The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

by Samuel R. Delany

  I put the wet chick into Dave’s hard, black hands, which minutes ago had offered me the peeping creature (“There, go on. Take it now. Take it. Don’t be afraid. It ain’t gonna hurt you!”), while I’d reached for it, pulled back, reached for it again, and everyone in the kitchen had laughed.

  “Naw,” Dave fingered up the head. “It’s dead. You done kilt it.”

  I began to cry, the tears coming from some place hugely full of a sorrow astonishing and terrifying in its immensity.

  “Now, he drowned it,” my father said, stopping my mother, who’d turned to comfort me. “We told him not to be after it like that. He’s got to learn about things like that.”

  I was four or five. It was evening. We were in Hopewell Junction. And the crickets and katydids chirruped outside.

  I stood there, over the coffee tin, tears tickling my cheek, even as I fisted them, again and again, away.

  That single dead chick was far more upsetting to me than the myriad human corpses I’d seen and would see at my father’s funeral parlor in the city, rolling past me in their coffins, naked on the embalming table, or in coffins in the back, their heads on a white napkin across the pillow while, in her blue smock, the beautician who worked in the beauty parlor down the street styled their hair, or finally on display, dressed and coiffed, in the viewing rooms.

  Though it was wholly unconnected in any direct way with my subway obsession, I thought about that moment of childhood despair, when intentions and ignorances had gone tragically awry, a lot while I was at the hospital.

  Sometimes I felt as if I were a child again, weeping for something yellow, soft, and innocent I’d inadvertently destroyed. Sometimes I felt like a small creature, thrust below the surface by a huge, ignorant monster, suffocating, choking, drowning.

  But even while I sat in one of the patient lounges, remembering, trying to bring out some single and unified meaning from the memory, I would find myself drifting into the associational excess that came with it.

  About two inches the taller, Dave would stand with my father out by the electric chicken plucker, while the washtub on the outdoor burner bubbled along its aluminum rim, and a clutch of white hens hung by their feet from the tree, necks dripping …

  Sometimes Dave would knife the head clear off, then turn the headless creature loose so that my father and I could watch it run, and splatter, and stumble, and get up, and run a little more, and fall over, and get up and fall over and over again, white feathers splashed and speckled.

  Dave pressed a switch, and the rubber fingers on the plucker’s drum (the axle leading into the fire-engine red housing clotted with feathers and blood) began to turn, to disappear at transparent speeds. Dave pushed the visor of his painter’s cap up on his forehead. “See there! See there, Sam,” he’d say to my father. “See there, how it go?”

  From a nail at about grown-up eye level, single legs bound together with twine, the three white chickens finally ceased flapping and splattering the bark of the oak tree to drool blood from their red combs on the leaves and feathers among the roots. Dave turned to untie them, to carry them to the washtub and plunge them into the boiling water, surface obscured by bubbles.

  Another memory equally close: on the rag rug in front of the Hopewell Junction fireplace, my mother and I would play with a wagon full of blocks with blue designs along the edge, or she would read me the word balloons in the book of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby cartoons, or from an oversized volume of Mother Goose. But finally, she would have to leave to go to the kitchen to fix dinner, and the moment’s abandonment, while I sat among blocks and books, seemed as absolute as death, obliterating almost wholly the hour or two of pleasure that had preceded it, that now set it in relief, that made a tragedy of her defection.

  And another? In the kitchen at Hopewell Junction, my father pointed his finger down at me and declared with hissing intensity: “No, you may not send away for it! That’s your punishment!”

  (Punishment for what, I have no memory of at all. Some eight-year-old prank, perhaps, I’d played on my sister?)

  Then he snatched the empty Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box out of my hand, its broad back covered with pictures of the pasteboard circus figures—clowns, monkeys, animal tamers with their lions and tigers, and aerial artists that swung from trapezes you could make out of real string—that, only moments before, I’d been about to get for only a box-top and twenty-five cents sent somewhere called Battle Creek. My father shoved the box into the galvanized trash can. I was struck with a yearning as sharp as fire, as cold as grief. And the circus became an intense and magic image of the forbidden, the out-of-reach, which (as I sat in the hospital, recalling all these associations) I’d yet again, in the three volumes of my completed trilogy, pursued with words to fix somehow its associations with death, the father, and despair.

  But these excesses are, after all, memory itself. They make of life a text, in which time (in both directions), temperament (tenor, texture, and timbre), or merely verbal contiguity is as much the organizer as the random rules of narrative, just as they assure that—to the person seeking a single meaning from any of its images—it remains unmasterable.

  42.01. The therapy program at the Day/Night Center was firmly oriented toward the present, rather than toward the historical retrieval of psychic minutiae more orthodox Freudian approaches encouraged. “How are you feeling now?” was the most common question, both in our group and in our individual sessions. But this may be why I spent so much time when I was not in session hunting through my past on my own.

  42.1. Who was my mother?

  The youngest of three sisters (a fourth had died in infancy), when she was growing up in the Bronx she and some of her friends had a hateful old white woman for a teacher. To get back at her for tormenting the class, my mother and some of her friends got an old, rotting fish. They put it in a gift box, wrapped it up with pink paper and ribbon, and left it on her desk. “When she came in and saw it, she looked so happy,” my mother said. “She sat down at the desk to unwrap it. When she took off the lid, though, and saw what it was, she just sat there at her desk and began to cry. I look back on it and wonder how we could have done something so hurtful. But we did.”

  “Did she act any nicer to you after she realized how much she’d made you all dislike her?” I asked. I was then nine, perhaps ten.

  “No,” my mother said. “She really didn’t.”

  “Did you feel sorry for her, after that, and try to make things easier on her?”

  “No, I’m afraid we didn’t either. We just thought it was very funny. But the truth was, she really was a mean, small-minded, petty woman. She shouldn’t have been teaching. But she probably had no other choice, back then.”

  My mother was always concerned that my sister and I have the broadest possible cultural exposure. When I was six, I attended some of the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts at Carnegie Hall. We would sit in the balcony, looking down at the orchestra, now looking over at our music teacher, Mr. McIllheny, who’d come to hear one of them and who sat ten seats away, now at the other children from my school, here and there, around us, as the conductor led his young audience through the lucid musical organization of Haydn, Mozart, Ravel.

  “I remember struggling to get you and your sister ready on time. I got your coats on, threw on my own, got you into the bus—we just made it. Then, when I’d finally gotten you into your seats (the first thing the conductor down on the podium would say was, ‘Now everyone take the gum out of your mouths and put it away,’ and I looked over at you, and there you were, taking your gum out. I didn’t even know you’d been chewing any! I wondered for weeks where you’d gotten it) and I was in my own seat, shrugging off my coat, I looked down and saw I was still wearing my apron! I’d forgotten to take it off, we were in such a rush.”

  My sixth summer, my mother enrolled me and herself in the Vassar Summer Institute for Gifted Children. The Vassar campus was not far from Hopewell Junction. The whole family was
supposed to attend, and many fathers were there; but when he was not in his professional guise as undertaker, my father became nervous and anxious about meeting strangers, and finally (and rather huffily) he refused to take part in this nonsense—save for an occasional visit on weekends.

  My memories of that stay:

  Row on row of ornately filigreed, blackened bronze mailbox doors, each with its little dial and glass window, on the lobby wall of my mother’s dorm; sitting on the floor in her room, my mother read “The Teeny Weenies” to me from the comics in the New York Sunday paper, or cut out the stand-up figure included each week; evening sings with the music teacher, where we learned the songs of Marais and Miranda, or watched some older kids (the seven-year-olds) perform The Three Little Pigs, using chairs and tables for props—an enthralling production that still, in the back of my mind, remains my effective standard for theater. I remember the tiled footbath you had to wade through before going swimming, the jets of water rilling across my feet, the navy blue tank suits that the mothers and the instructors wore as they walked around the edge of the pale blue water with the ear flaps of their bathing caps turned up, the smell of chlorine (the woman swimming instructor telling us children, standing about naked at the wall of the pool, what chlorine was), while light streaked about the walls and dark blue ceiling, under the skylight.

  Somewhat later I nearly drowned at the pool’s deep end as the instructor took another step back from the wall, then tossed me forward toward the edge. I splashed down. There was a moment when, my eyes opened below the surface, I saw blurred and truncated adults standing in the blue distance, run with swinging and interweaving ropes and ropes of light, while I swallowed more and more water, and clawed upward, and, for moments, minutes, it seemed, did not move at all, but only choked and got more water down my throat—

  —with the sudden burst into air, I panted and cried and clutched—this time getting it—at the pool’s edge.

  “I almost drowned!” I got out, coughing.

  And the instructor, behind me, said absently, looking off at some children who were splashing around somewhere down toward the shallower end, “No, you didn’t. …” until she looked back at me and realized something had happened.

  Afterwards I lay, wet and naked, on the wooden bench by the wall, getting my breath back, still coughing, while the swimming session—including my mother—went on below the echoing skylight.

  Once I was caught out after bedtime on the lawn under the early full moon in a still blue sky: I’d decided, in my pajamas, that I would go see my mother. To that end, I’d left my room—its walls were institutional blue, the bedsteads were white-enameled iron, chipped all over; and I shared it with a brilliant boy who knew all about butterflies and chrysalises. As I was making my way across the lawn, a young assistant teacher saw me, asked me what I was doing, lifted me up, and began to carry me back to the children’s sleeping hall. “You should let me go see my mother,” I said. “Because I’m a werewolf.”

  “Are you now?” she said.

  I bounced on her shoulder as we went along over the grass. “Um-hum.” Then I sank my teeth into her neck.

  She screamed and dropped me to the grass.

  “I told you you should let me see my mother.” I got up. “I hurt my arm.”

  “That,” she said, looking down at me and rubbing her neck, “was not funny at all!”

  And the excess to this orderly progression of maternal presences and absences?

  Some moment when I was six or seven, with my mother at the bathroom sink washing her face to get ready to go somewhere, and I stood at her side, plaguing her with my whining demand that I wanted to play with the food coloring now, we’d played with the food coloring yesterday, why couldn’t I play with the food coloring, now, I just wanted the food coloring so I could play with—

  Mother turned from the sink in anger and drew back her fist.

  We both stood, silent, surprised.

  I was afraid. Perhaps she was, too.

  The blow was never struck.

  She turned back to the sink.

  And I was left with the astonishing revelation that not only was this small, short-haired woman—my mother—capable of reason and reassurance and intelligence, but also—though I hardly ever saw it again and certainly not directed at me—of rage.

  42.2. Who was my father?

  Youngest of ten brothers and sisters, my father grew up on the campus of St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina. “It was just a small Negro college, back then. Everyone did everything. Momma and Pappa both taught,” he told me. “So did my older sisters—and brothers, sometimes. Momma was the Dean of Women. But among other things, she was in charge of buying all the food supplies for the dining facilities. White salesmen used to come around to the school and knock on the door to sell her things—flour, cornmeal, rice, molasses. She had a big key chain, where she kept all the keys to the school. The salesman would come up on the porch and knock on the door. She’d come to the door and say, ‘Yes?’ And she’d wait for the salesman to take off his hat. Well, as far as the salesmen were concerned, they were white men dealing with a nigger woman at a nigger college. (On the campus, they’d call every man they met ‘Professor’—students, janitors, teachers: ‘Hey, there, Professor, can you tell me where to find …?’ It was a big joke to them. But they wouldn’t call you ‘Mister.’) And most of them didn’t think to take their hats off. But Momma wouldn’t even say, ‘Come in,’ till that hat came off. She’d stand there as long as twenty minutes, at the door, nodding, shaking her head, saying, ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir,’ and finally knocking those keys against the palm of her hand. But because that white man wouldn’t take his hat off, she never bought anything from him.”

  And he told me this:

  “You know, Pappa was the first Negro bishop—an Episcopalian bishop, because that’s what we were—in the United States. Well, he was pretty strict. You did something wrong, and he’d say: ‘Now, Sam, you’re going to get a whipping for that.’ He never hit you when he was actually angry, you see. But waiting for it was worse than its happening. He never forgot, either. An hour later, or the next day, even, he’d call you into his study. And he’d say, ‘Sam, you go in the back now, cut me six long switches, and bring ’em here.’ Well, then you knew it was about to happen. I’d go out in the back and cut switches and suffer the pangs of the damned—you’d bring him one that was too short, and he’d make you go out and cut another one. I’d bring ’em in and say, ‘Here, Pappa.’ And he’d look over each one to see if it was long enough. Then he’d get up and say, ‘All right. Take your pants down, now. …’ But I tell you, cutting them and having to bring them to him, that was the worst part.”

  Once I listened to my father and several of his brothers and sisters reminisce about an afternoon in which Pappa had grown so angry at my father’s next oldest brother he chained Hubert to the water pump in the front yard, got out an orange crate, and beat him till the crate was in splinters and the boy’s back and buttocks were bloody. That Uncle Hubert, the dignified and respected judge, had once suffered this treatment was not what bothered me. There was so much talk of punishment among my father and my aunts and uncles that, rightly or wrongly or despite its love, to me that home seemed a house of an extraordinary violence and rigid order. Despite the levity with which his siblings remembered it, they could not recall the nature of the particular infraction—just as I no longer know why I was forbidden to send for the toy circus, or why, later, I was beaten with the hairbrush over my father’s knee, or why, still later, I was not allowed to go and see House of Wax in 3-D.

  My strongest early associations with my father are his seasonal trips to his home in Raleigh, North Carolina, on the St. Augustine campus—during which a certain tension would leave the family. And though it returned when he returned, his arrival from one of these expeditions meant toys (once a tin lighthouse with a stick that turned around on the roof, from one end of which hung an airplane and from
the other a helicopter) and candy (a nougat roll usually, covered with pecans).

  In the evenings, my sister and I would be playing innocently enough, it seemed, in the living room, and the door to the downstairs offices would be jerked open loudly, and my father’s voice would come up the steps in a raucous whisper: “For God’s sakes, Margaret! Will you shut those kids up! I’ve got a funeral going on down here! They sound like a herd of elephants coming through!” and my mother, moments later, would stop what she was doing in the kitchen and walk up into the back of the house, to try and occupy us with a less rambunctious game.

  When I was five, my father took me on the train to visit his home in Raleigh. We rode overnight in a rumbling, narrow-halled sleeping car. The porter came and opened our berths. My father slept in the upper bed. I slept in the lower. And my father told me we mustn’t keep the light on, because there were crazy people out in the darkness with guns who would shoot their rifles at lighted train windows just for the fun of it. I went to sleep uneasily in the rumbling dark.

  The next day, we went to the campus and he showed me his childhood house. All I remember was that it was small and neat. “Back when I was a boy, it was all grown up around there,” he explained, standing on the porch and pointing across a stretch of lawn, while the woman who owned it now (a friend of my father’s family) stood with arms folded across a lace blouse, smiling—and I was pretty sure he meant that was the place he’d had to go to cut the switches. The day was a cascade of memories for Dad, as well as for the various family and friends we visited and who fed us lunch here and dinner there, with the greatest of black Southern hospitality. I listened to all the stories and nodded dutifully and forgot them immediately. But what remains as the marvel and wonder of the trip was the minutes we stepped into my cousin Eddie’s new dry cleaning store. The great metal valves, the asbestos-covered pipes, the shiny equipment all enameled bright green—rather than dirty beige, like the one up Seventh Avenue where, from time to time, my father would take me to drop off the dry cleaning.