"Face to Face": Localizing Lucy Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light

"Face to Face": Localizing Lucy Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the LightAuthor(s): ERIC GARDNERSource: Legacy, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2007), pp. 50-71Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679591 .

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"Face to Face": Localizing Lucy Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light

ERIC GARDNER

Saginaw Valley State University

Were it not for Lucy Delaney's c.1891 narrative From the Darkness Cometh

the Light; or, Struggles for Freedom, she might not be remembered today. However, as Delaney's preface notes, "[S]o many of my friends have urged me

to give a short sketch of my varied life that I have consented, and herewith pres ent it for the consideration of my readers" (vii). Delaney's brief narrative of

that varied life actually begins with the false enslavement of her mother before

Delaney's birth and then follows Delaney through a range of masters and mis

tresses of the Berry and Wash families. As she grows, her own family is gradu

ally sundered by slavery?by the sale of her father, the escape of her sister and an attempted escape by her mother, the sale of her mother, and, finally, her own

threatened sale and attempted escape (after Delaney clashes repeatedly with her

last mistress, Martha Berry Mitchell). Delaney's mother, Polly Wash, though, stumbles on a now little-known set of legal provisions and files suit both for her

freedom and, in a separate action, for Delaney's. Most of Delaney's narrative

follows the progress of her own freedom suit, through seventeen months in the

St. Louis Jail (where her master demanded she be placed for what he considered

to be safekeeping), a set of climatic courtroom scenes during which Delaney is represented by Edward Bates (who would later become Abraham Lincoln's

Attorney General), and, finally, freedom through a victory in court. Her narra

tive concludes with the complex juxtaposition of her sadness at the destruction

of her family (she is, for example, reunited with her father only to find him

unable to return to the life in St. Louis he had lost decades before) and her deep satisfaction at becoming a key figure in St. Louis's Black community.

Delaney's text has attracted only limited notice, though, in part because it

seems an anachronism: Delaney was a contemporary of Frederick Douglass,

LEGACY, VOL. 24, NO. 1, 2007- PP. 5O-7I. COPYRIGHT ? 2007 THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS



William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, and a host of others who published their

slave narratives while the American system of chattel slavery was still in full

force, but her narrative is a contemporary of the next generation of Black texts, such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's novel Iola Leroy, Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert's history The House of Bondage, the later and more history-centered texts

of figures like Douglass and Brown, and the African American "uplift books"

published at the end of the nineteenth century.1 This essay shares new information on the personal and local motivations

and contexts behind Delaney's narrative and, in so doing, offers a reading of

From the Darkness as a public document designed to participate in the world

of St. Louis in the 1890s, even though most of it focuses on events of the 1840s. The essay thus examines a set of intertwined stories. First, it tells the story of

how the narrative survived near oblivion and was reborn in the late twentieth

century; in revising this story, it draws heavily on the contexts of the book's

late nineteenth-century composition and publication. Both of these stories, in

turn, intersect with an examination of Delaney's postbellum community (spe

cifically Black Masonic) activism. This set of biographical details identifies the

narrative's probable intended audience as, primarily, Black women in St. Louis.

Ultimately, all of these stories demonstrate that the central goal of Delaney's narrative was personal legacy-building?specifically, to use the personal to

make larger arguments about how the next generation(s) should remember

slavery and both represent and understand Blackness. Telling these stories

allows the essay to conclude with a rereading of key elements of Delaney's nar

rative (including some that have baffled previous critics) as well as a rereading of some recent critics' dismissals of some Black women's texts of the 1890s. This rereading asserts both the importance of From the Darkness as an indi vidual text and the broader need to consider the public place(s) of Delaney's story?rather than just her book.

Delaney's book seems to have suffered a severely limited initial reception. To date, I have discovered only eight extant copies of From the Darkness; none

of the copies I have examined have marginalia that suggest who their original owners were.2 I have yet to find a review or advertisement for the book and have found no comments by readers in the 1890s. Two explanations for this seem plausible. First, the book may well have had an exceedingly small print run. Second, something may have happened to part of that run. A tantalizing piece of uncorroborated evidence for this second possibility exists in the copy of Delaney's book now owned by the University of Missouri at Kansas City: what appears to be a clipping from a book dealer's catalog is pasted into the

book, and it claims that "practically the whole of this edition was sold for waste

Eric Gardner 51



paper shortly after publication." The clipping is undated and cites no source for this information.

The earliest provenance record for a copy of From the Darkness is that of the Missouri Historical Society, which acquired its copy in January of 1903, seven

years before Delaney's death.3 This copy alone may well have saved Delaney's narrative from oblivion. Harrison Trexler's 1914 Slavery in Missouri, 1804-1865, which long stood as a definitive work, cited Delaney as a source; strong circum stantial evidence suggests that Trexler used the copy in the Missouri Historical

Society. Because most subsequent studies built from or responded to Trexler,

they, too, cited Delaney's narrative with some regularity.4 Such citation also put Delaney's narrative in literary bibliographies. However,

as they did with Iola Leroy, critics essentially mentioned and then ignored From the Darkness until the flowering of Black feminist scholarship in the 1980s and the book's reissue in 1988 as part of Six Women s Slave Narratives, a volume in the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. Hazel V. Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood and Frances Smith Foster's Written by Herself, though they mention rather than focus on Delaney's text, set ground work for further consideration. Still, though Delaney's narrative is now regu

larly taught, critical discussion of the text has remained somewhat limited. Part of this has undoubtedly come from many critics' emphasis?seen in a cursory examination of the MLA Bibliography?on late nineteenth-century fiction by better known figures like Frances Harper and Charles Chesnutt over autobio

graphical narrative, but part probably also comes from a thin sense of the con

texts surrounding Delaney's rhetorical situation.

Critical work on Delaney's narrative to date can be divided into four strands.

Carby's study placed Delaney's text alongside other women's slave narra

tives, emphasizing her construction of Black womanhood (36-37). This first

approach offers fascinating potential for dialogic reading?potential yet to

be fully realized. Lindon Barrett's detailed work on the narrative in his "Self

Knowledge, Law, and African American Autobiography," and his brief consid eration in "African American Slave Narratives" (435), marks the genesis of two more strands?one examining how the narrative handles questions of physi

cality and textual representation and another focusing on how Delaney repre sents the space of the American courtroom in her discussion of her freedom suit trial. The final strand?exemplified by work by Foster and especially P.

Gabrielle Foreman?takes up issues raised by the first three strands and com

plicates them by placing Delaney's narrative in dialogue with national issues

of the 1880s and 1890s. As such, Foster's and Foreman's work demands further

consideration here.

Foster's sense of context allows her to go beyond Carby to argue that Delaney's

52 legacy: volume 24 no. 1 2007



narrative "synthesize [s] the secular and the spiritual accounts" of the nexus of

slavery, race, and gender "into a deliberately racial account" (178). Specifically, Foster compares Delaney to both Octavia V. R. Albert and the main figure in

Albert's book The House of Bondage, aged former slave Charlotte Brooks. Foster

argues that Delaney

assumed a dispassionate narrative persona similar to that of... Albert, but instead

of using a Charlotte Brooks as the nucleus around which the other narratives clus

tered ... Delaney claimed that position as her own. And she is right in line with her

contemporaries who were writing to remind men and white women that African

American women knew themselves to be and were hereby proclaiming themselves

as entitled to full participation in the life of the nation and the world. (179)

Similarly, Foreman posits a much more contextual purpose than Barrett for

the courtroom scenes in From the Darkness: to address the legal battles leading up to Plessy v. Ferguson. Foreman rightly notes Louisiana's 1890 act mandat

ing segregation in intra-state transportation, the organized efforts by groups like the American Citizens Equal Rights Association and individuals like Albion

Tourgee to challenge the act's constitutionality, and the national reportage of the

act and its challengers by the Black press (342-43). And Foreman is correct that

Delaney's narrative was published when the Black presence in the courtroom

and the courtroom's definition of Blackness were becoming more and more

important. Stewart v. the Sue (1885), a transport case heard in the Maryland District Court a decade before Plessy reached the Supreme Court, offers a key earlier example of such.5 Foreman usefully argues that seeing such legal battles as some of Delaney's "historical referents" helps us understand that she might have been reminding her initial readers of more contemporary ramifications

of her "lawyer's admonition?cYou need not think because my client is colored that she has no rights, and can be cheated out of her freedom'" (Delaney 34;

qtd. in Foreman 343). From such arguments, both Foster and Foreman rightly mark Delaney's

text as instructive?in John Ernest's words, an example of "cultural pedagogy" (497)?a text designed to teach postbellum readers about both how slavery affected African Americans (especially African American women) and how they might respond to contemporary racism and sexism. Like the curiously named character Lucille Delany in Harper's Iola Leroy, Lucy Delaney urges readers of

From the Darkness to view their goal as making "the best use" of their time by

sharing "the few talents the Lord has bestowed on" them "for His glory and to

benefit those for whom" they live (63).6 Still, as valuable as Foster's and (especially) Foreman's readings of From

the Darkness are, they are hampered by the lack of information on Delaney's

Eric Gardner 53



biography and local contexts. Indeed, critics beginning with Carby have been

hesitant to give detailed consideration to the wrecked families in the narrative.

These include the sister who escaped to Canada, the failed post-Emancipation reunion with Delaney's long-lost father, and especially the handful of unhe

roic facets of the otherwise positive depiction of Delaney's mother Polly Wash

(specifically, her absence at Delaney's trial, after starting the suit and caring for Delaney throughout her time in the St. Louis jail. Foreman briefly refers

to this absence as "the mystery of symbolic maternal abandonment" [342]).

Similarly, critics ignore the more than two full pages (in a sixty-four-page nar

rative) devoted to a biography of white slaveholder and attorney Edward Bates.

They generally ignore Delaney's preface and final posttrial chapter, and they

generally sever Delaney totally from the context of Black St. Louis.

These last issues become even more ripe for discussion when we begin to

piece together the publication and composition history of From the Darkness.

That history has remained cloudy; indeed, we still do not even know the exact

date of the book's publication. Most estimates suggest that it was published in

the early 1890s, and the publisher's address ("No. 11, Bridge Entrance" in St.

Louis), when compared to city directory listings, confirms that the book was

most probably published between 1890 and 1893.7 One internal clue strongly

suggests that it was written, if not published, in 1891: in speaking of her mar

riage, Delaney says that she has had a "happy married life, continuing forty-two

years" (58); if she were married in 1849, as per St. Louis records, forty-two years would take her to 1891.8

We know a bit more about the book's publisher, listed as the "Publishing House of J. T. Smith." John T. Smith was an active St. Louis printer at least as

early as 1880; he must have been fairly successful, as, in addition to his wife, the

thirty-year-old English immigrant was listed in the 1880 Federal Census as hav

ing a live-in domestic servant. From 1888 until the turn of the century, he was

included in various ways in city directories?first as a member of Ferris, Smith, and Company (as well as a manager of the St. Louis Critic), later as "John T.

Smith" under listings for printers, and still later, as part of the "Smith Brothers"

and "John T. Smith" under listings for publishers.9 Smith's calling his business a "Publishing House," though, was a stretch. I

have located only ten extant titles published by Smith (including Delaney's); almost all were issued between 1890 and 1895. Almost all were clearly religious, and one was actually published for the Presbyterian Board of Publication.10

This small line suggests that printer Smith held some of the beliefs espoused in

the texts he published; the strong Christian tone of Delaney's text might have

helped him decide to take it. Perhaps more important, though, his line?and

especially the job he did for the Presbyterian Board?suggests that Smith prob




ably did some subsidy and vanity publishing. The tiny number of surviving

copies suggests that Delaney's book may have been such a project. More impor tant, Delaney's prefatory statement that the book resulted from the urging of

"so many of my friends," when taken as a simple statement of fact, rather than

a trope of autobiography, strengthens this suggestion (vii). So who were those friends?

Delaney's brief summary of her life after her freedom suit offers key hints.

She notes that she

was elected President of the first colored society, called the "Female Union" ...;

President of a society known as the "Daughters of Zion"; was matron of "Siloam

Court," No. 2, three years in succession; was Most Ancient Matron of the "Grand

Court of Missouri," of which only the wives of Masons are allowed to become

members. I am at present, Past Grand Chief Preceptress of the "Daughters of the

Tabernacle and Knights of Tabor." (62-63)

Historians have, as yet, been unable to track the first two organizations. The rest

are Masonic or neo-Masonic, and it was to these organizations that Delaney devoted a great deal of her later life. Their members were likely Delaney's friends, and the combination of these friendships and organizational ties prob

ably served as the occasion for the call for Delaney's narrative.

There is no doubt that these organizations, and Black freemasonry in gen

eral, attempted to engage and replicate some values advocated by comparable white organizations that catered to the middling classes.11 Delaney's member

ship in Siloam Court (part of the Heroines of Jericho), for example, was clearly a statement of class status, or, at least, class aspirations: she had to pay regular dues and invest in the society's elaborate regalia as well as pay expenses to travel

to social events and meetings, some of which were held outside of St. Louis.12

As with many Black Masonic organizations, processionals and high ceremony dominated much of the formal interactions of the Heroines. They also seem

to have had a fairly strict moral code for their members, and records exist of

members being suspended and even expelled for violations. And, of course,

they were quite selective in their membership, generally demanding some direct

connection to a male Mason.

Still, to assume that the so-called "values of white bourgeois society"?gen

erally understood to be self-help, family and community engagement, and late

nineteenth-century Protestant morality?were inherently white is, to say the

least, deeply problematic. Delaney, of course, seems to have held these values

throughout her life in spite of the whites around her, not because she wanted

to be like those whites. Similarly, while much Masonic ritual does in some

ways center on high fantasy?what E. Franklin Frazier called a "world of make

Eric Gardner 55



believe" (127)?such sweeping generalizations deeply oversimplify freemason

ry's place in the Black community. In St. Louis, in addition to and sometimes intertwining with, the more

conservative and bourgeois strands of freemasonry were also rich strands of Black nationalism and communal self-help among Black Masons. These facets

allowed, in Gary Kremer's words, "the black victim of white racism to respond

creatively to the limitations placed upon him [sic]" (52). At the heart of these

strands of Black freemasonry in St. Louis?the strands with which Delaney was

most closely allied?stood Moses Dickson.

Dickson seems to have been born free in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the 1820s and was initially trained as a barber. Most accounts of his subsequent life run toward

myth. According to the biographical account in Manual of the International

Order of Twelve of Knights and Daughters of Tabor, which Dickson may have

authored, he supposedly began a three-year "tour" of the South in 1841, ending up in New Orleans in mid-1844, when he "saw slavery in all its horrors" and

"witnessed such scenes of monstrous cruelty as caused his African blood to

boil with suppressed indignation at the sight of the outrageous suffering of

his people" (8-9). During this time, he supposedly "made the acquaintance of a few true and trusty young men, who were ready to enter into any plan that

would assure freedom to the African race," and, in August of 1846, they met in

St. Louis, where Dickson had settled (8). Their purported plan, authored by Dickson, was nothing short of revolutionary:

Organizations were secretly to be made in the Southern States. None but reliable,

fearless men were to be enrolled. The organizers were to carefully pick the men

that were courageous, patient, temperate, and possessed of sound common sense.

One feature of... [their oath] was: "I can die, but I cannot reveal the name of any

member until the slaves are free." This oath was never broken. . . . Silently, like

the falling of Autumn leaves, the organizations multiplied, until, in 1856, an army

of true and trusty men numbered forty-seven thousand, two hundred and forty

Knights of Liberty. (8-9)

At the center of this massive army, according to Dickson's accounts, stood his

"disciples"?his "Order of Twelve" (9,12). Dickson was supposedly ready to call

for a national uprising in 1856 or 1857, but he held back in the face of growing

anti-slavery sentiment and a prophetic vision of the Civil War. He instead is

said to have shifted his efforts to working with the Underground Railroad and

to have waited for the great war (10).13

Though almost impossible to substantiate and certainly at least somewhat

exaggerated, simply the existence and the character of these claims?made first

in the 1891 ritual book Manual of the International Order of Twelve of Knights




and Daughters of Tabor?merit further research. Dickson, consciously linking himself to slave revolutionaries like Nat Turner, claimed to have called for an

answer to slavery that was both violent and massive. Rather than letting this

ideology fade after Emancipation, he consistently refined and reinvoked it.14

The ritual book that makes these claims and advanced this radical sense of

Blackness was designed for the male branch of the organization Delaney speaks of as the "Daughters of the Tabernacle and Knights of Tabor" (63). Delaney was

actively involved in the Daughters by at least the mid-i88os: on 13 October 1887,

she was elected the Chief Grand Preceptress (head) of the state temple, and she

was re-elected in 1888. She continued to be active in her local temple long after.

She was clearly aware of the history of the Knights of Liberty, and she must

have worked closely with Dickson.

Delaney and Dickson were also closely tied through the Heroines of Jericho noted above. Dickson and his wife Mary helped set up the first Black chap ter (called a "Court") of the Heroines, and Dickson himself wrote the orga nizations rituals. Active in the Heroines' second St. Louis Court (the Siloam

Court) for perhaps three decades, Delaney and St. Mary's Court leader Mary Dickson attended citywide meetings together for almost twenty years. When

the Heroines had enough Courts to form a "Grand Court" at the state level

in 1874, Delaney was elected "Grand Treasurer" at the same meeting at which

Mary Dickson was elected the "Grand Inner Gatekeeper." Delaney also served

three years as the Siloam Court Matron (head) and eventually became the state

organizations Grand Worthy Matron (head) at least three times. As Grand

Worthy Matron, she hosted the Grand Court's 1899 meeting in St. Louis, orga nized and presided over a special series of meetings in 1901 eulogizing Moses

Dickson, and was probably involved in planning the massive funeral activities

when Dickson passed.15

Who were the other women who joined these organizations?who supported the Dicksons so much that they came to refer to them as "Father Dickson" and

"Mother Dickson"? While a full study of such is beyond the scope of this essay, we can note that, in what seems to have been a scenario of class separation more common among Masonic women than men, few of them entered the

ranks of the elite of Black St. Louis. Most were not tied?even though Mary Dickson was?to the land- and business-owning antebellum free Blacks chron

icled in Cyprian Glamorgan's The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. Most were not

members of the groups founded by the Black descendants of the wealthy and

powerful Choteaus or the new Black elite (like the Vashon family) who came to

St. Louis after the Civil War. In a rare case, for example, Alice Richardson, the

Heroines of Jericho member who planned Delaney's funeral, briefly belonged to Susan Paul Vashon's "Informal Dames," but she also seems to have left the

Eric Gardner 57



organization (which charged dues of at least twenty-five cents per meeting) when economic times worsened. If Richardson's entry into the fringes of the Black elite was somewhat out of character for many Black Masonic women in

St. Louis, other markers of her status were not. Her husband George was a chef, an occupation arguably on par with Delaney's husband Zachariah's work for

the postal service (work that was reduced from clerk to laborer status after the

end of the remnants of Reconstruction). The few remaining photographs of St.

Louis women's Masonic groups suggest?in a St. Louis and a world obsessed

with skin tone?that some may have been of mixed ancestry, but that many were, like Richardson, in the terms used by the census, "Black" rather than

"mulatto." As the club movement became more democratized in the 1890s, these were the women who might join, but not generally the women of pres

tigious families who would be marked as leaders. In essence, they were Black women aspiring to (and beginning to join) the middling classes?Black women

who were still quite close to a slavery-dominated past and who were certainly eager to hear and build on the Dickson message of self-determination, nascent

Black nationalism, and African American Protestantism.16

Delaney must have believed deeply in these organizations?as well as in key leaders like the Dicksons?and in the values they advocated, as, over a period of three decades or more, she gave them a great deal of time and resources

(including financial resources, which were often thin for the Delaneys).17 These

organizations' community-centered ethos runs throughout Delaney's narra

tive. Readers of From the Darkness will not be surprised, for example, that the Heroines of Jericho pledged to be "united under the form of a Court for mutual

aid and protection, to assist each other in sickness and distress, and comfort a

member when lonely or disabled"; as well, the 1903 History of St. Mary's Court

proudly claimed that, during its existence, it had "paid out in death benefits over $2,500 and in sick benefits ... over $6000" (64).

It seems likely that Delaney's deep organizational ties had personal com

ponents, too, for at times, she was both "lonely" and "disabled." In one of the

most touching and troubling sections of From the Darkness, Delaney writes of

how her charitable work with the Exodusters, during which she "piled inquiry upon inquiry" in search of information about the father who had been ripped from her in childhood, led to a brief and bittersweet reunion with a now "old,

grizzled and gray" man "made prematurely old by the accumulation of trou

bles" (60-61).18 As an important organizer within the Black community, Moses

Dickson had been at the forefront of such efforts; it is certainly possible that

he?and/or his wife, and/or other Masons?aided Delaney in tracking down

her father, celebrated their reunion, and counseled Delaney, who must have

been heartbroken when her father, who "felt like a stranger in a strange land" in

St. Louis, decided to return to the life he had built in Mississippi (61).




More painful?and rushed over in the narrative with brief language that only hints at how Delaney's "cup of bitterness was full to the brim and overflowing"

(58-59)?is the fact that, by the time she published her narrative, all four of

her children had died.19 One of the implied functions of Black Masonic orga nizations was to reinforce parenting structures, so it is certainly possible that

Delaney found some solace in working with younger Masonic women: though her own children had died, as "Matron," "Most Ancient Matron," and "Grand

Worthy Matron," Delaney was charged with the guidance of younger members.

The stories of her life Delaney must have told them?stories that became the

basis for From the Darkness?may well have been a central piece of that guid ance. Finally, late in life, widowed and nearly destitute, it was to the first Black

Masonic home in Missouri that Delaney turned. She died there on 31 August 1910, and her funeral in St. Louis was sponsored by the Heroines of Jericho.20

Given both the bent of freemasonry to represent its members as exemplars of key virtues and the sense that freemasonry contributed to community bet

terment, history, and memory, asking a woman of Delaney's stature to write a

"short sketch" like From the Darkness would certainly have been in line with the

ethos of these organizations. While Delaney s lack of ties to some of the more

upper-class Black clubs in St. Louis might have limited support and patronage from St. Louis's most prominent Blacks, her Masonic ties might have offered

both encouragement and support for printing and circulating her text.

Within this framework?recognizing Delaney as part of a localized network

of Blacks (and especially Black women) aspiring to the middling classes, but

also, concurrently, to self-determination, self-help, African American Protestant

values, and a radicalism necessary to confront and overcome slavery's remain

ing presences?we should return to her prefatory description of her book's

purpose. Delaney writes,

Those who were with me in the days of slavery will appreciate these pages, for

though they cannot recur with any happiness to the now "shadowy past, or renew

the unrenewablethe unaccountable longing for the aged to look backward and

review the events of their youth will find an answering chord in this little book.

Those of you who have never suffered as we have, perhaps may suppose the

case, and therefore accept with interest and sympathy the passages of life and char

acter here portrayed and the lessons which should follow from them, (vii)

Her text, then, is centrally about memory, specifically about how slavery becomes remembered and about what those memories should teach. Toward

the end of the narrative, she directly addresses readers in the same spirit: "I

have brought you face to face with but a few of the painful facts engendered by

slavery.... Just have patience a little longer, and I have done" (62).

Eric Gardner 59



In the broadest national sense, comments by Foster and Foreman about the

books audience and purpose are certainly on target. Localizing their sense of

the book as emphasizing cultural pedagogy offers even richer possibilities. To

bring her readers "face to face" with slavery?especially given that some of her

intended readers knew slavery as she did and that others needed to learn more

about it before taking lessons from it?Delaney had to revise the ways in which

the dominant national and local culture talked about slavery. In part, this meant

revising the approaches of both the genre of the slave narrative and specific immediate postbellum narratives of Missouri slavery like The Story ofMattie J.

Jackson and especially Elizabeth Keckley's now well-known Behind the Scenes; in part it meant establishing a continuity between African Americans of the

1890s (especially those in St. Louis) and the pasts marked by slavery. In doing both, Delaney's work echoes some of Foster's description of Alberts House of

Bondage: "The details of slavery ... serve to introduce younger readers to the

recent history upon which their present is based and to remind those who had

been inclined to forget or to romanticize the horrors of that institution" (169).

Specifically, this means that Delaney does not simply show the myriad ways that slavery destroyed her nuclear family (such as the sale of her father, her

separations from her mother, or her separation from her sister); she also shows

how, even in freedom, the remnants of the slave system continue to damage Black families. Her sister Nancy, for example, could not return to the United

States for decades because she remained a fugitive; Canada eventually became

the home for her that a tainted United States could never be. In depicting this,

Delaney challenges the growing Jim Crow dominance in the South and the for

getting of slavery being forced on the public by white Southern fantasies from

the likes of Thomas Dixon.

Delaney's depiction of her reunion with her father, though, emphasizes how

her narrative goes beyond and in different directions from the texts to which

historicist critics like Foster and Foreman generally compare From the Darkness.

It also shows Delaney's use of heavily localized examples to make both national

and local points. Harper and especially Albert had a great deal invested in the

suggestion that such reunions could heal the Black families that had been torn

apart by slavery. Thus, Iola Leroy features a successful reunion as a key piece of

its plot (179-84). Even more prominent, the pages of the Southwestern Christian

Advocate (which Albert's husband edited and where Albert's work was first seri

alized) regularly carried a "Lost Friends" column through which Black read

ers could attempt to find lost family members; occasionally, the paper carried

reports of successful reunions.

For Delaney's very real family, luck?and community involvement by groups like the Masonic and neo-Masonic organizations in which she was active, as well




as charity and careful digging?did produce a reunion like those surrounding

Harper's and Albert's works, but it was a reunion that only emphasized how

deep were the scars left by slavery. St. Louis had grown too foreign for Delaney's father, and his wife Polly had died. Finally, he felt he could not live there, and so he returned to Mississippi. Delaney's Masonic "sisters" and "daughters"?

probably her primary intended audience?would have understood, as Delaney did, that such scars remained and were often reopened. Given St. Louis's posi tion in the regional slave trade (as a gateway to New Orleans and the rest of the

Mississippi, a past only briefly attended to in Jackson's and Keckley's stories),

many probably shared Delaney's situation of a family sundered. And even if the

events of the 1840s and 1850s might be distant memories?or not even memo

ries for Delaney's youngest "daughters"?the complexity of the Exodus would

have been fresh to all. These were the woman who witnessed and aided the

thousands of former slaves, often in great need, attempting to pass through St. Louis in hopes of finding both a future and some of what they had lost

through slavery, and these were the women for whom I argue From the Darkness was designed.

Within this more complex and troubled sense of the damage done to Black

families by slavery, it is actually no surprise, then, that Delaney refuses to

romanticize her mother. Carby and Foreman are correct that her depiction of

Polly Wash seems to place her in the rhetorical space of the hero (Carby 36-37; Foreman 342-43), a space contradicted by Wash's absence at Delaney's trial

(described in heartrending detail) and her rather cold comfort of Delaney when

Delaney's first husband dies. But rather than making an inexplicable break with

sentimental narrative?or any of the other explanations posited by previous critics?Delaney's narrative seems to center on sharing just such seeming con

tradictions with an audience that might well recognize them.

Simple biographical circumstances may have kept Polly Wash from the courtroom: as a recently freed Black washerwoman, she would have had great need for wages and would have been barred from the trial because of her race.

Thus, her absence only emphasizes the fact that, in the courtroom, hero that she might be, Polly Wash would have been powerless, absent. And so it is in this space?the space that legally defines Black bodies?that Delaney talks of

being disembodied, of first "trembling, as if with ague," then of seeing her self "floating down the river" with "heart-throbs ... the throbs of the mighty engine which propelled me from my mother and freedom forever," and, finally, of seeming "to be another person?an on-looker?and in my heart dwelt a pity for the poor lonely girl, with down-cast face, sitting on the bench apart from

anyone else in that noisy room" (40, 47). Bodies are, indeed, as Barrett points out, "paramount in this narrative," but they are imbued with meaning not only

Eric Gardner 61



by their presence and character, but by their absence, their ultimate meaning lessness to white titans bent on oratorical and metaphysical struggle ("African

American" 435). Rather than depicting the idealized slave mother of 1850s sentimental litera

ture (Eliza of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin) or the absent mother of Douglass's Narrative (who comes into focus only slightly in his later autobiographies), in her tale of the 1840s and the 1890s, Delaney shows her readers both that a

Black mother can be heroic and that she can be beaten down in ways from which she may never recover. It is this simultaneous duality that readers of the

1890s needed to recognize: this, Delaney argues, is what a Black female hero is and must be. Given her audience of Black Masonic women in St. Louis, she

may have simply been articulating what some in that audience already knew.

Many of the members of the Heroines and other Masonic and neo-Masonic

organizations for Black women had undoubtedly been beaten down by slav

ery, racism, gender discrimination, and economic and physical trials. Yet many still chose community activism, chose?both in their organizations' elaborate

processionals and rituals and in their quieter and plainer charitable work?to

recognize each other, to name each other, as "heroines."

Delaney's self-representation might best be seen in that light, too. Like the

heroines of antebellum sentimental literature and slave narratives, of texts by late nineteenth-century African American women, and of Masonic and neo

Masonic ritual and practice, Delaney embodies the virtues of benevolent

fellow-feeling, chastity, humility, and honesty. But she recognizes both that

racist oppression challenges these virtues and that holding such virtues does not necessarily lead to earthly rewards. In this recognition, her narrative breaks

notably with much sentimental literature, which (ironically, for all its focus on

heavenly rewards) often eventually rewards good characters with good lives.

Indeed, Delaney's representation of her final mistress Martha Mitchell seems a direct attack on sentimentalism: rather than a whip, white matron Mitchell uses the tools of domesticity (a shovel, tongs, broomstick, and, eventually, her

influence over her husband) to chastise the outspoken Delaney, to whom she

refers as "that saucy baggage" (28). And though the demands of true woman

hood may have kept detailed discussion of the moment from the text, Delaney nonetheless suggests that a physical fight followed Mitchell's attacks?one that

happened both because Martha Mitchell failed to be a true woman and because

slavery limited the ways Delaney could practice such ideals. Similarly, though

Delaney held to such ideals throughout her free life, that life was full of trag

edy?the loss of her first husband, the loss of her father, and the loss of all of

her children?tragedies that are all either directly or indirectly connected to the

raced and gendered legacy of slavery.




The only figure uniformly idealized in the narrative is, ironically, a white male

slaveholder: Edward Bates. Delaney's two and a half pages that detail his biog

raphy suggest that she did some research to ensure correctness and coverage. She is also quite selective: the biography never mentions that Bates was a slave

holder; only he is allowed to say such in Delaney's representation of his closing

argument in her freedom suit. The biography itself dwells at some length on

his Quaker background, his opposition to pro-slavery measures (especially on

the Kansas question), and, of course, his appointment to the Lincoln cabinet.

With the single exception that the steamer on which Frederick Turner is killed

is named the Edward Bates (a painfully ironic historical fact rather than a fic

tional creation), Bates's name rings through the text as heroic.21

Why, in a narrative that so carefully attempts to balance the representations of even the most heroic Black women, does a white male slaveholder become so

idealized? Part of the answer to this may be biographical: it does, indeed, seem

that Bates functioned in Delaney's mind as her champion, regardless of his

motives. Some of Delaney's Masonic sisters might have had a similar opinion of Bates: though his relationship to African Americans during the antebellum

period was complex, to say the least, his family did free prominent minister

John Anderson,22 whose church activities touched much of free Black St. Louis

and who was favorably discussed in Galusha Anderson's 1909 history of the

region (37). Part, though, may also be tied to the key question near the narrative's end:

"Can the negro race succeed, proportionally, as well as the whites, if given the same chance and an even start?" (63-64). This question suggests a broader audi ence both among and outside of African Americans. And, if a white audience

(especially, perhaps, a younger white audience who did not remember slavery and had certainly "never suffered as we have" [vii]) materialized, Delaney may have wanted them also to learn "the lessons which should follow" from her nar

rative. Thus Bates, in his clear opposition to the simple and total evil of the other white men in the narrative?Delaney's masters Robert Wash, Henry Coxe, and David D. Mitchell, as well as Mitchell's attorney Thomas Hutchinson?may well serve as what Delaney hopes white men could, and should, become. The

dedication of the book (to the Grand Army of the Republic) seems to serve a

similar function: to offer a direct reminder of what Delaney remembers them

fighting for (v). Perhaps Delaney consciously remembers Bates as idealized in order to push those memories into contemporary practice.23 In essence,

Delaney may have been rewriting key St. Louis whites into beings more respect ful of the Black community's values?and Black women's value as true "hero ines." In this recreation of Bates, Delaney was performing a version of the same

act she shows Polly Wash performing: her mother, Delaney says, "had girded up

Eric Gardner 63



her loins for the fight, and, knowing that she was right, was resolved, by the help of God and a good lawyer, to win my case" and sought out Bates (35). Wash had chosen him and, in essence, made him into her daughter's attorney, made him into the best St. Louis whites could offer.

These strategic uses of memory suggest that Delaney ends her narrative with the resume-like list of her community activities because it allows her to assert

that she has not "hidden in a napkin" the "talents the Lord bestowed" on her. "What better can we do than to live for others?" she asks, building from her account of the events of the 1840s and specifically addressing readers of the

1890s (and beyond) who may have forgotten or never even known those events

(63). She has, in short, become a community and communitarian leader?a

heroine. While she, and her mother Polly Wash, certainly did not have "the same chance and an even start" as an idealized figure like Edward Bates, she?

again, like Polly Wash?was able to lift herself up and to help her "sisters" and

"daughters" lift themselves.

If, as this reading suggests, the end purpose of Delaney's narrative was to

challenge readers to remember slavery in its complexity and apply that remem

brance in daily life decades after?seemingly with Delaney as a model?we, of course, must ask whether she were successful in finding and influencing an

audience, particularly in light of Houston Baker's dismissal of texts contem

porary with From the Darkness like Iola Leroy. Baker suggests that critics have

claimed a "great deal more social effect and liberating reader response" for such texts "than their actual reception histories seem to warrant" (25). Foreman's

study of the complex responses to historical referents in Iola Leroy paired with

Foster's archival work on how Harper's fiction circulated certainly respond to

Baker's comments as they apply to Iola Leroy. In terms of the reception history of Delaney's text, however, his criticism is, in one way, correct: Delaney's book

did not reach the large audience that it is now clear Harper's novel touched, and

it certainly did not reach the national multiracial audience that the fiction of a

writer like Charles Chesnutt did.

But Baker's comments are curiously focused solely on the stories as they were

circulated in book form. It is now clear, for example, that the cultural work of

Iola Leroy was part of Harper's much larger activism, which included poetry, serialized novels in the Black press, lectures, committee and club work, and a range of other kinds of civic engagement. Taken as a package, such output

certainly had a "great deal" of "social effect and liberating... response." So, too, does it seem that Delaney's story circulated much more widely than her hook.

Indeed, her story had already circulated widely and successfully enough in the

Black community of St. Louis that "so many" of her "friends" urged her to write

and publish it in book form.




Further, if Harpers Lucille Delany is consciously modeled on Delaney, that

modeling would probably have come from acquaintance with Delaney's com

munity work, especially her oral sharing of her story through Black Masonic

organizations. Even if Harper's character name is a coincidence, Delaney, like

that character, clearly reached a wide circle of other Black women throughout Missouri and beyond at the end of the nineteenth century. Her story and her

Masonic activism had enough "social effect" to make the creation of her book

possible and to ensure that modern readers would be able to give up "just a

moment of [their lives]" to come "face to face with but only a few of the painful facts engendered by slavery" (62).

NOTES

The author wishes to thank Jodie Gardner, Michael Everman, Kristin Zapalac, P.

Gabrielle Foreman, the anonymous readers for and the editors of Legacy, and the staffs

of the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project, the Missouri State Archives,

the Missouri Historical Society, the University of Missouri at St. Louis Library, and the

Saginaw Valley State University Library for their kind assistance. Some of the work on

this essay was supported by a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the

Humanities; the author acknowledges their support and notes that any views, findings,

conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those

of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

1. The massive group of texts produced for such uplift purposes?including denomi

national and church histories, biographical dictionaries, and encyclopedias?during the

last two decades of the nineteenth century remains woefully understudied, especially

given that key pieces of African American fiction and poetry functioned in dialogue

with such and were sometimes even written by the same authors.

2. Copies of the first edition are owned by the Missouri Historical Society, the

University of Missouri at Kansas City, the University of Missouri at St. Louis, Yale

University, Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Historical

Society, and the Western Reserve Historical Society Library. The concentration of copies

in Missouri and in libraries that have significant collections on American chattel slavery

suggests that the original market for the book was highly localized (and that special col

lections librarians outside of Missouri acquired the book to thicken subject-specific col

lections). Perhaps one of the most celebrated cases of neglect in early African American

letters, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, may well have had a wider initial reception than From

the Darkness; my essay "Of Bottles and Books" tracks forty-two extant copies of Our Nig

compared to the eight copies of Delaney's work.

3. The Missouri Historical Society's records unfortunately do not give a reason or a

vendor for the purchase. As noted later in the essay, Delaney died on 31 August 1910. For

Eric Gardner 65



years, her death record had been sealed; after 1910 records were opened, it was presumed

lost because it was filed under "Polly Delaney."

4. Much of Trexler's research was done at the Missouri Historical Society Library.

For later works, see, for example, Donnie D. Bellamy's oft-cited article, "Free Blacks in

Antebellum Missouri."

5. Stewart v. the Sue was decided on 2 February 1885. See "Colored People's Rights."

6. Foreman recognizes, as did Foster, that Harper's character Lucille Delany, in addi

tion to having a name that is a "close homonym" to Delaney's, has several broader

similarities to Delaney (342). While we do not know, as yet, whether Harper based

her character on a reading of Delaney's text or, more likely, simply a familiarity with

some aspects of Delaney's life story, Harper's Delany is, as Foreman argues, "the proto

feminist heroine of the novel" who, among other bold moves, "refuses to give up her

teaching once married, an act then sure to be viewed as a controversial assertion of

independence" (343). 7. See, for examples, St. Louis City Directory for 1890 (1229,1651); Directory for 1891

(1294,1731); Directory for 1892 (1436,1921); Directory for 1893 (1318,1791). The St. Louis

City Directory for 1889 lists 919 Olive as publisher J. T. Smith's business address (1188), while the Directory for 1894 lists his business address at 202 North 2nd (1869).

8. Delaney's marriage is listed in St. Louis Marriages 7: 372. On Delaney's early life,

including her freedom suit, see my essay "'You have no business to whip me.'"

9. In addition to the 1880 Federal Census of Missouri, City of St. Louis, 174D, see, for

example, St. Louis City Directory for 1888 (1179,1375); Directory for 1889 (1188); Directory

for 1890 (1229,1651); Directory for 1891 (1294,1731); Directory for 1892 (1436,1921); Directory

for 1893 (1318,1791); Directory for 1894 (1869); Directory for 1895 (400, 407); Directory for 1896 (1506); Directory for 1897 (1582, 2146); Directory for 1898 (i559> 2121); Directory for 1899 (1630,2208).

10. With the exception of R. M. Loughridge's English and Muskokee Dictionary (1890),

most of Smith's publications were clearly religious in theme and content.

11. To date, there has been no comprehensive scholarly history of late nineteenth-cen

tury Black freemasonry. The standard text, William A. Muraskin's Middle-Class Blacks

in a White Society, is steeped in the ideologies of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" and

related sociology and so marks freemasonry as class-based, specifically as a symbol of

Blacks' desire to enter and perform middle-class roles. The text also relies heavily on the

sense, articulated by prominent Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, that freemasonry

was a retreat into fantasy (Muraskin 2-3). Muraskin actually claims to find great fault

with most of Frazier's work (especially Black Bourgeousie), asserting that Frazier's status

as a member of the group he writes about and his "hostility to the group" caused him to

fall into "moralistic polemic, which lost sight of reality." Ironically, though, Muraskin's

method and assumptions lead him to many of the same conclusions as Frazier?so

much so that historians after Muraskin try to pair him with Frazier. Though it focuses




on the early twentieth century, Martin Summer's fine Manliness and Its Discontents use

fully revises work by figures like Frazier and Muraskin. Building from both Muraskin

and Frazier, the most detailed discussion of early Black freemasonry in St. Louis, Gary

Kremer's "The World of Make-Believe" thoughtfully articulates conservative Turner's

connections to Masonry but still concludes that Black Masonic and neo-Masonic orga

nizations simply "institutionalized the very type of white bourgeois values and behavior

with which Turner was comfortable" (51-52).

12. For more information about the Heroines of Jericho, in addition to Muraskin's

generalized comments in Middle-Class Blacks, see Dickson 11-21 and Proceedings 11-13.

Being elected to office, and especially to the highest positions, demanded an even greater

financial investment. Dickson describes the standard full regalia as including "[a]n

apron and collar in one piece, made to fit over the shoulders and down to a point on

the back, cut to fit around the neck and over the breast, down in front about two-thirds

from waist to feet; color, scarlet, made of velvet, silk or satin; seven gold stars and five

silver stars; a golden fringe around the edge of the entire apron; gold lace and silver lace

for trimming; a cord and tassel to confine the apron at the waist; lining, white" (21).

The expectation of the Most Ancient Matron?in essence, the chapter head?was that

she would have "[a] golden crown with twelve points ... ornamented with twelve small

silver stars set on a scarlet band one inch wide ... at the base; in front, a silver bugle;

the points of the crown ornamented with brilliants [sic], red, white and blue. A purple

robe, full from the shoulders, and trailing four feet; robe trimmed with silver lace and

spangled with small golden stars. A scepter, made to suit the taste" (18-19). She would

also have "a page to attend her on public occasions" (19).

13. As with Black Masonry in general, there has, as yet, been no substantial scholarly

treatment of Dickson or his organization. In addition to Manual, see O'Brien 240-41

and Wright 16-18.

14. Beyond?or perhaps through?such claims, Dickson created a position of author

ity in Black Missouri generally and St. Louis specifically. He served as a delegate to every

state convention of the Republican party between 1864 and 1878. Ordained in the African

Methodist Episcopal Church in 1867, he actively advocated for Black education (includ

ing the founding of Lincoln University), suffrage, civil rights, and self-determination

until his death in 1901. Critics have yet to explore the similarities between Dickson's

account and Martin Delany's 1859 novel Blake?an examination that might prove fasci

nating, given Delany's Masonic work.

15. See History 7-29 and Proceedings 57-58. Born in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, in 1818,

Mary Dickson was the youngest of the ten children of a German immigrant and an

African American woman who seems to have been free. She was sent to St. Louis for her

education?some sources say to live with an older sister, and some say to live with "her

aunt Mrs. Louise Chouteau"?specifically at the Sacred Heart Convent, run by a group

of nuns active in the Catholic education of African American children. After a brief

Eric Gardner 67



first marriage that ended with her husband's death, the young widow married Dickson

in 1848. Among Black freemasons throughout the city and state, she became an almost

iconic figure after 1875, especially after her death in 1891. See History 42-43; Manual 10,

18-24; and Proceedings 7-8 and 19-21. The first "Worthy Joshua" of the St. Mary's Court,

one of the few male positions in the organization, was the Reverend Hiram Revels, who

would go on to become the first African American to serve in the United States Senate,

suggesting just how high Black freemasonry reached.

Though she does not mention it in her narrative, Delaney was a key figure in the

founding of Missouri's Black Order of the Eastern Star, an organization with ties to the

Royal Arch Masons and, again, to the Dicksons. She is reported to have been one of the

first Black women in Missouri to attain membership in the Order (in 1884, from the

Grand Chapter in Ohio) and was elected the "Worthy Matron" (head) when the first

Missouri Black chapter of the Order was founded in St. Louis on 22 April 1887. Present

among supporting Master Masons to see her win this honor was Moses Dickson. In 1890,

when the organization had expanded to five chapters in St. Louis and met to form its

own state-level Grand Chapter (separating from the "parentage" of the Ohio Chapter),

Delaney, still Worthy Matron of the initial chapter, was elected as the state group's first

"Grand Worthy Matron" (head). She served for two years and supervised the founding

of at least nine new chapters, in locations across the state ranging from Kansas City to

Independence and from St. Joseph to Plattsburg, as well as a distant chapter in St. Paul,

Minnesota. See "History and Origin."

16. On such clubs, see the collection on the Informal Dames in the Western Historical

Ms. Coll., U of Missouri at St. Louis, as well as Hendricks and Knupfer. On Richardson,

in addition to the Informal Dames records, see St. Louis City Directory for 1908 (1517);

City Directory for 1909 (1706); Directory for 1910 (1681); Directory for 1911 (1651); Directory

for 1912 (1701). On other members of the Heroines and for the photographs, see the

Heroines of Jericho collection.

17. Searches of city directories for the period show the Delaneys moving several times

and, of course, note Zachariah's gradual decline to "laborer" and then, seemingly, jobless

status. After Zachariah's death, Delaney lived in near poverty.

18. Grenz's "The Exodusters of 1879" and Painter's Exodusters are two of the best

introductions to the Exodus, in which thousands of Southern Blacks attempted to move

to Kansas to start new lives, passing through St. Louis on their way.

19. Tracking Delaney's children (who are never named in the narrative, though she

mentions having four) is difficult, though census records show six children living with the

Delaneys in 1870 and only one son remaining in 1880. That son, Charles, died 18 December

1880. See Missouri Federal Census for 1870 (239); Missouri Federal Census for 1880, (63 D,

64A); Death Certificate of Charles Delaney, filed 24 December 1880 in St. Louis.

20. On Delaney's funeral arrangements, see "Delaney," St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and

"Delaney," St. Louis Post-Dispatch.




21. On the explosion, which killed Delaney's first husband Frederick Turner, see

"Terrible Steamboat Calamity," Lloyd, and "Report on the Explosion."

22. John Anderson is now best remembered as Dred and Harriet Scott's pastor.

23. Mrs. Lacy, the jailer's sister-in-law who comforts Delaney on her way to her free

dom suit trial, may similarly serve as a foil to Martha Mitchell.

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Eric Gardner 71



"Face to Face": Localizing Lucy Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light

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Transcript of "Face to Face": Localizing Lucy Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light