Lucy Delaney
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Lucy Delaney (c. 1830 – c. 1890) was an African-American author and former slave, remembered for her inspiring 1891 narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom.
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[edit] Early life
Very little is known of Delaney outside of the record of her own memoir. Born Lucy Ann Berry in St. Louis, Missouri, Delaney was the daughter of slaves Polly Berry and a male slave whose name she does not reveal. Polly Berry had been born free in Illinois, but kidnapped in her childhood by slave-catchers and sold to a General Berry despite her free status. Delaney remembers the General as a kind owner; with his death in a duel, however, her father was sold to a plantation down the river by the family’s new owners.
Polly Berry became increasingly rebellious and suspected that her owners intended to sell the rest of her family downriver as well. She grew determined to arrange escape for herself and her two daughters. Delaney’s older sister Nancy easily slipped away from their owners on a vacation in the North, and reached Canada safely. Soon Berry escaped as well, reaching Chicago, but then returned for fear that the owners would retaliate against Delaney. On returning, however, Polly Berry sued for her freedom, managing to document her free birth to the court. Her suit was successful, but she remained in St. Louis to try to secure Delaney’s freedom by legal or illegal means.
[edit] Trial and freedom
By 1842, Delaney was showing herself to be increasingly defiant to another new owner, D. D. Mitchell, who again threatened to sell her down the river. Delaney escaped and hid at the house of a friend of her mother’s. That week, her mother filed suit in court for Delaney’s freedom, arguing that the daughter of a freeborn must of necessity be a freeborn herself. She later persuaded Edward Bates, future Attorney General of Abraham Lincoln, then a prominent Whig politician, to argue the suit in court.
Delaney was remanded to the jail, where she would remain for more than 17 months while the trial was argued. Finally the judge sided with Berry and Bates and granted Delaney’s freedom; she was approximately 14 years old.
[edit] Later life
In 1845, Delaney visited her sister Nancy in Toronto, where she met steamboat worker Frederick Turner. The couple soon married, and settled in Quincy, Illinois. However, Turner died very soon after in a boiler explosion. Ironically, the steamboat that killed him was The Edward Bates, named for the same lawyer who had secured Delaney’s freedom only a few years before.
Lucy then moved back to St. Louis, soon marrying Zachariah Delaney in 1849, to whom she was still married with the 1891 publication of her memoirs. Though the couple had four children, two did not survive infancy; the remaining children, a son and a daughter, both died in their early twenties, leaving Delaney childless.
Lucy Delaney later was elected president of the Female Union, an organization of African-American women. She also served as president of the Daughters of Zion.
Nothing has been recorded about the year or circumstances of her death.
[edit] Memoirs
In 1891, Delaney published her From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom, which remains virtually the only source of information regarding her life. The text takes much of its shape from slave narratives and is primarily devoted to Polly Berry’s struggles to free her family. Though the story is obstensibly Delaney’s, Berry remains the primary driving force and often seems to be more the protagonist than Delaney herself.
The narrative is very spiritual in tone, both celebrating what Delaney sees as God’s benevolent role in her own life as well as attacking the hypocrisy of Christian slave owners. Also, like many post-bellum slave narratives, From the Darkness does not so much recount the horrors of slavery as attempt to show the strength of the African-Americans who suffered them. Consequently, the narrative continues after Delaney’s freedom, showing her fortitude following the death of her first husband, and later her four children. In this, again, Delaney’s mother serves as an advisor and role model. Delaney also celebrates her later political involvement, arguing for the potential of African-American citizens in American democracy.
[edit] Publication history
‘’From the Darkness’’ was originally published in St. Louis in 1891 by J.T. Smith. Though the book soon fell out of print, it was reprinted in 1988 in the collection Six Women’s Slave Narratives by Oxford University Press. Critic P. Gabrielle Foreman has suggested that Frances Harper based the character of "Lucille Delaney" in Iola Leroy on the real-life Delaney’s memoirs.
[edit] Work
From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom (1891). Reprinted in Six Women’s Slave Narratives. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. ISBN 0-19-505262-5.
[edit] Reference
Shockley, Ann Allen, Afro-American Women Writers 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide, New Haven, Connecticut: Meridian Books, 1989. ISBN 0-452-00981-2
