Zelph the Black Patriot

You’ve probably heard of Dasher and Dancer and Zelph the White Lamanite. But do you recall the most famous Zelph of all? Zelph the Black Patriot?

I just read Kenneth Roberts’ Rabble in Arms, a novel of the American Revolution. I can’t really recommend it. The author curiously chose to make Benedict Arnold his all-American beau ideal of Patriotic heroism. Yes, that Benedict Arnold. Worse, Roberts’ Arnold speaks in nothing but exclamation points.

But what really tickled my Mormon funny bone was Zelph the black Patriot. Zelph is a slave belonging to the protagonist’s family who enlists with the protagonist and his brother. He plays no significant role. The main thing about him, for this reader, is his name. Is it a coincidence? Did Kenneth Roberts have some sort of obscure contact with the obscure bywaters of Mormonism?

Neither Rabble in Arms or any other Roberts’ book has any references to Onondagus or Zarahemla or anything else Mormon, though a Googlebooks search shows that the word “Zelph” overwhelmingly occurs in Mormon books. Some science-fiction books I never heard of do have it as the name of a planet and a river and of small, biting insects. And in a book about slavery in New England, it shows up as the name of a slave. New England slaves named Zelph sound like the probable source for Roberts’ Zelph, but how would a slave get the name Zelph? It’s not in the Bible. There are a number of Zelph’s in old censuses from the early 1800s, some of them white, so presumably it wasn’t just an African tribal name that the odd slave retained.

Coincidentally, the SF book that mentions a river Zelph does so in connection with slavery.