Millenarian prophecies were not uncommon in the late nineteenth century, but After Death is distinctive for the way it frames apocalypse with the author’s experiences of white supremacist violence. These incidents, along with Randolph’s new conviction that “we are liable to” apocalypse, seem to tie the earth’s imminent upheaval to the continuation of Black unfreedom after Emancipation. Notably, the forthcoming cataclysm, and the better world it ultimately inaugurates, coincides with a literal emergence of the underground. When Randolph concludes, “The earth is gestating new and better children: fearful will be her parturition; but joyous will the family be!”, he imagines the earth’s gestation as the quickening of forces within it that will forge new communities above it.
We might read After Death’s vision of the earth turned inside-out as also imaging Randolph’s conception of the occult underground: contiguous with the extraterrestrial, “against the world”, in his words. Yet by the time Randolph issued a revised edition of After Death five years later, this vision of extraterrestrially induced, seismic cataclysm had vanished. He rewrites the prophecy to predict instead a future of “modified republicanism” in the United States, anchored in racial segregation. He asserts that “Indians” and “the unfortunate mixed race” are destined for “extinction”, white Americans will “dictate laws to the habitable globe” (but benignly), and “the nation will give the negro a vast territory freely”. Before the end of 1875, there will come “a literal and unprecedented outpouring of the Spirit (world)”, “especially in the Southern States among the blacks, who will, with almost a frenzied zeal, march off to their Zion in the south-west”. “If I am in the body on that day, I will be their Peter the Hermit, and cast my lot with theirs”, Randolph vowed.
The new empire and the new civilization yet to come out of that poor yet rich and mighty people is destined to be as great in peace and spiritual goodness, as their masters have been in intellect and war. In that new Zion, Science will erect her halls and Art shall build her schools; and in them African genius, untainted for the cuticular hue, God’s doings, not theirs, shall pursue the triumphs of investigation. Ay! And by its warmth and fervor open new doors to the mysterious realms above and around us, that the colder white can never penetrate; and thus the black shall add his quota to the common stock of human knowledge, and the word Justice will have a meaning in this world.
The apocalyptic fervor and subterranean upheaval of the 1867 edition have dropped out, replaced by the prospect of a spiritually developed Black colony. We might see Randolph’s faith in Reconstruction in this vision. But it is hard not to hear despair in his prediction of white global rule, however peaceful; the eradication of Indigenous and multiracial people; and the relegation of Black people to the desert to commune with “the mysterious realms above and around us”. Concluding that “the races can never live side by side on equal terms”, Randolph looks toward a colonization project, directed by the US government, that strongly resembles the efforts of the white-led American Colonization Society to send free African Americans to West Africa in the early nineteenth century. As the frontier replaces the underground, Randolph no longer contemplates destroying the world to remake it; he just wants to be left in peace. In this attenuated future, “justice will have a meaning in this world” not when it is upturned, but once Black people “open new doors” into other ones.