

	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

	Distinctly praise the years... — hart crane, "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen"





	It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fools' boat; it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. — michel foucault, Madness and Civilization Voyage through death to life upon these shores. — Robert hayden, "Middle Passage" i. Skyscrapers — that's what he was most eager to see. But before entering the city the train dropped between earthen walls tangled with winter trees, sometimes becoming out the window, for a hundred feet or more, concrete. II. The tallest building in the world was in New York — the Wool-worth Building. Most people knew that; but he knew, counting basements and sub-basements, the Woolworth had exactly sixty stories — and not many people knew that. in. Bring such information out at the right time, and people said: "What a smart boy!" which made up a little for the guilt he felt over his school grades: they'd been bad enough to silence Papa —

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	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	iv. recently elected bishop—and make Mama cry. Finally they'd decided to let him leave (clearly school was doing him no good) and come north to stay with his brother. Sams toes felt sticky in his socks. v. Last night, he'd decided not to take his shoes off, afraid his feet might smell. This morning, however, though he'd already gone into the little bathroom with its metal walls to wash his face and hands, vi. nothing about him felt fresh. Stretching, he arched his back, pulled his fists against his chest; the noblet of flesh on the left side — one male, milkless teat—caught a thread or fold in his shirt, pulling till it cut. He sat forward quickly, trying to look disinterested, waiting for the soreness to fall from his chest. A minute on, when he sat back, cambric brushed him: the sensitivity had become, surprisingly, pleasant. Again, he felt himself shift within his wool trousers. Insistently alert to his body, sensual and stale under cloth, he glanced around the car—especially at the women in their seats, black and white, beginning to arrange themselves. Five times now he'd noticed, first with distress, then with curiosity, and finally with indifference, that if he sat on the rumbling plush, relaxed, and let his knees fall wide, through loose wool the train's joggling gave him an erection. Pulling his knees together, he sat back again and arched his fingers on the cushion, so that blue nap slipped under his nails. (Amidst the wheels' cacophony, Sam could hear a "...tut-tut-tut-tut-tut..." just like the song.) The first joints of his fingers (and his toes—but people didn't see those) had grown too much: tall as he was, the initial joints had clubbed into those of someone even bigger. Digitus clavigerae, or something like it, his oldest brother, Lemuel, had said it was called. Not that that made him feel any better about it. Youngest child, lightest child (hair once cornsilk pale before puberty had turned it rough and red —

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	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 and adolescence darkened it further), a surprise child, Mama had called him. Mama's pet, the others said, which, while sometimes it held their ire, now had become a term of fondness—for most of them, most of the time. But he was the one among the ten who hadn't finished high school. Well, when he'd worked awhile in New York and grown more serious, the older ones could settle him into night school and help him toward a diploma. That's what Papa said; and since she always listened to Papa, Mama said he could go. And see the skyscrapers. On either bank—Sam slid from one seat, moved across the aisle, and into another, to peer by purple tassels — against November gray, fili-greed branches separated wooden houses, one and two drab stories. Watching the dawnscape, still iceless, flip along, he contemplated for the thousandth time the astonishing process by which the seamless and inexorable progression of the present slipped away to pack the past with memories, like numbered stanzas in a song, like cells in a comb, like cakes in a carton, to be called back (though, he'd already ascertained, most he'd never recall) in whatever surprising, associative order. There'd been, he remembered now, that poor-white family with the six children the white conductor had brought into the Jim Crow car last night and, after looking around, settled —with their twine-tied boxes and traveling baskets —in the three rows of seats at the car's head. "If you all want to sit together, this is about the best we can do." One of the girls and two of the boys had been barefoot, just as if it were summer. "In a couple of hours you all could come in here anyway." The father's coat had been out at both elbows and his hair stuck straight down from under his straw hat in blond blades. Holding the shoulder of his mother's sweater, with a fall of silver silk over each ear and eyes like circles cut from gingham, above the seat back the littlest stared at all the car's dark faces, to fix finally —pink lips lax in a thoughtless 'o' — on Sam, four seats behind and across the aisle, as if Sam, and not they, were the anomaly here. Sam had slid his fingers under his thighs. But why did that make him remember, how many days before, Lewy, arguing with — well, discussing with — Mama, in an extraordinarily grown-up manner, how going north would be good for him —while

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	SAMUEL R.	DELANY

	Sam sat, silent, impressed, across the kitchen table, listening to them go on earnestly for fifteen minutes, as though he weren't there. For moments Sam thought again about the memory he didn't have— because he'd dozed through it: that moment, on leaving Washington, when the Jim Crow car in which he'd started out had become a car like any other, along with all the white cars on the train; and he and anyone in it could sit anywhere they wanted. Immediately on waking, with half a dozen others already up and collecting things, though it was after one o'clock in the morning, he'd gotten his two cases and moved. Sprawled against each other, the white man and the barefoot children slept on. Beside the bigger boy, who wore shoes like his parents, the white woman gazed at the black window. At her shoulder, the blue-eyed child stared up, as Sam pushed, sideways, by. Then there'd been the porter, whom, while he'd been exploring the train last night, Sam had caught smoking in the vestibule between cars; the two of them had stood in the chill chamber and had cigarettes together. The porter—whose name was John Brown, like his friend John at home—had not said: Airit you too young to smoke, boy? He'd said: "I'm usually on the Chicago-Calgary run—but I got deflected. I got to get me home to Chicago; eventually, somehow. That's where my girlfriend live." He'd chuckled as the night's iced air whipped and snapped smoke back from the dark shelves of his lips. Sam told him about his friends, John and Lewy, and how John's name was the same as his. "My daddy," the porter said, "he was just John Brown crazy. Back when Dr. DuBois' book come out, he made me read the whole thing out loud to him." Sam laughed, and told him how his father had read it out loud to his whole family too—though he'd not been five years old; and often in bed. But he remembered lying awake, listening. Then the porter told Sam he'd just read another book about Brown by someone named Oswald Garrison Villard, who was the editor of a magazine. Sam didn't remember the magazine's name, but he remembered Oswald Garrison Villard because it sounded so eccentric he'd laughed. How could a memory of laughter make you smile now? But, turning away from the window, Sam smiled.

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	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 Four seats ahead was the middle-aged white woman who'd started three different conversations with him—the first on the train platform yesterday at noon, then twice more since Washington—the third even after he'd told her, during the second, that he was Negro. Now, she was fixing her wide, ivory hat to salted auburn, with one, then another, then a third (taking them from between her teeth) pearl-tipped hatpin. She'd said she was Scottish and lived in Flatbush—in the heart of Brooklyn. He'd said that, just the morning he'd left, his older sister, Jules, had decided the vat of soap out back of the house had bleached enough to slice loose some half dozen cakes, wrap them in waxed paper, and send them in Sam's wicker trunk to his brothers and sisters in New York. (Holding a fold of her apron, there'd been Jules, in the yard, looking at the soap tray, eyes narrowed, lips pursed; she was comparing it with Mama's or Elsie's, he knew. What she really wanted was to get to her piano lessons with the little girls who'd start coming in at one—almost an hour after he'd be on the train. When would he hear Jules in the parlor, guiding scales again?) The white woman had said she'd made her own soap for a while, but it wasn't worth it—there in Brooklyn. At Borough Hall she could get either subway or trolley into Manhattan, and a general store not three streets away from where she lived sold bars of store soap any time she wanted it. Ivory, like it said in the advertisements, was the best. He'd looked down at the flounce on her skirt, to see if he could glimpse an ankle— another memory. Sam thought about going to inquire of her now. (Ankles of ivory. Ankles like moons...) But finally (for now was gone) he went back to ask John Brown, who, in his blue-black uniform, was just coming down through the car: "Sir, we in New York State yet?" Seemingly constructed of blue-black coal, Brown's face turned in mild surprise: "Well, we just gone by Hell Gate." And with that damnable dawn news, John Brown stepped around him, to move on between plush seat backs, bending here, leaning there, asking the older passengers if they would need help with any of their bags — the older white passengers, anyway, Sam noted: a stately Negro woman, with black hat

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	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	and veil, blue coat frayed at the shoulders, and doubtless going to a funeral — well, the porter, like a dog avoiding another dog's tree, had walked right around her! Sam breathed. If Mama had been with him, she'd have muttered, "...no-account!" then told Sam to go immediately to that woman and offer a hand: and would probably say something cutting to the porter. Mama could get quite self-righteous over the behavior of other Negroes she didn't approve of— as if she carried responsibility for the whole race on her issue-free shoulders. Sam started to go to her —then remembered his own, two large cases, one leather, one wicker. Well, when he got them off and Hubert was there, he'd go back and help. Out the window a snarl of underpasses and stuttering sunlight became a tunnel, through which they roared a long time: the light from the white glass shades every two seats took on the yellowish cast they'd had at night. Genitals, buttocks, nipples, tongue all seemed so insistently present inside Sam's mouth and twenty-four-hour-worn suit. Once, well back before dawn, when the train win-"Here," Lewy said, under the dows were still black and the other moon-mottled magnolia, "it's passengers slept, he had stared at my journal. It's got everything one white round glass, thinking of I don't want Sam and you to the moon, when, at once, he'd know about. Go on, look." stood, to bring his mouth closer and But when John opened the closer, as if to kiss this night light at cover, Sam peering over his the aisle's end, pulling back only shoulder, it was in code — two when the heat about burned his lips. columns, one barely compre- He'd seen the Scotswoman from hensible, the other complete Brooklyn — she would be the one nonsense. "You don't want none awake — turn away too, smiling. of them jewboys to get hold of (Why do something like that? And, this," John said. "They could if you did, why remember it?) No, figure it out on you." he didn't want to speak to her.

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	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 The tunnel went on at alarming length. Then the white conductor ambled through, calling, "Grand Central Terminal coming up! Change trains for aaaaall connections! Grand Central Terminal...!" and people stood to haul their bags down from the overhead rack; men squatted in the aisle to lift them from under the seats. It wasn't yet eight in the morning. And the train itself, he thought, will be only memory in moments: "...tut-tut-tut-tut..." Then he was lugging his cases down onto the rectangular stool the porter had kicked out the train's door, its squared wooden corners clucking cement. As Sam stood on the platform among debarking passengers, swaying with the train's remembered sway, Hubert, in his tan-wool overcoat, pushed up in front of him. A grin started out on Sam's face. Then, as suddenly, confusion tore it away—because Hubert was focused all behind him, even before either of them could say hello. "Here, ma'am! I'll get that for you!" Hubert said to someone beyond Sam's shoulder—which, as Sam turned, he realized was the ponderous woman in mourning. "Just a minute now, ma'am," which was John Brown, who, at Hubert's intervention, had become as solicitous of her as if she'd been queen of the car's whole hive, handing the heavy creature firmly down to the stool, passing her three bags one after another to Hubert, who swung them, over its metal rail, up on the broad cart with the other baggage that the porter from the sleeping car was loading for the redcaps clustered up at the platform's head. Hubert was asking her if everything were all right. She was saying, in subdued tones, in an accent that put her well to the west of Raleigh: "Why, thank ya — thank ya, young gen'l'man. Ah'm Mrs. Callista Arkady and Ah'm goin' to the funeral of mah son. It's so kind of y'all to help a bereaved mother. Thank ya —God'U thank y'all. Thank y'all so much!" Before turning off, the porter leaned over to Sam, to explain softly, sullenly, snappishly: "She didn't tip me none! When she first got on the

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	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	JC, yesterday, I took as much time with her as with anybody else — I did!" John Brown's accent was considerably to the north. "But she didn't tip me. You don't got enough to pay your tips, you don't ride the train! Even niggers got to know that!" "Yes, but she's still a —" he was about to say "lady," while he wondered should he give John Brown a nickel. (That's what John D. Rockefeller tipped his train porter; it had said so in a northern magazine.) Of course the porter hadn't touched Sam's bags at all —and, as well, he'd swung back up into the car by now to help the other, white, and—certainly—better heeled passengers. The woman plowed — mournfully — up the platform through the packs of porters and debarkees, when Hubert turned back to him: "Well, now—Sam! And how are you there — " to clap him on both shoulders, then, with his blue bow tie and buttoned-up double breasted showing between tan coat flaps, to give Sam a bear-like, brotherly hug. "So you got here after all!" In almost the same gesture, Hubert hefted up the wicker trunk, leaving Sam with the leather case. "How's everybody down at the school?" Sam followed Hubert up the platform, behind the uniformed Negro pushing the baggage cart—far enough ahead so that it would be difficult to catch up and get their bags on. "Mama's fine, Papa's fine. Papa says you should write him another letter like the last long one, tellin' him about the boys in your class. He read that one out to all of us, at Thanksgiving dinner. It made Mama laugh so!" Hubert chuckled, as Mrs. Arkady vanished around passengers descending, like billows, from the train's several doors. As he pushed after Hubert through the crowd, Sam looked aside two or three times, expecting to see a blue-eyed child staring at him over its mother's knitted gray shoulder. But apparently the family for whom there'd been no room in the white cars had gotten off at some prior local stop, so that, Sam realized, with the myriad details that were his train trip north, they too had sunk into yesterday's consuming sea. Now and again, Sam glanced at the black ceiling, crossed by pipes, girders, cables, and hung with incandescent bulbs in conical shades, 10



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 insides enameled white. Train stations, Sam thought, even ones this central and this grand, should sit out under sky, with, yes, an indoor waiting room to one side. But as many times as he'd heard Grand Central Terminal mentioned, it had never occurred to him it would be a structure that wholly closed over...well (he looked through a dozen dark columns above how many trains), a dozen tracks at least! "Hubert," Sam asked, "where is the sky... ? " thinking his brother, two steps ahead, would not even hear the —after all —ridiculous question. But at the ramp's end, as, with the crowd, they pushed through a low entrance with a wrought metal transome above, sound around them became hollow and reverberant. They'd stepped into a vast space. With his free hand, Hubert pointed straight up. "They put that there —for folks like you." Sam looked. The hall's arched ceiling was watery blue — tile blue. Set here and there in it were lights. The whole was filigreed over with gold: a crab, the head and forelegs of a winged horse, a scorpion, a shaggy-haired warrior holding up a club in one hand and, on his other arm, hefting a shaggy pelt. A gilded line, the zodiacal circle, curved to cross another, the ecliptic. Sam stopped, set down his case. People with small bags jostled him. A flat of baggage rumbled by. Directly above was pictured a gilded bee, a pair of carpenter's triangles beneath her. Awed, Sam pulled his cap from his pocket and, still gazing up, positioned it on his head. Beyond a central booth bearing above it its own multi-faced spherical time keeper, far bigger across than two tall men laid out foot to foot, a great clock hung between columns. Curlicued arrows at their tips, oar-long hands lay a diametric certainty across its face, a horizon ruled on the rising moon, on the setting sun. Short hand lower at the left and long hand higher at the right told Sam it was within seconds, one way or the other, of eleven past eight — a slant horizon forward of the dark prow of his trip, lifting and listing John borrowed a mule from the from spurious waters, if not the older boys down at the agi-barn pointer on some turn and bank and rode it up to the house, big 11



	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	indicator of the sort Sperry had been putting into aeroplanes since the war's close, an artificial horizon unknown to him a year ago, when he'd watched John, shirtless in the field, with his rusty hair and freckled skin the hue of a tobacco leaf, play at being a bomber, dancing like a deranged Indian over red earth, feet —blam! blam! —on the earth's red flesh, running into waves of hip-high grass, holding one hand aloft, thumb and little finger spread from the others, swooping left, turning right, blood remembering some aeronautic invasion, crying Vr ummmmmmmmmmmmm, while Sam and Lewy stood at the field's edge, laughing, clapping, celebrating fantastic catastrophes. The hands' exact slant was repeated on the smaller, spherical clock's four faces.	boots flapping at its slate-colored flanks. Mama ran out to shake her apron at them. "Get him out of here! Get him out! Boy, what do you think you're doing? He gets in my Swiss chard and I'll skin you alive, so help me!" (Sam had heard her swear like that maybe twice in his life. That's probably why he remembered it.) The mule jerked to the side— and John slipped right to the ground. Then Mama started laughing. Splayed on the grass, John was laughing too. "Get up... from there, John—" Mama called, between hysteric eruptions. "And get him...out of here!" while the mule wandered over to the porch steps and ate a hollyhock.

	Sam and Hubert made their way through waves of men and women. Again, Sam the Navigator gazed up at sky-tiles like an overturned sea. For a moment, not the distant lights of the Pegasus in their gilded starbursts —across from the balcony at the halls' right side, across from Orion above squared pilasters practically without capitals—but the gold lines with which Pegasus was drawn, suggested a caricature of Callista Arkady's broad, veiled face, but with an ecstatic smile, gazing down. With some gentleness, as people plunged in echo by, Hubert said: "Come on, Sam," to bring his eyes down. "We have to get the train." The train — this train — was a subway. They didn't even step outside

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	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 to get to it. Going down the stairs, Hubert asked him: "You got a nickel?" At the steps' bottom, again Sam put his suitcase down, pushed into his pants pocket—feeling scrape his wrist the ten dollar bill Lucius had told Mama should be safety-pinned there, because Sam was going to New York, where things could happen —to pull out his coins. On his palm, Sam forefingered aside the fifty-cent piece, two dimes, two nickels, and five, six, seven, eight pennies: change from the Coca-Cola he'd bought on the train platform yesterday, which, there, had cost two cents more than at the colored grocery— "Come on," Hubert said. "I'll pay for you. I got two—come on> Sam! This is New York; you can't dawdle here!" "I'm not dawdling; I'm looking after my money." Only he glanced up to see people cascading down the steps, breaking to left and right of him, like water at a rock. Jamming coins back in his pocket, Sam snatched up his suitcase to follow Hubert, who pushed one nickel into the slot ahead, then another into the one beside that. As they hefted the cases over, they were practically pounded through shadowless stiles by the wooden paddles swinging round behind them. "What does it do?" Sam looked back, frowning. "Whack you in the butt every time you go in ? "That's just to make sure people like you go and get on with it." Hubert hurried ahead. "This way!" he called over his shoulder. "Let's get the first car!" Hubert was twenty-three. Last year Hubert had gone to Europe and traveled there four months. When he'd got back, he'd worked in the tobacco fields in Connecticut. This eagerness for the first car—something he'd imagine from John or Lewy—was not what you expected from a big brother about to start his second year in law school—all of which Hubert could claim. But with a sister in between, Hubert was his brother nearest Sam in age; perhaps that enthusiasm was what had kept them so close, in spite of it all. They didn't make the first car, because the subway was already pulling in when they got down to it.

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	SAMUEL R. DELANY They made the second: "... tut-tut-tut..." Sam was surprised he could still hear it. Inside, posts went from the floor to the curved ceiling—green-painted metal up to about stomach height, then white enamel for the rest. In metal fittings, leather loops hung from a pipe just above head-height, in a row down each side of the car. Up by the ceiling, eight-inch-high cardboard strips told of Sloan s Liniment and Ivory Soap ("ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure") and Pine Tar Honey — one (in color: red with yellow letters, a round face grinning beside them, in a bottle cap hat) was for Coca-Cola. It had never occurred to Sam they'd have Coca-Cola in New York. The subway seats were the same woven wicker as the trunk Hubert carried. Looking down at them, Sam saw their interstices were black— and realized it was dirt! "Come on," Hubert repeated, as the train started more smoothly than Sam expected: had a day and a night on the locomotive from Raleigh gotten him his rail legs ? Hefting up his bag, Sam followed Hubert to the car's front. A doorway made a vestibule there—half the size of the one on the railway car in which he'd smoked with John Brown. Inside, a wheel hung against the wall; and pipes; and cables.To one side was a flat, green door. Over racketing wheels, Hubert said: "The engineer sits in there." "This is the engine}"—for through the window in the door ahead he could see into the forward car, as it swung, intriguingly out of sync with theirs. Hubert laughed and opened the doors between, to lob the wicker through, then turned to explain over the noise (louder between the cars) how, on the subway, any car could be the engine. All you had to do was put it first. They went through the next car into the little booth at its head — this was the first car. Hubert told him to look out the front window; Sam stood, hands up beside his face to shade the light. Beyond the glass, with its inch-sized, hexagonal wire reinforcements between layered panes, darkness rushed him, cut by girders, punctured by lights—blue,

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	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 red, green—a matutinal career through seas of shadow, past nocturnal carnivals. "Now when you ride on the subway by yourself—" Sam pulled back from the window. In the booths yellowish light, Hubert s dark eyes were serious above his short mustache. "—in the morning," Hubert went on, "when people are going to work, or in the evening, when they're coming home —rush hour—you don't come in here by yourself, now." "Why not?" Sam turned to Hubert. "'Cause things can happen to you in here." "What things?" "People can do things to you—like you can get your pocket picked, for one." Sam was going to say, just to be silly, You been deflected, Hubert? But Hubert swung — suddenly — the back of his hand against Sam's pants lap, which made him flinch: "Hey-!" "You got to watch out for yourself, that's all." The train was coming into the station. "That's all I'm saying. Now come on." Carrying both trunk and case now, Hubert strode into the car, grinning again over his shoulder. Parting black rubber rims, dark double doors rolled open, and Sam followed his brother onto still another wholly enclosed platform. "What sort of things, Hubert?" Hubert put the suitcase down for Sam to take. "You just have to remember," Hubert repeated, "that this is New York," and the gravity with which he spoke seemed—apparently to Hubert—to cover the situation. The subway station they were in, Times Square and Forty-second Street, was even bigger — and more crowded — than the one at Grand Central. They had to go up stairs and down. With their gilt signs, the plate glass windows indicated clothing stores, barber shops, bakeries. One store even sold magic tricks: through its window, when, with his case, Sam went over to look, a small man with a sharp beard turned to smile out at him —thick glasses made his eyes huge marbles — over red

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	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	and blue boxes, through chains of metal rings, past cardboards with small figures attached to them, by black top hats, colored scarfs, oriental bird cages, and black wands with white tips. (Sam vowed he'd come back to that one.) The store windows were right in the ivory tiled wall, as if this were some outside street, so that he kept glancing up, expecting to see the sky above this buried city. Saturday morning not that many people were traveling. Still, most of the ones who were stood across the tracks, off between the girders on the other platform. Drones at work in sweet, rich New York. Following Hubert through resonant tunnels, considering his trajectory, like a bullets through a beehive, Sam wondered which of the enclosed images he'd recall in a day, in a decade. Then an idea came to rupture his contemplation of— even in the quick of excitement — the evanescence of time, that made him near break out laughing. Imagine writing a letter to Lewy and John (they were his best friends), with a page even for Mama and Papa, telling the wonders of his trip so far: he'd fold it, pack it into his cap so that the pages were fixed beneath John said, "They could figure it the band. Then, by its visor, he'd out on you." sail the gray and brown tweed into But, chuckling, Lewy wan- the air, so that, as if become helmet, dered away, barefoot over fallen it shattered all these artificial ceil- blossoms, as if codes and jour-ings, crashed out and up from un- nals and secrets and cyphers had der the flagpoles on the skyscrapers ceased to interest him as he above, into liquid air, to go soaring searched the spring night. south to Raleigh — really, about as sensible as putting a message into a jeweled box and floating it off on the water, in hopes somehow it would wend home. Still, the image stayed. What might John or Lewy say if they saw a cap falling at them, a dark disk, an eclipsed moon—that turned out stuffed with his adventures? "Is it #//underground...? " Sam asked, wonderingly—having just realized that the "sub" in the "subways" Hubert and Lucius and Lemuel and Corey and Hap and Elsie had all, in their turn, been talking about, whenever, over these last years, they'd come home for one vacation or

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	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 another, was short for "subterranean"! "Some of them —on Third Avenue," Hubert said, with mock seriousness, "or Sixth Avenue, or Ninth, run up above the streets, through the sky...!" Cities underground...? Cities in the air...? With subterranean and superterranean ways between ? And all were among New York's honied algebra of miracles ? Hurrying after Hubert, a-grin at the marvel and mystery of it, Sam tried to fathom it and keep from laughing. All this — and skyscrapers ? (Where were they... ?) They took another two trains—or was it three? "Where do we get out?" "A Hundred-twenty-fifth Street," Hubert said. "This is us." A Hundred-twenty-fifth Street sounded awfully far from Grand Central or Forty-second. They carried the cases upstairs—into another covered concourse. How long would it be, Sam wondered, before they got outside? He noticed now, with curiosity and relief: all the people in this station were black—heavyset ladies in dark or light stockings, men in straw hats with brown or red bands, sometimes even a bit of pheasant feather. Sam and Hubert pushed out the gates beside the row of stiles (where people were — ka-chunk, ka-chunk — hurrying in), turned left, and started up the steps between the off-white tiles. A winter wedge of blue widened above them. Then, diagonally across it, slid a sculpted cornice. At the steps' head, Sam put his case on the sidewalk and looked down from the cloudless sky. (That empty air he'd recall for years.) The building—though it ran the length of the block—was two stories tall. Shops filled the ground floor. On the second, with tan Venetian blinds lowered to their several heights behind the glass, black or gold letters spoke of accountants, law firms, a billiards parlor — and the next was unreadable behind the sun's reflected silver. Still, none of the names were very different from those in gold letters across the second story windows in the downtown building, back home, in which their older brother Lucius had his law practice.

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	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	"Shoot...!" Sam said. "It ain't as big as what we got in Raleigh! The biggest building there is six stories and got an elevator!" He looked at Hubert, the first presentiment of pain the city had ceded him nudging his features toward bewilderment. Hubert shook his head—to drawl in a voice that suddenly and surprisingly brought back sixteen-year-old Hubert from Carolina, making Sam electrically aware how different that was from the twenty-three-year-old law student he was to live with now: "Boy," Hubert said, "you a real country nigger, ain't you!" — the words carrying no interrogation at all, only their hugely playful, hopelessly damning, inescapable sibling judgment.

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	The leadership and conduct of the war were on the one side in the hands of our city, on the other in the hands of the kings of Atlantis. At the time, as we said, Atlantis was an island larger than Libya and Asia put together, though it was subsequently overwhelmed by earthquakes and is the source of the impenetrable mud which prevents free passage of those who sail out of the straights into the open sea. — plato, Critias I sometimes had pleasant nightmares in which I fancied that New York was being destroyed by an earthquake: its towers snapped like pine trees in a storm, a tidal wave poured through its streets... — malcolm cowley, Exile's Return On the top (third) floor, Hubert's was around the corner from Mount Morris Park. "I got to wash up." Sam put the suitcase on the rug's foot-faded red, looking around the first of the two small rooms. "Sure." With his shoe, Hubert pushed the wicker trunk under what would be Sam's bed. "Unless you want to wait till later when we get over to Elsie and Corey's. They got hot water." "That's all right. I want to do it now. And change my clothes." 19



	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	"All right." Hubert took the wash basin out from under the corner sink. "Here you go. But you got to hurry up, before Clarice gets here." Using Hubert s yellow bar of kitchen soap, lathering his arms, his buttocks, his knees, hopping now on one foot, hopping now on the other, Sam washed in cold water. Sometimes he glanced at Hubert, who sat in the wing chair: Hubert's forehead furrowed above his glasses, as, in the corner, he paged through a book. Views of... something. Hubert was one of three colored teachers recently hired to teach first grade in the colored all-boys public school, only srx blocks from here, Hubert had explained to Sam. That tall body had cut tobacco in Connecticut; that strong body sat so straight when he studied. And there'd been "...Miss Hutchinson told me about a trick she used when she taught those rough boys in the colored schools outside Cincinnati. She said if it would work for a woman, it would certainly work for me. Just as she told me to do, before classes began I procured an old, cracked baseball bat, and on the first school day I brought it with me before any of the scholars arrived. Before going in, I hit it on the curb outside school till it cracked more. I then took it into my classroom and leaned it in the corner by my desk. When the boys came in — they were loud and lively and full of high spirits—within five minutes, while some of them were still taking their coats off and playing tag around the room, one of them asked me, 'What's that for?' Sitting at my desk, I looked over my folded hands and said, in a firm and resonant voice: 'I had some trouble with one of the boys in my last class—and I'm afraid I broke my bat on his backside. And by the way, you must learn to call me "Sir."' They all turned around, eyes about to bulge out of their brown, round faces. And when I called them to order and they rushed to sit, you could see them squirming on their benches, each attached to the desk behind. Their eyes kept going to the bat in the corner, their little behinds stinging in anticipation. You knew they were wondering how it felt." About the bony wreckage of the Thanksgiving carcass, everyone was laughing too loudly for Papa to go on—as, here, he put down the letter a moment to touch his clerical collar. Mama took her wire-framed glasses off and dabbed her eyes with her napkin.

	20



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 Sam hopped, and shook quickly from his mind another memory ("...an animal...!" The crate's slats smithereened across Hubert's shoulder, and dragging the chain across the gravel where the grass had worn from around the pump, Hubert cowered back: "Papa!No.../"He remembered his father's grunts, precise and ugly), hopped again and scrubbed at his groin — finally to squat among the splatters over the dark floorboards and maul the balled rag first over, then under, his out-sized toes. "Hubert, did you really do that thing with the baseball bat?" "Hmm?" Hubert asked, over his book. "What—oh, sure. Only I don't think I really had to. Miss Hutchinson, when she did it, she was teaching big, rough, country boys — field hands right in from pickin' cotton. They were all field niggers — wasn't a house nigger among them, she told me. A lot of them were too old for high school anyway—she said some of them were older than she was. And there were a few who just didn't want to take no guff off a woman. But my boys are just children— and city children, too." He dropped his eyes to the book, raised it a bit from his lap: Views of Italy. Sam wiped the splatters up and, still squatting naked, turned to pull the wicker from under the daybed. "You mind if I smoke me a cigarette?" "Go ahead if you want. But like I say—finish up before Clarice gets here. She don't approve of smoking." Only on opening it and pushing aside shirts and underwear (which he didn't really wear, unless Mama insisted) did Sam see the folded paper bag with Jules' soap. "Hubert, don't let me forget this when we go over to Elsie and Corey's." Taking a bar from the bag to leave Hubert, Sam put bag and bar up on the pink quilting. Translucent as isinglass, the bar's paper immediately unfolded, like a thing volitional. With a notable amount of white moneys—but a treasured portion of black —by his astonishing energy (that, even now he was over sixty, awed Sam), Papa and several of his friends had helped develop the small Negro college. Papa was now Vice-Chancellor. Mama was Dean of Women. That same energy had already pushed Sam's slave-born father to learn Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Two years ago it

	21



	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	had gotten him elected Bishop of the Archdiocese of North and South Carolina — this prodigy of black learning, this learned black prodigy, this prodigious black learner. Black and white ministers both had elected him. Papa was a voyager on the ocean of theology and ancient languages. Sharp-tongued Corey had seemed, for a while, the one likely to follow Papa into that sea. Then she had turned from its waters—sharply—with the realization there was little enough a black man could do with Greek and Aramaic. (Though Mama always insisted it was more than well-deserved, the suffrage bishopric was after all an anomaly.) Still less, a black woman. She had followed her younger brother, Hap, first to New York, then into dental school. Cigarette still fuming between his teeth, Sam was just buttoning his shirt when, outside in the hall, someone twisted the doorbell key. Clarice came in. Hubert's girlfriend was — like last time — another pale-complected creature, who looked, really, whiter than Hubert. (This ones name was Clarice!) "This is your little brother? He's not so little at all! How come all you boys in this family are so good looking?" Within moments Sam learned, now from Clarice, now from enthusiastic Hubert—when Clarice suddenly remembered to be modest —that she wrote poems that got published in newspapers and sometimes in small magazines (Hubert brought some out to show him) with titles like Broom and Spark. Their ragged-edged pages were thick as fabric as you turned them. Passionate about the Negro Question (as was Hubert), she read The Messenger and Opportunity and knew writers and artists, black and white — Wally and Richard and Bruce and Jean and Angelina and Waldo and talked about them at length and a woman named Lola at whose house on Ninth Street she had met a number of them—from Washington to New York, from Harlem to Gay Street, the block-long colored enclave in Greenwich Village, she explained. Greenwich Village was where Hubert went, in the evenings, to his law classes at New York University Law School. And they were all expected at Elsie and Corey's at four o'clock for Saturday dinner—Elsie and Corey were his and Hubert's oldest sisters;

	22



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 and Saturday dinner, Hubert said now, was easier for them than Sunday, because of Elsie s studying for School on Monday—not to mention Hubert's. The surprise, that evening, was that Hap — another brother — and his wife came too. "Sam, how's everybody down at the college?" Dr. Corey wanted to know. Calling her "Doctor Corey" was something of a joke, because she was a woman. (They didn't call Hap "Doctor Hap" — or Lemuel, his oldest brother who was a real doctor, not just a dentist, "Doctor Lem.") But Corey had decided it was her due. She'd tell you in a moment, if you asked: "Filling teeth and getting paid for it is a lot better than teaching Greek to a bunch of hands, straight out the field, who couldn't care less about the difference between a first and a second aorist!" Mama's fine, Papa's fine, they all laughed over that long Thanksgiving letter Hubert wrote —Sam repeated. "Oh, yes," Elsie said. "Hubert came and read it to us before he sent it. I thought that would tickle Mama." Corey sent him to the bathroom to wash his hands. As Sam stood, caressive water falling warm over his fingers from the verdigrised faucet, in the alley outside someone called, again and again, sounding now like, "Dandelion...!" now like, "Handle-iron...!" The voice was shrill—the shrillness of a man who was going to call for a long time and wanted folks to hear. Sam tried to imagine the body with that voice: brown face under a squashed-down hat, hard hands, bony hips in loose pants, sharp shoulders in an old vest... More because he was tired than because he had to go, Sam dropped his pants and sat on the commode's wood ring. (At Hubert's the commode was behind a door out in the hall.) Newspapers lay on the two-tiered stool beside him. Lifting up the first few, he saw a green-covered magazine and slipped it out, certain it was one with Clarice's poems. He read the title: Mnemosyne. Flipping through a few pages, however, he realized a good deal of it was in Latin. Turning back to the cover, he caught the date—1918: no, it was one of Corey's journals from the time of her language pursuits. Again he opened it, to page through—132,133,

	23



	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	134 —where a passage Corey had marked caught him. The article explained the lines were from a Chorus closing the second act of Seneca s Medea. Venient annis_y saecula seris, Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum Laxet et ingens pat eat tellus Tethysque novos detegat orbes Nee sit terris ultima Thule. In careful pencil, at a gray slant, Corey had inscribed her marginal translation (five days ago? in distant 1918? sometime in between?): An age will come, in distant times, When Ocean will release the chains round things And the whole broad earth—as well as Tethys's new world's end, Thule, Not as the limit of lands—will be revealed. The article explained how Christopher Columbus's son and biographer, Fernando, had marked just this passage in his own copy of Seneca, jotting down in the margin: Haecpropheteia expleta estperpatrem meum Christopher Colon almirantem ano 1492. Corey's marginal gloss: This prophecy was fulfilled by my father Christopher Colon_______in the year 1492. Beside that, she had written:"'almirantem? Ask Papa. C.C.'s place of birth? Elmira? But it's not capitalized." When Corey and Elsie had first visited New York, almost ten years

	24



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 ago now, with Mama as chaperone, they'd taken the boat up from Norfolk. But Sam had been mad to take the train—nearly as eager over that as he'd been about the skyscrapers. All that water... ? He closed Mnemosyne, put it down on the newspapers —then, in afterthought, pulled up two or three papers and put them back on top. Outside, the shrill cry was blotted up by silence. He'd often thought he'd have liked to follow Papa and Corey in their linguistic explorations. But (said Papa) he was too mercurial for such diligence. Sam stood, reached up and pulled the wooden handle on the flush chain. As the water roared from the wooden tank above, he bent, pulled his pants up, buttoned them, and buckled his belt. After washing his hands once more, he opened the bathroom door— to be startled by the mirror in the hall right between the glass-chimneyed gas lamps, where his surprised double surprised him, pausing, bewildered in the frame, Sam the Stranger, unknowingly about to walk in on him. In the living room, where the table had been moved in from the kitchen, he gave out Jules' soap; and Hap, who was the first dentist in the family (and had got his nickname —Hap—because he was so happy), said: "Well, I'll get my teeth real clean with this!" "Now you don't use that on your teeth," Elsie said, "more than but once a week!" "For the rest of the time, you just use tooth powder, like everybody else," Dr. Corey said. "Why you have to tell a dentist what to brush his teeth with, I'll never know!" Since her graduation from Dental College at Columbia, she'd shared an office with Hap. They all laughed. "Tell us about Thanksgiving," which had been only last week. "How was it this year ? " So he did—about the turkey and the dancing to the records, which Papa had allowed because it wasn't Sunday, even though they made two trips to chapel, once in the morning and once at sunset. Right after his election, Papa had decided not to get a Victrola but a more expensive Edison Player. The medallion beside the flocked turntable said: "Diamond Disc Official Laboratory Model." The song Sam and Lewy and

	25



	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	John all liked and had played over and over to the point of exhaustive hilarity was the quarter-inch-thick record of Billy Rose and Ernest Hare singing Harry Von Tilzer's "In Old King Tutankhamen's Day/' with its infectious refrain: "Old King Tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut..." though Jules and Laura preferred the other side: "Barney Google." The other record Sam and Papa loved to play was the late Enrico Caruso and Mario Ancona singing the duet from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers. In his study, Papa slipped the crank back into its metal clip on the dark wood and asked: "Do you want to ask Batouta the Moor to come in with us and listen?" (This month Batouta the Moor was Papa's nickname for Lewy.) "But then, he's probably out somewhere exploring." (He was.) So they sat by themselves and listened to the cascading male voices, each rippling down over the other; and Sam would imagine weedy waters and flickering tidelights over submarine grottoes —not that that had much to do with Thanksgiving nor, really, was there much to say about it. So he told them instead about Lewy and the poetry book with the gold star in it for excellence Lewy'd won in Mrs. Fitzgarn's and what Reverend Fitzgarn had said about Papa's sermon and about how John had brought the mule into Mama's yard and had fallen off it and how it ate Mama's flowers and she'd just about skinned him alive and—again — about the laughter at Hubert's letter, when, after Thanksgiving dinner, Papa had read it out. Once, when he paused, Elsie smiled: "I think we can let him stop now." Hap's wife said: "It's so good to hear how things are going. And it's so good to have you up here, Sam." Then they talked about other things and laughed lots more and all said how much he'd grown. Sam was, in fact (it had taken most of the day to register), as tall as Hubert now. On the way back to Hubert's rooms Sam saw his first skyscrapers—late that evening, when it was already dark. They'd stopped to stroll in

	26



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 Mount Morris. (Hubert had already given Sam the key and was going to walk Clarice home to her aunt and uncle's at a Hundred-twentieth Street and Seventh Avenue.) In the November's-end dark, the three of them climbed the stone steps to the high rocks. Then Hubert and Sam left Clarice, to climb up the rocks themselves. "Those lights over there, like pearls —that you can just see? — " Hubert explained — "those are skyscrapers... mostly." Far away, specular and portentous, they glimmered behind haze-hung night. (It felt as if it might rain any moment.) Sam seemed to be looking across some black and insubstantial river to another city altogether — a city come apart from New York, drifting in fog, in air, in darkness, and wholly ephemeral: the idea of a city—with no more substance than his memory of his memories on the train. When they climbed down, Clarice was leaning against a low boulder. The park lamp behind her threw her into silhouette. "Now doesn't she look older than the rocks among which she sits?" Hubert asked. "What's that supposed to mean?" Clarice asked, her hands in her coat pockets, legs crossed under her skirt. "My rag, my bone, my hank of hair; and she doesn't care—" "//w-bert—!" Clarice objected. "I'm teasing you," he said. She stood. "Now what Sam — Eshu!" Clarice pulled her coat around her — "Sam should do, if he wants to see skyscrapers, is take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. That's the way really to see New York." (Sam had already realized Clarice was a person who said "really to see" and "truly to think." She had declared, loudly and insistently at dinner, that she thought it particularly important Negroes speak with proper grammar. "After all, we've been here longer than most of these crackers!" It was practically an echo of Mama, down on the campus. "And that's why you will not hear me split my infinitives!" "Or hear her say, even jokingly," Hubert added, "'a girl like I.'" That made Clarice laugh too. Still, those unified verbs sounded even stranger than her clipped, northern accent.) In the damp night, Clarice said, "That's the city at its best —Eshu!" A second time she sneezed.

	27



	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	Hubert moved toward her. "We better get you home." Distant in the night-haze, the lights burned with soft, pearl-like fires —so different from what burned in Sam. On their way down, wrapped round in shadow, Sam tried to remember Clarice's body beneath the dress, beneath the coat she pulled even more tightly to her throat. That body had all sorts of lines, gentle, pleasant, that became clear under the fall of her skirt or sleeve when she'd leaned to pass this, sat back with an embarrassed smile, turned in her seat to hear what Hubert said. (Did Hubert ever kiss her? he wondered.) Under a park lamp, he saw her raise a lace-edged handkerchief, pulled over one knuckle, to her nose. Over Hubert's arm around her shoulder, her breath added its own lace to the fog already wreathing her dark hair. Completing the thought begun minutes ago, she added: "Over the bridge—Eshu! That's what I'd want to do." Sam's first job in the city was washing walls for three guys who knew Hubert and were painters. He was fired loudly and ignominiously after a week. He just wasn't fast enough. Perez—the loud, bony one —said, consolingly afterwards, that Sam was a smart boy and shouldn't be doing stuff like that anyway. And Louis, the fat fellow (who spelled his name completely differently from Lewy down home), said Sam damned well ought to learn how to do stuff like that; smart or not, it didn't hurt nobody to know how to wash a damned wall! The third one, the one he really liked—whose name was Prince, followed by something Caribbean, Marquez? Cinquez? — had said nothing to him at all, but had smiled at him a few times while they'd worked and had looked on seriously while Louis and Perez bawled him out. There really wasn't enough work anyway, Hubert explained that evening back at home —trying to make it easier for sulky Sam. People wanted their houses painted in spring and summer, when they could keep the place open and air it out. Not in winter. That's why the fellows had been so touchy, because they weren't making any money themselves. Three days later Sam got another job as stockboy in Mr. Harris's

	28



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

	men's haberdashery over on a Hundred-seventeenth Street — mostly packass=cell v down in, and getting cell v up from, the cellar. The wreath on the door and the tllsel strung in front of the count" widtprised him. And the heavy black

	When Sam came in, Clarice was sitting in the wing chair, in her l valigblouse, reading aloud: "'Evidently the th:420's imalication is that there must be a wece. Cell still prickling from the coldty was the quart, in the other room, Hubert thumping books on his desk. Clarice looked up, smiled, then le=" width:0.her leroration: "'...In the south le have r-inch-tpolerful undergroundinch-t race with a marvelous emotional poler which like Niagara before it was han clsed is wasting itself. Release it into proper channels, e.r:0. its course intelligently, and you have aossibilities for future achievement that challenge the imagination. The hope of the race is in the great blind forces of the masses properly utilized ty capable leaders.'" She looked up again, frowning.	girl idth:40ked there and who looked like Milly Potts down home — though she had none of Milly's
		sense of humor—wore a Christmas pin on her blouse. But then, Christmas was less than two weektd cla.

	On the way back to Hubert's rooms Sam saw <86.05pt; text-align:left;">29

gomery does go onlass=row> , doesn't =r...?" Cl="top" he spoke to Hubert, behind the wall against which dth:4bet;"> "What's that?" Sam began to shrug off his coat.

Clarice smiled again. "It's ass=romy Opportunity. "Jean...?"

From inside, Hubert said: "Sam, if that's you, would you please clean up in there a little!"

"I was going to spread your bed up," Clarice said softly from the chair, "only he wouldn't let—"

But, coat back on his shoulders and ears hot

"Oh, I'm sorry...!" The ormed wd all aroun and greatlydiv classed-while againlse here."Eshu! That's what I'd want to do."

Cell still prickling from the coldty was the quart, in the other room, Hubert thumping books on his desk. Clarice looked up, smiled, then le=" width:0.her leroration:

Cell still prickling from the coldty was the quart, in the other room, Hubert thumping books on his desk. Clarice looked up, sthing to him at all, but had smiled at him a few times while they'd worked and had looked on seriously while Louis and P11.84ean, Marquout.

ne morerplease ?style=" ouass=celif I the qjust have two more of this kind—please?

"Sometimes," Sam said, "when people first meet me, they think I am. But I'm

"Yes. Of course," theformed said. =" width:I had just been paying attention, I would've seen it."

Sam looked down at the girl, who still s"> her.

"Where'rer widthfrom?" Sam asked.

"We'rerfrom the 419.66pt; Hospital," theformed said, indicatpulla the quile of cardboard pinned t0.her lapel, row> something printed on it, "for the Insane." The girl had the same cardboard pinned lopsidedly to her coat. So explai; heightbehind. The eyes of a tall and "> p-shouldered girl expltr clook in the same

deir young/div> goe not shadowed (clothed) amongs5.84pt; own companie, until they be nighg=huff33or tw=hve returns of the leafe old, nor are they much ashamed thereof,h: text31.fore would the before remembered ... sometymes resorting to our fort... texbeing over tw=hve years, they put on a kind of semecnt aum lethern apron before their bellies, and are very shamehad d to be s

< nobody to know how to wash a damned wall! The third one, the one he really liked—whose name was Prince, followed by something C13.19pt; , Marquez8.60pt;"> < had said nothing to him at all, but had smiled at him a few times while they'd worked and had looked on seriously while Louis and P13.19pt; , Marquout.

There really wasn't enough work anyway, Hubert explain13.19pt;evening back at home —trying to make13.19pt; , Marque1 93pt;">

<. Her had was the l valst. The bass=32pt 0.00pt fin<. Her higure,d—please?

T"> brown made a v>rrent down her skull. So as noelto stare, Sam dropped his eyes—and saw,<—please?rn hem, her ankles and the legs above them.were as badly burned as her had lass=roore only some sort of slippers, which her heelsnd dark, tover the edge of,ging over matarkewed with snoe-colored .lush. Sam turned a littlet10 sted his eyes again—and whiff of unwashed sourness. Could that be one of them?

Reallyck on his shouver things that could be wreakstyle=" wibody!

Sams bags were weighty with Hubert s and Elsie's and Corey's—and his own—gifts. But the floor was too wet to set them down.

Just then the Ablir girl ran forward to the window beside theirs, shouldering aside the generous-breasted, humus-skinned woman who had just handed in a package as the bars had been, for a moment, unlocked and swung aside.

The bars clicked closed; the woman said, "Hey, you—!"






Elsie and Corey, to mail the lass=rohopping bags full of gifts width:0.Raleigh. (One bag was Hubert'g:0.00pt .) The building Hare a fort— The lines of people-Within, pine bows were draped all around the uppwholllding on the marble walls— Bells of shiny red and ding:7.paper hung, soundless, in each corner. Black rubber mats were splayed over the floor, slopping " width:0.lush people tracked about in rundown 88pt; and open thloshes with jingling clasps. Wreaths with red berries and red ribbon were wired to the doors. But even inside, the marble lass=cas chill and damp enough for your breath to driftd cla in clouds. Were all these black and yellow and ta /td> brown faces, in all these lines in front of all the brass-barred

	windows01pt;ding presents width:0.some ever-div cing, 651.35pized, td> hopelessly unlocatable place ( texnever wiffling the post5p readers of the carefully printed or clumdiny scmain fraddresses on brown paper under twine)td class=ome ? Certainly, to look at the bags and parcels they carried, it to the po. The clerks behind the bars, Sam had eight:11.were all white. Post5p clerks were white at home00pt;" texthere were only lass=rwindows in the post office he went to in Raleigh. Here, between marble columns—and it wasn't even the central post office—tenrwindows lined the wall, so.00pt;"> some bert had a behind the squared brass bars.

	*30e thought begun minutes ago, she added: "Over the bridge—Eshu!* That's what I'd want to do."**		< had said nothing to him at all, but had smiled at him a few times while they'd worked and had looked on seriously while Louis and P11.84ean, Marquout. There really wasn't enough work anyway, Hubert explain11.84eaevening back at home —trying to make11.84ean, Marque1 style=" padding:0.12pt 3yle=" 0.00pt 77.03pt; text-align:justify; text-indent:12.34pt;">There really wasn't enough work anyway, Hubert explain11.84eaevening back at home —trying to make11.84ean, Marqu507.12pt;"> ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 With broad, brown cheekbass=cebrown eyes h was and crossed, and wearing an old e=" widtht, a girl 7.00pt; herself next to him, to stare up. From within her blu00, strabismic gaze, a glint of blue surhad d in Sams mind—from the staring bay back th:405.88pt; hThen it sank into the tuary of her curiosity, to swirl cla. Looking down at her and in a voice more /td> ly than ght:5.2, Sam asked her age-absent stare (was she eleven? was she 2>27?): "Now who are owe?" She hece up her hand to him, or rather her wrist—with her fingers bent down. The hand was deformed — or at least... its deformity idtprised, even 88pcked, width:40forefinger was thumb-thick and longer than " style=" , which was, in turn, longer than " string finger, which was longer than " stlittle—all of them, in" ed, fatter than fingers were supposed to be. The er to were dirty, spiky. Her teeth were set apart ss=fouish gum —some of the lower ass=ceSam realized, missing. "What's your na0.?" he asked again, of this unappealing child. deformed behind him said, "She's appealinyou her wrist beadscross the roo— smallcebrownskinned, with nicely done hair and a green cloth coat (class=pad' 0.00pt 0.00pout in tufts,ext-align:lea gray kerchief tied not under her chin but off center by her cheek, classloth ends a zzled like something someone had sucked on) — theformed took the girl's wrist . And Cd it up. Black-gloved fingers n="top" band of white beads from under the	"See," theformed said. "E-l-l-a A-B-L-i-R...this is Ella Ablir." Each lettered bead had tor ho>	"No." Sam st 77.6 "I'm afraid I'm


	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	ormed at his window in red coat and red hat, with thick-pt 33.388pt; buttoning ilock sup stockings white as some nurse's: she seemed to be buying many small stamps for a penny or two pennies;" texwasn't idtd class=celt;">


	; text-align:justify;">e.r:0.ion. "Over on the island. But they ain't really insane at all." She st 77.6 "Ncell cola little bit of in="top" re just some very nice0.00pt; height—who all been very, specan> deformed in red finishquot; "You go on ahead there. I'm


	*32e thought begun minutes ago, she added: "Over the bridge—Eshu!* That's what I'd want to do."**

		right hand, so that the handle cords and household drudges afterign="top:417.0n iloc across his st wi- it is extremelyidth:409.know ing palms. t;"> "That's awful nice0of" ouasThey 409. of in="do get restless sometimes, when nd still so long. I apprecantding o lot." She turned and anntop">d to the =huff3 widthgile: "Now block stvalign="todth:0.0ce colored gentlemed right here. I'mnd stepped toward the bars.


	33



	SAMUEL R.	DELANY

	With all her brachydactylic fingers, Ella pointed through. Inside, the white clerk brought forward a toy horse, that Ella must have seen. He stuck one plush hoof through the bars and waved it at her. Ella took a breath, grabbed it, and tried to tug it out —but, still smiling, the clerk pulled it from her grip and raised it higher between the bars, beyond her reach, to wave the leg once more. Silent, determined, Ella jumped, missed, jumped again. She didn't jump very high; and the little lift she managed suggested her physical coordination was deeply impaired. The woman who'd just handed her package through looked down now, frowned, then began to smile. From behind the bars, the clerk said with a notable brogue: "All right, little girl. Now you have to let the other people mail their letters." Biting her broad underlip, Ella Ablir backed from the cage, gazing within. A bunch of penny postcards in one hand, not yet put into her pocket book, the woman in the green coat stepped away from the next window over to receive the child's shoulders with guiding gloves. At the contact, the woman's worried look relaxed. "AH right," she said. "Let's all behave. Come on, now—let's go. I got your penny postcards for you. We're going to take them back home and draw pictures of what we want for Christmas and send them to Santa Claus at the North Pole. That's what we're going to do now." As she stepped by Sam, she smiled her gratitude for his brief vigil—and explained: "They won't never get nothing. And they can't write. But they like to draw the pictures and send them to Santa." She turned to the girls. "Now all of us. Let's go!" Their cardboard tags at their several levels on threadbare cloth (the tall one's coat was ludicrously too small), they shuffled before the woman, like wounded angels or emissaries from another world, up between the lines of Christmas mailers loaded with letters and packages to be sent by sea and rail and air to where and wherever. Postage on all Sam's three shopping-bags full came to two dollars and seventeen cents. Turning from the window, the bags at his side empty and all in one

	34



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 hand now, flapping like wind-abandoned sails, Sam saw the big clock on the wall above the door. It was circled in eight concentric rings of metal, each one set back from the next (for the eight planets, perhaps?), the face a ninth and central wafer, whiter than ice, arrow-tipped hands upthrust, long one right and short one left, telling him it was five past eleven. That noon was the first time Sam tried to find the underground magic shop at Forty-second Street. For most of his exploration, he kept making the same turns and going along the same underground alleys, even as he tried to get somewhere new, finally to give up: he didn't want to be late for dinner at Corey and Elsie's. When he was unsure of what train he was actually supposed to take to get back to Harlem, he asked an elderly Negro in a suit with baggy knees and the jacket and vest grayed with powdered plaster, who was carrying a chest of tools on the platform—and came home. New Year's Day was practically balmy. For a while Sam retained a memory of strolling down Lenox Avenue, just a sweater under his suit jacket. Hands in his pants pockets, he whistled jets of music and condensed breath, ambling by the pine trees discarded that morning at the curb over soiled snow clutching the sidewalk's rim. Wooden stands were still nailed to the trunks: crossed planks, a board square, or some more complicated contrivance with braces. The needle-bare branches transformed the trees into long-slain carcasses. The next day the temperature dropped to a previously unknown and, till then unbelievable, paralytic cold. What had been snow and slush became a rind of ice over the city. That night, ears stinging and face a mask of pain from the wind, Sam hurried toward Mount Morris past a mound of trees, delicately afire in the corner lot, one still with ornaments on its charring branches, black before crackling flame. Late in February's icy circuit, when Sam answered the door, Clarice came in, waving a newspaper, cheeks blotched red with cold. "You've got to see this. This is too much. This is, I tell you, the living end!"

	35



	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	Hubert got up from the wing chair. "What is it?" "What is it?" The room was chill; and though Clarice's coat was open, she didn't shrug it off. "Here—now did you believe you were ever going to live to see something like this in a paper — even a New York City paper?" The picture took up a quarter of the second page. White actress Mary Blair knelt on the ground beside a seated, twenty-six year old Negro actor, Paul Robeson, kissing his hand! The play was Eugene O'Neill's All Gods Chillun Got Wings, scheduled to open at the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village sometime that spring. Robeson played a young, Negro law student— "See. He was a lawyer, Hubert—like you." "Wz plays a lawyer," Hubert corrected. "In the play." Sam read over Clarice's shoulder. "No, he really was a lawyer," Clarice said. "Before. But he gave it up for the theater!" "He wasn't a lawyer; he was a football player!" Sam said. "See." Football was Sam's own sport—he had played center in high school, till Papa—when John's brother broke his leg in the game, the sharp bone coming through his brown, bloody shin—decided it was too rough and had forbidden him: everyone at home had encouraged him to go out for basketball, for which Sam had no particular love. "It says he was All-American Halfback in 1917 and 1918." "First he was a football player—when he was at Rutgers," Clarice explained. "Then he was a lawyer. Then he became an actor." "Well," Hubert said, "I can't imagine his being a very good lawyer, then. Where'd he go to law school?" "Columbia." "People are going to try and stop that play from going on," Hubert said. "You just watch." "There's a statement in here by the actress," Clarice said. "She thinks it's an honor to be in the play." The picture was...well, uncomfortable making. But maybe that was because you just didn't see pictures like that.

	36



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 "Is that man dreamy —or is he dreamy?" Clarice asked. "Oh, Hubert—!" she added. Because Hubert was frowning. "I'm teasing youl" Still, in March Clarice dragged them off to see Robeson in Nan Stevens' Roseanne, over at the Lafayette Theater. "We've got to go!" she insisted. "It's only playing for a week!" On Saturday afternoon they met before the yellow, horizontally striated walls with the other Negroes at a Hundred-thirty-second Street and Seventh Avenue. In their gloves, scarves, hats, a lot of people must have read the articles that had been appearing. There'd been a slew of them since the first one—and the picture had been reprinted by now in half a dozen papers. Clarice said: "This is surely a lot more people than usually come to this sort of thing." She took a hand from her fox muff to rub one knuckle on her nose. The tickets were thirty-five cents. The matinee was supposed to start at two-thirty, but it was almost quarter to three before they let people in. And a tall, West Indian looking — and sounding — man called out something, very loudly, about "a C.P.T. matinee," which made some people laugh. "Oh, that's terrible!" Clarice whispered. "Come on, let's go inside. I'm freezing!" Before the curtain went up, a stolid, brownskinned man, Mr. Gilpin, head of the Lafayette Players, came out and made a speech saying the Lafayette was the only Negro dramatic company in the country; and if the audience liked what they were doing for the colored community, they could make extra donations in the lobby. Clarice leaned toward Hubert. Sam heard her whisper: "You read that article in The Messenger I showed you... ? Where Lewis got on them so for only doing white plays with black actors...?" In the light from the stage, Hubert nodded. Then Gilpin went back in through the curtain. A moment later red drapery pulled aside from the stage. Robeson played a Negro preacher—it was hard to see him, at least at the beginning, and not think of Papa—whose actions became more and more sinful. And he was certainly wonderful. When he got excited, his voice filled the theater. He seemed half again as big as most of the other

	37



	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	actors, and he moved around, towering, handsome, like some half-wild, wondrous animal barely caged by the set. Canvas walls and mache trees shook as he strode by. Indeed, the glee, the wild joy with which he embraced his sins—drinking, crap shooting, shirking his Sunday sermons, and finally falling into the arms of a no-account Negro woman and getting her with child—made those weaknesses seem almost like some socially rebellious strength. Finally, though, his congregation turned on him. He was only saved in the end by a brave black woman—Roseanne —who'd been in love with him all along and who made an impassioned speech to the black people, who'd gathered to lynch him, about his humanity and his weaknesses and how his weaknesses were really their weaknesses. (Robeson spent a lot of time on his knees in the play, though not the actress.) But in comparison to Robeson's performance, the long-suffering Roseanne's words to the angry townsfolk seemed preachier than any of Papa's sermons. Clapping wildly, Sam stood up with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow. But as they were walking down to a Hundred-sixteenth Street, Hubert said, "Another weak-willed nigger and another strong-headed woman. And niggers lynching niggers ? Where, I wonder, did they get that one from ? Now you know the woman who wrote that play had to be white!" Clarice was thoughtful—walking with rapid, thoughtful steps, once in a while coughing into her muff. Possibly it had made her uncomfortable too. A blizzard rose in the last days of March; and, with only an hour out here and an hour out there, the chill effluvia still fell on April Fool's Day. each Friday at Mr. Harris's he went to the bank at lunchtime thirty-five or forty dollars in pennies;"> <" stygirl gumh:> wing Missely's tw=hve and put the

	38

< had said nothing to him at all, but had smiled at him a few times while they'd worked and had looked on seriously while Louis and P12.11pt; , Marqu0.00pt;">




rn coatnotp:417.Milly's sense of humor two Fridays on Mr. Harris came in and unwrapped his scarf "Feelsnlike snow again don't co" and after hanging up the aknesses smaroon wool on the coat rack's brass hook said "Before you go downsing hiSam run over two buildings and hunt up Poonkin he'll probably be in the cellarvalign="topwearinose boards he told me about and if he do you bring asss=celback here as you can carry I want to put me up some shelving downsing hiin the back all right" and Sam said "A Mr. Poonkin" and Mr. Harris said "I don't think there's acel'mister' in with it just Poonkin" and h"top" sed gold tooth bright between the white ass=32pta face as deep a brown as Papa's "Poonkin was in the graph War you know ask him to tell you about it sometime v>rnnot on malign="now get going" and in only his shirtsleevesng, Negro lut in the gelxpltron through steph> a lower /td> in deepll va shadow "Mr. Poonkin..." because he was a well-bred boy and his father said you call ass=c mister"now you hear me white ar colored v>rnespecan> Elsieunkempt, each had something dnient anniwrass=row> her. pt;">	schedule he

	39

"First he was a football player—when he was at Rutgers," Clarice e11.03ptjustify; out.

There really wasn't enough work anyway, Hubert explain11.03eaevening back at home —trying to make11.03ptjustify; e1 57pt;">

the light as they :5.2o> Tuhe foot in its black hei grats=block stylc=font1light Sam tried to imagine that body hporeality "Come on back with me, and hg C13. carry "em"tr class=row> clasoldght:14.40pt;be to have been in the graph War anyway because Papa who was over sixty-five :405.52pt;en a slave Sam's t was seven.00pt;"> in Georgia and that 3.ant ht:14.40pt;be seventy-five eighty the qthis bent black man be that > on14.50second trip three boards was all Poonkin the qcarry at a ign="the light fell td> weaknwide withered hands weough Ju gray knitting he glanced down to see what was in the Oh, Hubresol"top:e would ;">

nd Poonkin 5.52pt; hmet him was the qthink of the s=c as Poonkin a title rather than a na0. Poonkin let cackled sylla;"> predictable rh rn2>27. But I14.40me a rifle and I14ih Ju a' > ' stylbehind some spruce trees, th:0.00body what ;"> justifit I1 het" and Sam laughed "Diduff. " rebels or Union men" the cacklesfaalign="


	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	pt;">	nd the suspense acellonger, over about some wood ?ght:14.40for =" widtd anxiously, "Can you see him? he wants to lass=bome an nd stepped derful things..." forward the face wizened as a prune

jutop" s of 'em was bluetop" s of 'em was gray. But
justio widthtd class=ces I1 het. It weren't like this last war. This last war, it look like about everybody wearkilled. But I'mmorerlign="top" in that box than in the warell valign=yle=". What'0.00pt;"> you want?t 33.42pt 0.00pt true because back in '22 width:419cews had filled the papers of the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb Sam and gn="top" styl5.52pt;gun to find in the candyheduledtop" :419cewsstands inent a lot Raleigh y; tmost amazing magazines withtr cmaspinedtop" colored coverle=" wiitles like Aline-hei and Mtop"> Magazine and AligStory Magazine and they had they'd them for a quarterthing. nd had read t 33.4Khufutableal Tomb" by Talb < Munlock stydam HuligShirk's "Osirid walls ("Have you t;en reading about King Tut? If so, you'll berlign="top" in 'Osirid'!17.25pt;"> Weird T" styand Popular Magazine and John had found a copy of Saxblohmer's T" styof Sht:50 Egypt and they had traded them and they had td class=ceglider together
reading my inf alone clathe b get nebeside S.52ptnedtpt 0.0after it had been closed down as a hospital.00pt;"before had been reopened as the first building on campus or classlegged clathe d t 0 floor reading and reading and rereading mf graythis ism allned Er.lish width:1ligrepiduAmerican reidth:40foref"> /divrebeln frame="boxtheir fathers by helping the young/s=c anyway eaph Arab0forefdangerous Africae tribes diamonds that had been in the famm saw,nd Poonkin's voice acute to his own cne-hey said "You wanti>weak—you can have 'emtop" sbody livin'td class= left 'emtoheighrder="0" ctd clasbuilding to go, too. Moved out fohe 0pt 0. ago. I used to read mph> Bign="" Poonkin explained "First /i>schI did when

< had said nothing to him at all, but had smiled at him a few times while they'd worked and had looked on seriously while Louis and 240.24pt; height:0.00pt;">
Jcrapercause he was n=" padda poet nor an artist pt;"> , Sam diss=cell coltry to="top" .00pthe ="b" pad>
< nobody to know how to wash a damned wall! The third one, the one he really liked—whose name was Prince, followed by something C08.28pt; height:647.28pt;"> dentist in the family (and had got his ni valign="top" style=" width:0.00pt;"> below was k valass:td class=block slls, s:405.52p0.00pt falling, and "ome high breeze had swept clouds away from—his eyes a6pt;"ed t Elsie and inum alley-td> —class=paand reclass=paragd>tenaries of ;"> ors=block ere lass=rwindows in the wall padding:0.00hi ends a zzledrope00pnd fire etd> s... One had ragraph style=
"> no thicker than a bedsheet, hanging ash top brave black woman.;">
rabis14.40pt;"ppled textile was the shadow of a body — a woman's body;"> br.00ts —he started): &qu t was .24pt 76, wearing nothing! The /limil vaness of an arm raised od icell "> ;s14.40pthanging top , her silhouette turned. The /ill was at herbed th, and as s" paddinned to" width:186.05rave b,p">
The surprise of her lign:jing made him gaspThe play udding chest,

SAMUEL R.

DELANY

the war was over was learn mphto read some0.00pt;pt; heimy family, toot; texI wouldn't read stufflike that. Cats infecgood t 33.00pt;read no more nohow" and when Sam came back after working an anxious two more class=in Mr. Harris'sdent:12.1 warmer by a corner paraffin he240.32nd b when yot by two kerosene lamps class=paragrs were in arohopping bag on a dey she2f of newspapers beside the cellarvph styclosed nowxthe bag leaning utop" stylbrick wall when t 0 sted t:fixed; wpaper belease?was a picture of KKKk style=bedsheetstr class=high a v>rchk stacing " style=" w where anyone s="all" ve taken t:fAnyone at sh hoof through the bars and waved it at her. Ella took 1set. Ca32.88pt 0.00pt 76.44pt; text-align:justify;">That evening r clasrked yate at Mr. Harris's. When he left t> weaknesse handso?was style=" w.

pdtop" :419slush by the :fis along the curb, it struck him: it was the polerless whcTpro-duced most of the myths of powestyle=" wwas the po,
p14.50pt;">"First hed; wparkstance t=" gotten it.
Inside, Sam took off his coat, took off his heig, pants, shs=cels styleSam's t was just in the long Johns03eaeveninggiven pt;—and put on his suit jacket. Hubert was in class tonight—and wouldiv class=pareat with Clarice in her aunt and uncle's kitchen afterward. Sam sat in Hubert'g:wing chair, took a s=paragrrst hed; wohopping bag aroundparagrap foot

/dise years away from craph> 5pt 0.00pt 30.lign="top" style=" width: text-indent:12.10pt;">On the wall padding:0.00his bed, stylb valign="t had a curtainEach let—and a drape:0.00ilon finishquez8.60plasthaknessein his weamagazine and turning to the f st height/td> yclosed d. Was there some sort of light shquing utost hed; walley?
Sam walked across the rug and pulled away drape and curtain.

Th>

WithJu gray stnot,tr>

So he told them instead about Lewy and the3

jacket shoulder, roundbehind him.

And kissed it.

Crystals melted before his lips — he closed his eyes — and a water bead ran along the crevice between. He opened his mouth just a little— and a cold drop rolled within, warming. Mouthing snow, he took in only the tiniest bit of air through lattices of white fire.

Two days later on his third trip underground to Times Square and Forty-second Street specifically to find it, almost by accident Sam turned to see the window full of false noses, exploding cigars, and sneezing powder—more jokes in the window, actually, than the magic tricks that had first caught his attention. The shop's exotic name was Cathay. It also had lots of Chinese boxes for sale, and ivory carvings with black wood bases, Japanese fans and Oriental scarves that were not particularly magic at all. Maybe he had passed it before and, for all the other things there, hadn't recognized it. But there was the top hat, the wand... Inside, the bearded man with the bottle-bottom glasses was a Mr. Horstein, who, soon as they got to talking, explained how he'd been a magician back in the 'nineties —oh, yes, the magic was the first reason

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug of16lign:j "They won't never get nothing.16lign:justify; 0.00pt;">

38

16lign:j "They won't never get nothing.16lign:justify; rnarvon, u.know Harris?" widhe t="top.
"What's that?" Sam began to shrug of16lign:j "They won't never get nothing.16lign:justify; 489.48pt;">
s stly he went down 14.40ptknees of his union suit before the painted wainscot belease?

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug of16lign:j "They won't never get nothing.16lign:justify; 17.52pt;">

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug of16lign:j "They won't never get nothin:416.16pt; height:6.48pt;">
44
"What's that?" Sam began to shrug of16lign:j "They won't nevstyle=" width:416.16pt; height:76.08pt;">

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug of09.84pt;">

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug of09.84pt;">

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

for Cathay's existence. The rest was all because sailors on leave and sometimes tourists liked to buy them. Clearly Mr. Horstein loved to talk to his customers. He talked about the great Harry Houdini, who, no, never came to Cathay. But Mr. Horstein had met him in Chicago and then again in Syracuse. Apparently they were acquaintances. "Not friends. But we say 'Hello,' as men who share the same profession." Last year when Houdini had played the Jackson Theater, Sam and Lewy had not been allowed to go — because neither Papa nor Lewy's stepfather would allow their children to go to a segregated theater. John's mother didn't mind though; and Lewy and Sam might well have snuck in with him. (Going with someone whose parents said it was all right made it not quite so much like sneaking.) But that week John was sick and had his throat tied up with a scarf full of asafcetida.

Mr. Horstein (Sam had been in the store for almost three hours) had introduced Sam to several of his customers by now: "This is Sam—isn't this a good-looking, intelligent colored boy? He's a real credit, and I like to have this kind of young fellow here."

Riding home on the subway, Sam read an article in a red pamphlet with lots of fancy symbols on the cover about astrology Mr. Horstein had sold him for a nickel: it talked about the Transit of Mercury, that happened this year, and might even —this part Sam wasn't clear onfall on Sam's birthday, though such transits were more common in November than in May.

When he got home, Hubert —or Clarice —had left Views of Italy open under the reading lamp. He picked it up, turned the lamp on, and held it down under the light to look at a photograph of a hill—northwest of Sienna, the caption said. The hilltop was ringed by a wall, set at equal distances with blocky towers: seven towers, Sam counted — though the caption said there'd once been fourteen.

Insistent through sleep, voices like water met him, within some dream, listening. The long sounds of morning, the tired sounds, indistinct — metal hit metal somewhere and reverberated. Someone shouted. As far away as the train tracks a siren complained of its windy wound. All

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug of09.84pt;">

45

SAMUEL R.

DELANY

muffled in sleep, signs tangled in the sheets around him, vanishing. {Who is this woman with us...?) A truck lumbered east. Another one braked—and a motor started. Someone shouted—again. Something hit something else, dully. Outside, in half light, beyond the window, April snow still fell — and sounds rose; morning sounds carrying away his drowsiness. He turned under the quilt (to face the draped window), wondering if they might return it. Soft sounds slid around him, slipped over him like a sleeve, waiting in the winter-dimmed city. Outside, the black stones of Mount Morris would be a pillow of white. {A black woman clothed in white moving through the white city...a white woman on a cloth of light.) He could see, through the edge of the glass beside the drape, smoke spill from a roof vent into smoke, to wander up the sky, wash off in winter wisps.

Under the covers, Sam thought: And beside me...

He moved his hand with their thickened fingertips out from the depression his body had warmed to the cold place where no one lay. (A white woman in the heart of... a black woman in a city of light.) Somewhere a siren sounded, weaving together for him the possibilities of his vacant day.

Saturday at Corey and Elsie's there was a short, sharp argument between Sam and Hubert: Sam was happy to do his tricks for Hubert— and even Clarice—back at Hubert's, but Hubert suggested after dinner that Sam perform one of Cathay's wonders for his sisters: a vanishing coin. Sam had brought the trick over, after all, in his inner jacket pocket, precisely for that. But Hubert's request got only Sam's refusal, first a quiet one, then an insistent one, then —with red-cheeked embarrassment—a loud one, when Hubert wouldn't stop.

But, at least partly, it was because Mr. Carter, a Columbia Teacher's College friend of Elsie's, was there that afternoon for dinner — a mahogany-complected, articulate young man from Philadelphia, who cut all his food with his fork. But Mr. Carter displayed a smiling, inquisitive awe before Elsie and her siblings that Sam recognized: it was the air other ministers, especially white ones, displayed when they visited Papa

46

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

socially at home. And nothing made a social situation more uncomfortable for Sam. It turned everything you did into a performance, and always left him somewhere between tongue-tied and belligerent.

"I'dlike to see you do a magic trick," Mr. Carter had prompted across the remains of dinner, in what clearly he thought was an encouraging way.

"Go on, Sam!" Hubert said. "That's what you brought it over here for—to show people!"

"No!" Sam said. "Come on, now—I said No! Didn't you hear me?" His voice was too loud, his hand was actually shaking, and the silence after it was much too long.

Corey rescued him: "Now Sam is still learning these things. And you've got to practice them before you do them for other people. He just needs to practice and will show us all his trick in his own time, now."

Hubert dragged his forearm from the table, sucked his teeth — his turn to sulk.

But nothing dented Mr. Carter's simple, irrepressible good will. "Can I ask you something seriously, though?" His dark fingers moved on the handle of his unused knife.

"I don't know." Corey smiled. "Can you?"

"Would you please tell me — because I have heard this story about you two ladies so many times before, but just in snatches and fragments, so that you never know what you're really supposed to believe and what you're not—just so I can tell other people when I get back to Philadelphia—what really happened at that movie, there—was it six or seven years ago?"

"What movie?" Elsie asked.

"That movie," Mr. Carter said, "where you two got into all that trouble ? "

"Six years ago?" Elsie said. "What movie does he—"

"Oh, I know what he means," Dr. Corey said. "Arnold—" which was Mr. Carter's name to Corey and Elsie, but not to Hubert, Clarice, and Sam—"that wasn't six years ago. That was seven, eight—" she frowned. "That was nine years ago now!"

47

SAMUEL R. DELANY

"But...what happened?"

"Might as well go ahead," Hubert said. "After all this time, everybody ought to know."

"What movie ? " Sam said. Though he knew the outlines of the tale, the fragmentariness was as much there for him as for Arnold Carter— since, nine years ago, when Corey and Elsie had first gone up to the city, where they'd stayed for two years before coming home, Sam had been... well, nine.

"That great big movie they made, about the south—and the Ku Klux Klan and all," Hubert said. "About the wonderful white south and the black devils who were raping all those white women—"

"Oh!" Elsie said. "That awful movie — that made everybody go out and start lynching all those people!"

"It didn't start them lynching," Corey said. "But it certainly made them go out and lynch more."

"What did you have to do with it?" Sam asked.

"We were picketing — a peaceful picket line. With a lot of other Negroes."

"With a lot of other angry Negroes, I bet," Hubert said. "That's what I heard."

"We were angry," Dr. Corey said. "Who wouldn't be angry, at a movie like that?"

"How did a movie make people lynch people?" Sam wanted to know.

"It was a movie about those damned Ku Klux Klansmen—" Corey didn't use language like that and it startled Sam to hear her cuss like Louis—"and told how wonderful they were and how they were protecting southern white womanhood."

What came back to Sam was a memory of his cousin, or a woman whom his mother had called their cousin: yes, he'd been nine, eight, maybe younger, when her and her husband's mutilated bodies, under gray canvas, had been brought, in the creaking wagon, back through the evening trees, to the campus—

"We were picketing," Corey said. "That's all. With the others, across the street from the theater."

n="top">

₄8

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

"Well, that wasn't quite all," Elsie said.

"Then what else did we do?" Dr. Corey asked, indignantly.

But Elsie had some devilment in her eye.

And there was a grin back of Dr. Corey's indignation. "We certainly didn't do very much else — that anyone with a grain of sense wouldn't have done. There's no forgiving a movie like that—stirring people up to violence against their fellow man!"

"What did she do, Miss Elsie?" Mr. Carter asked.

"Well, we were picketing, there across the street. The policemen were keeping us back. And you could see that it wasn't doing anything to keep people from going into the movie—"

"The thing we wanted to do," Corey said, "was to stop them from going to see it, you see. That's what we were trying to do."

"So finally," Elsie said, "Corey says to me, 'Come on.' Well, I didn't know where she was going."

"You did too!" Corey said. "I to/dyou—"

"After we got in line," Elsie said, "you told me. We left the pickets, went down to the end of the block, crossed over, came back, and got on the ticket line to the movie. That's when I asked you, what we were going to do. And you told me, 'We're going to go inside and see that movie !' Well, I was afraid to leave her, because I knew she was probably going to do something foolish—and I didn't want her to get in trouble."

"You went into the movie?" Clarice asked. From her tone, Sam realized this was new to her as well.

Corey nodded.

"We went into the movie," Elsie said, "took our seats, and waited for the lights to go down and the man at the organ to start his playing—and I asked: 'Corey, what are we going to do now?' And she whispered, 'Hush!' and just to sit there and to do what she did. Well, I thought, dear Lord, give me strength! What has this crazy girl, my own little sister, got it into her head to do ? "

"Then what happened?" Sam asked.

"The lights went off, the man started to play the organ, and the movie began — and Corey jumps up, scoots out into the aisle, with those

49

SAMUEL R. DELANY

long dresses we used to wear back then, catching on everybody's knees, saying real loud, 'Excuse me—excuse me, please!' and I'm coming right after her. I think people thought she was sick—and had to use the facilities. So they were making room.

"But then, when she got into the aisle, she ran right down toward the front of the theater —and I'm running to keep up. And she climbed onto the stage — "

"I jumped onto the stage," Corey said. "I got hold of the edge, and I went up like a boy over a fence—though I don't know whether I could do it today—"

"And she grabbed hold of the edge of the screen, with the light from the projector all over us, and people starting to stand up and call out to ask if something was wrong, and she ripped'it—-"

Corey laughed. "I certainly did. I remember, you stood there, on the stage, in front of all those people, and you said, 'Oh, Corey—!'"

"Then / grabbed hold," Elsie said, "and started ripping too!"

"Once we began, she ripped more than I did," Corey said. "I really think Elsie was having fun."

"I was scared to death," Elsie said. "But, by then, I figured it didn't make much difference. I knew we were going to end up in jail, no matter —so I decided it'd be better at least to do what we'd come for. Yes, I got hold of it—and I ripped it too. In about a New York minute, the two of us tore the whole screen down!"

Clarice hooted, hands over her mouth.

"But then what happened?" Sam said, between his own guffaws.

"I mean," Clarice said, "how did you two get out of there?"

"Very quickly," Corey said. "We were lucky. Someone in the audience by that time had started fighting. There were other people on the stage now—you remember that man who asked us, so politely, while we were ripping, if something was wrong? But the fist fight in the audience, that was taking up all the ushers' attention. So even while they were putting the lights on, we rushed backstage and down some steps and around through a door that opened right into the alley — and got out!"

So

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

"This is so funny," Clarice said, recovering herself. "A couple of months ago, I was reading in Opportunity about the 'riot' they had at the premier ofBirth of a Nation. And you mean you two were the riot?"

"I guess we were pretty much most of the riot. It was in the newspapers," Elsie said, "the next day. But I wouldn't think they'd still be talking about it now. It was nine — almost ten years ago; and it was just a movie, after all. Who'd want to remember something like that?"

"A low down, dirty, rotten movie," Dr. Corey said, "that made people go out and killt^ch other!"

"Mama and Papa never talked about that," Sam said. "I don't think they'd like something like that, you all being in the newspapers for get-tin' in some kind of trouble!"

"We didn't want to worry Mama and Papa," Elsie said. "So we didn't tell them. But I guess other people told them just this bit and that bit— and it all gets out of hand."

"But we didn't do anything to be ashamed of," Dr. Corey said. "I thought it was right then. And I'd do it again today, if I had to. The lynchings went up all over the country in nineteen fifteen—because of that movie. That's probably why they're up now. Not a man or woman, black or white, Christian or Jew, with free-thinking ideas and care for his fellows was safe anywhere in the country while that movie was on."

"Jews?" Sam said. "They don't lynch Jews." Back home, John and his brother had told Sam that, because Jews had all the money, everybody was afraid to cross them and that's why they were taking control of just everything. "They got too much money."

"Don't lynch Jews?" Dr. Corey declared. "And just what makes you think they don't, boy? That poor Jew, Mr. Frank, he was lynched down in Georgia, right near where Papa was born, the very summer that movie was showing. Don't lynch Jews? Where have you been, boy? Back when the Jim Crow laws came in, everybody was getting lynched. That was the crime of it, see? That's what taking the law into your own hands is all about. Anybody they didn't like, got lynched—for any reason. You think they didn't lynch Jews ? They lynched white people, they lynched black people —they lynched women, children, and Jews. Don't let me

5i

SAMUEL R. DELANY

hear you talkin' nonsense like that anymore, Sam. Sometimes I think you don't know anything!"

"Now they did lynch more colored than anybody else," Elsie said. "You know that, Corey."

Corey just humphed.

"You remember that sign they put up in the park in downtown Raleigh, when the Jim Crow laws came in? 'No Jews or Dogs Allowed'?" Elsie laughed. "They didn't even think enough of niggers to put up a sign to keep us out."

Sam had heard about the sign; but by the time he'd got to go downtown, there were just the usual signs for where coloreds were supposed to go and the water fountains you were supposed to drink from and where whites were supposed to go and drink. There'd been a mysterious time, Sam knew, that had ended just around his birth, when everyone went to the theater together; when people even went to school together. His older brothers and sisters—Lemuel and Elsie and Corey and Lucius —often spoke of it, when everyone in Raleigh had gone to the Jackson Theater and sat wherever they'd wanted to and watched plays by Shakespeare and dastardly melodramas and uproarious comic skits, in which people sang and danced and minstrels Tommed in black-face, and men in top hats did magic tricks. (Mr. Horstein had said that, personally, he'd never played the Jackson in Raleigh —but magicians had come to Cathay who had.) But now all the theaters in Raleigh were segregated, and Papa wouldn't let him go at all. A few times he'd snuck in with Lewy and John. (John's mother taught Mathematics and Women's Deportment at the college —his father had died three years ago — and didn't care.) In the balcony, John's brother's crutches leaning over the seat back, the boys sat with the other colored children—nigger heaven, everybody called it—to watch Mary Pickford and William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks... Though Corey probably had her point, John was pretty smart, and Sam was not yet ready to dismiss completely John's judgment of the Jews...

"That's true," Corey said, uncharacteristically pensive, "that's true__"

52

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

And for a moment Sam wasn't sure if memory had made him miss something important in the present.

That night, after Hubert came back from taking Clarice home and went into his own room to study, then to sleep, Sam got up, moved the drape and curtain back, to hang them in a great down-descending arch over the wing of the chair. Then he got back in bed and lay awake, covers over his mouth and ears, blinking at the moonlight out the window.

At work a few days later, Sam asked: "Mr. Harris, you seen Mr. Poonkin ? "

"Awww..." Mr. Harris said, like someone with something real sad he'd forgotten to tell you: "Last week, Poonkin—he got the pee-neumo-nia. I guess it was on the Tuesday you didn't come in. They took him over to Manhattan Hospital on Ward's Island—"

"—for the Insane?"

Mr. Harris frowned. "Well, they got a lot more people out there than just the looneys now, you know. I guess they got pretty much everybody over there who can't pay for hisself. But Poonkin got the pee-neumonia — the old people's friend."

Sam looked puzzled.

"That's what they call it." Glare slid left to right across Mr. Harris's gold tooth. Denting green silk, Mr. Harris's tiepin was gold. "At least it's the friend of old people like Poonkin who ain't got nobody to care for 'em. It takes 'em quick and, as dying goes, goes pretty easy. I wouldn't be surprised if old Poonkin's dead by now—though nobody's told me that, yet. Though why they'd come and tell me, I don't know. I'm no kin of his. Poonkin been around here long before I got here. Now he's gone."

While he worked in the cellar, sometimes looking over at the boards against the cement wall, Sam thought about going to visit old Poonkin on Ward's Island. He tried to picture himself in a great public hospital, endless dividing sheets rippling white between the beds, talking to the old man, propped on his pillow: "Mr. Poonkin, tell me about what you

53

< Tuhe foot in its black hei grats=block stylc=font1light Sam tried to imagine that body hporeality "Come on back with me, and hg C13. carry "em"tr class=row> clasoldght:14.40pt;be to have been in the graph 40.73pt;">

>

55t 0.00pt 28.99pt; text-align:justify; text-indent:11.98pt;"> much else — that anyone with a grain of sense wouldn't have done. There's no forgiving a movie like that—stirring people up to violence against their fellow man!"

SAMUEL R. DELANY

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o409.80pt;">

did in the War—about the rifle and the barn—behind the spruce, before you could read—what of it you can remember...?" But he didn't really know if Poonkin were first name or last. (Those idiosyncratic memories of the War, what it was to be a fifteen-year-old black boy with a rifle in a barn, not to mention everything that had brought that child to the cellar two doors away, an aged, half-blind, brief and taloned guardian to those magazines—suddenly winking out. Memories—like spume from a broken wave...) In the hospital, weakly he calls to me. I start to leave, he calls again, but before I turn...there was Hubert, chained to the water pump, and Papa gasping, drawing back the orange crate in his brown hands, his collar loose and no shirt under his black vest, the arms of a man in his fifties, yes, but deeply dark in the evening blue. "You are not a man—you are a little animal!" Papa shouted. "And if you will live like an animal, I will treat you like an animal! I will beat you like a beast till you beg to be a man again...!" Crate slats splintered against Hubert's shoulder; he remembered the precise sound of his father's grunts. "Ah...I" The slats splintered again. "Keh...!" On the next blow they smithereened. "Dab.../" Hubert fell, pulled himself backward, shouting: "Papa! No, Papa...? No — /" Papa hit him with the stump of what hung from his hands, then hurled the bottom, missing Hubert, gouging grass. No...

No. (Sam walked slowly through the cold street.) For suppose he went over there and Mr. Harris was right: Poonkin wn:justify; tead:lk to his customers. He talked about the great Harry Houdini3most three hou76.92pt; text-align:justify;0pt 41.33pt; text-align:left;">that!
"If he's going to do it," Hubert said from the wing chairdiv clase'2pt;gun to tify, "Istyle=" ps soon he did it in front of lign="top" stywanti>we boy sneaking off to do it behind my back, now."

16pt;">ht:14.50pt;">Postaat Clarice's upset. ; heithought her unconcerned about the matter till now.

16pt;">k style=" widtont8>SAMUELheight:14.im—you said yon were going to height:14.im. font10 se=" l—it isn't any of my bidiness! And Inss=paragra" ve

Clapping wildly, Sam stood up with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.

54

said anythingv> ,ass=font9 coat st.50pt;" valign, she went to the ealized l valign="top" style=" width:0.00pt; height:0.00pt;"> h:240.36it to after her, it stuck—with a noise like P; , then, when she =" paddingraph stylnd pulled it to again, with zja. Outside, she yanked it to, and it h style=n two beats: Pa-Ti. The tensions > eaving turned the sound into a kind of thunder that left the room whisper0.36itsixed; wid Sam thought about saying: e=" widtyou said you didnt mind
i/i-

gn:left;">z—and by =row vali12.59p>

"That's ass=cell. Outside, W valign="todth:0.00pt;"Sam asked;percause Hubert was heigh0.36in his

"Well, style=" ardworking Negroes. "> got no-account be a fiatass=paragraph>any cews to you..e=" width:410.20pt;">
Sam nodded.

".00pt;"> Outsideth z. And there were someclazy ligz. Lould read—reened.no-account be a pan>
read—reened.just animals." Hubert /i>The tw valign=". "And valign' her cust;">
<77pt; text-align:left;">"I

got to go!" she insisteder="0" celpick ton, wi," Hubert said, "" celc">
"I st.50pp" st-uot;

"ing="0" es an animal make water or do his bidiness?uot;

"Ri" w where's he'p"standwid."

I come24pt;">

<; and, with only an hour out here and an hour out there, the chill effluvia still fell on April Fool's Day. each Friday at Mr. Harris's he went to6 what happened?" Sam said, between his own guffaws.
<" stygirl gumh:> wing Missely's tw=hve and put the
4pt; text-align:justify; text-indent:10.90pt;"> ss=font10 style=" line-height:14.50pt;">"What's that?;I gu6pt 0.00pt 59. But there was the top hat, the wand...

"What movie ? " Sam said. Though he knew t">

the modpt;"> got to top" !rom a rtd clp of what you're ass=font10 your mouth and sv classinto your supposhouteknowtwhite people going to be smok R. DELA Rs—tyle=" widthit's funnyeight:38.46pt;">

"Wign' ha lot worse?uot;
"I know can't pt;"> <, 3.ant ht:1could turn it"top">
12.59pt; hemove57pt;"le=" law/div>
13u8.00ping off somewherey said. "T00tectpthe ="b ad l
"What movie ? " Sam said. Though he knew t">
Clapping wildly, Sam stood up with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.

56:0.00pt 32.28pt 0.00pt 78.12pt; text-align:justify; text-indent:12.00pt;">"What movie ? " Sam said. Though he knew t">
much else — that anyone with a grain of sense wouldn't have done. There's no forgiving a movie like that—stirring people up to violence against their fellow man!"

"That's true," Corey said, uncharacteristically pensive, "that's true__"
He see

t52pt;">&quosensebiswov
i>tfulness unv cla, as efable-" widts acelPenelope,w valily before the next day> i>t a city in which you've once t;Wel, and it might as well " veidth:0.00nto the sea.) But ..cthat pt; texi>the mparagrr cthus of all dreamps up, first /i>scs to go le=mysystematically, thetincidents conf;They wour own weaknesses ly whilbecause w/dire lucky enough not to " veito talk about, there's no particular reasonlign' hall. The incidents w/td> "top">n se,ght t
"What movie ? " Sam said. Though he knew t">

57

ped nowxof its green andnign="top" style—, and mail R. DEL home , who, with his s=cel Hubert nds, with his chocolatetchest, with his cr>sps=cell v" padding:t; heigh35pt; hem on to ton, wih the stuJohn:=" lich valign=

d for Sam the ;w valmemory of g to make11.03ph.27pt; teRobeson on stage. eadyle=" wit; te50pt;">&qu'ot;What:0? Notop" style="what was the name of the playph.27pt; teat the Lafayette ? Had hept; teRobeson in The Emt;"> uJones, thato pu;"nated with ;What:0 e was the top hat, tthrough thattyle=" width:499.5? Nobe a
n="the movie. And there was so if oltalk about, and so many articles =" wciyle=" w ne or twoh:41e 9s by,aragraph sidyle=" w27pt; te;What:0 because he knew w27pt; tesomething with Robeson in ent:12.1around that timeidth:0.00p, in 1944, Sam and his weahow his weahow —the Robeson product52pt;">Ot649.8 e was tMt;"opolit:0 Ot;"ax"en whalign="tse F;"rer as Iago, Ut: Hag
t; teRobeson perform.
Sam had t; tehim just not quite so fr.00pt;">.
read—refor .) Hsetop" stylty...a whitehim to ht t
< &quuntil the voice fixed that l va poreality "Come on back with me, and hg C13. carry "em"tr cl0/div> < text-align:justify; text-indent:11.86pt;">"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o413.40pt;">

< text-align:justify; text-indent:11.86pt;">"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o413.40pt;">

60

< text-align:justify; text-indent:11.86pt;">"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o413.40pt;">

SAMUEL R. DELANY

&quomagazines, trMarquez:0.00pt 33.54pt 0.0—

"We were angry," Dr. Corey said. "Who wouldn't be angry, at a movie likcl0/div>

rucled visentistign=a kind of pleasure.
Tlass=blockfter yle=full p" styClarice

do?" Dr. Cmagic trickxt-align:leground Cathay. pt;"> R. dth:0.0="b ashment of a novel by.. .Harry Houdini!
Polign With the Pharaohs.

did in the War—about the rifle and the barn—lded up and slipped ugh work anyway, class, Lewy's standwweahow —the RHfletheiest Manetho fle and Imhotep off spy R0.00quotUkwarnKingdomDEL 1924
t home —trying towhat was width:1. —the RHf,t:14.8! "> " vei really by Houdiro?) Conhider">14.50pt;resent. And 7pt;""top">quickly=and tell me what you4pt;"> Though Inp" stydiv cling back a:0.00;">"soont;as I'm styleathtubt;
: you'll style(orltry to=styl) for the n:leftwo0="b ashments and a movie about those dl colswoop!sibleif, in anl valitwo months, I wid styheard :0.00;">do?&quoI shallnp"ame magic and ju-juwidth:s on the ast

59

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o413.40pt;">

SAMUEL R. DELANY

now Harris?" widhe t="top.

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o413.40pt;">

sumption that thou hast forgotten thy brothers in the southlands."

Sam slid the oversized magazine into the top drawer, wondering whether he'd really have the patience to wait for the next two installments before reading it in a night.

The first of Mr. Horstein's tricks he'd bought was the magic coin that disappeared. Actually, the trick was just a length of black elastic with a clip on one end you could fasten up your sleeve and a bit of gum on the other that you could stick to any quarter or nickel. But now, as he kneaded the stickum, he realized it was losing its adhesion. More and more times it pulled loose from the coin, letting it fall to the rug as often as it snapped the metal glittering from sight.

The most effective trick—and the most expensive (eighty-five cents) —was a little guillotine in which you could cut a cigarette in half; but if you put your finger through the same hole, you could make the blade slip aside so that it appeared —magically—to pass through your finger, leaving it unhurt and whole.

The third one—though it had cost only a dime—didn't work at all: a hollow, metal cup in the form of a thumb's first joint. Smoking a cigarette, without letting anyone see, you secreted the false thumb in your fist. Then you took the cigarette and poked it into your fingers, putting it out on the bottom of the metal cup the false thumb made. You kept packing the cigarette in, until it was inside your fist completely. Finally you used your other thumb to tamp it down further—only you slid your thumb into the false metal one, got it seated good—then opened both your hands.

The cigarette had disappeared. And nobody was supposed to be able to see the thumb cap (with the cigarette inside) over your real one.

The cap was large enough so that, when Hubert tried it on, it just fell off. And Hubert's hands weren't small. Still, Sam's own thumb was too big to wedge into it. Also, the thumbnail on the cap didn't look like the broad, oversized nails curving down over Sam's fingers. And it was painted a luminous pink, that, when Clarice examined it, she said didn't look like anyone's skin color she knew—black, white, gray, or grizzly!

Hubert had suggested Sam ask Mr. Horstein for his dime back. But

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o411.75pt;">

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o411.75pt;">

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

then, though he liked Mr. Horstein, he was still a little afraid of him (he was a Jew, after all), and a dime wasn't a lot.

Sam pushed all three tricks off the dresser, into the drawer on top of Weird Tales, and closed it.

And, for Clarice, he put on his suit jacket. And his cap.

"Remember — " That was Hubert, reading the paper in the wing chair; he had folded it back to an advertisement for a new kind of suitcase, made from something called... Naugahyde ? "Elsie wants us all over there by four." Hubert looked across the dark room from under the tas-seled lamp. "Since your birthday's this coming Tuesday, she and Corey are probably going to do something a little special today. So don't you be late, now."

When he asked the man behind the bars how to get to the Brooklyn Bridge from the station, Sam was told he should have gotten off at City Hall —which was closer. This was the old stop (Brooklyn Bridge) for workers who repaired the bridge —not for people who wanted to walk across it. But if he went two blocks to the east and turned left, he'd come to the walkway.

Beyond the Oriental ornateness of the Pulitzer Building, he saw the structure between —and above —the swoop and curve of trolley tracks, the girders of the EL

It really was immense!

He turned left onto Rose Street, which took him down under one of the bridge's stone archways. The arches left and right were walled and windowed, with padlocked doors.

Did people live there, in the base of the bridge? Sam turned into the stone underpass.

Hung from the middle of the overhead stone, its rim painted fresh green, a wooden sign read:

BRIDGE WALKWAY

Beside it was an opening in the stone. The stairway's walls were close set. As he stood there, two colored girls with gingham showing from

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o411.75pt;">

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o411.75pt;">

61

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o411.75pt;">

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o509.99pt;">

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o509.99pt;">

SAMUEL R. DELANY

stopped when it hit the bridges
stanchion. But when he got closer, some white boys, one copper-haired and none more than fourteen, ran
p with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.

62
p with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.

Clapping wildly, Sam stood up with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.

under their yellow cloth coats ran down. He glimpsed their shiny shoes, their white socks over their little-girl ankles, bare little-girl legs above— and smiled, as they descended toward him, out of the shadow, laughing —while an older sister in a straw hat with a grownup-looking bluejay feather came down behind, more sedately. She was almost as old as Clarice —and, from the way she turned her shoulders and nodded so faintly without a smile, clearly considered herself to look smart.

And (he turned to look after her) she did.

Then all three were gone.

He was left only his own smile and their brief memory. Shrugging his suit jacket together, putting his big, country-boy hand against one stone wall, he started up.

And came out onto the concrete ramp rolling toward the first stanchion. Beyond green rails, cars

passed left and right of him—along Hart Crane was born on July 21, with a trolley. As its troller crossed 1899 in Garrettsville, Ohio. He beneath sustaining guys, its antenna was the only child of Clarence jangling under the overhead wire, Arthur and Grace Hart Crane. sparks spit down. Rocking away toward Brooklyn, a cart lagged behind, its gun-gray horse and its colored driver, in his gray slouch brim, impassive beside the electrical crackling, the blue-green shower of light.

Between him and the traffic, a cable thick as an oil drum lifted slant and vertical cords toward the double vault of stone. Sam started forward, walking toward where the ce-In July of 1923, Edna St.-Vin- ment flooring gave way to wood. cent Millay married Dutch cof- And as hundreds on hundreds of fee importer Eugen Jan Boisse- thousands of pedestrians had vain. The couple lived at y^Vi thought so many times before, Sam Bedford Street, at nine feet wide thought: Lord, this is marvelous! the narrowest house in New York At first it seemed the walkway

Cityeft;">SAMUEL R. DELANY

< text-align:justify; text-indent:11.86pt;">"What's that?colspan="2" valign="top" style=" width:407.04pt;">

63

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924
p with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.

round the central stone column, down—those were metal steps up to the higher level, not a ribbed green metal wall—the stairs. Check these off. Braithwaite died in 1962. Ange- Once Lewy had made a clock
p with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.

lina Grimke in 1958. Fenton Johnson in 1958 also.... Effie Lee New-some was doing poorly this past summer, I was told by a lady from Wilberforce, but she was still alive. Her address has been Box 291, Wilberforce, Ohio.

Nanina Albas address is 303 Fonville Street, Tuskegee, Alabama. Shall I write her for bio-notes, or would you like to?... There is a Charles E. Wheeler, Jr. listed in the Chicago telephone directory, but I can't get an answer there —yet. Will try again. I am not sure (in fact, I doubt) this is the

poet__Jean Toomer is still in a

nursing home in Doylestown, Pa. His wife Marjorie Toomer can be reached at their home, "The Barn", r.d. 2, Doylestown. She will answer letters promptly. I have visited her twice. She is active for civil rights. Jean's literary disappointments after Cane were shattering. He tried desperately to repeat that artistic achievement (but not as a

Negro) and failed__I persuaded

her and him to give his papers and literary effects to Fisk. A large collection. There is now a chance that

from a ten-gallon kerosene can, a hole punched in the bottom to dribble water ("No, no—!" Mama said. "Don't bring that in here. Set it out by the pump!") and a board float in the top, fixed to a cord, that, as the float lowered, turned a spool on another board that rotated an elaborately scrolled hand, from an old clock Lewy'd found, about a cardboard dial. The first dial Lewy had drawn was marked with minutes in five-minute groupings. It kept time for practically three-quarters of an hour. But that evening Lewy came over and closeted himself with Papa in the study, and the next day he'd replaced the dial with one far more elaborate, drawn on a piece of parchment, inked in reds and blacks and greens and suggesting some medieval illuminated compass, now marked with a time scale of three fourteen-minute intervals, each divided in two, then further divided into three, with the major divisions indicated by signs from the zodiac and the smaller ones notated in Hebrew letters, representing a special,

stanchion. But when he got closer, some white boys, one copper-haired and none more than fourt23.79pt; height:0.00pt;">

SAMUEL R.

"What movie ? " Sam said. Though he knew t">

Cane may be reprinted along with some of Jean's unpublished writings .... The sonnet by Allen Tate is perfect for The Poetry of the Negro. His background as a Fugitive and redhot i'll take my STANDer adds to its effectiveness. As Coun-tee said about himself, Allen's "conversion came high-priced," no doubt.... and there are letters from him in the Toomer Collection. Hart Crane was trying to arrange for the two (Toomer and Tate) to meet. In any case, we can now see that the early anti-Negro expressions of the Fugitives probably reflected guilt feelings, as this "Sonnet at Christmas" makes clear in

Tate's case__ By the way, I also

sponsored Frank Lima for his Opportunity. We should let him pass for colored, if he wishes. I thought he was Puerto Rican at the time. Nobody would object to a Mexican identifying as a Negro. Not even a black muslim or a black panther. And I will not object to a couple or so poems by Mason Jordan Mason so long as we make it plain in the biographical note that at least we are not sure. He certainly writes in Negro, as Karl Shapiro says of Tol-son. And he's good.

I don't expect us to find any-

ancient, mystic time scale, out of Africa from before the dawn of the West — which Lewy had just made up. Lewy had explained, laughing, to Sam and John: "Now white boys do not do things like this. Your daddy told me that when he was helping me with the letters last night," and John said, "You shouldVe used Arab letters on it! Or Egyptian!" And Lewy, who knew what John was getting at, said, "I like the Jewish letters. They're easier to remember. And the Bishop doesn't speak Egyptian

— yet." Helping Lewy fill the clock, or sitting, the three of them, out by the pump, watching the hand's imperceptible progress across the mystic signs, at such moments Sam could forget the occasional throbs of desire to be the same clear and earth-dark hue as Lewy and his own father. Well, nobody had trouble telling John was colored, for all his rusty hair. Strange though, Sam thought; such an instant as that was what let him look with sympathy at such a group of city white children

— who, he was sure, from their ragged socks, worn shoes, and the rope tied around one's waist in place of a belt, were just the boys

6₄

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

thing from the Allen Ginsberg who didn't do things like that. cabal that meets our criteria. So They broke around him, run-

why don't we close the door now. ning—and were gone.

Beside the steps stood a wooden booth with a glassed-in window, before which were the same brass bars he'd become familiar with in front of tellers at the bank and clerks in the subway's change booths and post offices. Below the wooden shelf with its worn depression for the change to slide into, was another sign—

Toll: Pedestrians l<t

—faded and flaking. But perhaps the toll was not in effect today—or, indeed, had not been in effect for some time: the booth was closed; no one sat behind the bars to collect.

Sam climbed the stairs and walked around the great stone column— on the near side of which a black-bronze plaque explained that the bridge had first been opened to traffic in 1883—forty-one years ago!

He strolled out on the walkway, looking down over the green rail, at the tracks between him and the trolley wires.

Dead in the afternoon — hasn't the sky?—, gas lamps at intervals stood along the walkway's sides. A sailor in early whites came toward him, hurled balled waxed paper from a late lunch over the rail, to follow it with a delicately flipped toothpick from his lips' corner. He was carrying some kind of Japanese fan. Over its folds, pastel waves were painted in blues and blacks. The sailor hawked across the bar, returned from moving the other authority recently dropped, and gave Sam a grin: Sam imagined sputum sparkling down between girders to the water. The fellow sauntered away around the stone. (The fan. Where was it from? Where would it go?...Cathay.) Benches with wrought iron backs sat along the walkway, wrested as much of that severe sunshine as you need now. Now turning, Sam saw the

lower city's skyline, towers above Cowley and Crane at Sweets. the water —yes, and there, on the Fitzgerald and Agee at the way you go, were his skyscrapers! Chrysler. Agee's first poems

65

SAMUEL R. DELANY

And there in the other direction bore a title from Crane's exhor-was the green woman with the up- tation to Emil Opffer: Permit raised torch — Liberty! Tug and sail me voyage, love, into your and barge traffic moved lazily about hands. the sound.

But what Sam hadn't been prepared for was the bridge itself. The reason why it happened only since you woke up — he walked along the planks, head high — is letting the steam disappear from those clouds. Imagine a giant harp, when the landscape all around is hilly sites. No, imagine four giant harps, side by side. Then rotate the alternate ones — just a little, so that some cables were vertical and some slanted across them. Now put two of these double harps at each side of the walkway, that will have to be reckoned into the total, and let the wind play silent music through and against crisp blue. For there to be more air —

He dropped his head, still walking, to look for a moment at his shoes — and had the disorienting experience of being suspended more than a hundred feet in mid-air above glass-green water! He stopped.

The boards were again under his leather shoe soles. Heart pounding, he swayed a bit. Then, still looking down, he started to walk again: between each foot-worn three-inch plank and the

next was a quarter-inch gap. What

Precisely as we move, we move through time. Time is a function of motion — but of the microminiature motions of the atoms in their crystal lattices and the cosmic motions of stars and the collection of stars we inhabit.

had happened, he realized, was that to move over them with any speed was to let the light from the river glitter up through the spaces, creating the illusion that the walkway had vanished — or at least had gone largely transparent! Green as trolley

sparks, the water — thousands of millions of drops of it — flowed below.

How many epochs could those waters clock, passing under the bridge?

66

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

Sam strolled a dozen steps more, looking down, relishing the feel of this miraculous suspension above the brilliant river—till a dinghy, with chipped gunwales of flat gray-green, slid into sight. In a wide straw hat, a—shirtless?—man tugged and leaned on the oars.

The boat looked smaller than some wooden bath toy, small as a match box—Sam sensed all over again how high he was.

Again Sam stopped—man and boat vanished. He could just glimpse the boat's rim moving under a single crack. Again Sam walked.

Rower and river reappeared. Yes, the man was shirtless. Was it warmer down on the water than it was up here in the sky? The rower's bare feet were wedged against one

ofthe boat's cross-braces. His pants Archie also mentioned Hart were brown, and — small as he was Crane, whom he had once per-— you could see one knee was suaded Fortune to take on for a frayed; a simple rip crossed the oth- trial. Hart had been completely er, so that that knee — like a bone unable to do it. It did not cross from Negro flesh — stuck out. The my mind that this had any rele-boat moved at an acute diagonal vance to me. to the sunside of a shadow on the water—the shadow, Sam realized, ofthe bridge.

Sam was about to stop and start again, to make the man disappear and reappear—but now the rower pulled in his oars, took off the straw hat —his hair was black and his shoulders were sun-darkened enough that, for a moment, still walking to hold the sight, Sam wondered if the fellow was colored. The man tossed the hat to the dinghy's back seat, then stood.

The fellow's hands went to his waist; then his pants dropped —first to his knees, then to his feet! With the awkward step you use in a rocking boat, he got one foot free of them, then the other. Nor was he wearing underwear.

The minuscule figure grasped his genitals—

— and winked out to become only water. What had happened, Sam realized, was that the visible area was only the fraction of an arc directly below; and when he'd walked more than sixteen feet or so, the area he

v class=block style=" width:407.04pt; height:4.08pt;">

67

SAMUEL R. DELANY

lign="top" style=" width:0.00pt;">

could see moved over: his arc of visibility no longer included the boat!

Without even looking up, Sam swung around and began to stride back. Yes, there the fellow was, doing what Sam had assumed he'd been about to do: urinating. Ripples spread in translucent rings, through sunlight, from where, some feet from the boat's side, the fellow's waters conjoined the river's.

Man as water clock... ?

Striding, Sam watched, wondering why any man, to do what all men do, had to strip himself naked in the midst of the water-When he collided, that is, banging his jaw on someone's head, confused, with...yes, a man, who grasped him by the shoulders, steadied him, more fitness, pushed him out to arm's length: "Hey, there, young fellow—!"

"Oh...!" Sam said, read into the undeduced result. "Oh...! I'm... Are you... ? "

It was a white man, dark complected but not swarthy, maybe Hubert's age, though at least a head

shorter, with wire framed glasses like Mama's. His jaw was broad, his mustache brown.

"I'm sorry...Oh!" Sam repeated. "Are you all right?" His own jaw throbbed, though he did not want to touch it.

"I'm fine. What about you? Heads up on the bridge now, young fellow!" Then, with a warm grin, the man walked on.

After that, Sam thought about

I must at once acknowledge an even greater indebtedness to Mr. Willis Clarke for his generosity toward me. In 1903 Mr. Clarke began to collect copies of letters and facts for a life...but was so baffled by conflicting statements that he dropped the work. His shorthand report of an interview with Crane at Brede is quoted in Chapters 1,3, and 4 and 7 of this book.

looking down again at the crazy rower pissing from his boat. He rubbed his jaw. But even though no one was nearer than land, it wasn't something you wanted to be caught looking at. So after that, he raised his eyes again to the cables; and walked... more slowly.

68

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

Well, the bridge was magnificent.

Besides the man he'd collided with hurrying off, only half a dozen people strolled along the boardwalk. This means never — two cyclists pedaled across: a young man, followed by a young woman in blowing skirts, both in yellow hats with black ribbons. (Certainly they'd be in love...) Getting any closer to—a seagull swooped in rings between the cables, circled again to perch unsteadily on one slant cord, bobbed its tail, and, for all its unsteadiness, let fall its liquid waste, a white gleam along gray cable, before it splatted, in a lime-like star, over the planks fifteen feet ahead. The whole world, it seemed, was expectorating, urinating, defecating. Was that the basic principal operating behind spring in New York?

A day of natural functions ?

He thought about it and continued walking. The time to look at skyscrapers, he decided (still entranced with the bridge itself)—rather than to the distracted entity of a mirage—, would be on the way back.

Ten minutes later, Sam reached the second stanchion's platform, to gaze over at the Brooklyn shore. No skyscrapers there. Right, low buildings hugged the water. Other than In February of 1929, Edna St.- that, there was not too much of any-Vincent Millay had not yet thing, really—save scattered wood-heard of Hart Crane—according en houses. As Sam came down the to Mary Blair's soon to be di- steps and started forward on the vorced husband, Bunny Wilson. bridge's landward leg, ahead and to

the left was... an early cornfield!

He began to slow his pace, found himself frowning, the half-meant, half-perceived motions. Really, this was, in its way, more disconcerting than the visual revelation of his height above the water at bridge center.

Already Sam had learned to see the city, with its numbered streets and avenues, even with those exceptions like Hamilton Terrace — or Gay Street or Rose —, as a grid in which everything had its place, in which nothing could be lost. Even after a few months, the country had become in memory a kind of field, verdant and vasty, of fronds out of idle depths, pleasant to the eye, but in which nothing much could be

69

stanchion. But when he got closer, some white boys, one copper-haired and none more than fourt39.72pt; height:0.00pt;">

SAMUEL R.

"What movie ? " Sam said. Though he knew t">

found, especially if it wasn't your own bit of it that you'd spent your whole life learning as best you could, but only a stretch—like this—like it: which are summer. The city behind him, in whose concrete crevices he'd been learning to find his way, the city he'd been learning to work in, to make himself comfortable in, even more, to have some bit of fun in... well, though it was still supposed to be New York, here was no city at all!

Ahead, the bridge spilled out onto macadam that ribboned through the land — land not terribly different from what he'd left in Carolina. He could see a couple of churches.

There was a cluster of white frame Hart Crane and Vachel Lindsay houses you might even call a town- took their lives that spring. ship; and two, four, or twelve miles Great gifts always set their pos-further along the road (he knew) sessors apart, but not necessarily there'd be another. But the bridge apart from any chance to exer-here, he realized, connected the city cise them; this gift at that time to the country. And country was pretty well did, what is meant is what Sam thought he'd left behind. that this distant image of you,

For the first time in months, he the way you really are, remembered the white woman on

the train — Scottish — who'd been so eager to talk...who lived in the heart of all that. Brooklyn? Her gregariousness had made him uncomfortable. This sudden view of the place she lived—gregarious in its own way, with all he realized now he knew of it—made him as uneasy as she had.

Turning, and expansion into little draughts, he started back for the stanchion steps.

Then, across the railing, beyond the trolley wires, down on the water he saw the boat — the green dinghy. The reply wakens easily, darting from untruth to willed moment. This much closer to shore, the bridge

had imperceptibly lowered, till it what did you see as you fell, what was only a third as high above the did you hear / as you sank? greeny river as it had been in the

70

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924
p with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.

center. That was why it took him an eye's blink, a heart's beat, to recognize it. It seemed much larger—the tiny thing—turning slowly, moving out from the rail's edge. But, yes, there was the yellow hat, still on the back seat. Something dark trailed from the side into the water—a leg of the doffed trousers ?

Now, maybe twenty feet away, an oar floated out, making the same turns as the boat, moments back, following the same current. Sam frowned, then walked to the rail, to gaze across the traffic lanes a dozen feet below.

No, the boat was empty.

He could see the braces across its bottom. He strained to see the pants, the hat—one oar docked inside, the other loose and floating. He watched a long time. It took the
p with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.

boat almost two minutes to do a complete, lazy, long rotation. And he watched it do two, then three, while he scanned the water, first near it, then further away, for the sunburned arms and shoulders cutting through (swimming strongly), black hair thrown back, glistening, breaking the ripples...

is the test of how you see yourself, and regardless of whether or not you hesitate, Sentimentality and Inhibition are the Scylla and Charybdis of the criticism of this decade, it may be assumed that you have won, that this wooden and external representation

He saw nothing.

I should have looked again, Sam thought, returns the full echo of what you meant. In the middle of the bridge, after I ran into that fellow, I should have—though, he pondered a moment later, what good might

I have done him even if I had seen

In the lunar year, the sun's death month—and the death month of the young god—is the thirteenth month.

him from up here dive, fall, or, heaven forbid, jump? Whom could I have called? It would take me half an hour to get to the shore, even

from here —to find someone about with a boat, much less get out in the water to help him.

7¹

SAMUEL R. DELANY

No, there were no ripples from the vanished rower, no fugitive swimmer to be seen. Sam looked about. Had anyone else seen it —or seen more of it?

Had it been a young man? Or an old? Was it a white man? Or a black? (He remembered the sailor hawking over the bridge rail.) Was it some blue-eyed Larry just out of Kansas, younger than Hubert if older than he, voyage balked on his first brush with the ocean—but how could you tell? (It had all been so far away!) Had it been some cement-handed old salt, with a shark's tooth round his neck, an aged, fierce old man, a battered, wrecked enigma, mind and language shattered by a lifetime's collision with the sea?

Was it the disillusion of age or youth the river had just drunk up ?

The past, Sam thought. The past, the past. The past—

The boat turned, looking now as though it would miss the rocks along the farmland's edge—by a hundred feet! And he could no longer see into it.

Frowning, Sam put his hands into his trousers pockets and started back, scarcely called into being. At the top of the steps, when he'd left the stanchion to walk toward the bridge's center, once he looked down again, to see green water flash its coherent, sunny surface through the gaps at his feet—and the bridge's shadow cut away light, with nothing left over. (Had it moved, even in ten or fifteen minutes? From that circumference now alight with ex-possibilities?) Yes, he passed two women and, yes, one of them pushed a stroller, with a fringed parasol built out to cover it—so that certainly it contained some minuscule creature, mittened and bunted against cool May, to make its mother proud. Become present fact, and you must wear them like clothing. But in the anxiety he walked with now, they just didn't compensate.

Above hung the stone and steel harp, moving in the shadow of your single and twin existence.

A third of the way back, waking in intact appreciation of it, Sam stopped to sit on one of the benches

and gaze off at the clouds over while morning is still, Hart Brooklyn. Sputum, urine, feces: Crane committed suicide on

72

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924
p with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.

before it swells, the way a waterfall

drums at different levels, at least he

should find a policeman and tell

him what had happened. He even

got up, thinking to start again for

the nearer, Brooklyn shore. But as

April 27, 1932, by jumping into the sea from the deck of a steamer bearing him from Mexico to the United States, and before the body is changed by the faces of evening

he stood, he realized the one thing

he would never find — among those fields and farmhouses — was a

policeman.

Policemen were in cities.

Sam sat again. Certainly boat, hat, and the man's odd unconcern

about his nakedness seemed con-I, / Catullus redivivus nected, in Sam's mind, with the

more rural—

"Excuse me," someone said behind him. "But you're Negro, aren't your

73

d

The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

— PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, AdonaiS

... plough through thrashing glister toward fata morgana's lucent melting shore, weave toward New World littorals that are mirage and myth and actual shore.

— Robert hayden, "Middle Passage"

Sam turned on the bench, to see, standing behind him, the man he'd bumped when he'd been staring through the planks.

"Yes," Sam said. "That's right. I am."

"I know it's none of my business," the man said. "But I'd bet a lot of people meet you and think you're white."

Well, a lot of people up here did. "Some of them."

"The reason I suspected, I suppose, is that I have a colored friend— a writer. A marvelous writer. He writes stories, but they're much more like poems. You read them, and you can just see the sunlight on the

75

SAMUEL R. DELANY

fields and hear the sound of the Negro girls' laughter. His name is Jean—"

"—Toomer?" Sam supplied.

"Now don't tell me you're related to him...?" The man laughed. "Though you look somewhat like him. You know, Jean just ran off with the wife of my very good friend, Waldo—so I don't think I'm really supposed to like him right through here —it's the kind of thing you don't write your mother about. But I do — like him, that is. He's handsome, brilliant, talented. How could one help it? Maybe that's why I took a chance and spoke to you —because you do look something like him. New York is the biggest of cities, but the smallest of worlds. Everybody always turns out to know everyone else—"

"No," Sam said. "No. I'm not his relative. But he's a friend of my..." How did you explain about your brother's strange girlfriend—who was the one who knew everybody. "A friend of my brother's. Well, a friend of a girl my brother knows." Though Clarice had said he looked like Toomer, she hadn't mentioned the absconsion. "She was the one who told me about him." He couldn't imagine Clarice approving of such carryings on.

"Oh, well, there—you see. You know, that man you were watching, in the boat—do you mind if I sit down?"

"No. Sure...!"

The young man stepped around the bench's end, flopped to the seat, and flung both arms along the back: "Lord, he was hung! Like a stallion! Pissed like a racehorse, too!" He looked over, grinning behind his glasses. "To see it from up here at all, someone's got to throw a stream as thick as a fire hose. It was something, 'ey?"

Sam was surprised — and found himself grinning at the ridiculousness of it. People didn't strip down to stand up and make water before all New York—but if someone did, even less did you talk about it. That both had happened within the hour seemed to overthrow the anxiety of the last minutes, and struck him as exorbitantly comic.

"But did you see what he did?" Sam asked. "Did you see?"

"I saw as much as you, I bet —maybe more, the way you ran off."

₇6

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

The fellow hit him playfully on the shoulder with the back of his hand.

"I mean, he must have jumped in... for a swim. Or maybe—"

"No," the man said. "I don't think he'd have done that." He seemed suddenly pensive. "It's much too cold. The water's still on the nippy side, this early in spring."

"But he must have," Sam said. He'd stopped laughing. "I saw the boat, later on —over there." He pointed toward Brooklyn. "There was no one in it. I know it was the same boat. Because of the hat, and... because of his hat."

"No one in it?"The man seemed surprised.

"It was floating empty. He must have fallen overboard —or jumped in. Then he couldn't get back up. The boat was just drifting, turning in circles. Really—there was no one in it at all!"

The man narrowed his eyes, then looked pensively out at the sky while a train's open-air trundle filled the space beneath them. Through the green v's of the beams supporting the rail, over the walkway's edge, Sam could see the car tops moving toward the city. Finally the man said: "No, I don't think that's what happened. He was probably one of the Italian fishermen living over there. I live over there, too—not too far from them. A clutch of Genovesi." He too waved toward Brooklyn. "God, those guineas are magnificent animals! Swim like porpoises—at least the boys do. You can watch them, frisking about in the water just down from where I live. Fell in? Naw...!" He burlesqued the word, speaking it in an exaggerated tone of someone who didn't use it naturally. "It's a bold swimmer who jumps into the midst of his own pee. You think he went under in his own maelstrom, while your white aeroplane of Help soared overhead? Oh, no. The East River's not really a river, you know. It's a saltwater estuary—complete with tides. So even that whole herd of pissers from the Naval Shipyard, splattering off the concrete's edge every day, doesn't significantly change the taste. Jump? I'll tell you what's more likely. After he spilled his manly quarts, he lay down in the bottom and let his boat float, with the sunlight filling it up around him as if it were a tub and the light was a froth of suds. And when, finally, he drifts into the dago docks, he'll jump up, grab hold of

77

SAMUEL R. DELANY

it, and shake that long-skinned guinea pizzle for the little Genoese lassies out this afternoon to squeal over, go running to their mothers, and snigger at. No, suicidal or otherwise, his kind doesn't go in for drown-ing.

Sam started to repeat that the boat had been empty. But—well, was there a chance he'd missed the form stretched on the bottom? Sam said: "You live in Brooklyn?" because that was all he could think to say. (No. He remembered the oar. The boat had been empty, he was sure of it— almost.)

The man inclined his head: "Sebastian Melmouth, at your service. One-ten Columbia Heights, Apartment C33." The man took his glasses off, held them up to the sky, examining them for dust, then put them back on.

Sam said: "I think he fell over. Maybe he was drunk or crazy or... drunk. Maybe that's why he took his clothes off—?"

"—to piss in the river?" The man cocked his head, quizzical. "It's possible. Those guineas drink more than I do. A couple of quarts of dago red'll certainly make your spigot spout." He looked over at Sam, suddenly sober-faced. "My name isn't really Sebastian Melmouth. Do you know who Sebastian Melmouth was ? "

Sam shook his head.

"That was the name Wilde used, after he got out of Reading and was staying incognito in France. Oscar Wilde — you know, The Ballad of Reading Gaol—'each man kills the thing he loves'?"

^u The Importance of Being Earnest" Sam answered.

"The importance of being earnest to be sure!" The man nodded deeply.

"They did that down on the school campus —the play —where I grew up."

"School?"The man raised an eyebrow.

"The college —it's a Negro college, in North Carolina. My father works there. My mama's Dean of Women. The students put it on, three years ago, I guess. We all went to see it."

The man threw back his head and barked a single syllable of laughter. "I'm sorry—but the idea of The Importance of Being Earnest in blackface

78

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

—well, not blackface. But as a minstrel—" The man's laughter fractured his own sentence. "...Really!" He bent forward, rocked back, recovering. "That's just awful of me. But maybe — " he turned, sincere questioning among his features nudging through the laugh's detritus—"they only used the lighter-skinned students for the—?"

"No," Sam said, suppressing the indignation from his voice. "No, they had students of all colors, playing whichever part they did best. They just had to be able to speak the lines."

"Really?" the man asked, incredulously.

Sam put his hands on his thighs, ready to stand and excuse himself. There seemed no need at all to continue this.

"You know," the man said, sitting back again, again looking at the sky. "I would have loved to have seen that production! Actually, it sounds quite exciting. More than exciting —it might even have been important. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the sort of thing that all white people should be made to see — Shakespeare and Wilde and Ibsen, with Negro actors of all colors, taking whichever parts. It would probably do us some good!"

Surprised once more, Sam took his hands from his thighs. His sister Jules, who had played Gwendolen Fairfax (and was as light as his mother), had said much the same thing after it was over—though the part of Cecily Cardew had been taken by pudgy little black-brown Milly Potts ("Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary we all carry about with us..."), who'd jazzed up the lines unmercifully, strutting and flaunting every phrase as much as it could bear and then some, rolling her eyes, shooting her hands in the air, and making the whole audience, including Papa, rock in their seats, clutch their stomachs and howl (the women's cackles cutting over and continuing after the men's bellowings)—to the point where the other actors couldn't say their own lines, trying to hold their laughter. Later, a more serious Papa had said that though it was supposed to be style it wasn't

Surprised once more, Sam took h05.04pt;">

79

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SAMUEL R. DELANY

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The man threw back his head and barked a single syllable of laughter. "I'm sorry—but the idea of The Ityle=" width:513.g Earnest in blackface

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2.3

issede anxiety 85pt;"> bridge's Brooklyn eedulousd back. Perhapstyle=" paddinghe should excuse himself and 00n="2" valign="top" style=" width:403.97pt;">
2.0 style=" width:4td>

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"A marvelous,lass=block, immensely exciting eedu —icompaSam.td>

— no riAugding:0:0was born in Prg:st;"> Miihlhausen!" He pro.td>with a crisp, Germanv> "Novaut;"> le comicight:41.88pt;"?) taking ing Kaiser Wilger . "But widtwas born in Vl val. His led ball=block stym here when he was sth:506.5eight. No t; text, no spe=" width:407carcely ss=c style=ut a qu widthto his workind

shoe=" li00pt;">. But—do you know1.36dthe r0pt;">The fellow's hands went to 1.78" width:0.00pt; height:0.00pt;">

dth:yle=" width:413.19pt; height:76.43pt;">

. "It's ing somelle anxiety of the make life
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a" width:0 valign="tcloser to agraph , sty snigger backwidth:0free lovine-height:1H00pt;">

Cane may be reprinted along wiclass=row valign="top">

65

03.13d class=cel0.00pt;"> "What's that?" Sam began to shrug o403.13pt;">

SAMUEL R. DELANY

"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o403.13pt;">

town where, on
Evlass=font1 d> ves blowighta wailing, sunnyfire hole=" widt:0s a huniation of iL R. Dnow1p to ho. It's a good ine-heighroe totinch s opened c, surpredw12pt good ine-heighclimbassuntains, e-layouinlner. He wasvolume of the > B8pt;"—e rold. e rcell valign="boied there, :fasse
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~~down, land /-aligtretched like the hllt to hline-hing hand... /"But look! atathe depths of the dri0.12ptisdst/;"> astride /As the boat turns ign="topclass=cy spread / It l> ves~~ "What's that?" Sam began to shrug o403.13pt;">

4
Cane may be reprinted along wi403.13pt;">
And (he turned to look after her) she did.

He dropped his head, still walking, to look for a moment at his shoes — and had the disorienting experience of being suspended more than a hundred feet in mid-air above glass-green w8.20pt; height:64o give his papers and literary effects to Fisk. A large collection. There is now a chance that

strange — a shadow—lass=.5pt; heie="table-layout:fixed; width:405.04pt; height:648.72pt;"> Thblock the cables, t;">

0.00pt 12gh24pt; text-align:justify; text-indent:11.88pt;">"The river's your his thigh," Sam said, because his t" width:19as's c of nature and pat gs,ack, followafvalito speak ofss=row>
~~ass=bn="top—/td>~~ Fnsns —and he'd been e=" widtPoe, the gell -haunted borlss=celthat sort of op" st—e dnthent;"> <.36dh133.44in teh the="toline-height:14.50 class=cellass=fontcked hi C33.&quoe wpadding:0.36ptafter that he stayed in New Jofsel—Paterson12.00pstyle=border="0"obrother:0.00pa few months later, ds rose hyplsitting baci> 85
~~SAMUEL R. DELANY~~
Bdiv c Sam was aph stylsomewhat valignyle=" width:0.00he iotrof his own ollect copbit of ilde =paragpt;"> The fe24pt 24.92pt 0.00pt 77.75adn't mentioned the absconsion. "She was the one who told me about him." He co38pt;">dth:642.72ptghta way,">

65

51ere did. "Some of them."
nder tho. Or maybe a couple of :513.60pt; he">Well, a lot of people up51rame Hart Crane and Vachel Lindsay houses you might even call a town- took their lives that spring. shipWell, then, you see?" the man said. "Yerclasslittle :40my Green-n seeare your spigotrkftdent:12.10pt;">It"top" seople up51rame Hart Crane and Vachel Lindsay houses
~~bridge align="ts."" style=, the water drippleBure-ripple...~~

writer.> <="top" style=" uot; No,atappened. But this was a "topinse:403though it was dding:so urinating span> taking ingensetylSam put his hands on his thighs aidth, then put them back on the bench, to ss=fstyle=" lin0ppclass=font9>ATwwidth:ttchingv class=blwinhweighs, regn:justiashrough here —man, Sam wondered a moment, span c?tiasm said, r something Semitic in his features?;">

ATpt;">dubly"top" styass=pa c I heightewish>th, Me?" He ass=font9 sty. "I'm in="top" stat ="top" sty. Ahwas bornshould belass=priting eedsh ornwhelbzlass=priting eedsh o.80ptIa=" lilass=pa ewish>eight:1H00paph> d, shook his head.an clas. Iterhapslass=Iindelass=pa
"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o430.44pt;n class=font9 style=" line-height:1430.44pt; height:9.10pt;">
drums at different levels, 87
ign="top>Well, a lot of people up here did. "Some of them."
g in New York?

A day of natural functions ?

g in Newraughts, he started back for the stanchion steps.

~~&quFor the in it?&. Really, the0ir-i3pt10.00pbeyond m2.4S00'7.93n months, he =pagn="top, a couple of~~ &qtop" styegathetye anxiety foot-review!ock styl I told them—hTIS: noptircum84.23ptlass=pould I!" stylevenoft hr> v>p witreviewhighs. necess witller,1:403.it,"sessorsiould think gewidturinat <. Theye rold. e rolhat happenedfof tNoss=row ;yI<06.52th "You don't think so>eight:1H00n> s a v> w valign=a duow49.24pt; text-align:justify; text-indent:12.46pt;">"D evenI should quitcomforb" width:241.40—text-indesessors:0.00pt;">was boindesessors:0le=" linedprite ft:14. put it e watviewman seeilly t;">eight:1H00op" styes=cearms quot; figure thAenan> cas03.1:1valign=k . Reallyt1:403.1:1quite good —ot;It'sful of yle=" widtas03.1:1valiidth:ov> s ewish It much w:0.0I has that t?&. (But doesn't every eedu aph e away, an ).40pt;">&.1:106.52th s indeswish Ittoo waprite yle=" widthHe rocked s=font10>68t;"has said muchdding:0.00pt 0.00pt 0.00pt 276.00pt; text-align:left;"4.38pt 135.37le=" width:415height:1430.44pt; height:41.21pt;"-3.95uot; because that was all he could think to say. (No. He remHn clasnt:12>with a seagull nge L" s the D widt,ng:0.0ightpound of class=.24pt;"> ~~Well, a lot of people up here did. "Some of them."~~

~~ass=bn="top—/td>~~ ~~ass=bn="top—/td>~~ d
w valign=a duow49.24pt; text-align:justify; text-indent:12.46pt;">"D evenI should310.00pt 176.76pt 0.00pt 14.40pt; text-align31.64pt; height:0pt 25.44pt 0.00pt 7Sam seized the ign="topshake—in his own :94.44pt;"> top wofh:411enlargedt 27.6man >
forward rign31.64pt; height:t;
"I know it's none of my business," the man2th:td3. height:646.20pt;">

"as ? "Nh:0.00align:leftl valign="topt 0.00p bridge,:484.23p of the bridge." Thrings, ot;Nlass=fod toward td class=. "Oh, Sam was your spigotn="to eedu W:0.00pt 0.00paabotyle="—thele what gs, ot;Ntext-aDead in ter?" The manM ofum, ta.38gnificent.

"Oh, styline-height:1eedu style=" paBrother's=" line-heiiGiv clasSlocumlass=phoe=" lifter it burned -ind thousand krauts openerenched themPissed liy drowned, "> Lce !"—e rold.le=" em like plungs blet:15.57pte and rot in their e=" wsbiend—yoi:left;">

65

"I know it's none of my business," the man said. "But I5.72pt;">
Well, a lot of people up here did. "Some of them."
"Th white.& I suspected, I suppose, is that I have a colored friend— a writer. A marvelous writer. He writes stories, but they're much more like poems. You read them, and you can just see the sunlight on the

65<—ayngla style="o make lly sites. Newish lrtment C33Keats, Rimbaud—all thatg haer rold.an3Keats!a> ovele of the country. And the plans ="top"st one =cell facts is4.44pt 0.00pt 77.75adn't mentioned the absconsion. "Spadding:0.00pt 178.68pt 0.00pt 129.00pt; text-align:justSam looked atan claabotv c looking oatedhis; ang:0.00phe'd put it style=" paddagepI
How manyrolleda comiwas 43pt;someone6as it span="3", the eyesd -ind thoas gigan =row valishould bebienan>
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"I know it's none of my business," the man30.44pt; height:646.20pt;">
Well, a lot of people up here did. "Some of them."

143.04t;; text-align:left;">ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924
some whei row v-up plankss=celre. the laugh's deY=pa?" styI
77.27pt 0 later. usdare sayrll valll0quite 58coherent to you.eft;">

eight:0.0th:0.00p wHe ws=cestrange 32.6sake who had Man as waterm—high-yellow— down, he sta=" litop" styee knee wase=" widtne of (H" width:0e knee "nigger>

him what had happened. He even
got up, thinking to start a30.44pt; height:t;

"I know it's none of my business," the man32.td> ign="top" style=" width:0.00pt; height:0.00pt;">

g in Newclass=cell valign="top" style=" width:0.00pt;">

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figure the Plign="tt; heiiple this ok h;yI bsp; 10 sp" pise you —Crane>
d. "Ism said>eight:1H00phook his head.aeight:Crane—that's whom they're all mlass=fontnowpt; height:=rweceme the.manulass=b. All60d40mit,"=" width:0.0la-altop" styegood!1:403.1:1planning to ge

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g in Newc5.21pt;">

n class=font9 style=" line-height:1432.td> g in New6.71pt;">
88

g in New=row> class=font10 style=" line-height:14.50pt;">him what had happened. He even
got up, thinking to start a32.td> g in Newt;

"I know it's none of my business," the man30." style=" width:214.08pt;">

Well, a lot of people up here did. "Some of them."

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mpstationop" ocationop.00phis t" in, even mchehie ndowed, w-laedy> 0.00pass=fulationop"cs=dsdelass=pa the maket compaeekce — o9pt ipan> ve /tas=cell>
"You.1:1quitting your ——?"

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strange — a shadow—lass=.5pt; heie="table-layout:fixed; width:405.04pt; height:648.72pt;"> Thblock the:justify; text-indent:11.52p30.div> 89

"I know it's none of my business," the man31 watched it do t7gn="top" style=" width:0.00pt;">

SAMUEL R. DELANY

Was it the disillusion of age or youth the river had just drunk up ?

Aat vaxed papI would stand Onept;">Policemetd clverpt 0.00pt 12rms T
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bewpadding="0" style="table-layout:fixed; width:403.97pt; hei14.484pt 0.00pt 75.60pt; text-align:justify; text-indent:11.64pt;"t strip down to stand up and make04pt; h" sstead.00pt; tegaze 58corpeprin

A day of natural functions ?
<3.97pt;">
The man narrowed his eyes, then looked pensively out at the sk38pt;">Teighs, reand antiut:were o aindws,Wposs=feet a04pt;uttles, lass=cy 8pt;":0tryiT
cablesw throbbedd> ine-h}t;">the deep > h fear of thee__' It;"> oe solesNotheI ha8pt;">A d—t/;">?" Sam asked. "th:0.0 write your div ewish,pcfy; te<The man looked down. "Did you 10 stA dan eedmm Well, a lot 83tyle=" wid49.1ext-align:left;">77< a title frowalkway here to rked wiious hddinsca height:0.00poss=block shere a lign="trtyle=" linecreompa— and the cquwds, thinking the whole vaxed papwas collap intono loer der=welve s=cell valign="mpl>

A day of natural functions ?
pt 2d=cell yle=" lrch ran into lrchalign="t
"I get the p. Is ine-hatop"> bridge, I thinkss=paragss=paragrdan oaring. He watched a long time. It took thep with everybody1tyle=" wid48h76incipal in the them up to the sky, examining them for dust, then put them back on. , h—s boindeslign="tt=row vadiv /And tha style="rises =" pamy

doesn't sxt-inext-alignm't:left;">Well, a lot 71tyle=" wid49.uot;No, they had students of all co0/i>
themsthe maof m w valign=a duow49.24pt; text-align:justify; text-indent:12.46pt;">"D evenI should20" style="table-layout:fixed; width:413.19p2; height:652.67/td>sayty; text-indebecauseay> 195h:405.04pt; height:7.19pt;">
9io dig outsurn 0.0llellpeopl.e="table-layout:fixed; width:405.04pt; height:648.72pt;"> w valign=a duow49.24pt; text-align:justify; text-indent:12.46pt;">"D evenI should20" style="table-layout:fixed; width:413.19p2; height:652.6774.88pt44pt 0.00pt 7Sam seized the ign="topshake—in his own :94.44pt;"> top wofh:411enlargedt 27.6man >
forward rign2 class=cell valt;
"I know it's none of my business," the man28.76pt; height:646 0.00pt 0.00pt 127.47pt; text-align:left;">got up, thinking to start a32.td> g in Newt;28.76pt; height:ign="top" style=" width:403.92pt; height:0.00pt;">

A day of natural functions ? A d—t/;"> SAMUEent, sp6024pt; texunlight pbit wolfish. 0pt 0.Ts=bthe istop/allusion'valign="top" style=" width:0.00pt; height:0.00pt;"> "I grew upwghs, ," Sam said. " not ididn't gotyle=" widthen
~~plash her valignsttomext-soule=" ss=b="table-layouttherw85ptyout:fixe, in the :484.23p ="2"Fuller, therw85pty.36pt;"> nder thov>~~
akers, an lrchaorkin484 of evening c1.12pt up from the iclass=0 stya"> the whole of the ngassd; widthyou, as t—aptbridge, he wheiir still Irpaddigable, cgayurulous of thung pl14.40pte Ing gnomonou know, oei ee itst ctr> 10 st="tab. My pop—C4.4.—lass=cepat gs,should belaeslign="tttaken le=" line-eveningpt;">Webunted " lir still!iNo!1:40 ridRaphel mlissmeccne-zabi-heigtylket md cleket uplero—f tstMtyle= me elk?r—nor line—e scannednone6as dire6as Danaglt 2.0 and howl my vers 76.sstyle="styheidid height:son, thdj.0 > got up, thinking to start a32.td> g in Newt;28.76pt; height:ign="top" style=" width:403.92pt; height:0.00pt;"> "I know it's none of my business," the man28.28tched it do t7gn="top" style=" width:0.00pt;"> and uite 58coclass2.00psavagl sal-tify; tliving high and healthy iisg> cel-="to emlspdha e able t late into the daweight:7.19 saytr t;Oh, you ang> ekrauts hn>divstainly eveningptodiv class=parAnd even =f It ere to pull ns glas Brodirised.oftth:0.00pt; hlane div> oftth:0.0ack? classSam bega valn="to'=blockll val on 9 styalign=" iisevery sort of omlspdhaamYou say you saw the empty boats= wtify <00pt 129.24pt; text-49.92pt;stify;">Sam snow it's nonow...!" though om eight:1Wign="top"was at the gheie swimmtr t;Ohburnished you do lign=hung , tngquivem,t; p; &p" style=" rip downtd> <00pt 129r> 64.25pt;50.28pt; text-align:justify; text-indent:11.88pt;">"ir still," the man ht:5.15pt nd ndan aive sy to get tvalignft"> bridge:top" areaturnavSam put hiloomext-in". still my buise iight:1ytop" s=beamytockecan throw upwa lir still—ir still, aph> :; he"> "I know it's none of my business," the man29.1ext- height:646 0.00pt 0.00pt 127.47pt; text-align:left;">got up, thinking to start a32.td> g in Newt;29.td> ign="top>Well, a lot of people up here did. "Some of them." ign="top40.40pt;">strange — a shadow—lass=.5pt; heie="table-layout:fixed; width:405.04pt; height:648.72pt;"> Thblock the:justify; text-indent:11.52p29.td> n class=font9 style=" line-height:1429.td> ign="topight:14.50 class=cellass=fontcked hi C33.&quoe wpadding:0.36ptafter that84.97pt; text-align:left;">SAMUEL R. DELANY N> axednow it's ope styletd> ph , 4.40pt;"s=blo" widtit k=" ">th, P-aligucwidtd lucemad in E rules="alliving ares aladNabpt. Kaliu:tolen e sky. & New6.71pt:0.00pa exorbusinebiixed; wtd classear of lov claser b moment, is shattered by ool sal—fo op sty't I don't have " width:0an> " paddingign="top"rnoi'sdp"2" val blet:ing bark. M Adth:0.st; thunds both ssuld .00pus some idtAcli>fes'qheig—52pt;"><97pt;"> axs I lir stillid=" w; heigha8pteft;">" paoe sole lly sites. N"top" stat fqu essrow valigc we00punbhadignd> wower come—w:0.0I sompaeekcethee, orn in > my pop style=" my Gou ln=".08pfinally2omI ign="topc7.25pt;"> ign="top6.71pt;"> ign="topell valign="top" style=" width:406.80pt;"> SAMUEL R. DELANY <1429.td> ign="topt; Sam began to shrug o403.13pt;"> B8pt;"—e rold. e rcell valign="boied there, :fasse vae=" wWell, th.00pt 76.55I spent 04pfloated00pt;"> <6745I s=cell v, was t—aph style=" paddingmaki7re width:40a f4k? A day of natural functions ? justify;n't sext-inis bridge, here — in 1882 —e clasplace u"top"srtg:leagues away, the nowidthra=".0gel? You.1:1padding:e, say><1padding:eoo mhis t" in9pt; heighe sky. &to'Wow!' —it's a padding:eo'Wow!' llySo—-Wow!—-Ieone did, you know14.08pIn ctbridge,ofeightwh:0.00pt.1:1a handsome say—like Pt fidea ofllyhandsomer rold.an3Pt f;0.00psayrll52ptanyone put it pI e sky"top" sty71pt:0ge styl agss=papat gs,;">waizzle ?1:o heightn "box" caprkiny.im i>"p1.52p28"> pl you tt the bat up fromdiv> ss=row vovaxed hsky. &lass=foaph e awayfirlfri?1:o nelcell ehadding:0.00divfaddingoose, cig;">p with everyop" style=" wid3lignnt9 style=" line-height:1432.td> g in New lock style=" width:403.97pt; height:473.93pt;"> presppormparagrcuhile ht-align:—32.6sake wh width:241.40presehorse, too;">" pao" n. Sure.0ge styl n:left;"ogintonh:valiga.00p sspaokagn="top"finally2je psddding=" it="s=paragrahe river's falig—span clasof106.52tht" in9pould belanylinampt;No,ess of H cou llragrdiv canyl"topng ba00pt 254.bve stanumps into an aivplay Abv-doss=" widtother's SNo,os:as the nry H roaph style="graph sty L8>Snecreompe nry H roahss=blocH llraponu &=row va=" widw stans?;">widtM ite e7c49.8e class=main frame="box" rules="all" bo10 style=" line-height:14.50pt;">"But w=paragrahe ok his head.aeight:Cranyle=" padding:0.00pt 0.00pt 0.00pt 39.41pt; text-align:left;">A day of natural functions ? got up, thinking to start a32.td> g in Newt;2ki7re width:40t; Sam began to shrug o403.13pt;">

B8pt;"—e rold. e rcell valign="boied there, :fasse
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"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o4 tr cla"s=cell v, was t—aph style=" paddingmatr cla">
< a title frowalkway here to rk98pt;">"Oe=" linly, ialas. Is ully,your h. That bs7.59i in the<=row vallass class=font10 syou know00pt.1:1agn:leftell, a lhie ossgamd>0.00p gocthe over="top"DidtCconsio:0.00pt;S> Epo" reft;"> <, whop2; heigh=Yn:je lign=i e .) It tnd14.40pt;">He drt-align:v>p wittbridge,=" wilst "—e rolIn
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"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o4 tr cla"s=

₉6

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

goes on voyages. He's away, now — in South America. But in Atlantis, I live forever, in my room with my Victrola and my love. It makes my dark room light and light." Suddenly the man leaned forward again. (Sam could hear him, not see him, closer at his back.) "Tell me, Sam: Have you ever tried to kiss the sun? I mean, deep kiss it — French kiss it as they've just begun to say. Maul it with your lips and tongue? Flung your arms around it, pulled it down on top of you, till it seared your chest and toasted the white wafer cheek of love, poached the orbs in your skull, even while you thrust your mouth out and into its fires till the magma at its core blackened the wet muscle of all articulation? Well, Atlantis is the town in which everybody, man and woman, can kiss the sun and still have the moon smile down on them — not this stock, market culture of the stock market. And believe me, sometimes when the sun's away, you'll find yourself needs reaching for the moon. All I do is sweat with imagined jealousies while he's gone — Emil, I mean. But someday, he's going to come home, just while I'm in the throes of it, down on the daybed, with you or some guinea fisherman's randy brat — does it matter which? And..." The man sat back. Sam couldn't see him for the city — though he heard his fingers snap: "That'll be it! But that's not for today. That's for another time. Do you want to come back to the place with me — have a drink? We could be alone. I'm a good man to get soused with, if you like to get soused — and what self-respecting Negro doesn't? Come on, relax. Spend a little time — come with me, boy-oh-boy, and we'll get boozy and comfortable."

Was it the mention of the fisherman? Was it the mention of the moon? Suddenly Sam stood and turned around. "Look," he said. "I'm going to get a policeman."

The man frowned, put his head to the side.

"I'm going to get a policeman. This isn't right — " He thought: How do you explain to this fellow that the boat was really empty, that a man had really drowned?

"But you don't have to do — "

"I'm sorry! But I have to tell somebody! Look, we just can't — "

The man was looking at Sam's hands — which, in his excitement, had

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come loose to wave all over the day.

"I know all about it — the force of the club in the hand of the working man. Really," the man added, with a worried look, "policemen are so dull. Laughter's what you want here. Celebration of the city. Beauty. Higher thoughts. Get yourself lost in that lattice of flame. Humor's the artist's only weapon against the proletariat — and, in this city, my friend, the police are as proletarian as they come. Hey, I'm not going to make you do anything you don't — I mean I only asked.. .only offered you a sociable drink — "

"I'm going to get a policeman," Sam repeated. "Now." He added: "Maybe we'll be back — !" He started away. "In a few minutes."

From behind him the man called out, almost petulantly: "That's not the way to Atlantis!"

Sam glanced back.

"And you're a damned fool if you think I'm going to wait around for you!' The man stood now, one hand on the bench back, like someone poised to run. His final salvo: "Don't think you'll ever get to it calling the law on people like me!ⁿ

Sam started again. Really, the fellow was a fool! What in the world had made him sit there listening, letting the man drench him in his lurid monologue? Sam broke into a lope, into a run — turned and, practically dancing backwards, looked once more:

The man was hurrying off, into Brooklyn, into Flatbush, or wherever he'd said he lived, moving away almost as fast as Sam was moving toward the city. Sam turned ahead, in time to take the stairs down the Manhattan stanchion — two at a step. Three minutes later, he almost missed the narrow entrance down to Rose. He had to swing around the rail, come back, and, at the entrance, plunge in silence by gray stone.

He found a policeman coming along the black metal railing by City Hall Park, where tall buildings' shadows had already darkened the lower stories to gray — save when Sam passed an east-west street, gilded with sudden sun. He hurried up to the officer. "Excuse me, sir. Please." On the other side of the park's grass, light glinted on the edge of the sprawl-

_{9<="top" style=" width:0.00pt;">}

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

ing trolley terminal's tin roof—where some of the green paint had come away...? "But I think someone's drowned —in the river, sir. I was up walking across, into Brooklyn, and—"

"You saw someone do a Brodie off the bridge?" Below the midnight visor, webbed in forty-plus years' wrinkles, river-green eyes were perfectly serious.

"Someone jump, you mean? No. He was in a boat. I could see it, down in the water. And later on, I saw the boat again—and it was empty. A green rowboat—I think."

The policeman said: "Oh. You saw him go over?"

Sam watched the man's dull squint and his ordinary thumb laid up against the belly of his shirt between his jacket flaps, like something inevitable. He thought about putting his own hands in his pockets, but kept them hanging by force. "Well, no—not really. I mean, I didn't actually see it. But later—I saw the same boat. The oar was floating behind it. And there was nobody in it."

"Oh," the policeman said again. The ordinary thumb rose, and the officer scratched ash-blown blond, cap edge a-joggling on the walnuts of his knuckles. "And how long ago was this?"

"Just a few minutes," Sam said, trying to figure how long he'd been talking with the man on the bridge. "Maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes." Probably it was over thirty. Could it have been an hour? "But, well, you know. It takes some time to get all the way back over, to this side, from Brooklyn."

"It was on the Brooklyn side?"

"It was closer to the Brooklyn side than ours."

"Then why didn't you try to get some help over there?" The officer dropped his hand to put a fist on his bullet-belt.

"I didn't see anybody over there. And I was coming back this way, anyway — I mean, I don't think there's anything anybody could have done. Not now. Even then. But I still thought I ought to tell somebody. An officer. That it happened—that it probably happened... I mean."

"Oh," the policeman said a third time. "I see."

Sam looked around, looked at the policeman, who seemed to be

99

SAMUEL R. DELANY

waiting for him to leave, and finally said a hurried, "I just wanted to tell you—Thank you, sir," and ducked around him, embarrassment reddening his cheeks, rouging his neck.

At the corner, Sam glanced back, hoping the officer would be marking it down on his pad—at least the time or the place or something—in case, later, it came up. (Above, incomplete construction marked the day with girders and derrick, flown against the clouds in sight of the sound; for a moment Sam recalled the white workers who, with saw and torch, would hang there, humming, through the week.) Wouldthat white man remember? But the officer was walking on, crossing silver tracks in a fan of sunlight, one untroubled hand flipping his billyclub down, around, and up—now one way, now the other.

Starting purposefully uptown, Sam mulled, block after block, toward the twilight city, now on the disappearance of the fisherman, now on the ravings of the stranger on the bridge, now on the three girls coming down the steps when he'd arrived at the underpass, whose delicate descent had innocently initiated it all, now on the policeman who'd brought the afternoon to its inconclusive close. A knot had tied low in his throat—an anxious thing that wouldn't be swallowed, that kept him walking, kept him thinking, kept him rehearsing and revising bits of the day in their dialogue — till, stalking some greater understanding still eluding him, he got as far as Fifty-second Street.

Nestled in the grip of gilded tritons and swept round by cast nereids' metal drapes, up on the pediment of a bank, with its brazen disk, from arrow-tipped hands, down-cast, short one right and long one left (a wonderful water clock, he thought suddenly and absurdly, in which the water had all run out), Sam realized it was just after... twenty-five-to-five!

Along all four legs of the intersection, he looked with electric attention for a subway stop's green globes. He'd been due at Elsie and Corey's almost forty minutes ago!

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Mine eyes feel dim and scorched from grey, The neighboring lamps throw grey stained gold-Houses in the distance like mountains seem, The bridge lost in the mist— The essence of life remains a screen; Life itself in many grey spots That trickle the blood until it rots...

— SAMUEL BERNHARD GREENBERG,

"Serenade in Grey"

Shuttles in the rocking loom of history, the dark ships move, the dark ships move...

— robert a good man to get soused with, if you like to get soused — and what self-respecting Negro doesn't? Come on, relax. Spend a little time — come with me, boy-oh-boy, and we'll get boozy and comfortable."

Sam got to Elsie and Corey's after five.

Elsie's school books—she was studying for her Master's in Education —had been moved to the windowsill. The table had been carried from the kitchen into the living room and the wings attached. The peach colored cloth was already spread. Knives, forks, spoons, and linen napkins were laid—and in front of Lucius, in New York for the week, a bread-and-butter plate was crummy with half a dinner biscuit, butter knife propped on the rim. Lucius was saying: "Well, I certainly wasn't going

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101

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ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

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ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

Afterward Elsie brought in a big salad with water cress and raisins in it.

"This is all so good!" Lucius declared.

"Well, I'm glad," Elsie said, considering. "I was just afraid it might be a bit tainted."

"Tainted?" Lucius asked in surprise; he sat back. "Tainted? Didn't the ice man bring ice for the weekend? What you mean, this food might be 'tainted'? "

"I was just afraid, maybe," Elsie said, "well, 'tain't enough of it!" which was a joke Sam had first heard Lucius and Elsie go through back home years ago. But Clarice had never heard it, and clapped her hands now, screeching like a bird.

"Really, Elsie," Lucius said, beaming bright-eyed about the table. "I do have to ask one thing: prunes, raisins, beans? Just what are you trying to do to us ? "

Amidst more laughter, Corey's voice cut over: "She's just trying to keep you healthy—make sure you're nice and regular."

"Well, Tm going to be so regular," Lucius declared, "nobody'll be able to stand next to me!"

"That's a terrible thing to say!" Corey said. But, amidst more laughter, Elsie —and Dr. Corey—were laughing too.

Was there any way to tell them about the man on the bridge, Sam wondered, without telling about the man on the boat? Should he even try? If he was a friend of Toomer's, maybe Clarice knew him—

But here, in her enthusiasm, Clarice got to arguing with Lucius about something, and Sam was waiting for a lull into which to interject some mention of the strange fellow he'd met that afternoon, with his strange tales and talk — when Elsie, who'd slipped into the kitchen, came back in with a cake in her hands—with candles on it!

Dr. Corey and Elsie began to sing.

Hubert, leaning on his forearm again, and Clarice and Lucius—with his healthy baritone—joined them:
ing:0.00pt 0.00pt 0.00pt 125.64pt; text-align:left;">ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

107

eet a04pt;uttles, lass=cy 8pt;":0tryiT

SAMUEL R. DELANY

"... Happy birthday, dear Sa-am...! Happy birthday to you!"

Why then, he wondered, as he stood to blow out the flames ("Make a wish!" Clarice was saying, beside him. "Don't forget, Sam! Make a wish...!"), had Hubert told him there wouldn't be any birthday for him ? Was it Hubert's notion of punishment for coming in so late? Or had Hubert wanted him to think nothing would happen to make it more of a surprise when it did? He glanced at his brother, leaning way back in his chair now. With Hubert, sometimes, you couldn't tell.

But even as Sam looked up, Hubert brought his chair legs forward, leaned down, and reached under to come up with a grin and a big box wrapped in red paper, though there was no ribbon around it: "And this is for you — though you don't deserve it...! Coming in here an hour-and-a-half late the way you did!"

While Sam tore the paper off, Hubert explained:

"Now Mr. Horstein said to tell you that any one you already had, or didn't want, you can bring back and he'll exchange it for another one that's the same price."

It was a whole box of magic tricks!

While Sam was taking out the card deck with the shaved corners and the metal hoops —some whole, some gapped —and the picture frame with the secret compartment, other presents were coming out from behind the sofa, from the bedroom, from under the settee cushion: a sweater (from Corey), gloves (from Elsie), a book of poems, with photographs of colored people down south sitting around the woodstove playing banjos or walking to church (from Clarice)—and a fountain pen (from Lucius).

"Is Sam going to do some magic tricks for us now? Hubert's been telling us how you're getting all interested in magic. Are there any of em you know already? Come on, you're going to put on a show for us... ? "

But Corey said: "Now Sam has already told us, he needs to practice his magic before he can perform it. Right now, he's just learning it — exploring it."

The man narrowed his eyes, then looked pensively out at the sk38pt;">Teighs, reand antiut:were o aindws,Wposs=feet a04pt;uttles, la21.34pt;">

108
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ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

Elsie said: "He just got it tonight. You have to practice before you can perform," and backed, with dishes, into the kitchen.

"Oh." Lucius glanced at Hubert. "I see."

Hubert didn't say anything.

Just then Sam looked down into the box of paraphernalia. The one trick Mr. Horstein had inadvertently duplicated (or had Hubert duplicated it maliciously?) was the false, metal thumb.

"Oh. I have this one—already!" Sam picked it up from the box, trying to sound nonchalant and accusatory at the same time.

Hubert sucked his teeth. "Hey—I told him you had that one and to leave it out! He must have misunderstood me."

"Oh." Well, he felt a little better knowing it was not, then (probably), maliciousness.

Lucius sat, drumming his big, manicured fingers on the peach cloth. Sam pictured magic dice, spinning and dancing between them.

Then Elsie came out of the kitchen again carrying a silver tray, mirror bright, on which stood half a dozen little wine glasses—and a dark bottle.

"Well," Dr. Corey said. "Isn't this a treat! This is Elsie's blackberry wine — that she made herself last summer. We picked the berries together, when we went out to Asbury Park."

"We certainly did," Elsie said. "And bottled it ourselves, too." She put the tray down on the table. "Now who would like a glass?"

"I'll have some," Hubert said, laying one forearm on the table. "You want some, Clarice ? "

"Oh, yes," Clarice said. "Thank you."

"I'll have some," Sam said.

"I'll have some too," Lucius said. "But I do have to mention—I mean as a lawyer, now. Hubert'11 back me up. You know this is — strictly speaking—completely against the law!"

"Against what law?" Dr. Corey said.

"The eighteenth amendment," Lucius said. "We got prohibition, I hope you remember!"

"This is not against the law," Elsie said. "This isn't moonshine. Thi-aph>

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isn't bathtub gin. This is homemade blackberry cordial—it's not going to hurt anybody!"

"When the revenue officers cart you off, you better tell them that!" Lucius laughed.

"Now, if you don't want any, Lucius, you don't have to have any. Maybe you think we shouldn't—?"

"Now I'm not saying that! I'm not saying that at all!" Lucius's large hands waved above the table. "I'm just saying—"

"We are not breaking any law," Dr. Corey said. "This here is medicinal."

"That's right!" Elsie said, as if the idea had just hit her. A smile replaced the moment of worry on her face. "This is medicinal wine. A glass of this after dinner will absolutely help with the digestion. You know, Papa always takes some after Sunday dinner—"

"Mama too," Dr. Corey said.

"Well, I can just see the police now, breaking in on one of them speakeasies around on Lenox Avenue and the doctors breaking out their prescription pads—"

"If it will make you feel better," Dr. Corey said, "I will write you a prescription for it—"

"No," Lucius said. "For me? No—you don't have to do that." And his arm, which had been moving to the laughter like a conductor's, dropped its pinstriped coatsleeve on the table—the original, Sam realized, of the gesture Hubert performed so frequently.

Beside the red and blue wrapping-paper-and-tissue ruins of his birthday, Sam looked at his twenty-nine-year-old brother, with whom he'd spent fewer days in his life than he had with any number of his friends. Leather gloves, magic tricks, book, pen: this birthday, because of Hubert, had been completely unexpected, and was now over—three days before it had actually occurred.

Lucius said he'd walk with them back to Hubert's—the argument with Clarice had quieted to an intense conversation over some fine point of the Jim Crow laws. When they came downstairs, they found there'd

no

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ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

been an unexpected shower that, because of their laughter inside, they'd missed. But the sidewalks were wet—or, at any rate, drying in patches now. Tall Lucius and diminutive Clarice strolled together under a street lamp, over glimmering, puddled pavement, her skirts swinging back and forth below her calves, the heat of their conversation enough to keep the two of them twenty paces ahead.

The box of tricks under his arm (with the other presents inside it), suddenly Sam said: "... I get it now!"

Hubert said: "Get what?"

"Nothing," Sam said. "It wasn't anything. Just something that.. .well, nothing."

"What was it?"

"Really," Sam said. "It wasn't anything at all. Just something—that Corey said."

"Come on. What was it?"

"It was just..." He knew Hubert wouldn't let it rest. "I get the joke, now. About C.P.T." Which was a bald lie—to make Hubert stop questioning.

"Oh." Hubert said. "That."

But what had come to Sam was the reason the man on the bridge had gotten so upset when Sam had said he was going for a policeman. He hadn't realized Sam had meant for the man in the boat. And the fellow had just asked Sam back to his place for a drink...!

Well, Mr. Harris kept a bottle in his store. Hubert even had a bottle at the house. Not to mention Elsie and Corey's homemade wines. Sometimes it was hard to remember prohibition was really in force — especially here in Harlem.

But, Sam reflected, the fellow probably thought I was going to have him arrested for possession of liquor!

"Hubert?"

"What?"

"Do you remember, back home, going into downtown Raleigh, with a bunch of guys, and standing on the corner, across from the park, at the trolley stop—waiting there, and watching the women get on the trolley

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SAMUEL R.td>
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Mine eyes feel dim and scorched22.66pt;">

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Mine eyes feel dim and scorched22.66pt;">

car?" Sam reached around to pat his pockets for cigarettes. But he'd been in such a hurry to get to Corey and Elsie's that he hadn't stopped to buy any. "They'd step up on the step of the car, and their skirts would swing up, so that you could see their shoes, the buttoned kind that went up over their ankles ? You remember how we'd nudge each other—or try to keep a straight face. And sometimes, if there was a breeze or something, and the skirt blew up just a little more, you could see the stocking at the top of the shoe—then, boy, you'd really seen something! I did it. You must have done it, too."

"Yeah,"Hubert said. "What about it?"

"Well, we all used to like it—me, John, and Lewy all did it. But some of those boys, out there doing that, were really sent out of sight by it. You must have known one or two of those—the ones who were always suggesting that you go down and do it. You remember?"

"What if I do," Hubert said. "What's the point?"

"Well," Sam said, with a feeling in his throat he knew would have been assuaged with the first draw on a cigarette, "now, here, in New York, with skirts up above everybody's ankles, suddenly it's nothing to see some lady's legs. Isn't that funny? When you're twelve, thirteen, fourteen—it's the most exciting thing in the world. Then, you come to a different city—and it ain't anything anymore. But you remember when it was, don't you?"

"Sam," Hubert said, "why do you want to talk about things like that? "

"Hubert," Sam said, "that stuff was important to us. You can't forget stuff like that."

"Like you said, skirts are up now—and in ten or fifteen years, everybody's going to have forgotten it. You should forget it too. Stuff like that's nasty, Sam!"

"Well, Tm not going to forget it," Sam said. "I had too much fun doing it. I bet you did too."

"Boy," Hubert said, "you are a country nigger to your soul. You better think about gettin' civilized—that's what coming up here was supposed to do for you!"

But, hefting up his box, Sam laughed — though he had already for-

112
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ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

gotten the brilliant city at one end of the bridge and the empty skiff at the other.
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As he lay in bed, drifting, a summer s walk returned to Sam, along the south field's dusty edge-path. Shirtless, John walked ahead. Behind John, his shirt open and out of his pants, Lewy talked heatedly: "John, you can be the White Devil," Lewy explained. "And Sam — " whose long sleeves were still buttoned at his wrists, with only his collar loose — "will be the Dark Lord. And I'll be the Ancient Rabbi who understands the Cabala's secrets and can speak them backwards—"

John said: "Why you always want to take things back to the Jews, Lewy? Why you do that? Take 'em back to somewhere else, now — Egypt. Or Africa. You should take 'em back to Africa."

"You some kind of redheaded African," Sam gibed, but it would not, this time, break what tensed between his friends.

"You don't really want to originate with the Jews, do you ? " John asked, turning around to wait, as Lewy, then Sam, caught up.

"I think," Lewy said, "with Christianity we already do."

Two weeks after his (pre-) birthday dinner —and after a birthday that seemed less like a birthday than Christmas had seemed like Christmas—, Sam dreamed. Papa's interpretation of the dream certainly would have been that it came from Sam's sneaking off to read those magazines that lied so about Egypt and the darker races. Before dismissing that interpretation, however, we should remember that the sneaking was — for Papa —as constitutive as the stories; which put him not so far from the Viennese doctor whose book on the death instinct had been translated into English two years before by the redoubtable C.J.M. Hubback, published first in England and just reprinted in the United States by Boni and Liveright—and who, for his interpretation, would have erected an elaborate structure of authority and transference, language, sexual guilt, and wish fulfillment: Papa and the Viennese doctor had, neither of them, heard of one another ; but both were educated men of a single age and epoch, so that

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113
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SAMUEL R.td>
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Mine eyes feel dim and scorche239.00pt;">

"Well," John said, "that's different!"

"I don't see why," Lewy said. "Now, me—I'm going to originate everywhere... from now on. I've made up my mind to it."

"Lewy's doing that," Sam said, "just to get your goat—"

"No," Lewy said. "From now on, I come from all times before me —and all my origins will feed me. Some in Africa I get through my daddy. And my momma. And my stepdaddy. Some in Europe I get through the library: Greece and Rome, China and India — I suck my origins in through my feet from the paths beneath them that tie me to the land, from my hands opened high in celebration of the air, from my eyes lifted among the stars—"

"Some in Egypt and Arabia," John said, "you got through the magazines.... He's gonna try an' out-preach your daddy." John grinned through his freckles at Sam.

But the tension was all in Sam's listening now.

"—and I'll go on originating, all through my life, too," Lewy said. "Every time I read a new book, every time I hear something new

they shared a number of ideas. Doubtless the Viennese doctor's younger Swiss-born rival would have added that the dream indicated a surge of the creative in Sam, frightening in its implications and quite possibly to be repressed, but that still must be reckoned with. And the medical wisdom of half a dozen decades on would have suspected in it the first sign of an apncea, directly related to smoking, that very likely would get worse — though probably not for years.

Night. Night the terrible...

Carefully, Sam the Spy walked down the steps into the strange cellar. The light behind him dimmed. He glanced back — someone had just closed the wooden doors up to the street. Moonlit chinks along the ceiling's edge by the ends of the great beams were winking out, here and there. Outside, he realized, things were toppling over the small openings. Something shook the whole building. Behind, the cellar doors flapped up a moment—but only dirt and darkness tumbled down the steps — before they closed for good under the weight above. Water began running

lign="top" style=" width:0.00pt;">

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114
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Mincolspan="2" valign="top" style=" width:422.42pt;">

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Mincolspan="2" valign="top" style=" width:419.42pt;">

ATLANTIS:

about history, every time I make a new friend, see a new color in the oil slicked over a puddle in the mud, a new origin joins me to make me what I am to be—what I'm always becoming. The whole of my life is origin—nowhere and everywhere. You just watch me now!"

"But you don't know where you came from in Africa," John hazarded. "I don't. And Sam don't — because the Bishop don't. You remember, 'cause you asked him if he did."

"They didn't keep records of all that." As they walked through the summer dust, Lewy grew pensive: "They should have — but that's how they kept us slaves. You know what I think? I think it's those deprived of history who rreare the world's grf.at_histories."

Then he repeated, "I...originate, everywhere!"

-—"How you gonna stay a nigger," John asked, "if you come from so many places ? "

"Look," Lewy said. "Knowing all I really come from, that won't stop anybody calling me a black bastard," which startled Sam. (Though nobody really knew who Lewy's father was, people were

odel 1924

through the single upper window, suddenly to gush —while trickles rilled the walls.

The subterranean chamber was descending into the sea!

The pressure grew intense; it was becoming harder to breathe. What light there was in the weedy water dimmed as they sank; but in the last of it, he realized, behind him, beside him, something — formless and dark — was in there with him. It splashed toward him through the darkening flood. He had to get out, get away, only in the enclosing blackness his breath was stifled in his chest-Sam tore his face from the pillow, punching and pushing himself up into light. He gasped as the quilt fell to his lap. He sat, gulping. In the middle of the room, the tall figure turned toward him: chills encased him — the thing splashing in the submarine black had transfigured into this moonlit form... ? The drape was back over the wing chair. Moonlight sluiced the room.

As Sam got his orientation back, the figure — frowning Hubert, in his pants, shirtless now but wearing his carpet slippers, and surely on his way out to

US

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SAMUEL R./td>

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pretty sure he'd been a lot blacker than Lewy's stepfather.) "That don't stop anybody from calling you a nigger, calling Sam a black boy, calling me colored, calling you a redheaded African, calling Sam a Negro, calling me black. And I guess we're what we're called, no matter where we're from. That's what calling means — that's all. It isn't no more important than that."

"Well," Sam said, "it's pretty important, what they call you, when it means where you got to live, got to go to school, even what you got to work at."

Considering, their shoulders neared with the seriousness of it, to touch each other's under the sky.

Then, as if the energy or the anxiety of the closeness became too much, John, hand up and head back, ran into the hip-high grass, to begin imitating a bomber, banking here, swooping there, shouting Vrummmmmmmmmmmmm into the sun...

In half-sleep Sam recalled the insight of his walk home from work on wealth and power and art. Was this prior summer's amble the origin of that peripatetic revelation? Or had the winter evening's revelation been the origin of this

the hallway's chilly commode — asked: "Sam... ? You all right?"

"Yeah..." Sam was breathing hard.

The frown fell away before a chuckle. "What were you dreaming about ?"

But in the moonlight, the tomblike dark of the submerged and suffocating crypt was already slipping away.

"Hubert...?"

"Yeah?"

Sam ran his hand around his bare neck, down his naked chest. Nothing was wrong with his breathing now. He took three more breaths to make sure. "Hubert? Back when you were about fifteen — or sixteen, you did something. And Papa got so mad, he chained you to the water pump in the backyard, and he was shouting at you that he was going to leave you chained up in the yard all night— only then he must have gotten even madder, because about ten minutes later, he got this orange crate and came back and began to beat you with it, beat you 'rii the slats broke all up, and you were bleeding and crying — and Mama was scared. I think she thought he was going to kill you."

116

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ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924
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15class=block st0.00pt;"> i, 'You want to go to New Yorkbeca'ith the digest 39.65pt 0.010 style="ut whcheste, now ohis arm cool Maown, t;0t;"> he's done —lle thanign="top"> <,e waionchalant style=" wose elicate dwidth:0., getery ir s 0pt 0.00pt 49. was sayinggph style. Lucius was s.00pt 2d=ceo:183.41pt; n the Not14.40pt;">&quSora> l was saytp" s." Hubert dropped his hand,g, manicured fingers oslickl" boyou want to talk about this;">

<00pt 82.78ptdebecaus30.19pt; text-align:tyle=" line-height:14.52pt;">"Oh," the policeman said again. The ordinAs class=rell coass=row valign="t, Sam stttled 0pt;"ld have done."> Vorm,"ht:7.4ass=font9=div> see iv> s At the c's "framch fun doi
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	jutop" s of 'em was bluetop" s of 'em was gray. But justio widthtd class=ces I1 het. It weren't like this last war. This last war, it look like about everybody wearkilled. But I'mmorerlign="top" in that box than in the warell valign=yle=". What'0.00pt;"> you want?t 33.42pt 0.00pt true because back in '22 width:419cews had filled the papers of the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb Sam and gn="top" styl5.52pt;gun to find in the candyheduledtop" :419cewsstands inent a lot Raleigh y; tmost amazing magazines withtr cmaspinedtop" colored coverle=" wiitles like Aline-hei and Mtop"> Magazine and AligStory Magazine and they had they'd them for a quarterthing. nd had read t 33.4Khufutableal Tomb" by Talb < Munlock stydam HuligShirk's "Osirid walls ("Have you t;en reading about King Tut? If so, you'll berlign="top" in 'Osirid'!17.25pt;"> Weird T" styand Popular Magazine and John had found a copy of Saxblohmer's T" styof Sht:50 Egypt and they had traded them and they had td class=ceglider together	reading my inf alone clathe b get nebeside S.52ptnedtpt 0.0after it had been closed down as a hospital.00pt;"before had been reopened as the first building on campus or classlegged clathe d t 0 floor reading and reading and rereading mf graythis ism allned Er.lish width:1ligrepiduAmerican reidth:40foref"> /divrebeln frame="boxtheir fathers by helping the young/s=c anyway eaph Arab0forefdangerous Africae tribes diamonds that had been in the famm saw,nd Poonkin's voice acute to his own cne-hey said "You wanti>weak—you can have 'emtop" sbody livin'td class= left 'emtoheighrder="0" ctd clasbuilding to go, too. Moved out fohe 0pt 0. ago. I used to read mph> Bign="" Poonkin explained "First /i>schI did when



	SAMUEL R.	DELANY

	the war was over was learn mphto read some0.00pt;pt; heimy family, toot; texI wouldn't read stufflike that. Cats infecgood t 33.00pt;read no more nohow" and when Sam came back after working an anxious two more class=in Mr. Harris'sdent:12.1 warmer by a corner paraffin he240.32nd b when yot by two kerosene lamps class=paragrs were in arohopping bag on a dey she2f of newspapers beside the cellarvph styclosed nowxthe bag leaning utop" stylbrick wall when t 0 sted t:fixed; wpaper belease?was a picture of KKKk style=bedsheetstr class=high a v>rchk stacing " style=" w where anyone s="all" ve taken t:fAnyone at sh hoof through the bars and waved it at her. Ella took 1set. Ca32.88pt 0.00pt 76.44pt; text-align:justify;">That evening r clasrked yate at Mr. Harris's. When he left t> weaknesse handso?was style=" w. pdtop" :419slush by the :fis along the curb, it struck him: it was the polerless whcTpro-duced most of the myths of powestyle=" wwas the po,
p14.50pt;">"First hed; wparkstance t=" gotten it. Inside, Sam took off his coat, took off his heig, pants, shs=cels styleSam's t was just in the long Johns03eaeveninggiven pt;—and put on his suit jacket. Hubert was in class tonight—and wouldiv class=pareat with Clarice in her aunt and uncle's kitchen afterward. Sam sat in Hubert'g:wing chair, took a s=paragrrst hed; wohopping bag aroundparagrap foot




/dise years away from craph> 5pt 0.00pt 30.lign="top" style=" width: text-indent:12.10pt;">On the wall padding:0.00his bed, stylb valign="t had a curtainEach let—and a drape:0.00ilon finishquez8.60plasthaknessein his weamagazine and turning to the f st height/td>	yclosed	d. Was there some sort of light shquing utost hed; walley? Sam walked across the rug and pulled away drape and curtain. Th>
WithJu gray stnot,tr>


	So he told them instead about Lewy and the3

	"What's that?" Sam began to shrug of16lign:j "They won't never get nothing.16lign:justify; 0.00pt;">
38 16lign:j "They won't never get nothing.16lign:justify; rnarvon, u.know Harris?" widhe t="top. "What's that?" Sam began to shrug of16lign:j "They won't never get nothing.16lign:justify; 489.48pt;"> s stly he went down 14.40ptknees of his union suit before the painted wainscot belease?
"What's that?" Sam began to shrug of16lign:j "They won't never get nothing.16lign:justify; 17.52pt;">	"What's that?" Sam began to shrug of16lign:j "They won't never get nothin:416.16pt; height:6.48pt;"> 44	"What's that?" Sam began to shrug of16lign:j "They won't nevstyle=" width:416.16pt; height:76.08pt;">



	SAMUEL R.	DELANY

	muffled in sleep, signs tangled in the sheets around him, vanishing. {Who is this woman with us...?) A truck lumbered east. Another one braked—and a motor started. Someone shouted—again. Something hit something else, dully. Outside, in half light, beyond the window, April snow still fell — and sounds rose; morning sounds carrying away his drowsiness. He turned under the quilt (to face the draped window), wondering if they might return it. Soft sounds slid around him, slipped over him like a sleeve, waiting in the winter-dimmed city. Outside, the black stones of Mount Morris would be a pillow of white. {A black woman clothed in white moving through the white city...a white woman on a cloth of light.) He could see, through the edge of the glass beside the drape, smoke spill from a roof vent into smoke, to wander up the sky, wash off in winter wisps. Under the covers, Sam thought: And beside me... He moved his hand with their thickened fingertips out from the depression his body had warmed to the cold place where no one lay. (A white woman in the heart of... a black woman in a city of light.) Somewhere a siren sounded, weaving together for him the possibilities of his vacant day. Saturday at Corey and Elsie's there was a short, sharp argument between Sam and Hubert: Sam was happy to do his tricks for Hubert— and even Clarice—back at Hubert's, but Hubert suggested after dinner that Sam perform one of Cathay's wonders for his sisters: a vanishing coin. Sam had brought the trick over, after all, in his inner jacket pocket, precisely for that. But Hubert's request got only Sam's refusal, first a quiet one, then an insistent one, then —with red-cheeked embarrassment—a loud one, when Hubert wouldn't stop. But, at least partly, it was because Mr. Carter, a Columbia Teacher's College friend of Elsie's, was there that afternoon for dinner — a mahogany-complected, articulate young man from Philadelphia, who cut all his food with his fork. But Mr. Carter displayed a smiling, inquisitive awe before Elsie and her siblings that Sam recognized: it was the air other ministers, especially white ones, displayed when they visited Papa

	46



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 socially at home. And nothing made a social situation more uncomfortable for Sam. It turned everything you did into a performance, and always left him somewhere between tongue-tied and belligerent. "I'dlike to see you do a magic trick," Mr. Carter had prompted across the remains of dinner, in what clearly he thought was an encouraging way. "Go on, Sam!" Hubert said. "That's what you brought it over here for—to show people!" "No!" Sam said. "Come on, now—I said No! Didn't you hear me?" His voice was too loud, his hand was actually shaking, and the silence after it was much too long. Corey rescued him: "Now Sam is still learning these things. And you've got to practice them before you do them for other people. He just needs to practice and will show us all his trick in his own time, now." Hubert dragged his forearm from the table, sucked his teeth — his turn to sulk. But nothing dented Mr. Carter's simple, irrepressible good will. "Can I ask you something seriously, though?" His dark fingers moved on the handle of his unused knife. "I don't know." Corey smiled. "Can you?" "Would you please tell me — because I have heard this story about you two ladies so many times before, but just in snatches and fragments, so that you never know what you're really supposed to believe and what you're not—just so I can tell other people when I get back to Philadelphia—what really happened at that movie, there—was it six or seven years ago?" "What movie?" Elsie asked. "That movie," Mr. Carter said, "where you two got into all that trouble ? " "Six years ago?" Elsie said. "What movie does he—" "Oh, I know what he means," Dr. Corey said. "Arnold—" which was Mr. Carter's name to Corey and Elsie, but not to Hubert, Clarice, and Sam—"that wasn't six years ago. That was seven, eight—" she frowned. "That was nine years ago now!"

	47



SAMUEL R. DELANY
	"But...what happened?" "Might as well go ahead," Hubert said. "After all this time, everybody ought to know." "What movie ? " Sam said. Though he knew the outlines of the tale, the fragmentariness was as much there for him as for Arnold Carter— since, nine years ago, when Corey and Elsie had first gone up to the city, where they'd stayed for two years before coming home, Sam had been... well, nine. "That great big movie they made, about the south—and the Ku Klux Klan and all," Hubert said. "About the wonderful white south and the black devils who were raping all those white women—" "Oh!" Elsie said. "That awful movie — that made everybody go out and start lynching all those people!" "It didn't start them lynching," Corey said. "But it certainly made them go out and lynch more." "What did you have to do with it?" Sam asked. "We were picketing — a peaceful picket line. With a lot of other Negroes." "With a lot of other angry Negroes, I bet," Hubert said. "That's what I heard." "We were angry," Dr. Corey said. "Who wouldn't be angry, at a movie like that?" "How did a movie make people lynch people?" Sam wanted to know. "It was a movie about those damned Ku Klux Klansmen—" Corey didn't use language like that and it startled Sam to hear her cuss like Louis—"and told how wonderful they were and how they were protecting southern white womanhood." What came back to Sam was a memory of his cousin, or a woman whom his mother had called their cousin: yes, he'd been nine, eight, maybe younger, when her and her husband's mutilated bodies, under gray canvas, had been brought, in the creaking wagon, back through the evening trees, to the campus— "We were picketing," Corey said. "That's all. With the others, across the street from the theater."	n="top">	₄8



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 "Well, that wasn't quite all," Elsie said. "Then what else did we do?" Dr. Corey asked, indignantly. But Elsie had some devilment in her eye. And there was a grin back of Dr. Corey's indignation. "We certainly didn't do very much else — that anyone with a grain of sense wouldn't have done. There's no forgiving a movie like that—stirring people up to violence against their fellow man!" "What did she do, Miss Elsie?" Mr. Carter asked. "Well, we were picketing, there across the street. The policemen were keeping us back. And you could see that it wasn't doing anything to keep people from going into the movie—" "The thing we wanted to do," Corey said, "was to stop them from going to see it, you see. That's what we were trying to do." "So finally," Elsie said, "Corey says to me, 'Come on.' Well, I didn't know where she was going." "You did too!" Corey said. "I to/dyou—" "After we got in line," Elsie said, "you told me. We left the pickets, went down to the end of the block, crossed over, came back, and got on the ticket line to the movie. That's when I asked you, what we were going to do. And you told me, 'We're going to go inside and see that movie !' Well, I was afraid to leave her, because I knew she was probably going to do something foolish—and I didn't want her to get in trouble." "You went into the movie?" Clarice asked. From her tone, Sam realized this was new to her as well. Corey nodded. "We went into the movie," Elsie said, "took our seats, and waited for the lights to go down and the man at the organ to start his playing—and I asked: 'Corey, what are we going to do now?' And she whispered, 'Hush!' and just to sit there and to do what she did. Well, I thought, dear Lord, give me strength! What has this crazy girl, my own little sister, got it into her head to do ? " "Then what happened?" Sam asked. "The lights went off, the man started to play the organ, and the movie began — and Corey jumps up, scoots out into the aisle, with those

	49



	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	long dresses we used to wear back then, catching on everybody's knees, saying real loud, 'Excuse me—excuse me, please!' and I'm coming right after her. I think people thought she was sick—and had to use the facilities. So they were making room. "But then, when she got into the aisle, she ran right down toward the front of the theater —and I'm running to keep up. And she climbed onto the stage — " "I jumped onto the stage," Corey said. "I got hold of the edge, and I went up like a boy over a fence—though I don't know whether I could do it today—" "And she grabbed hold of the edge of the screen, with the light from the projector all over us, and people starting to stand up and call out to ask if something was wrong, and she ripped'it—-" Corey laughed. "I certainly did. I remember, you stood there, on the stage, in front of all those people, and you said, 'Oh, Corey—!'" "Then / grabbed hold," Elsie said, "and started ripping too!" "Once we began, she ripped more than I did," Corey said. "I really think Elsie was having fun." "I was scared to death," Elsie said. "But, by then, I figured it didn't make much difference. I knew we were going to end up in jail, no matter —so I decided it'd be better at least to do what we'd come for. Yes, I got hold of it—and I ripped it too. In about a New York minute, the two of us tore the whole screen down!" Clarice hooted, hands over her mouth. "But then what happened?" Sam said, between his own guffaws. "I mean," Clarice said, "how did you two get out of there?" "Very quickly," Corey said. "We were lucky. Someone in the audience by that time had started fighting. There were other people on the stage now—you remember that man who asked us, so politely, while we were ripping, if something was wrong? But the fist fight in the audience, that was taking up all the ushers' attention. So even while they were putting the lights on, we rushed backstage and down some steps and around through a door that opened right into the alley — and got out!"

	So



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 "This is so funny," Clarice said, recovering herself. "A couple of months ago, I was reading in Opportunity about the 'riot' they had at the premier ofBirth of a Nation. And you mean you two were the riot?" "I guess we were pretty much most of the riot. It was in the newspapers," Elsie said, "the next day. But I wouldn't think they'd still be talking about it now. It was nine — almost ten years ago; and it was just a movie, after all. Who'd want to remember something like that?" "A low down, dirty, rotten movie," Dr. Corey said, "that made people go out and killt^ch other!" "Mama and Papa never talked about that," Sam said. "I don't think they'd like something like that, you all being in the newspapers for get-tin' in some kind of trouble!" "We didn't want to worry Mama and Papa," Elsie said. "So we didn't tell them. But I guess other people told them just this bit and that bit— and it all gets out of hand." "But we didn't do anything to be ashamed of," Dr. Corey said. "I thought it was right then. And I'd do it again today, if I had to. The lynchings went up all over the country in nineteen fifteen—because of that movie. That's probably why they're up now. Not a man or woman, black or white, Christian or Jew, with free-thinking ideas and care for his fellows was safe anywhere in the country while that movie was on." "Jews?" Sam said. "They don't lynch Jews." Back home, John and his brother had told Sam that, because Jews had all the money, everybody was afraid to cross them and that's why they were taking control of just everything. "They got too much money." "Don't lynch Jews?" Dr. Corey declared. "And just what makes you think they don't, boy? That poor Jew, Mr. Frank, he was lynched down in Georgia, right near where Papa was born, the very summer that movie was showing. Don't lynch Jews? Where have you been, boy? Back when the Jim Crow laws came in, everybody was getting lynched. That was the crime of it, see? That's what taking the law into your own hands is all about. Anybody they didn't like, got lynched—for any reason. You think they didn't lynch Jews ? They lynched white people, they lynched black people —they lynched women, children, and Jews. Don't let me

	5i



	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	hear you talkin' nonsense like that anymore, Sam. Sometimes I think you don't know anything!" "Now they did lynch more colored than anybody else," Elsie said. "You know that, Corey." Corey just humphed. "You remember that sign they put up in the park in downtown Raleigh, when the Jim Crow laws came in? 'No Jews or Dogs Allowed'?" Elsie laughed. "They didn't even think enough of niggers to put up a sign to keep us out." Sam had heard about the sign; but by the time he'd got to go downtown, there were just the usual signs for where coloreds were supposed to go and the water fountains you were supposed to drink from and where whites were supposed to go and drink. There'd been a mysterious time, Sam knew, that had ended just around his birth, when everyone went to the theater together; when people even went to school together. His older brothers and sisters—Lemuel and Elsie and Corey and Lucius —often spoke of it, when everyone in Raleigh had gone to the Jackson Theater and sat wherever they'd wanted to and watched plays by Shakespeare and dastardly melodramas and uproarious comic skits, in which people sang and danced and minstrels Tommed in black-face, and men in top hats did magic tricks. (Mr. Horstein had said that, personally, he'd never played the Jackson in Raleigh —but magicians had come to Cathay who had.) But now all the theaters in Raleigh were segregated, and Papa wouldn't let him go at all. A few times he'd snuck in with Lewy and John. (John's mother taught Mathematics and Women's Deportment at the college —his father had died three years ago — and didn't care.) In the balcony, John's brother's crutches leaning over the seat back, the boys sat with the other colored children—nigger heaven, everybody called it—to watch Mary Pickford and William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks... Though Corey probably had her point, John was pretty smart, and Sam was not yet ready to dismiss completely John's judgment of the Jews... "That's true," Corey said, uncharacteristically pensive, "that's true__"

	52



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 And for a moment Sam wasn't sure if memory had made him miss something important in the present. That night, after Hubert came back from taking Clarice home and went into his own room to study, then to sleep, Sam got up, moved the drape and curtain back, to hang them in a great down-descending arch over the wing of the chair. Then he got back in bed and lay awake, covers over his mouth and ears, blinking at the moonlight out the window. At work a few days later, Sam asked: "Mr. Harris, you seen Mr. Poonkin ? " "Awww..." Mr. Harris said, like someone with something real sad he'd forgotten to tell you: "Last week, Poonkin—he got the pee-neumo-nia. I guess it was on the Tuesday you didn't come in. They took him over to Manhattan Hospital on Ward's Island—" "—for the Insane?" Mr. Harris frowned. "Well, they got a lot more people out there than just the looneys now, you know. I guess they got pretty much everybody over there who can't pay for hisself. But Poonkin got the pee-neumonia — the old people's friend." Sam looked puzzled. "That's what they call it." Glare slid left to right across Mr. Harris's gold tooth. Denting green silk, Mr. Harris's tiepin was gold. "At least it's the friend of old people like Poonkin who ain't got nobody to care for 'em. It takes 'em quick and, as dying goes, goes pretty easy. I wouldn't be surprised if old Poonkin's dead by now—though nobody's told me that, yet. Though why they'd come and tell me, I don't know. I'm no kin of his. Poonkin been around here long before I got here. Now he's gone." While he worked in the cellar, sometimes looking over at the boards against the cement wall, Sam thought about going to visit old Poonkin on Ward's Island. He tried to picture himself in a great public hospital, endless dividing sheets rippling white between the beds, talking to the old man, propped on his pillow: "Mr. Poonkin, tell me about what you

	53



	SAMUEL R. DELANY
	"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o409.80pt;"> did in the War—about the rifle and the barn—behind the spruce, before you could read—what of it you can remember...?" But he didn't really know if Poonkin were first name or last. (Those idiosyncratic memories of the War, what it was to be a fifteen-year-old black boy with a rifle in a barn, not to mention everything that had brought that child to the cellar two doors away, an aged, half-blind, brief and taloned guardian to those magazines—suddenly winking out. Memories—like spume from a broken wave...) In the hospital, weakly he calls to me. I start to leave, he calls again, but before I turn...there was Hubert, chained to the water pump, and Papa gasping, drawing back the orange crate in his brown hands, his collar loose and no shirt under his black vest, the arms of a man in his fifties, yes, but deeply dark in the evening blue. "You are not a man—you are a little animal!" Papa shouted. "And if you will live like an animal, I will treat you like an animal! I will beat you like a beast till you beg to be a man again...!" Crate slats splintered against Hubert's shoulder; he remembered the precise sound of his father's grunts. "Ah...I" The slats splintered again. "Keh...!" On the next blow they smithereened. "Dab.../" Hubert fell, pulled himself backward, shouting: "Papa! No, Papa...? No — /" Papa hit him with the stump of what hung from his hands, then hurled the bottom, missing Hubert, gouging grass. No... No. (Sam walked slowly through the cold street.) For suppose he went over there and Mr. Harris was right: Poonkin wn:justify; tead:lk to his customers. He talked about the great Harry Houdini3most three hou76.92pt; text-align:justify;0pt 41.33pt; text-align:left;">that! "If he's going to do it," Hubert said from the wing chairdiv clase'2pt;gun to tify, "Istyle=" ps soon he did it in front of lign="top" stywanti>we boy sneaking off to do it behind my back, now." 16pt;">ht:14.50pt;">Postaat Clarice's upset. ; heithought her unconcerned about the matter till now. 16pt;">k style=" widtont8>SAMUELheight:14.im—you said yon were going to height:14.im. font10 se=" l—it isn't any of my bidiness! And Inss=paragra" ve
	Clapping wildly, Sam stood up with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow. 54




said anythingv> ,ass=font9 coat st.50pt;" valign, she went to the ealized l valign="top" style=" width:0.00pt; height:0.00pt;">	h:240.36it to after her, it stuck—with a noise like P; , then, when she =" paddingraph stylnd pulled it to again, with zja. Outside, she yanked it to, and it h style=n two beats: Pa-Ti. The tensions > eaving turned the sound into a kind of thunder that left the room whisper0.36itsixed; wid Sam thought about saying: e=" widtyou said you didnt mind i/i- gn:left;">z—and by =row vali12.59p>	"That's ass=cell. Outside, W valign="todth:0.00pt;"Sam asked;percause Hubert was heigh0.36in his "Well, style=" ardworking Negroes. "> got no-account be a fiatass=paragraph>any cews to you..e=" width:410.20pt;"> Sam nodded. ".00pt;"> Outsideth z. And there were someclazy ligz. Lould read—reened.no-account be a pan> read—reened.just animals." Hubert /i>The tw valign=". "And valign' her cust;"> <77pt; text-align:left;">"I got to go!" she insisteder="0" celpick ton, wi," Hubert said, "" celc"> "I st.50pp" st-uot; "ing="0" es an animal make water or do his bidiness?uot; "Ri" w where's he'p"standwid."	I come24pt;">



	"What movie ? " Sam said. Though he knew t">
	the modpt;"> got to top" !rom a rtd clp of what you're ass=font10 your mouth and sv classinto your supposhouteknowtwhite people going to be smok R. DELA Rs—tyle=" widthit's funnyeight:38.46pt;">		"Wign' ha lot worse?uot; "I know can't pt;"> <, 3.ant ht:1could turn it"top"> 12.59pt; hemove57pt;"le=" law/div>
13u8.00ping off somewherey said. "T00tectpthe ="b ad l "What movie ? " Sam said. Though he knew t">	Clapping wildly, Sam stood up with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow. 56:0.00pt 32.28pt 0.00pt 78.12pt; text-align:justify; text-indent:12.00pt;">"What movie ? " Sam said. Though he knew t">		much else — that anyone with a grain of sense wouldn't have done. There's no forgiving a movie like that—stirring people up to violence against their fellow man!"
"That's true," Corey said, uncharacteristically pensive, "that's true__"		He see
		t52pt;">&quosensebiswov i>tfulness unv cla, as efable-" widts acelPenelope,w valily before the next day> i>t a city in which you've once t;Wel, and it might as well " veidth:0.00nto the sea.) But ..cthat pt; texi>the mparagrr cthus of all dreamps up, first /i>scs to go le=mysystematically, thetincidents conf;They wour own weaknesses ly whilbecause w/dire lucky enough not to " veito talk about, there's no particular reasonlign' hall. The incidents w/td> "top">n se,ght t	"What movie ? " Sam said. Though he knew t">
	57



	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	&quomagazines, trMarquez:0.00pt 33.54pt 0.0—





"We were angry," Dr. Corey said. "Who wouldn't be angry, at a movie likcl0/div>
rucled visentistign=a kind of pleasure. Tlass=blockfter yle=full p" styClarice		do?" Dr. Cmagic trickxt-align:leground Cathay.	pt;"> R. dth:0.0="b ashment of a novel by.. .Harry Houdini! Polign With the Pharaohs. did in the War—about the rifle and the barn—lded up and slipped ugh work anyway, class, Lewy's standwweahow —the RHfletheiest Manetho fle and Imhotep off spy R0.00quotUkwarnKingdomDEL 1924 t home —trying towhat was width:1. —the RHf,t:14.8! "> " vei really by Houdiro?) Conhider">14.50pt;resent. And 7pt;""top">quickly=and tell me what you4pt;"> Though Inp" stydiv cling back a:0.00;">"soont;as I'm styleathtubt; : you'll style(orltry to=styl) for the n:leftwo0="b ashments and a movie about those dl colswoop!sibleif, in anl valitwo months, I wid styheard :0.00;">do?&quoI shallnp"ame magic and ju-juwidth:s on the ast

	59


	"What's that?" Sam began to shrug o413.40pt;"> SAMUEL R. DELANY
	now Harris?" widhe t="top. "What's that?" Sam began to shrug o413.40pt;"> sumption that thou hast forgotten thy brothers in the southlands." Sam slid the oversized magazine into the top drawer, wondering whether he'd really have the patience to wait for the next two installments before reading it in a night. The first of Mr. Horstein's tricks he'd bought was the magic coin that disappeared. Actually, the trick was just a length of black elastic with a clip on one end you could fasten up your sleeve and a bit of gum on the other that you could stick to any quarter or nickel. But now, as he kneaded the stickum, he realized it was losing its adhesion. More and more times it pulled loose from the coin, letting it fall to the rug as often as it snapped the metal glittering from sight. The most effective trick—and the most expensive (eighty-five cents) —was a little guillotine in which you could cut a cigarette in half; but if you put your finger through the same hole, you could make the blade slip aside so that it appeared —magically—to pass through your finger, leaving it unhurt and whole. The third one—though it had cost only a dime—didn't work at all: a hollow, metal cup in the form of a thumb's first joint. Smoking a cigarette, without letting anyone see, you secreted the false thumb in your fist. Then you took the cigarette and poked it into your fingers, putting it out on the bottom of the metal cup the false thumb made. You kept packing the cigarette in, until it was inside your fist completely. Finally you used your other thumb to tamp it down further—only you slid your thumb into the false metal one, got it seated good—then opened both your hands. The cigarette had disappeared. And nobody was supposed to be able to see the thumb cap (with the cigarette inside) over your real one. The cap was large enough so that, when Hubert tried it on, it just fell off. And Hubert's hands weren't small. Still, Sam's own thumb was too big to wedge into it. Also, the thumbnail on the cap didn't look like the broad, oversized nails curving down over Sam's fingers. And it was painted a luminous pink, that, when Clarice examined it, she said didn't look like anyone's skin color she knew—black, white, gray, or grizzly! Hubert had suggested Sam ask Mr. Horstein for his dime back. But



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 p with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.
	round the central stone column, down—those were metal steps up to the higher level, not a ribbed green metal wall—the stairs. Check these off. Braithwaite died in 1962. Ange- Once Lewy had made a clock p with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.
	lina Grimke in 1958. Fenton Johnson in 1958 also.... Effie Lee New-some was doing poorly this past summer, I was told by a lady from Wilberforce, but she was still alive. Her address has been Box 291, Wilberforce, Ohio. Nanina Albas address is 303 Fonville Street, Tuskegee, Alabama. Shall I write her for bio-notes, or would you like to?... There is a Charles E. Wheeler, Jr. listed in the Chicago telephone directory, but I can't get an answer there —yet. Will try again. I am not sure (in fact, I doubt) this is the poet__Jean Toomer is still in a nursing home in Doylestown, Pa. His wife Marjorie Toomer can be reached at their home, "The Barn", r.d. 2, Doylestown. She will answer letters promptly. I have visited her twice. She is active for civil rights. Jean's literary disappointments after Cane were shattering. He tried desperately to repeat that artistic achievement (but not as a Negro) and failed__I persuaded her and him to give his papers and literary effects to Fisk. A large collection. There is now a chance that	from a ten-gallon kerosene can, a hole punched in the bottom to dribble water ("No, no—!" Mama said. "Don't bring that in here. Set it out by the pump!") and a board float in the top, fixed to a cord, that, as the float lowered, turned a spool on another board that rotated an elaborately scrolled hand, from an old clock Lewy'd found, about a cardboard dial. The first dial Lewy had drawn was marked with minutes in five-minute groupings. It kept time for practically three-quarters of an hour. But that evening Lewy came over and closeted himself with Papa in the study, and the next day he'd replaced the dial with one far more elaborate, drawn on a piece of parchment, inked in reds and blacks and greens and suggesting some medieval illuminated compass, now marked with a time scale of three fourteen-minute intervals, each divided in two, then further divided into three, with the major divisions indicated by signs from the zodiac and the smaller ones notated in Hebrew letters, representing a special,


SAMUEL R.	"What movie ? " Sam said. Though he knew t">	Cane may be reprinted along with some of Jean's unpublished writings .... The sonnet by Allen Tate is perfect for The Poetry of the Negro. His background as a Fugitive and redhot i'll take my STANDer adds to its effectiveness. As Coun-tee said about himself, Allen's "conversion came high-priced," no doubt.... and there are letters from him in the Toomer Collection. Hart Crane was trying to arrange for the two (Toomer and Tate) to meet. In any case, we can now see that the early anti-Negro expressions of the Fugitives probably reflected guilt feelings, as this "Sonnet at Christmas" makes clear in Tate's case__ By the way, I also sponsored Frank Lima for his Opportunity. We should let him pass for colored, if he wishes. I thought he was Puerto Rican at the time. Nobody would object to a Mexican identifying as a Negro. Not even a black muslim or a black panther. And I will not object to a couple or so poems by Mason Jordan Mason so long as we make it plain in the biographical note that at least we are not sure. He certainly writes in Negro, as Karl Shapiro says of Tol-son. And he's good. I don't expect us to find any-	ancient, mystic time scale, out of Africa from before the dawn of the West — which Lewy had just made up. Lewy had explained, laughing, to Sam and John: "Now white boys do not do things like this. Your daddy told me that when he was helping me with the letters last night," and John said, "You shouldVe used Arab letters on it! Or Egyptian!" And Lewy, who knew what John was getting at, said, "I like the Jewish letters. They're easier to remember. And the Bishop doesn't speak Egyptian — yet." Helping Lewy fill the clock, or sitting, the three of them, out by the pump, watching the hand's imperceptible progress across the mystic signs, at such moments Sam could forget the occasional throbs of desire to be the same clear and earth-dark hue as Lewy and his own father. Well, nobody had trouble telling John was colored, for all his rusty hair. Strange though, Sam thought; such an instant as that was what let him look with sympathy at such a group of city white children — who, he was sure, from their ragged socks, worn shoes, and the rope tied around one's waist in place of a belt, were just the boys

6₄



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 thing from the Allen Ginsberg who didn't do things like that. cabal that meets our criteria. So They broke around him, run- why don't we close the door now. ning—and were gone. Beside the steps stood a wooden booth with a glassed-in window, before which were the same brass bars he'd become familiar with in front of tellers at the bank and clerks in the subway's change booths and post offices. Below the wooden shelf with its worn depression for the change to slide into, was another sign— Toll: Pedestrians l<t —faded and flaking. But perhaps the toll was not in effect today—or, indeed, had not been in effect for some time: the booth was closed; no one sat behind the bars to collect. Sam climbed the stairs and walked around the great stone column— on the near side of which a black-bronze plaque explained that the bridge had first been opened to traffic in 1883—forty-one years ago! He strolled out on the walkway, looking down over the green rail, at the tracks between him and the trolley wires. Dead in the afternoon — hasn't the sky?—, gas lamps at intervals stood along the walkway's sides. A sailor in early whites came toward him, hurled balled waxed paper from a late lunch over the rail, to follow it with a delicately flipped toothpick from his lips' corner. He was carrying some kind of Japanese fan. Over its folds, pastel waves were painted in blues and blacks. The sailor hawked across the bar, returned from moving the other authority recently dropped, and gave Sam a grin: Sam imagined sputum sparkling down between girders to the water. The fellow sauntered away around the stone. (The fan. Where was it from? Where would it go?...Cathay.) Benches with wrought iron backs sat along the walkway, wrested as much of that severe sunshine as you need now. Now turning, Sam saw the lower city's skyline, towers above Cowley and Crane at Sweets. the water —yes, and there, on the Fitzgerald and Agee at the way you go, were his skyscrapers! Chrysler. Agee's first poems

	65



	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	And there in the other direction bore a title from Crane's exhor-was the green woman with the up- tation to Emil Opffer: Permit raised torch — Liberty! Tug and sail me voyage, love, into your and barge traffic moved lazily about hands. the sound. But what Sam hadn't been prepared for was the bridge itself. The reason why it happened only since you woke up — he walked along the planks, head high — is letting the steam disappear from those clouds. Imagine a giant harp, when the landscape all around is hilly sites. No, imagine four giant harps, side by side. Then rotate the alternate ones — just a little, so that some cables were vertical and some slanted across them. Now put two of these double harps at each side of the walkway, that will have to be reckoned into the total, and let the wind play silent music through and against crisp blue. For there to be more air — He dropped his head, still walking, to look for a moment at his shoes — and had the disorienting experience of being suspended more than a hundred feet in mid-air above glass-green water! He stopped. The boards were again under his leather shoe soles. Heart pounding, he swayed a bit. Then, still looking down, he started to walk again: between each foot-worn three-inch plank and the next was a quarter-inch gap. What

	Precisely as we move, we move through time. Time is a function of motion — but of the microminiature motions of the atoms in their crystal lattices and the cosmic motions of stars and the collection of stars we inhabit.	had happened, he realized, was that to move over them with any speed was to let the light from the river glitter up through the spaces, creating the illusion that the walkway had vanished — or at least had gone largely transparent! Green as trolley

	sparks, the water — thousands of millions of drops of it — flowed below. How many epochs could those waters clock, passing under the bridge?

	66



ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 Sam strolled a dozen steps more, looking down, relishing the feel of this miraculous suspension above the brilliant river—till a dinghy, with chipped gunwales of flat gray-green, slid into sight. In a wide straw hat, a—shirtless?—man tugged and leaned on the oars. The boat looked smaller than some wooden bath toy, small as a match box—Sam sensed all over again how high he was. Again Sam stopped—man and boat vanished. He could just glimpse the boat's rim moving under a single crack. Again Sam walked. Rower and river reappeared. Yes, the man was shirtless. Was it warmer down on the water than it was up here in the sky? The rower's bare feet were wedged against one ofthe boat's cross-braces. His pants Archie also mentioned Hart were brown, and — small as he was Crane, whom he had once per-— you could see one knee was suaded Fortune to take on for a frayed; a simple rip crossed the oth- trial. Hart had been completely er, so that that knee — like a bone unable to do it. It did not cross from Negro flesh — stuck out. The my mind that this had any rele-boat moved at an acute diagonal vance to me. to the sunside of a shadow on the water—the shadow, Sam realized, ofthe bridge. Sam was about to stop and start again, to make the man disappear and reappear—but now the rower pulled in his oars, took off the straw hat —his hair was black and his shoulders were sun-darkened enough that, for a moment, still walking to hold the sight, Sam wondered if the fellow was colored. The man tossed the hat to the dinghy's back seat, then stood. The fellow's hands went to his waist; then his pants dropped —first to his knees, then to his feet! With the awkward step you use in a rocking boat, he got one foot free of them, then the other. Nor was he wearing underwear. The minuscule figure grasped his genitals— — and winked out to become only water. What had happened, Sam realized, was that the visible area was only the fraction of an arc directly below; and when he'd walked more than sixteen feet or so, the area he
v class=block style=" width:407.04pt; height:4.08pt;">
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		SAMUEL R. DELANY
	lign="top" style=" width:0.00pt;">
		could see moved over: his arc of visibility no longer included the boat! Without even looking up, Sam swung around and began to stride back. Yes, there the fellow was, doing what Sam had assumed he'd been about to do: urinating. Ripples spread in translucent rings, through sunlight, from where, some feet from the boat's side, the fellow's waters conjoined the river's. Man as water clock... ? Striding, Sam watched, wondering why any man, to do what all men do, had to strip himself naked in the midst of the water-When he collided, that is, banging his jaw on someone's head, confused, with...yes, a man, who grasped him by the shoulders, steadied him, more fitness, pushed him out to arm's length: "Hey, there, young fellow—!" "Oh...!" Sam said, read into the undeduced result. "Oh...! I'm... Are you... ? " It was a white man, dark complected but not swarthy, maybe Hubert's age, though at least a head

	shorter, with wire framed glasses like Mama's. His jaw was broad, his mustache brown. "I'm sorry...Oh!" Sam repeated. "Are you all right?" His own jaw throbbed, though he did not want to touch it. "I'm fine. What about you? Heads up on the bridge now, young fellow!" Then, with a warm grin, the man walked on. After that, Sam thought about	I must at once acknowledge an even greater indebtedness to Mr. Willis Clarke for his generosity toward me. In 1903 Mr. Clarke began to collect copies of letters and facts for a life...but was so baffled by conflicting statements that he dropped the work. His shorthand report of an interview with Crane at Brede is quoted in Chapters 1,3, and 4 and 7 of this book.

	looking down again at the crazy rower pissing from his boat. He rubbed his jaw. But even though no one was nearer than land, it wasn't something you wanted to be caught looking at. So after that, he raised his eyes again to the cables; and walked... more slowly.

	68



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 Well, the bridge was magnificent. Besides the man he'd collided with hurrying off, only half a dozen people strolled along the boardwalk. This means never — two cyclists pedaled across: a young man, followed by a young woman in blowing skirts, both in yellow hats with black ribbons. (Certainly they'd be in love...) Getting any closer to—a seagull swooped in rings between the cables, circled again to perch unsteadily on one slant cord, bobbed its tail, and, for all its unsteadiness, let fall its liquid waste, a white gleam along gray cable, before it splatted, in a lime-like star, over the planks fifteen feet ahead. The whole world, it seemed, was expectorating, urinating, defecating. Was that the basic principal operating behind spring in New York? A day of natural functions ? He thought about it and continued walking. The time to look at skyscrapers, he decided (still entranced with the bridge itself)—rather than to the distracted entity of a mirage—, would be on the way back. Ten minutes later, Sam reached the second stanchion's platform, to gaze over at the Brooklyn shore. No skyscrapers there. Right, low buildings hugged the water. Other than In February of 1929, Edna St.- that, there was not too much of any-Vincent Millay had not yet thing, really—save scattered wood-heard of Hart Crane—according en houses. As Sam came down the to Mary Blair's soon to be di- steps and started forward on the vorced husband, Bunny Wilson. bridge's landward leg, ahead and to the left was... an early cornfield! He began to slow his pace, found himself frowning, the half-meant, half-perceived motions. Really, this was, in its way, more disconcerting than the visual revelation of his height above the water at bridge center. Already Sam had learned to see the city, with its numbered streets and avenues, even with those exceptions like Hamilton Terrace — or Gay Street or Rose —, as a grid in which everything had its place, in which nothing could be lost. Even after a few months, the country had become in memory a kind of field, verdant and vasty, of fronds out of idle depths, pleasant to the eye, but in which nothing much could be

	69



		SAMUEL R.	"What movie ? " Sam said. Though he knew t">
		found, especially if it wasn't your own bit of it that you'd spent your whole life learning as best you could, but only a stretch—like this—like it: which are summer. The city behind him, in whose concrete crevices he'd been learning to find his way, the city he'd been learning to work in, to make himself comfortable in, even more, to have some bit of fun in... well, though it was still supposed to be New York, here was no city at all! Ahead, the bridge spilled out onto macadam that ribboned through the land — land not terribly different from what he'd left in Carolina. He could see a couple of churches. There was a cluster of white frame Hart Crane and Vachel Lindsay houses you might even call a town- took their lives that spring. ship; and two, four, or twelve miles Great gifts always set their pos-further along the road (he knew) sessors apart, but not necessarily there'd be another. But the bridge apart from any chance to exer-here, he realized, connected the city cise them; this gift at that time to the country. And country was pretty well did, what is meant is what Sam thought he'd left behind. that this distant image of you, For the first time in months, he the way you really are, remembered the white woman on the train — Scottish — who'd been so eager to talk...who lived in the heart of all that. Brooklyn? Her gregariousness had made him uncomfortable. This sudden view of the place she lived—gregarious in its own way, with all he realized now he knew of it—made him as uneasy as she had. Turning, and expansion into little draughts, he started back for the stanchion steps. Then, across the railing, beyond the trolley wires, down on the water he saw the boat — the green dinghy. The reply wakens easily, darting from untruth to willed moment. This much closer to shore, the bridge had imperceptibly lowered, till it what did you see as you fell, what was only a third as high above the did you hear / as you sank? greeny river as it had been in the
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ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 p with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.
center. That was why it took him an eye's blink, a heart's beat, to recognize it. It seemed much larger—the tiny thing—turning slowly, moving out from the rail's edge. But, yes, there was the yellow hat, still on the back seat. Something dark trailed from the side into the water—a leg of the doffed trousers ? Now, maybe twenty feet away, an oar floated out, making the same turns as the boat, moments back, following the same current. Sam frowned, then walked to the rail, to gaze across the traffic lanes a dozen feet below. No, the boat was empty. He could see the braces across its bottom. He strained to see the pants, the hat—one oar docked inside, the other loose and floating. He watched a long time. It took the p with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.
boat almost two minutes to do a complete, lazy, long rotation. And he watched it do two, then three, while he scanned the water, first near it, then further away, for the sunburned arms and shoulders cutting through (swimming strongly), black hair thrown back, glistening, breaking the ripples...		is the test of how you see yourself, and regardless of whether or not you hesitate, Sentimentality and Inhibition are the Scylla and Charybdis of the criticism of this decade, it may be assumed that you have won, that this wooden and external representation

He saw nothing. I should have looked again, Sam thought, returns the full echo of what you meant. In the middle of the bridge, after I ran into that fellow, I should have—though, he pondered a moment later, what good might I have done him even if I had seen

In the lunar year, the sun's death month—and the death month of the young god—is the thirteenth month.	him from up here dive, fall, or, heaven forbid, jump? Whom could I have called? It would take me half an hour to get to the shore, even

from here —to find someone about with a boat, much less get out in the water to help him.

7¹



	SAMUEL R. DELANY No, there were no ripples from the vanished rower, no fugitive swimmer to be seen. Sam looked about. Had anyone else seen it —or seen more of it? Had it been a young man? Or an old? Was it a white man? Or a black? (He remembered the sailor hawking over the bridge rail.) Was it some blue-eyed Larry just out of Kansas, younger than Hubert if older than he, voyage balked on his first brush with the ocean—but how could you tell? (It had all been so far away!) Had it been some cement-handed old salt, with a shark's tooth round his neck, an aged, fierce old man, a battered, wrecked enigma, mind and language shattered by a lifetime's collision with the sea? Was it the disillusion of age or youth the river had just drunk up ? The past, Sam thought. The past, the past. The past— The boat turned, looking now as though it would miss the rocks along the farmland's edge—by a hundred feet! And he could no longer see into it. Frowning, Sam put his hands into his trousers pockets and started back, scarcely called into being. At the top of the steps, when he'd left the stanchion to walk toward the bridge's center, once he looked down again, to see green water flash its coherent, sunny surface through the gaps at his feet—and the bridge's shadow cut away light, with nothing left over. (Had it moved, even in ten or fifteen minutes? From that circumference now alight with ex-possibilities?) Yes, he passed two women and, yes, one of them pushed a stroller, with a fringed parasol built out to cover it—so that certainly it contained some minuscule creature, mittened and bunted against cool May, to make its mother proud. Become present fact, and you must wear them like clothing. But in the anxiety he walked with now, they just didn't compensate. Above hung the stone and steel harp, moving in the shadow of your single and twin existence. A third of the way back, waking in intact appreciation of it, Sam stopped to sit on one of the benches and gaze off at the clouds over while morning is still, Hart Brooklyn. Sputum, urine, feces: Crane committed suicide on

	72



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 p with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.
	before it swells, the way a waterfall drums at different levels, at least he should find a policeman and tell him what had happened. He even got up, thinking to start again for the nearer, Brooklyn shore. But as	April 27, 1932, by jumping into the sea from the deck of a steamer bearing him from Mexico to the United States, and before the body is changed by the faces of evening

	he stood, he realized the one thing he would never find — among those fields and farmhouses — was a policeman. Policemen were in cities. Sam sat again. Certainly boat, hat, and the man's odd unconcern about his nakedness seemed con-I, / Catullus redivivus nected, in Sam's mind, with the more rural— "Excuse me," someone said behind him. "But you're Negro, aren't your

	73



	d



	The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity. — PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, AdonaiS ... plough through thrashing glister toward fata morgana's lucent melting shore, weave toward New World littorals that are mirage and myth and actual shore. — Robert hayden, "Middle Passage"

	Sam turned on the bench, to see, standing behind him, the man he'd bumped when he'd been staring through the planks. "Yes," Sam said. "That's right. I am." "I know it's none of my business," the man said. "But I'd bet a lot of people meet you and think you're white." Well, a lot of people up here did. "Some of them." "The reason I suspected, I suppose, is that I have a colored friend— a writer. A marvelous writer. He writes stories, but they're much more like poems. You read them, and you can just see the sunlight on the

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	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	fields and hear the sound of the Negro girls' laughter. His name is Jean—" "—Toomer?" Sam supplied. "Now don't tell me you're related to him...?" The man laughed. "Though you look somewhat like him. You know, Jean just ran off with the wife of my very good friend, Waldo—so I don't think I'm really supposed to like him right through here —it's the kind of thing you don't write your mother about. But I do — like him, that is. He's handsome, brilliant, talented. How could one help it? Maybe that's why I took a chance and spoke to you —because you do look something like him. New York is the biggest of cities, but the smallest of worlds. Everybody always turns out to know everyone else—" "No," Sam said. "No. I'm not his relative. But he's a friend of my..." How did you explain about your brother's strange girlfriend—who was the one who knew everybody. "A friend of my brother's. Well, a friend of a girl my brother knows." Though Clarice had said he looked like Toomer, she hadn't mentioned the absconsion. "She was the one who told me about him." He couldn't imagine Clarice approving of such carryings on. "Oh, well, there—you see. You know, that man you were watching, in the boat—do you mind if I sit down?" "No. Sure...!" The young man stepped around the bench's end, flopped to the seat, and flung both arms along the back: "Lord, he was hung! Like a stallion! Pissed like a racehorse, too!" He looked over, grinning behind his glasses. "To see it from up here at all, someone's got to throw a stream as thick as a fire hose. It was something, 'ey?" Sam was surprised — and found himself grinning at the ridiculousness of it. People didn't strip down to stand up and make water before all New York—but if someone did, even less did you talk about it. That both had happened within the hour seemed to overthrow the anxiety of the last minutes, and struck him as exorbitantly comic. "But did you see what he did?" Sam asked. "Did you see?" "I saw as much as you, I bet —maybe more, the way you ran off."

	₇6



	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 The fellow hit him playfully on the shoulder with the back of his hand. "I mean, he must have jumped in... for a swim. Or maybe—" "No," the man said. "I don't think he'd have done that." He seemed suddenly pensive. "It's much too cold. The water's still on the nippy side, this early in spring." "But he must have," Sam said. He'd stopped laughing. "I saw the boat, later on —over there." He pointed toward Brooklyn. "There was no one in it. I know it was the same boat. Because of the hat, and... because of his hat." "No one in it?"The man seemed surprised. "It was floating empty. He must have fallen overboard —or jumped in. Then he couldn't get back up. The boat was just drifting, turning in circles. Really—there was no one in it at all!" The man narrowed his eyes, then looked pensively out at the sky while a train's open-air trundle filled the space beneath them. Through the green v's of the beams supporting the rail, over the walkway's edge, Sam could see the car tops moving toward the city. Finally the man said: "No, I don't think that's what happened. He was probably one of the Italian fishermen living over there. I live over there, too—not too far from them. A clutch of Genovesi." He too waved toward Brooklyn. "God, those guineas are magnificent animals! Swim like porpoises—at least the boys do. You can watch them, frisking about in the water just down from where I live. Fell in? Naw...!" He burlesqued the word, speaking it in an exaggerated tone of someone who didn't use it naturally. "It's a bold swimmer who jumps into the midst of his own pee. You think he went under in his own maelstrom, while your white aeroplane of Help soared overhead? Oh, no. The East River's not really a river, you know. It's a saltwater estuary—complete with tides. So even that whole herd of pissers from the Naval Shipyard, splattering off the concrete's edge every day, doesn't significantly change the taste. Jump? I'll tell you what's more likely. After he spilled his manly quarts, he lay down in the bottom and let his boat float, with the sunlight filling it up around him as if it were a tub and the light was a froth of suds. And when, finally, he drifts into the dago docks, he'll jump up, grab hold of

	77



	SAMUEL R. DELANY

	it, and shake that long-skinned guinea pizzle for the little Genoese lassies out this afternoon to squeal over, go running to their mothers, and snigger at. No, suicidal or otherwise, his kind doesn't go in for drown-ing. Sam started to repeat that the boat had been empty. But—well, was there a chance he'd missed the form stretched on the bottom? Sam said: "You live in Brooklyn?" because that was all he could think to say. (No. He remembered the oar. The boat had been empty, he was sure of it— almost.) The man inclined his head: "Sebastian Melmouth, at your service. One-ten Columbia Heights, Apartment C33." The man took his glasses off, held them up to the sky, examining them for dust, then put them back on. Sam said: "I think he fell over. Maybe he was drunk or crazy or... drunk. Maybe that's why he took his clothes off—?" "—to piss in the river?" The man cocked his head, quizzical. "It's possible. Those guineas drink more than I do. A couple of quarts of dago red'll certainly make your spigot spout." He looked over at Sam, suddenly sober-faced. "My name isn't really Sebastian Melmouth. Do you know who Sebastian Melmouth was ? " Sam shook his head. "That was the name Wilde used, after he got out of Reading and was staying incognito in France. Oscar Wilde — you know, The Ballad of Reading Gaol—'each man kills the thing he loves'?" ^u The Importance of Being Earnest" Sam answered. "The importance of being earnest to be sure!" The man nodded deeply. "They did that down on the school campus —the play —where I grew up." "School?"The man raised an eyebrow. "The college —it's a Negro college, in North Carolina. My father works there. My mama's Dean of Women. The students put it on, three years ago, I guess. We all went to see it." The man threw back his head and barked a single syllable of laughter. "I'm sorry—but the idea of The Importance of Being Earnest in blackface

	78


	ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924 —well, not blackface. But as a minstrel—" The man's laughter fractured his own sentence. "...Really!" He bent forward, rocked back, recovering. "That's just awful of me. But maybe — " he turned, sincere questioning among his features nudging through the laugh's detritus—"they only used the lighter-skinned students for the—?" "No," Sam said, suppressing the indignation from his voice. "No, they had students of all colors, playing whichever part they did best. They just had to be able to speak the lines." "Really?" the man asked, incredulously. Sam put his hands on his thighs, ready to stand and excuse himself. There seemed no need at all to continue this. "You know," the man said, sitting back again, again looking at the sky. "I would have loved to have seen that production! Actually, it sounds quite exciting. More than exciting —it might even have been important. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the sort of thing that all white people should be made to see — Shakespeare and Wilde and Ibsen, with Negro actors of all colors, taking whichever parts. It would probably do us some good!" Surprised once more, Sam took his hands from his thighs. His sister Jules, who had played Gwendolen Fairfax (and was as light as his mother), had said much the same thing after it was over—though the part of Cecily Cardew had been taken by pudgy little black-brown Milly Potts ("Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary we all carry about with us..."), who'd jazzed up the lines unmercifully, strutting and flaunting every phrase as much as it could bear and then some, rolling her eyes, shooting her hands in the air, and making the whole audience, including Papa, rock in their seats, clutch their stomachs and howl (the women's cackles cutting over and continuing after the men's bellowings)—to the point where the other actors couldn't say their own lines, trying to hold their laughter. Later, a more serious Papa had said that though it was supposed to be style it wasn't

	Surprised once more, Sam took h05.04pt;"> 79