FIVE GENERATIONS HENCE (3)
By:
September 18, 2025
Five Generations Hence is a 1916 afrofuturist novel by Lillian B. Jones. It is considered unique in its pre-Harlem Renaissance, pre-Marcus-Garvey call for a transcontinental dialogue between Africa and America, one that hinges on economic self-sufficiency and most particularly on the high-minded ideas and deeds of intelligent women. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize Chapter V, k for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5.
She continued, “I seemed suddenly to become transported to another land and clime, the topography of the country had changed and I seemed to feel a sense of growing warm — though you remember I told you there was a norther — the season also seemed to have changed, for it was a time of sowing rather than harvesting. I fancied I stood upon an immense plateau; below me flowed a river but recently returned to its channel, above me were sunny skies and floating clouds. I looked long and steady at the scene, pondering the singular coincidence. I saw a people, a black people, tilling the soil with a song of real joy upon their lips. I saw a civilization like to the white man’s about us today, but in his place stood another of a different hue. I beheld beautifully paved streets, handsome homes beautified and adorned, and before the doors sported dusky boys and girls. I seemed to be able to penetrate the very walls of business establishments and see that men and women of color were commercially engaged one with the other.
“I was as if thunderstruck when a voice, a still, small voice yet seemed to penetrate my inmost soul and cry in thunderous accents, ‘Five Generations Hence.’ I was stunned as the truth began to draw upon my soul: the land was Africa, the people were my own, returned to possess the heritage of their ancestors. I descended the hillside, hope kindled anew in my heaving bosom.
’Tis no idle tale I tell you, Violet, I beheld it all as plain as the noonday sun. I have deliberated upon the matter and, do you know, I have become convinced that there will be a final exodus of the Negro to Africa, not a wholesale exodus like the moving of an Indian reservation, but an individual departing, an acquiring of property in that unexplored land and the building of a new nation upon the ruins of the old.”
“Think you,” quietly interposed Miss Gray, “that with the present low birthrate and the great mortality with us that five generations hence there will be enough to form that great nation in Africa you so aptly picture; you know it has been averred that since the Negro has developed no marked civilization of his own, could not evolve one in rivalry with that of the white man, and could never become amalgamated with him, he is doomed to extinction.”
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.