Zinger opens her eyes; tries to shake clear of dreams that call her by name, her real name. She hasn’t heard it in so long.
“Nzingha.” The voice is calm, insistent, and real. Dream kneels beside her in the grass, smoothing the disheveled braids away from Zinger’s face. Most of Dream’s clothing is gone. She wears only tights and shoes, but doesn’t seem to notice. The night air is still and smells of apples. Zinger rises slowly, seeing Maysie bracing herself between Ayo and Eilsse. Elisse holds Brandon in one hand and one of Dream’s shirts in the other.
“Aunt Gwen’s is this way,” says Dream. “The big lady told me.…” Zinger stares at Dream, beyond stories, beyond words. Dream’s eyes shift and flicker, but she stands to her full height. “… i did not…” she says proudly, “… deceive my family… my advisors… or my people…” She turns, takes three deliberate, unhurried strides between the trees, then waits for Zinger and the others to follow.
RACISM AND SCIENCE FICTION
Samuel R. Delany
(1999)
Racism for me has always appeared to be first and foremost a system, largely supported by material and economic conditions at work in a field of social traditions. Thus, though racism is always made manifest through individuals’ decisions, actions, words, and feelings, when we have the luxury of looking at it with the longer view (and we don’t, always), usually I don’t see much point in blaming people personally, black or white, for their feelings or even for their specific actions—as long as they remain this side of the criminal. These are not what stabilize the system. These are not what promote and reproduce the system. These are not the points where the most lasting changes can be introduced to alter the system.
For better or for worse, I am often spoken of as the first African-American science-fiction writer. But I wear that originary label as uneasily as any writer has worn the label of science fiction writer itself. Among the ranks of what is often referred to as proto-science fiction, there are a number of black writers. M. P. Shiel, whose Purple Cloud and Lord of the Sea are still read, was a Creole with some African ancestry. Black leader Martin Delany (1812–1885—alas, no relation) wrote his single and highly imaginative novel, still to be found on shelves of bookstores today, Blake, or The Huts of America (1857), about an imagined successful slave revolt in Cuba and the American South—which is about as close to an sf-style alternative history novel as you can get. Other black writers whose work certainly borders on science fiction include Sutton E. Griggs and his novel Imperio in Imperium (1899), in which an African-American secret society conspires to found a separate black state by taking over Texas; and Edward Johnson, who, following Bellamy’s example in Looking Backward (1888), wrote Light Ahead for the Negro (1904), telling of a black man transported into a socialist United States in the far future. I believe I first heard Harlan Ellison make the point that we know of dozens upon dozens upon dozens of early pulp writers only as names: They conducted their careers entirely by mail—in a field and during an era when pen names were the rule rather than the exception. Among the “Remington C. Scotts” and the “Frank P. Joneses” who litter the contents pages of the early pulps, we simply have no way of knowing if one, three, or seven of them—or even many more—were blacks, Hispanics, women, Native Americans, Asians, or whatever. Writing is like that.
Toward the end of the Harlem Renaissance, the black social critic George Schuyler (1895–1977) published an acidic satire, Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933–1940 (The Macaulay Company, New York, 1931), which hinges on a three-day treatment costing fifty dollars through which black people can turn themselves white. The treatment involves “a formidable apparatus of sparkling nickel. It resembled a cross between a dentist chair and an electric chair.” The confusion this causes throughout racist America (as well as among black folks themselves) gives Schuyler a chance to satirize both white leaders and black. (Though W. E. B. Du Bois was himself lampooned by Schuyler as the aloof, money-hungry hypocrite Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard, Du Bois, in his column “The Browsing Reader” [in The Crisis, March ’31], called the novel “an extremely significant work” and “a rollicking, keen, good-natured criticism of the Negro problem in the United States” that was bound to be “abundantly misunderstood” because such was the fate of all satire.) The story follows the adventures of the dashing black Max Dasher and his sidekick Bunny, who become white and make their way through a world rendered topsy-turvy by the spreading racial ambiguity and deception. Toward the climax, the two white perpetrators of the system who have made themselves rich on the scheme are lynched by a group of whites (at a place called Happy Hill) who believe the two men are blacks in disguise. Though the term did not then exist, here the “humor” becomes so “black” as to take on elements of inchoate American horror. For his scene, Schuyler simply used accounts of actual lynchings of black men at the time, with a few changes in wording:
The two men… were stripped naked, held down by husky and willing farm hands and their ears and genitals cut off with jack-knives.… Some wag sewed their ears to their backs and they were released to run… [but were immediately brought down with revolvers by the crowd] amidst the uproarious laughter of the congregation.… [Still living, the two were bound together at a stake while] little boys and girls gaily gathered excelsior, scrap paper, twigs and small branches, while their proud parents fetched logs, boxes, kerosene.… [Reverend McPhule said a prayer, the flames were lit, the victims screamed, and the] crowd whooped with glee and Reverend McPhule beamed with satisfaction.… The odor of cooking meat permeated the clear, country air and many a nostril was guiltily distended.… When the roasting was over, the more adventurous members of Rev. McPhule’s flock rushed to the stake and groped in the two bodies for skeletal souveniers such as forefingers, toes and teeth. Proudly their pastor looked on. (217–218)
Might this have been too much for the readers of Amazing and Astounding? As it does for many black folk today, such a tale, despite the ’30s pulp diction, has a special place for me. Among the family stories I grew up with, one was an account of a similar lynching of a cousin of mine from only a decade or so before the year Schuyler’s story is set. A woman who looked white, my cousin was several months pregnant and traveling with her much darker husband when they were set upon by white men (because they believed the marriage was miscegenous) and lynched in a manner equally gruesome: Her husband’s body was similarly mutilated. And her child was no longer in her body when their corpses, as my father recounted the incident to me in the ’40s, were returned in a wagon to the campus of the black Episcopal college where my grandparents were administrators. Hundreds on hundreds of such social murders were recorded in detail by witnesses and participants between the Civil War and the Second World War. Thousands on thousands more went unrecorded. (Billy the Kid claimed to have taken active part in more than a dozen such murders of “Mexicans, niggers, and injuns,” which were not even counted among his famous twenty-one adolescent killings.) But this is (just one of) the horrors from which racism arises—and where it can still all too easily return.
In 1936 and 1938, under the pen name “Samuel I. Brooks,” Schuyler had two long stories published in some 63 weekly installments in the Pittsburgh Courier, a black Pennsylvania newspaper, about a black organization, led by a black Dr. Belsidus, who plots to take over the world—work that Schuyler considered “hokum and hack work of the purest vein.” Schuyler was known as an extreme political conservative, though the trajectory to that conservatism was very similar to Heinlein’s. (Unlike Heinlein’s, though, Schuyler’s view of science fiction was as conservative as anything about him.) Schuyler’s early socialist period was followed by a later conservatism that Schuyler himself, at least, felt in no way harbored any contradiction with his former principles, even though he joined the John Birch Society toward the start of the ’60s and wrote for its news organ American Opinion. His second Dr. Belsidus story remained unfinished
, and the two were not collected in book form until 1991 (Black Empire, by George S. Schuyler, ed. By Robert A. Hill and Kent Rasmussen, Northeastern University Press, Boston), fourteen years after his death.
Since I began to publish in 1962, I have often been asked, by people of all colors, what my experience of racial prejudice in the science fiction field has been. Has it been nonexistent? By no means: It was definitely there. A child of the political protests of the ’50s and ’60s, I’ve frequently said to people who asked that question: As long as there are only one, two, or a handful of us, however, I presume in a field such as science fiction, where many of its writers come out of the liberal-Jewish tradition, prejudice will most likely remain a slight force—until, say, black writers start to number thirteen, fifteen, twenty percent of the total. At that point, where the competition might be perceived as having some economic heft, chances are we will have as much racism and prejudice here as in any other field.
We are still a long way away from such statistics.
But we are certainly moving closer.
After—briefly—being my student at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, Octavia Butler entered the field with her first story, “Crossover,” in 1971 and her first novel, Patternmaster, in 1976—fourteen years after my own first novel appeared in the winter of ’62. But she recounts her story with brio and insight. Everyone was very glad to see her! After several short story sales, Steven Barnes first came to general attention in 1981 with Dreampark and other collaborations with Larry Niven. Charles Saunders published his Imaro novels with DAW Books in the early ’80s. Even more recently in the collateral field of horror, Tananarive Due has published The Between (1996) and My Soul to Keep (1997). Last year all of us except Charles were present at the first African-American Science Fiction Writers Conference sponsored by Clark Atlanta University. This year Toronto-based writer Nalo Hopkinson (another Clarion student about whom I have the pleasure of being able to boast that I had also taught at Clarion) published her award-winning sf novel Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner, New York, 1998). Another black North American sf writer is Haitian-born Claude-Michel Prévost, a francophone writer who publishes out of Vancouver, British Columbia. Since people ask me regularly what examples of prejudice I experienced in the science-fiction field, I thought this might be the time to answer—with a tale.
With five days to go in my twenty-fourth year, on March 25, 1967, my sixth science-fiction novel, Babel-17, won a Nebula Award (a tie actually) from the Science Fiction Writers of America. That same day the first copies of my eighth, The Einstein Intersection, became available at my publishers’ office. (Because of publishing schedules, my seventh, Empire Star, had preceded the sixth into print the previous spring.) At home on my desk at the back of an apartment I shared on St. Mark’s Place, my ninth, Nova, was a little more than three months from completion.
On February 10, a month and a half before the March awards, in its partially completed state, Nova had been purchased by Doubleday & Co. Well… three months after the awards banquet, in June, when it was done, with that first Nebula under my belt, I submitted Nova for serialization to the famous sf editor of Analog magazine, John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell rejected it, with a note and phone call to my agent explaining that, while he liked pretty much everything else about it, he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character. That was one of my first direct encounters, as a professional writer, with the slippery and always commercialized form of liberal American prejudice: Campbell had nothing against my being black, you understand. (There reputedly exists a letter from him to horror writer Dean Koontz, from only a year or two later, in which Campbell argues in all seriousness that a technologically advanced black civilization is a social and a biological impossibility.… ) No, perish the thought! Surely there was not a prejudiced bone in his body! It’s just that I had, by pure happenstance, chosen to write about someone whose mother was from Senegal (and whose father was from Norway), and it was the poor benighted readers, out there in America’s heartland, who, in 1967, would be too upset.…
It was all handled as though I’d just happened to have dressed my main character in a purple brocade dinner jacket. (In the phone call, Campbell made it fairly clear that this was his only reason for rejecting the book. Otherwise, he rather liked it.… ) Purple brocade just wasn’t big with the buyers that season. Sorry.…
Today if something like that happened, I would probably give the information to those people who feel it their job to make such things as widely known as possible. At the time, however, I swallowed it—a mark of both how the times, and I, have changed. I told myself I was too busy writing. The most profitable trajectory for a successful science fiction novel in those days was for an sf book to start life as a magazine serial, move on to hardcover publication, and finally be reprinted as a mass market paperback. If you were writing a novel a year (or, say, three novels every two years, which was then almost what I was averaging), that was the only way to push your annual income up, at the time, four to five figures—and the low five figures at that. That was the point I began to realize I probably was not going to be able to make the kind of living (modest enough!) that, only a few months before, at the Awards Banquet, I’d let myself envision. The things I saw myself writing in the future, I already knew, were going to be more rather than less controversial. The percentage of purple brocade was only going to go up.
The second installment of my story here concerns the first time the word “Negro” was said to me, as a direct reference to my racial origins, by someone in the science-fiction community. Understand that, since the late ’30s, that community, that world had been largely Jewish, highly liberal, and with notable exceptions leaned well to the left. Even its right-wing mavens, Robert Heinlein or Poul Anderson (or, indeed, Campbell), would have far preferred to go to a leftist party and have a friendly argument with some smart socialists than actually hang out with the right-wing and libertarian organizations which they may well have supported in principle and, in Heinlein’s case, with donations. April 14, 1968, a year and—perhaps—three weeks later, was the evening of the next Nebula Awards Banquet. A fortnight before, I had turned twenty-six. That year my eighth novel, The Einstein Intersection (which had materialized as an object on the day of the previous year’s), and my short story, “Aye, and Gomorrah…” were both nominated.
In those days the Nebula banquet was a black tie affair with upwards of a hundred guests at a midtown hotel-restaurant. Quite incidentally, it was a time of upheaval and uncertainty in my personal life (which, I suspect, is tantamount to saying I was a twenty-six-year-old writer). But that evening my mother and sister and a friend, as well as my wife, were at my table. My novel won—and the presentation of the glittering Lucite trophy was followed by a discomforting speech from an eminent member of the Science Fiction Writers of America.
Perhaps you’ve heard such disgruntled talks: They begin, as did this one, “What I have to say tonight, many of you are not going to like…” and went on to castigate the organization for letting itself be taken in by (the phrase was, or was something very like) “pretentious literary nonsense,” unto granting it awards, and abandoning the old values of good, solid, craftsmanlike story-telling. My name was not mentioned, but it was evident I was (along with Roger Zelazny, not present) the prime target of this fusillade. It’s an odd experience, I must tell you, to accept an award from a hall full of people in tuxedos and evening gowns and then, from the same podium at which you accepted it, hear a half-hour jeremiad from an éminence gris declaring that award to be worthless and the people who voted it to you duped fools. It’s not paranoia: By count I caught more than a dozen sets of eyes sweeping between me and the speaker going on about the triviality of work such as mine and the foolishness of the hundred-plus writers who had voted for it.
As you might imagine, the applause was slight, uncomfortable, and scattered. There was more coughing and chair scraping than clapping. By the end of the speec
h, I was drenched with the tricklings of mortification and wondering what I’d done to deserve them.
The master of ceremonies, Robert Silverberg, took the podium and said, “Well, I guess we’ve all been put in our place.” There was a bitter chuckle. And the next award was announced.
Again it went to me—for my short story, “Aye, and Gomorrah…”
I had, by that time, forgotten it was in the running. For the second time that evening, I got up and went to the podium to accept my trophy (it sits on a shelf above my desk about two feet away from me as I write); but, in dazzled embarrassment, it occurred to me as I was walking to the front of the hall that I must say something in my defense, though mistily I perceived it had best be as indirect as the attack. With my sweat soaked undershirt beneath my formal turtle-neck peeling and unpeeling from my back at each step, I took the podium and my second trophy of the evening. Into the microphone I said, as calmly as I could manage, “I write the novels and stories that I do and work on them as hard as I can to make them the best I can. That you’ve chosen to honor them—and twice in one night—is warming. Thank you.”
I received a standing ovation—though I was aware it was as much a reaction to the upbraiding of the naysayer as it was in support of anything that I had done.
I walked back down toward my seat, but as I passed one of the tables, a woman agent (not my own) who had several times written me and been supportive of my work, took my arm as I went by and pulled me down to say, “That was elegant, Chip…!” while the applause continued. At the same time, I felt a hand on my other sleeve—on the arm that held the Lucite block of the Nebula itself—and I turned to Isaac Asimov (whom I’d met for the first time at the banquet the year before), sitting on the other side and now pulling me toward him. With a large smile, wholly saturated with evident self-irony, he leaned toward me to say: “You know, Chip, we only voted you those awards because you’re Negro…!” I smiled back (there was no possibility he had intended the remark in any way seriously—as anything other than an attempt to cut through the evening’s many tensions.… Still, part of me rolled my eyes silently to heaven and said: Do I really need to hear this right this moment?) and returned to my table.
Dark Matter Page 46