SHEREE R. THOMAS, a native of Memphis, is a writer and editor based in New York City. She edited fiction at a major publishing company and is a former contributing editor to QBR and Essence Books. A graduate of the Clarion West Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop, she has published reviews and articles on the SF genre and contemporary Afrodiasporic culture in the Washington Post Book World, Rap Pages, and Black Issues Book Review. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in Ishmael Reed’s Konch, Drumvoices Revue, Obsidian III, and other literary journals. She is the founding editor of the literary journal ANANSI: Fiction of the African Diaspora. She can be reached at [email protected].
COPYRIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS
Copyrights for short fiction published from manuscript for the first time in this anthology are held by their authors and all rights are reserved by their authors. Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted material (any errors that may have occurred are inadvertent and will be corrected in subsequent editions, provided notification is sent to the publisher):
“Twice, at Once, Separated” © 2000 Linda Addison.
“Rhythm Travel” © 1996 by Amiri Baraka. First appeared in Fertile Ground: Memories & Visions. Reprinted by permission of the author and Runagate Press.
“The Woman in the Wall” © 2000 Steven Barnes.
“The Space Traders” © 1992 Derrick Bell. First appeared in Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Reprinted by permission of the author and Basic Books.
“The Evening and the Morning and the Night” © 1987 Omni Publications International. First appeared in Omni Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Afterword” © 1996 in Bloodchild and Other Stories, by Octavia E. Butler.
“The Monophobic Response” © 1995 Octavia E. Butler. First appeared under a different title in Journeys. Reprinted by permission of the author and PEN/Faulkner.
“The Goophered Grapevine” © 1887 Charles W. Chesnutt. First appeared in the Atlantic Monthly.
“Aye, and Gomorrah…” © 1968 Samuel R. Delany. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Henry Morrison.
“Racism and Science Fiction” © 1999 Samuel R. Delany. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Henry Morrison.
“The Comet” © 1920 W. E. B. Du Bois. First appeared in Darkwater: Voices from the Veil.
“Like Daughter” © 2000 Tananarive Due.
“Ark of Bones” © 1974 Henry Dumas. First appeared in Ark of Bones and Other Stories, ed. Eugene Redmond. Reprinted with permission of the author’s estate.
“The Astral Visitor Delta Blues” © 2000 Robert Fleming.
“Chicago 1927” © 2000 Jewelle Gomez.
“The Becoming” © 2000 Akua Lezli Hope.
“Greedy Choke Puppy” and “Ganger (Ball Lightning)” © 2000 Nalo Hopkinson.
“Sister Lilith” © 2000 Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.
“The African Origins of UFOs,” excerpt from the novel. © 2000 Anthony Joseph.
“Butta’s Backyard Barbecue” © 2000 Tony Medina.
“Yet Do I Wonder” © 2000 Paul D. Miller. First appeared in The Village Voice in 1994 in a slightly different version.
Intro to “Yet Do I Wonder” © 2000 Paul D. Miller.
“Black to the Future” © 2000 Walter Mosley. First appeared in the New York Times, Nov. 30, 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Hussy Strut” © 2000 Ama Patterson.
“Future Christmas,” excerpt from the novel The Terrible Twos © 1982 Ishmael Reed.
“Tasting Songs” © 2000 Leone Ross.
“Can You Wear My Eyes” © 2000 Kalamu ya Salaam.
“Buddy Bolden” © 1996 Kalamu ya Salaam. First appeared in Fertile Ground: Memories & Visions. Reprinted by permission of the author and Runagate Press.
“At Life’s Limits” © 2000 Kiini Ibura Salaam.
“Gimmile’s Songs” © 1984 Charles R. Saunders. First appeared in Sword and Sorceress, ed. Marion Zimmer Bradley. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Why Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science Fiction” © 2000 Charles R. Saunders.
“Black No More” © 1931 George S. Schuyler. First appeared in Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933–1940.
“At the Huts of Ajala” © 2000 Nisi Shawl.
“separation anxiety” © 2000 Evie Shockley.
“The Pretended” © 2000 Darryl A. Smith.
“Looking for the Invisible” © 2000 Sheree R. Thomas.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A project of this scope could not have been accomplished without the goodwill and patience of friends, old and new. The generous help and enthusiasm I received from so many people in working on this book was inspiring. All thanks and praise are due to:
My editor Betsy Mitchell, her assistant Jaime Levine, Managing Editor Bob Castillo, copy editor Dave Cole, Nancy Goldsmith, and the wonderful team at Warner. My agent Marie Dutton Brown, who shared my vision and kept the faith cheerfully. Cheryl D. Woodruff, for her continuous support. Carolyn Nichols for quite an intro to publishing. Nikki Sprinkle for pisco sours in Peru (who needs Paris?).
Chip Delany for liking the title when Dark Matter was only a theory. Octavia E. Butler and Gordon Van Gelder for words of wisdom. Charles R. Saunders for kindly bringing Darkwater to my attention. Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due for saying yes. Jewelle Gomez for giving us Gilda. Nalo Hopkinson for her lovely reading at the Dixon Place. David Earl Jackson and Kalamu ya Salaam, two of the most gifted and generous minds I know. Jabari Asim, Steve Cannon at A Gathering of the Tribes, Troy Johnson of the African American Literature Book Club, Joseph Monte, Ronda Racha Penrice, Angel R. Raspbury, Taiia Smart-Young, and all my ANANSI friends who helped spread the Nommo. Arthur Flowers and the members of the New Renaissance Writers Guild. The Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture. The Hamilton-Grange Branch of the New York Public Library for having the only remaining copy of Ark of Bones in the city. Fred Hudson and Martin Simmons of the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center and all those tending the generations… E. Ethelbert Miller, who answered my call with enthusiasm. Sun Ra for the soundtrack and John F. Szwed for Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. The 1999 Clarion West Science Fiction Writers Workshop and the New York Society of Science Fiction, whose Donald A. & Elsie B. Wollheim Scholarship helped get me there. Amazi, Andrea Hairston, and Liz Roberts, for Seattle and Sapelo, for clearing a space on the floor and precious time on their calendars. Ian Hageman for helping me stay logged on during those six weeks in Seattle. Gary Bowen’s DeColores Project, Askhari of DeGriotSpace, the e-Drum community, as well as Alondra Nelson, Paul D. Miller, www.afrofuturism.net, and all the brilliant minds of the AfroFuturism listserv. Long live the Future Texts[;)]. Bon Mama Rose Novembre, Armelle Smarth, and Safiya Henderson-Holmes for their supreme motherwit and Papa Jacques, too. Harold Louissaint and EGS for helping me survive the Crash(es) of ’99. Ruby J. Rollins and Daniel Coates for guidance and insightful critique. Professor Vanessa Dickerson for planting wild seeds of inspiration.
And finally, much love and respect to my mother, Jacqueline, brothers Terrence and Brian, and Darryl for the past ten years, with deepest gratitude to Jackie, Jada, Evens, and Daguy, who all lived graciously with the awesome presence of Dark Matter for over a year.
NOTES
Introduction
1. Douglas Turner Ward, Happy Ending and Day of Absence (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1944), 35, 57.
2. Douglas Turner Ward, “American Theatre; For Whites Only?” New York Times, August 14, 1966.
3. NASA Jet Propulsion Lab at California Technical Institute, glossary of terms, www.nasa.jpl.gov.
4. Kim Griest, “The Nature of the Dark Matter,” lecture delivered January 15, 1996, at the International School of Physics, Varenna.
5. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 253.
6. Rola
nd Anthony Oliver and Anthony Atmore, The African Middle Ages, 1400–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
7. Mungo Park, Travels into the Interior of Africa (London: Eland, 1983).
8. February–April 1899 is the date of the serialized version that appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. The complete novel appeared in 1902.
9. Adam Lively, Masks: Blackness, Race, and Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2.
The Space Traders
1. See John Yewell, Chris Dodge, and Jan Desirey, eds., Confronting Columbus: An Anthology (1992).
2. Military Selective Service Act, 50 USCS Appx § 451, et seq. See, for example, Selective Draft Law Cases, 245 U.S. 366 (1918).
3. L. Levy, K. Karst, and D. Mahoney, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, II (1986), 761.
4. Langston Hughes, “Note on Commercial Theatre,” in Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (1990), 190.
5. John Newton, “Amazing Grace,” in Songs of Zion (1981), 211.
6. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (1981); Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ed., A Holocaust Reader (1976); Asher Cohen, Joav Gelbar, and Chad Ward, eds., Comprehending the Holocaust: Historical and Literary Research (1988); Judith Miller, One, By One, By One: Facing the Holocaust (1988); Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust (1978).
7. David Savage, “1 in 4 Young Blacks in Jail or in Court Control, Study Says,” Los Angeles Times, 27 February 1990, sec. A, p. 1, col. 1.
8. Jason DeParle, “42% of Young Black Men Are in Capital’s Court System,” New York Times, 18 April 1992, sec. A, p. 1, col 1.
9. Luther v. Borden, 48 U.S. (7 How.) 1 (1849) (Court refused to determine which was the legitimate government of Rhode Island).
10. See Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962) (exploring the “political question” doctrine in definitive fashion).
11. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944) (sustaining a military order under which Americans of Japanese origin were removed from designated West Coast areas). See also Hrabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943) (upholding a military curfew imposed on persons of Japanese ancestry in the West Coast during the early months of the Second World War).
12. Giles v. Harris, 189 U.S. 475 (1903).
13. Ibid., 488.
14. See Derrick Bell, “The Referendum: Democracy’s Barrier to Racial Equality,” Washington Law Review 54 (1978):1.
* A small card, resembling a currycomb in construction, and used by negroes in the rural districts instead of a comb.
* In 1990, the figure was 24 percent, according to Justice Department data contained in a study funded by the Rand Corporation.7 The National Center on Institutions and Alternatives reported that 42 percent of the black men in the District of Columbia, aged eighteen through thirty-five, were enmeshed in the criminal justice system on any given day in 1991.8
* Justice Holmes wrote: “Unless we are prepared to supervise the voting in that state by officers of the court, it seems to us that all the plaintiff could get from equity would be an empty form. Apart from damages to the individual, relief from a great political wrong, if done, as alleged, by the people of a state itself, must be given by them or by the legislature and political department of the Government of the United States.”13
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Introduction: Looking for the Invisible
Fiction Sister Lilith, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
The Comet, by W. E. B. Du Bois
Chicago 1927, by Jewelle Gomez
Black No More (excerpt from the novel), by George S. Schuyler
separation anxiety, by Evie Shockley
Tasting Songs, by Leone Ross
Can You Wear My Eyes, by Kalamu ya Salaam
Like Daughter, by Tananarive Due
Greedy Choke Puppy, by Nalo Hopkinson
Rhythm Travel, by Amiri Baraka
Buddy Bolden, by Kalamu ya Salaam
Aye, and Gomorrah…, by Samuel R. Delany
Ganger (Ball Lightning), by Nalo Hopkinson
The Becoming, by Akua Lezli Hope
The Goophered Grapevine, by Charles W. Chesnutt
The Evening and the Morning and the Night, by Octavia E. Butler
Twice, at Once, Separated, by Linda Addison
Gimmile’s Songs, by Charles R. Saunders
At the Huts of Ajala, by Nisi Shawl
The Woman in the Wall, by Steven Barnes
Ark of Bones, by Henry Dumas
Butta’s Backyard Barbecue, by Tony Medina
Future Christmas (excerpt from the novel The Terrible Twos), by Ishmael Reed
At Life’s Limits, by Kiini Ibura Salaam
The African Origins of UFOs (excerpt from the novel), by Anthony Joseph
The Astral Visitor Delta Blues, by Robert Fleming
The Space Traders, by Derrick Bell
The Pretended, by Darryl A. Smith
Hussy Strutt, by Ama Patterson
Essays Racism and Science Fiction, by Samuel R. Delany
Why Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science Fiction, by Charles R. Saunders
Black to the Future, by Walter Mosley
Yet Do I Wonder, by Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
The Monophobic Response, by Octavia E. Butler
Contributors
Copyrights and Permissions
Acknowledgments
Notes
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by Sheree Thomas
Cover design by Don Puckey. Cover illustration by Daniel Minter
Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Grand Central Publishing
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Originall published in hardcover by Warner Books, Inc., July 2000
First ebook edition: December 2014
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