fisk Jubilee Singers whom Reuel revives after she is presumed dead in a train accident, left with total amnesia of her past life. Her fate becomes entangled with both Reuel, whom she secretly marries, and Aubrey Livingston, whose scheming and jealousy drive much of the novel's tragedy.
- Related: Reuel Briggs, Aubrey Livingston, Aunt Hannah
E
- Ergamenes
- The ancient Ethiopian king, contemporary of the second Ptolemy, whose prophesied royal descendant — born among the enslaved peoples carried to distant lands — is foretold to return and restore Meroe's former glory. The novel builds toward revealing Reuel Briggs as this prophesied heir.
- Related: Meroe, Reuel Briggs, Queen Candace
J
- Jim Titus
- The man Aubrey Livingston telegraphs and pays handsomely — ten thousand dollars for six months' work — to sabotage Reuel's affairs while he is away on the Ethiopian expedition, part of Aubrey's calculated plot to remove his rival and claim Dianthe for himself.
- Related: Aubrey Livingston
M
- Meroe
- The ancient Ethiopian capital, once entrepot of trade between north and south, east and west, whose ruins Professor Stone's expedition sets out to excavate. Hopkins invokes the historical writer Volney's declaration that the 'race of Negroes, the object of our extreme contempt,' gave the world 'our arts, sciences and even the use of speech,' grounding the novel's Afrocentric argument in real archaeological and historical claims.
- Related: Telassar (hidden Meroe), Ergamenes, Professor Stone
- Mesmerism and the Occult
- Reuel's scientific interest in mesmerism, trance states, and reviving the dead — a very 1902 fascination with the borderland between science and the supernatural — which drives the novel's opening plot (his revival of Dianthe) and recurs through Aunt Hannah's voodoo practice and the visionary 'second sight' that connects Reuel to Telassar across an ocean.
- Related: Reuel Briggs, Aunt Hannah, Mira
- Mira
- A mysterious woman in Telassar whose shadowy, spectral appearances — beckoning Reuel through the palace at night in response to a scream only he can hear — connect Telassar's supernatural atmosphere back to the novel's recurring themes of hidden identity and psychic connection across distance.
- Related: Telassar (hidden Meroe), Reuel Briggs, Mesmerism and the Occult
- Molly Vance
- Charlie Vance's sister, part of the wealthy Boston social circle surrounding Dianthe after her rescue, whose household and correspondence with the traveling men frame several of the novel's domestic chapters.
- Related: Charlie Vance ("Adonis"), Dianthe Lusk
P
- Passing and the Hidden Self
- The novel's organizing idea, named in its subtitle 'The Hidden Self': identity — racial, personal, even psychic — is never quite what it appears on the surface. Reuel's ability to pass as white, Dianthe's amnesia, and Telassar's hidden existence all dramatize the same theme of concealed truths beneath a deceptive exterior.
- Related: Reuel Briggs, Mesmerism and the Occult, Telassar (hidden Meroe)
- Pauline E. Hopkins (Author)
- The author of Of One Blood, a leading Black woman novelist, editor, and journalist of the early 1900s whose work for the Colored American Magazine combined popular romance and adventure plotting with pointed historical and political argument about African civilization and American racial hypocrisy.
- Related: The Colored American Magazine
- Professor Stone
- The leader of the archaeological expedition to Ethiopia that Reuel joins, whose scholarly enthusiasm for the ancient city of Meroe and its treasures drives the party deeper into the desert and toward the hidden city of Telassar.
- Related: Meroe, Telassar (hidden Meroe), Reuel Briggs
Q
- Queen Candace
- The hereditary title, not a personal name, held by the virgin queen who rules Telassar alongside a Council of twenty-five Sages, choosing her successor from among the city's virgins every fifteen years while awaiting the prophesied coming of a king descended from Ergamenes to found a new dynasty.
- Related: Telassar (hidden Meroe), Ergamenes, Ai
R
- Reuel Briggs
- The novel's protagonist, a brilliant but impoverished medical student at a Boston-area college, light-skinned enough to pass as white, whose hidden Black ancestry and psychic 'second sight' are gradually revealed across the novel. His scientific fascination with mesmerism and reanimation sets the plot in motion when he revives Dianthe Lusk, and his archaeological journey to Ethiopia reveals him to be the last legitimate descendant of Meroe's royal line.
- Related: Dianthe Lusk, Passing and the Hidden Self, Telassar (hidden Meroe)
S
- Second Sight
- Reuel's psychic gift, described in the novel as a power that intensifies and returns to him in full force in Telassar — allowing him to sense Dianthe's distress across the ocean and to hear cries and visions no one else perceives. It is the novel's clearest bridge between its Boston medical-science plot and its Ethiopian prophetic-fantasy plot.
- Related: Reuel Briggs, Mesmerism and the Occult, Mira
T
- Telassar (hidden Meroe)
- The lost African city Reuel and his companions discover on the archaeological expedition, a surviving remnant of ancient Meroitic civilization hidden from the outside world for centuries. Telassar reframes the novel from a Boston social drama into a speculative vision of African civilization, royalty, and prophecy, and it is here that Reuel learns his own hidden royal lineage.
- Related: Meroe, Ai, Queen Candace
- The Colored American Magazine
- The Boston monthly Pauline Hopkins edited and largely wrote for, where Of One Blood was serialized from November 1902 to November 1903, following her earlier novel Contending Forces — the publishing context that shaped the novel's direct engagement with contemporary racial uplift and Afrocentric historical argument.
- Related: Pauline E. Hopkins (Author)
- The Council of Twenty-Five Sages
- The body of learned men who govern Telassar alongside Queen Candace, each required to be married with at least two children and educated for periodic visits to the outside world — Hopkins's depiction of a sophisticated, self-sustaining African political and intellectual institution unknown to the West.
- Related: Queen Candace, Telassar (hidden Meroe), Ai
- The Fisk Jubilee Singers
- The historical touring choral ensemble from Fisk University, famous for popularizing Black spirituals, with which Dianthe Lusk performs before the train accident that leaves her presumed dead — a detail rooting the novel's fantastical plot in a real institution central to post-Reconstruction Black cultural achievement.
- Related: Dianthe Lusk
- The Train Accident
- The disaster that opens the novel's plot, in which Dianthe Lusk is presumed dead among the casualties before Reuel Briggs secretly revives her using his experimental methods — the inciting incident that binds the two characters' fates together and launches Reuel's growing fame as a physician.
- Related: Dianthe Lusk, Reuel Briggs, Mesmerism and the Occult