A land of spying cats and gulls, nuclear dirigibles buoyed by barkcloth balloons, and silent pistols that shoot poison knives…
Today sees the release of a new Tor Essentials edition of Nisi Shawl’s Everfair, including a foreword by Cadwell Turnbull. We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from this modern classic, a stunning alternate history of Belgium’s disastrous colonization of the Congo.
In this re-imagining of Belgium’s disastrous colonization of the Congo, African American missionaries join forces with British socialists to purchase land from the Congo Free State’s “owner,” King Leopold II. This land, which they name Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven for native populations of the Congo as well as settlers from around the world, including dream-eyed Europeans attempting to create a better society, formerly enslaved people returning from America, and Chinese railroad builders escaping hard labor. Using the combined knowledge of four continents, Everfair becomes a land of spying cats and gulls, nuclear dirigibles buoyed by barkcloth balloons, and silent pistols that shoot poison knives.
With this technology, Everfair will attempt to defeat the Belgian tyrant Leopold II. But even if they can defeat their great enemy, a looming world war and political infighting may threaten to destroy everything they have built.
Boma, Congo, December 1889
Horror.
The Reverend Lieutenant Thomas Jefferson Wilson could think of no other word to sum up what he had experienced on this trip. Even now, alone in the quiet, white-walled room provided him by his host, he heard their cries, he saw their wasted bodies, their eyes bulging large in their thin faces, pulsing with defeat, hopeless as marine creatures stranded on a desolate beach. He smelled them, their sores running with blood and infected matter where chafed by their chains at neck and wrist and waist and ankle. Smelled the sweat of their fear, the fear that made them lift up and carry burdens half their malnourished weight till released by death. Smelled their abundant corpses rotting by the trail in the tropic heat.
This land was to have been Heaven.
Restless as ever, he abandoned his seat on the narrow cot to unshutter the room’s one window. A breeze brought some relief from the day’s fierce temperatures. Even up here, on the capital’s plateau, a Pennsylvanian such as himself found the Congo “Free” State’s equatorial climate hard to withstand. But he should not complain.
Or not on his own behalf.
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Everfair
A tapping at the door. He opened it on a child of eleven, the household’s primary servant—a boy named Mola, he recalled. “’Soir,” the boy slurred in French. He entered, bearing with him a tray, the meal his master offered in lieu of the repast shared by Boma’s white residents at the hotel near the river below.
The Reverend Lieutenant Thomas Jefferson Wilson would not be welcome at that hotel, for he was not white.
The dishes on the tray held vegetables, the ever-present manioc, and stewed meat of some sort—probably from a fowl or goat. No doubt this was what Mola himself would sup upon, and Thomas made sure to tender the boy his thanks as effusively as his limited French allowed. When he was alone again he placed the tray beneath his cot, the food untouched. His journey upriver to Stanley Falls and then back here to the port of Boma had entirely wrecked his appetite.
The wine he also set aside, to aid him later in seeking sleep. He drank instead a gobletful of water from a crystal decanter, then set that on the sill to cool and turned again to his work.
To the horror.
At forty a veteran of three wars, Thomas had seen and survived much. Though no more than a child at the American Civil War’s onset, as soon as blacks were allowed to fight he had enlisted and seen action. That must be why his sojourn here in the Congo was affecting him so adversely, he told himself sternly. His reaction was not illness, not pain and anguish, but anger: righteous indignation that the evils of slavery, which he had staked his life to eradicate from the face of the Earth, had sprung up once again. Unprotested and, what was worse, unremarked, they had met him everywhere he journeyed in this supposed Utopia.
A pair of thin pillows lay over his traveling desk, incompletely concealing it. He retrieved it and drew forth the manuscript of his open letter to King Leopold, monarch of this realm and soi-disant benefactor of its benighted native population.
“Good and great friend,” the salutation read. “I have the honor to submit for your Majesty’s consideration some reflections respecting the Independent State of Congo, based upon a careful study and inspection of the country ” So far, he had written five pages and not yet named a third of the atrocities he had been forced to witness. The whippings, the murders committed so casually as if a form of sport, innocents dismembered—Thomas’s gorge rose, but he settled nonetheless to his self-appointed task.
Keeping his intended audience in mind, he aimed for a tone of forthrightness that yet maintained discreet silence on the more repulsive details of what he had discovered. The open letter would be published in his paper, The Commoner, and also as a stand-alone pamphlet; perhaps in boards as a small book, on the Continent. There he would find support for such an enterprise, translators…
The light dimmed rapidly, but not till he heard the clattering ratchet of the steam-driven trolley climbing Boma’s cliffs did Thomas cease his efforts. That noise, he knew, presaged the arrival of his host, the Anglo-Flemish trader Roger Morel. Thomas didn’t trust him, didn’t trust anyone who profited from Leopold’s reign. He packed away his open letter and went to meet the trolley at the platform mere yards from Morel’s villa.
Four cars comprised the steam train’s entire length. Their iron fuselages had been painted a brilliant yellow with gaudy red, blue, and green trim. This jaunty coloring and the fortuitous semblance of a face in the alignment of their doors and windows lent the cars a charming air much like the illustration in a children’s book. Thomas at first had succumbed to this charm and to the undeniable romance of such a small machine so beautifully built—until his peregrinations brought home to him the human cost involved.
Beneath the leafy serrations of a grove of palms the cars disgorged themselves of their riders, black-clad white men replacing their hats and stepping carefully down the platform’s wooden stairway. Morel bared his head again in salute to his visitor. Exchanging meaningless pleasantries, the two returned to Morel’s home.
Mola took his master’s hat and gloves at the door, handing him a glass half-filled with a greenish liquid. Thomas made as if to return to his room, considering his social obligations for the evening met, but Morel would have none of it. “No, no, my friend, I insist,” he said, indicating with his drink the sitting room’s best chair.
Ensconced perforce on its cushioned mahogany, Thomas accepted from Mola a second glass. He sipped the unknown beverage with his customary suspicion as the boy slipped from the room. It was faintly bitter and contained no alcohol he could detect.
“So.” His host had assumed a seat on the divan, crossing his legs and clasping his hands over one knee. “You leave the day after the morrow?”
“Yes.” There were other colonies to explore, perhaps more truly paradisiacal, more suited to providing his colored brethren a new home. The ship would stop for Accra and Dakar, and he intended to travel from there to Tunis, Cairo—“That is my plan.”
“I advise you to change it.”
Thomas looked at Morel inquiringly. His eyes held a warning gleam that overrode Thomas’s mistrust of him. Thomas set the harmless glass down on the side table with a steady enough hand and spoke: “I fail to take your meaning, sir.”
“Ah. You have no confidence in me. That is well.” Morel nodded as if confirming a pet theory to himself, his chin doubling. “You are being watched. You must leave tonight and go—elsewhere. A different route, more direct.”
A different route? “To where?” No use attempting any further to dissemble.
“To England.”
Not home. “Not to America?”
“In England you will be safe—enough. But this continent— there are large stakes, and the holders of those stakes are at every hand. During supper this evening I overheard enough, my English being supposed more imperfect than it is, to warrant giving you this warning.”
Morel stood. “As well, I have a—a commission of sorts— If you will allow me to retrieve certain papers I wish you to convey—” He left and returned with a sheaf of documents—bills of lading, figures in long columns, maps. Thomas read them in growing dismay. Here was proof, if such would be needed, of what he had witnessed. Proof and beyond proof The scope of the problem far exceeded what he had seen with his own eyes. Not thousands but tens of thousands were doomed unless the abominations practiced so freely in the Congo Free State were to cease, and cease now.
Liverpool, England, October 1890
Grim brick walls, dark with dead smoke, crowded Jackie Owen’s path. They huddled over him, blocking the grey clouds but not the icy rain. A drop ran beneath his collar. Another followed it. He shrugged irritably in his mackintosh but hurried on, pressing through a small group of workmen just freed from some nearby dock or warehouse.
It wasn’t the buildings’ fault. The narrowness of the ways between them, mere corridors, was what annoyed. So obviously outmoded. No room for machinery of any sort. Here was Victoria Street, a modern thoroughfare at last. Four lanes for carriages, business facades well set back but of more or less uniform height, meaning electric tramlines could easily be strung overhead between them. Striding rapidly along, an unconscious smile of contentment lurking behind his beard, Jackie saw only enough of his surroundings to avoid crashing into obstacles. He was lost, though continuing automatically on his course to St. George’s Hall. Lost in time, rapt in visions of things to come.
In Jackie Owen’s spectral Liverpool, the many layers of garments hampering females he passed gave way to sensible clothes allowing their limbs liberty of movement, their blood hygienic circulation. Prices disappeared from shop windows, beggars from corners and alley entrances, rendered obsolete by the benignities of the surprisingly successful Fabian movement’s socialism. And though the sun broke suddenly through the storm he took no note. Its brilliance was quite eclipsed by the eminence argent of an immense dirigible filling his mind’s sky.
Reaching the confluence of several broad avenues, Jackie entered St. John’s Gardens, still dreaming. These verdant acres had but lately been reclaimed from a church building, a hundred-year-old edifice that had been overdue for destruction—much like, in Jackie’s opinion, the institution it represented. In his imagination, the gardens’ new statue of reformer William Rathbone would be joined by monuments to others more radical—to himself? Why not? If he, John Herbert Owen, should make such a mark on the world as he expected, it would naturally be acknowledged.
Perhaps, also, there would be a likeness of tonight’s speaker. A black, yes, but by all reports a most distinguished man.
As he approached the steps climbing to the hall’s northmost entry, that closest to the Small Concert Room, Jackie let his visions recede. He was interested in who else saw fit to attend this evening’s performance.
The number surprised him. One or two damp placards held up by defenders of the regime confirmed that his opinions were not universally held. Yet dozens of people sharing them streamed ahead of him and fell behind—scores, hundreds. Wilson had appeared in Liverpool many times over the last few weeks, as attested by journalists here and in London. Of course his earlier venue had been a Baptist church. The church was abolitionist, but Jackie Owen, like other members of the dissident, socialist Fabian Society he had helped found, avoided such places. Perhaps they were not the only ones; perhaps more people were coming to their political senses.
Inside, only a faint odor assailed his nose. Kept in check by the hall’s amazing draughtless ventilation system (Jackie had made an earlier visit simply to tour this innovation), the smell of wet wool and feathers and inexpensive parfumerie increased only a little as he entered the confines of the room itself.
The audience looked to include a fair number of his countrymen. By no means restricted to manual labor here, they engaged in every form of trade and had infiltrated all classes. Liverpool was home to one of the largest concentrations of Irishmen off the Emerald Isle. And Irishwomen, too. He heard their low, lovely accents as he took his seat, wives admonishing their men to have a care, that broadcloth cost more than a penny the yard, sure, and was never meant to be soaking up so much of the world’s blessed moisture.
How he missed such talk in London, in the parlors, conservatories, and withdrawing rooms he frequented there.
A hush descended as the Reverend Lieutenant Thomas Jefferson Wilson took the podium. A dark, slim, upright man in dark dress, he stood out in the Small Concert Room’s gleaming brightness like a wick in a brass lamp. His words were fire.
“I come before you on this evening to tell of an evil in a far-off land which is yet nonetheless present here in this room, in our very midst,” the man began. Evidently a practiced orator, he nourished the flame he had lit without vain expenditure of air, without ever seeming to raise his voice. And still it filled that room, and the ears of his audience, at least eight hundred by Jackie’s best estimate. Their ears, and their hearts as well. He accused none of them of committing this crime, as he termed it, against humanity. Accused none but implicated all.
“Yes, I repeat, a crime against humanity! Are we blacks not men? Our skin is dusky, but our blood runs as red and salt as that of any fairer race.
“Picture yourselves, then, in the circumstances of these poor Negroes of the Congo. You who toil here in Europe for wages which permit you a bare living, a bare hope of something more for your offspring, imagine if you were to receive nothing. Imagine if you were beaten, threatened with death, if your dear wives were ravished from your sides and kept in prison till you had satisfied your employers’ impossible demands. Imagine, then, if you failed to meet them.”
Here he stepped off the stage’s left side, disappearing from the view of all but those seated at the extreme right edge of the room’s spherical plan. It was a measure of the hold this man exercised over his listeners that the hush that had greeted his first words only deepened in expectancy at his absence. Perhaps they had seen or had word of prior presentations and knew what was coming.
Wilson returned quickly, bearing with him a very ordinary-looking basket. Deserting the podium, he placed it on the stage’s edge, tipping it to expose its contents. Jackie beheld a mass of greyish lumps.
“Rubber,” Wilson pronounced, in accents usually reserved for the vilest of epithets. “Raw rubber, a substance bidding fair to replace ivory as the Dark Continent’s most profitable export.” He lifted from the basket a single, uneven ball of the stuff and held it up as a Hamlet might hold his Yorick’s skull. “A substance noteworthy for its strength, flexibility, and capacity to shed water. Vital to the production of tires for automobiles, bicycles, omnibuses—modes of transport to which I, and many of you also, owe our presence here tonight.” Sounding now as if he choked on his barely contained fury, Wilson managed to continue. “Also used in waterproofing boots and mackintoshes”—here Jackie felt himself flush with guilt— “rubber is harvested in the wild at great effort. A basketful such as I here display for your edification is the result of many days of grueling and dangerous work performed by dozens of desperate men. Desperate, desperate men, driven by such inducements as I have already outlined for you. And if”—Wilson turned now to gaze upon his audience, offering them the grey lump on his open, outstretched palm—“if they fail, then God above must help them, He must show them mercy, for no man on Earth will do so. For the wives are killed—strangled, generally, as bullets are too dear to spend on such a task. And the empty baskets are then filled, filled to overflowing with their husbands’ severed hands!”
Now the conflagration. Now the fires of outrage burnt freely as the audience rose to its feet, crying aloud for justice. Jackie stood with them. Marvelous! To be part of such a mob, to feel its unstoppable power for good. It must be for good…
But the fire Wilson had lit did not burn entirely beyond his control. When the crowd’s bellows had crested, the dark figure on the stage lifted its arms as if supplicating Heaven. Quiet fell.
“I hear you,” the speaker declared. “I hear your words clearly; you say with our Lord, ‘As you have done unto the least of these, so have you done unto me.’”
Jackie would not have put it that way, but a chorus of “Aye”s and “Hear! hear!”s came in response. “How, then,” Wilson asked, “shall we right this wrong?”
The reverend lieutenant explained his program and the fire flickered, died to embers. Letter-writing and petitions to Parliament was what he asked of them. A movement along the lines of Abolitionism. Which had been well and good in its time.
But Jackie had a better idea.
Excerpted from Everfair, copyright © 2023 by Nisi Shawl.
