Of One Blood

Of One Blood by Pauline E. Hopkins

Of One Blood opens with Reuel Briggs, a solitary, impoverished Harvard medical student, brooding in his bare room on a stormy November evening over a book on mysticism and trance states. He is a gifted scholar of occult phenomena, and nobody at the university knows his origins. Staring into the storm, he sees the face of a fair woman with golden hair and soft brown eyes. His only friend, the handsome Southerner Aubrey Livingston, then arrives and takes him to a jubilee concert at Tremont Temple. There the soprano Dianthe Lusk steps forward, and she wears the face from Reuel's vision. On Hallow-eve, at the Vance home in Mount Auburn, Molly Vance, Aubrey's betrothed, her brother Charlie, called "Adonis," and their friends draw lots to test a legend of a veiled lady haunting the neighboring Hyde House. In the avenue of hemlocks, Reuel meets Dianthe Lusk, who tells him, "You can help me, but not now; tomorrow." The next morning, a train accident sends Reuel to the hospital, where Dianthe lies apparently dead. The doctors, Livingston among them, have pronounced her so. Reuel diagnoses suspended animation and revives her with a powder before the astonished physicians. Both he and Livingston recognize her but say nothing of her identity. Reuel's feat brings him fame. Livingston has a detective trace Dianthe and learns she had left the jubilee troupe to work for a traveling magnetic physician, then disappeared. Dianthe's memory is a blank, and she falls into trances. While watching one such trance, Livingston realizes he desires her. Reuel confesses to Livingston that he loves her. Livingston warns that marrying a Negro woman would ruin him, and then whispers a secret that makes Reuel flush darkly. Molly takes Dianthe into Vance Hall under the name Felice Adams. Reuel proposes, and she accepts. Livingston learns that Reuel cannot find work, and he arranges for him to join an English expedition to the ruins of Ethiopian Meroe. Reuel takes the post to earn money, entrusting Dianthe to Livingston's care and receiving Livingston's solemn promise. Livingston secretly telegraphs a man named Jim Titus in Virginia. The telegram offers him ten thousand dollars if he succeeds within six months. Reuel and Dianthe marry on the morning of his departure. Reuel, Charlie and the servant Jim Titus then sail. At a Vance house party, Dianthe suddenly sings "Go down, Moses" with a second, ghostly voice behind her own. Her memory returns, though not her name. Livingston tells her she is Dianthe Lusk and says Reuel does not know she is a Negress. He threatens to expose her unless she gives herself to him. She obeys against her will. A mysterious servant-woman named Mira then appears to her and underscores a verse from the twelfth chapter of Luke about hidden things being revealed. Soon afterward, Aubrey, Molly and Dianthe set out in a canoe on the Charles, and it overturns. Cries for help ring out, and then silence. In Africa, Reuel's party crosses the desert from Tripoli. Reuel is trapped on a ruined ledge by a leopard and saved by Charlie, while Jim sleeps nearby. One night Mira's apparition shows Reuel a letter from Livingston in Jim's hands, ordering that Reuel's letters be destroyed. Reuel and Charlie then hear a cry for help in Dianthe's voice. At Meroe, Professor Stone reads an old parchment describing a hidden city and buried treasure, and he tells of the Ethiopian origins of civilization. He adds that a king of the royal line will return, marked by a lotus-lily birthmark. At the camp, news comes that Dianthe and Molly have drowned. Reuel nearly dies of grief. Then he walks to the Great Pyramid, where a narcotic vapor knocks him unconscious. Reuel wakes in Telassar, a hidden Ethiopian city. Its prime minister Ai greets him, and he is crowned Ergamenes, the long-awaited king. His lotus birthmark and his mother's old nighttime inspections explain his heritage to himself. He tells Ai of the Negro's treatment in America and is moved to feel shame for hiding his origin. In the inner city he meets Queen Candace, who strongly resembles Dianthe, and they pledge themselves to marry within a month. Ai then shows Reuel a magic disk and font of water that reveal the past and present. They show Dianthe and Molly alive, with Aubrey Livingston and Jim Titus as Reuel's enemies. Finally the disk shows Aubrey and Dianthe together in the Livingston mansion. Reuel resolves to return to America and confront Aubrey, but he suspects he is a prisoner in the city. Meanwhile, Charlie searches for Reuel at the pyramid with Jim, who has grown quiet. Seized by figures from a hidden door, they are carried underground to Ai, who lectures Charlie on race. Locked in a marble chamber, they find a hidden slab in the floor, descend, and discover chests of jewels and gold.

By Pauline E. Hopkins · First published 1903 · Genre: Speculative fiction, Lost race fiction, Gothic fiction · 24 chapters · 62,482 words

First lines

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 discomforture of the dismal season. The lingering equinoctial 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.

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Racial passing · African American literature · 19th-century American fiction · Gothic fiction · Occult and mysticism · Mesmerism · Trance states · Suspended animation · Post-emancipation America · Racial identity · Boston · Harvard medical student

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Of One Blood is listed on Textopian as a novel by Pauline E. Hopkins, dated 1903 CE.

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