The Atheist in the Attic

  I don’t know if he was really listening. Or what he was thinking. But I know he said, “Remember to let me know when they’re ready.” Perhaps he was interested in showing that he was learning. By that point, however, I was not paying attention any longer. Behind my own smile, I was dwelling on the moment of fear that was, in truth, only now ebbing.

  “May I go now, sir?”

  “Yes. Certainly, of course.” Of course he had picked up on the failing interest of a momentarily enthusiastic master. Yet I felt guilt that it had failed.

  “Now, don’t forget, I’ll have several sets to be washed—if you want to wash them—in a few days. I change them every—” and stopped because I realized that was none of his business. Though—perhaps as someone interested in washing them, he was curious to know why I wore them, since neither he—nor anyone else who worked in the house, I was certain—did. Servants didn’t. He got up, said “Thank you, sir … ?” with far too much curiosity for a good servant to show at a master’s sudden preoccupation or eccentricity.

  After an hour, I was sure I’d found our conversation far more instructive than he could have (all he could have learned is how to say, a bit more clearly, what he knew of his own life), though I still fancied him happy as he limped from my room.

  “Would you like me to put a shovel of coals in the warming pan and run them under your sheets?”

  “No. No. That really isn’t necessary.”

  So he opened the door—hesitated a moment with the false certainty of someone who’d thought hours about asking this question, and who, on deciding to ask it no matter what, realizes on its threshold that he still is unsure—and with one hand on the door handle behind him, demanded, low and hurried, though I’m sure he’d hoped to sound self-assured and somehow professional, “Could I … can I take your … perruque with me, and clean and … put new powder on it, perhaps. Brush it … ?” He added quickly, “I’ll have it back in an hour!”

  Oh, I thought. He’s one of those. “No,” I said. “You may not.” But then, so am I.

  Hastily, he backed out and closed the door. As was appropriate, neither of us had said good night. But I sat wondering why I had been so eager for him to like me and so anxious that he might not.

  Even more, why, when I’d thought about asking him what might have happened to him in the country, had I had a moment’s terror, as if he hated me?

  It had destroyed most of my pleasure in the conversation.

  From the side of the fireplace, I took one of the pans by its handle. The padded brocade was neutral in temperature. But my thumb on top and my fore knuckle underneath lay on the metal band at its edge. The metal was cold.

  Could he have intuited that I might have been thinking that he who’d said he wanted to wash my smallclothes actually wanted to kill me and … yes, eat me like a cannibal?

  And I felt—after today’s revelation—as if this were a rational possibility, which was the most frightening thing about it!

  My heart beat hard again, though as I breathed deeper I could see myself as funny, as ridiculous, as absurd—a new word arriving in my mind with each pounding in my chest …

  I leaned the warming pan back against the stone, and turned away from the coal shovel on its rack with the fire tongues. My penance would be to sleep in a cold bed. (Maybe I should have tried some of Gunter’s salts.) Besides, isn’t half the work people are always commending me for done simply because I’m very lazy and want to make everything in the world easier for all?

  But thoughts, in such ferment, do not cease. Though humor came to overlay the fear, it did not displace it. Was this the way aristocratic guilt, or any other kind, could turn into simple insanity? Or was it an inescapable risk faced by anyone who thinks as I do? Might a peasant feel it as much as a prince? Everyone has seen crazy peasants loose in the countryside. Many attics of dukes or barons held their family embarrassments, young or ancient, in townhouses or country manors, chained in bare stone rooms or locked in padded chambers with the food and the slop pots removed or replaced far too infrequently for either health or comfort, the inhabitants wanting to eat or fearing being eaten—or worse. I knew of several such families.

  I reached up and worked a middle finger under the wig’s cloth band around my all-but-shaved pate, and pulled so that the paste that held the false hair in place tugged loose, stinging across my head. (I could hear the skin tearing free.) I looked for the bust on which to set it down. In just two days the tasseled cloth on which the wooden statue sat would be faintly ringed with powder.

  Next time I see him, I must ask if anyone ever ate anyone he knew—in the rampjaar.

  Or before it or after it.

  Or if he had.

  The truth is not just a pleasant field to work in. It can free you from real terror. Especially when the choice is between the terror of asking and the greater terror of not knowing if such a fate lies lurking for you.

  And I must go on to ask, had he cleaned shit off water-closet walls before he came inside? And how did he feel about it? Precisely such questions (as much as why more than a dozen men and women in an enraged mob ate from the bodies of two murdered aristocrats), finally, made that Jew’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which I’d first read half a dozen years before, and reread—I confess, though for many people it would be confessing to a terrible crime—twice since. (Once, ironically enough, in Hamburg, and once here in Amsterdam, two years ago, when I wouldn’t have considered coming to see the man I’d—almost—snuck off to see today.)

  I got up, moved the lamp from stone mantel to inlaid table, and stripped off my clothing, hanging some things on the polished wooden clothes racks in the closet, putting my smallclothes, yes, in a pile at the back to give—in days—to Peytor.

  Rather think such horrors, such possibilities, were the concerns of Jews and peasants in The Hague. Certainly rather that than believe such things could infiltrate the Amsterdam home of my longstanding university friend, so generous to diplomatic scions like me and deformed peasants like Peytor—and trust he had an eye, a feel, a sense for those of us who were … good? (And could gullible Gunter have such a sense of anything … ?) I wished I might hear a church bell, as I had that afternoon when I’d left the Jew’s. But more and more they ring the bell less and less after sundown in cities. It’s not like the country with distance and tradition to dull such night disturbances. I wanted to hear it because it reminded me of the country. And, I realized, right then, the country was no longer safe.

  Drifting out of my sensory past into language, I remembered he’d had a slight smell, different from the ordinary outside men who come into the house now and again for a few minutes to carry a message, work for an hour, or stop in the scullery and chat with a kitchen woman.

  It was Cologne water, I think.

  I remembered when, as Gunter had prepared to step from his carriage that morning at his Jew’s, I’d thought he was showing me his hands because they held no weapon. Was Peytor the dirk he might have gripped? Was Spinoza? Was I to be the victim of either, because of my sympathies for both?

  I’ve been so taken up with these dialectical musings I haven’t been able to note that I’ve now arranged two other visits in the city for my duke. Yes, one more to The Hague to see another … lens maker, Leeuwenhoek, who is not a Jew. For a mad moment, that fact seemed as much a relief as if I’d learned that the lame boy who’d wanted to wash my underthings and brush out my wig was not a cannibal! As eager as Peytor is to advance himself, I will manage, once those visits are done, to go back to Spinoza for at least another day or even two. And I’m not going to give him the calculator: that’s a gift for London. I jot this down just to get my mind off the horror. The brilliant hermit at Trinity and I, at least, are destined to be friends.

  Or had I learned that he might be—

  Peytor’s master wears Cologne too—as do I. At this point in my life, in the day, in history, the liberal use of that scent strikes me as a sign. Its meaning is ambiguous and will remain so
—until I run into it on another peasant, perhaps … ?

  And do you know? That was the beginning of my most terrifying night in Amsterdam, though nothing happened but the rising and falling of my own fears of Peytor’s unannounced return. What calmed them, finally, as we neared a dark, drizzly dawn, during which he never came, was that I realized that whether he’d learned he might dab on some Cologne water to alter the way people thought of him (though not necessarily in the way he wished)—with or without Mary’s help, wherever she was that evening—I was probably as safe as I could have been, if only because the night was over, and I was still there.

  But there were still more visits.

  Racism and Science Fiction

  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, white or black, 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 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 the shelves of Barnes & Noble 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 alternate history novel as you can get. Other black writers whose work certainly borders on science fiction include Sutton E. Griggs and his novel Imperio 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 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 or them—or even many more—were not 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 (New York: Macaulay Company, 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 1931] 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 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 jackknives…. 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 souvenirs such as forefingers, toes and teeth. Proudly their pastor looked on (217–18).

  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 in which Schuyler’s story is set. Even the racial ambiguity of Schuyler’s victims speaks to the story. 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 a more than half 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 go.

  In 1936 and 1938, under the pen name “Samuel I. Brooks,” Schuyler had two long stories published in some sixty-three 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, fourteen years after his death (Black Empire, by George S. Schuyler, eds. Robert A. Hill and Kent Rasmussen, Boston: Northeastern University Press).

  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 13, 15, 20 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 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, called the African-American Fantastic Imagination. This year Toronto-based writer Nalo Hopkinson (another Clarion student whom I have the pleasure of being able to boast of as having also taught at Clarion) published her award-winning SF novel Brown Girl in the Ring (New York: Warner, 1998). Another black North American 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 have I experienced in the science fiction field, I thought this might be the time to answer, then—with a tale.