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 her 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.