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DELANEY, Lucy A.  FROM THE DARKNESS COMETH THE LIGHT; OR, STRUGGLES FOR FREEDOM. St. Louis, MO: J. T. Smith (n.d. ca. 1891). First edition. 64 pp. 16mo., red cloth stamped in gilt and black. Clean and bright. Corners gently bumped. Ink ownership to front flyleaf. Frontispiece engraving (portrait) fine.

Lucy A. Delaney (c. 1830-1890s) was born in St. Louis, Missouri to Polly Crocket and her husband.  Although Polly Crocket had once been a free woman, she was kidnapped from her home in Illinois and sold a a slave to Major Taylor Berry.  Berry arranged for his slaves to be freed upon his and his wife's deaths.  However, a few years after he died in a duel, his wife remarried.  When she died Berry's will was set aside and Lucy's family remained enslaved.  The family was separated when her father was sold to a plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi, and again when her sister, Nancy escaped to Canada.

Lucy published her narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom sometime in the 1890s.  She devotes a significant portion of it to her mother's attempts to prove that she was once a free woman.  Both she and Lucy presented their cases in trials, and both received verdicts granting them freedom.  The remainder fo the narrative briefly outlines Lucy's life after slavery.  Her first husband was killed in a tragic accident shortly after their marriage.  She and her second husband had four children, but all of them died before the work was published.  Lucy's mother lived with her after traveling to Canada to visit Nancy.  Shortly after their mother's death, Lucy and Nancy were reunited with their father, who remained in Vicksburg following the Civil War.

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 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.  She was elected President of the Female Union and later served as President of the Daughters of Zion in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.  Scarce.  SOLD