In February of 2016, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination published an essay by me called “A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction.” In the two years since, Tor.com has published my in-depth essays on thirteen of the 42 works mentioned. The original “Crash Course” listed those 42 titles in chronological order, but the essays skip around. In this fourteenth column I write about “The Devil in America,” one of the first professionally published stories by rising star Kai Ashante Wilson.
A ROUGH ONE
Using a nontraditional format, Wilson begins his story about an imagined nineteenth-century tragedy with a twentieth-century father’s reflections on real life anti-black violence in his own time. Just the victims’ names—Emmett Till, Amadou Diallo, Arthur McDuffie—evoke unavoidable brutality, the sort of waking nightmare that many an African American knows lies just below the surface of the mundane world. The reading doesn’t get any easier when Wilson brings his narrative skills fully to bear on describing the destruction of the fictional Rosetree.
SWEETNESS AND DARK
But before subjecting us to that, the author involves us in the inner cares and delights of Easter Mack, daughter of the handsome and commanding Hazel Mae Mack, whom she calls “Ma’am.” In August 1877, twelve-year-old Easter gives dinner scraps to her brother, who years before turned himself into a dog and got stuck that way. She makes sure a special hen stays on guard against evil, vibrates with the rising urgency of the promise of her friend Soubrette’s kiss, and persuades the angels invisibly filling the air around her to relight a blown-out candle. And she’s sure the rain threatening the Rosetree church’s annual picnic won’t fall on it—though thanks to the story’s opening, readers understand that something else will.
NO TIME, NO WAY
Easter understands that her doom is approaching, too—as well as any child can understand such a thing. Shifting his narrative to 1871, six years earlier, Wilson recounts how, in her childish pride, Easter bargained away the precarious peace and well-being wrought by her ancestors. Taken to a spot in the tobacco fields where Ma’am and Daddy weren’t ever supposed to take her, “no time, no way,” the six-year-old encounters a tricksy entity who calls himself “the banker.” As underscored by multiple epigraphs, and as Hazel herself points out in direct speech, knowledge of ancestral techniques for overcoming this entity’s malice have been stripped from African Americans by generations of enslavement. Whether six or twenty-six, Easter would be unequipped to deal wisely with this supernatural banker. In 1877 her safeguards fail. The banker’s payments come due. Her family and community are going to be slaughtered.
NO NO NO NO NO
The day of the fated celebration dawns. Again Wilson lulls the wariness he has roused in his readers, comforting us with cozy details about vases of flowers and picnic foods and the itinerant preacher’s sermon. But soon blood and bullets fly. The sensory immediacy so pleasant mere paragraphs earlier guts us. “To cry hard enough knocks a body down, and harder still needs both hands flat to the earth to get the grief out,” the author explains, emotion conveyed in terms of physical effort. An old neighbor man crossing his porch with the help of his cane dies before he knows what’s hit him. Scared children running fruitlessly away are shot in the back. Hazel offers herself as a sacrificial distraction, which allows Easter to escape with her canine brother by succumbing to the same spell that holds him in its sway. Temporarily.
BLAME
Who’s at fault for this horror? Not Hazel Mae, making the best use she knows how of the “old Africa magic” she has inherited. Not little Easter, trying to improve her family’s lot without proper tools and training. Not even the devil-possessed white men murdering and raping their way through a peaceful, unarmed community. Wilson provides a quotation from the nonexistent (as far as I can tell) anthropological text White Devils/Black Devils to make plain the real culprit: the uprooting effects of the Transatlantic slave trade and the dehumanizing racism based on it. Racism is a system, a “peculiar institution” supported by individuals’ acquiescing actions but as a whole affecting the world far more widely than any one of these. It has distorted the very nature of its captives’ deity, making of the amalgamation of ambivalent West African trickster figures a wholly malevolent entity, gorging on their suffering.
CALL ME
Wilson is a supernal writer, and I have no hesitation in recommending his work. In general. At this point there are only a few short stories, a novelette, and two novellas; he creates at a self-admittedly glacially slow pace. Unlike “Super Bass,” “Légendaire,” “A Taste of Honey,” “The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps,” and his most recent publication “The Lamentation of Their Women,” though, this novelette needs a post-read counseling session. So I’ve taken to offering phone consultations to anybody accepting and following through on my recommendation. Same to you. Email me at the AOL address on the bottom of my website’s main page and I’ll respond with my number. We’ll talk.
I COULDN’T HAVE
Writing that moves me deeply usually falls into one of two categories. Either it’s something I would never have thought of doing, or it’s something I’ve thought of doing but never dared. “Devil” is one of the latter sort. Could I have ever brought to vivid life one of those hellish scenes of mass murder so often repeated they’ve become a race memory? No. Not for any money. Not for any reward of any sort.
But Wilson did. And beautifully. Come marvel with me at what he’s done.
Nisi Shawl is a writer of science fiction and fantasy short stories and a journalist. She is the author of Everfair (Tor Books) and co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Asimov’s SF Magazine, Strange Horizons, and numerous other magazines and anthologies.
The link to the FSoI “Crash Course” is broken by a few extra characters at the end of the linked URL.
The correct URL is: http://www.fantasticstoriesoftheimagination.com/a-crash-course-in-the-history-of-black-science-fiction/
@1 – Fixed, thanks!
Damn
I feel like I read this story as part of an anthology but I can’t remember which one. Is this a short story or a whole novel?
In case it has not yet crossed your radar: Zeal & Ardor is a Black metal band, i.e., a black metal band whose major influence is Black American field hollers and spirituals. Writer-frontman Manuel Gagneux is biracial and started the band in response to racist abuse on 4chan, which may be the best outcome I have ever heard of people being racist on 4chan; the songs imagine a history where the forced Christianity of slavery engendered instead the defiant seeking out of Satan, which makes it especially sharp that reviewers have occasionally confused Gagneux’s vocals with the Alan Lomax field recordings they were deliberately made to sound like. “Devil Is Fine” is the sole music video so far and the best example of that style. “Blood in the River” is word-of-God about the Stono Rebellion, or at least this history’s version of it. I heard the album for the first time shortly after reading “The Lamentation of Their Women” and now I think of it permanently as a Kai Ashante Wilson soundtrack, which is why I mention it here. Also it’s just incredibly good.
@Flicker: It was reprinted in Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Nine; it’s a short story (or maybe a novelette, I don’t recall the word count) that is best described as a gut-punch to the head.
I read “The Lamentation of Their Women” when it was posted here, and was blown away. As a white man that tries to see himself and others as just people, that story really both contrasted the differences and highlighted the similarities between me and his characters. I found myself identifying strongly with ‘Nisha and Anhell’s rage against injustice, their need to fight back. At the same time, I felt unworthy of that identification. No matter what difficulties I’ve faced, who am I to claim kinship with these oppressed possessed? What hell had they walked through on Earth that made the infernal flames tolerable? I’ve had legal problems, sure, but I’ve been able to fight them outside of the Pit. It was a difficult read for me at first, until I gave in and stopped trying to understand the politics of racial difference, and just FELT. For a few moments, I could BE black, feeling that justified anger. I could hear the teachings of my grandmother (herself a devout Pentecostal), giving me fear of what powers they were taking in hand. By the time I finished, I was feeling that sense of being the imposter, again; the shame of a white man in blackface. But: the writing- the STORY- was so absorbing and immersive, I had been totally engaged.
I later read another essay here, I believe it was also by Wilson, about writing in racial vernacular without being stereotypical and shallow. He mentioned how writers should explore the choices of words, but not try to force a quality into them. After I read through it, I went back and read ‘Lamentation’ again. This time, I went in with no preconceptions of how I should feel when I read the ethnic slurs or local flavor. I just listened in my head to what he was saying, and let his deliberate choice of words color the story, giving in to the flow of emotion rather than trying to emulate how I thought it should feel to me (I know I still got it wrong, because some of the associations are just alien to me: I didn’t grow up black).I just accepted it, and got a better idea of the characters themselves, instead of trying to understand how their color affected the story. ‘Nisha is undoubtedly a black woman full of jealousy and vindictiveness, and Anhell is clearly a delicate, mixed color man filled with vanity, pride and fear, but the second time around, that was clearer to me because of their “being”, more than their descriptions.
What I’m trying to say, poorly, is that he is one hell of good writer. So good, in fact, that I can forget what color he’s writing about or which one I am while reading, and just see the story. That’s what makes him a great writer, and not just a great black writer. I only hope I brought some of that clarity back from the stories into the real world. Even if I try to treat others the same, I’m still considering what it means to treat them differently. If we could all just see each other’s story as characters, without even trying to understand the implications of what it means to consider whether we’re the same color or not, I think we wouldn’t have the problem of racism anymore. That may be just a fiction, or some hopeful fantasy, but if so, I’d like to thank Wilson for meta-telling that story, too. Color my world translucent, and let’s see inside ourselves.