Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany

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СКАЧАТЬ house and had a maid. My father’s business was on the ground floor. We lived on the top two. For another, I attended neither the public school two blocks to the north nor the Catholic school around the corner to the south. During my early childhood, every morning my father, or occasionally one of his employees, drove me down to a private school at 89th Street just off Park Avenue. The school’s population was overwhelmingly white, largely Jewish, and educated the children of enough millionaires, literary lights, government officials, and theatrical personages to keep its name, with fair frequency, in the papers as well as in the gossip of New York folk interested in the osmotic properties of success.

      In the ’40s Harlem’s southern boundary was much more abrupt than it is today: 110th Street, along the top of Central Park, delimited it with a sureness I could sense any time on my trip home I had to transfer from the Fifth Avenue Number Four bus to the Number Two, which would take me on up Seventh Avenue—waiting across from the corner of the park under the awning of some closed-down night spot reminiscent of Cole Porter days and the trampish lady who “won’t go to Harlem in ermines and pearls.”

      My twice-daily trip from Seventh Avenue and 132nd Street, between Mr. Onley’s and Mr. Lockley’s, to the private school just down the street from the construction then going on for the then-new Guggenheim Museum, the change from the black children of subway workers, hospital orderlies and taxi drivers (my friends on the block) to the white children of psychiatrists, publishers, and Columbia professors (my friends at school), was a journey of near ballistic violence through an absolute social barrier.

      I never questioned that violence.

      Such violences youngsters accustom themselves to very easily.

      But shortly after the incident with Mr. Lockley’s window gate I began to think—as you no doubt began thinking moments ago—of society itself as a structure similar to that gate. Well, not so much a gate, as a web. A net. Each person represented a juncture. The connections between them were not iron struts, but relations of money, goods, economics, information, emotions. Any social occurrence over here invariably moved, via these mediators, across the social net from person to person. This image of Mr. Lockley’s window gate seemed a good model for the life around me on the streets of Harlem. It seemed as well a good model for the life around me at my school. And yet from my position as a nineyear-old going on ten, I wondered just how these two gates, two webs, two nets, connected. In gross terms, the white one seemed to surround the black, holding the black one to its place and keeping it rather more crushed together in less space. But what were the actual connections between them? There was me, who passed from one to the other twice a day, along with the 15 or so other black children who lived in Harlem and, with me, attended the Dalton School—half of them it seemed, at that time, relatives of mine. The economic ties that connected the two webs could even be faintly traced via the white landlords and absentee store owners who took money out of the neighborhood, money that, by and large, was able to come back in only through blacks working either directly or indirectly for whites. Certainly the goods in Mr. Lockley’s store and most of the produce in Mr. Onley’s eventually took money out of the neighborhood. But these still left the ties of information and emotion—without which the economic ties had to remain oppressive.

      These ties were not there.

      Their absence was the barrier I crossed every time I left for and returned from my school. Their absence was the violence.

      What was the ’50s for me?

      It began with the electrocution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for treason. The parents of my liberal white friends were shocked, deeply, at what they saw as a clear emblem of something profoundly wrong in the land, regardless of whether they believed in the guilt or innocence of the gentle Jewish couple.

      It was the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till by mysterious and terrifying white men somewhere in the south. From our front window we watched diagonally across the street where, before what had once been the Lafayette Theater (where Orson Welles had directed Canada Lee in Blackbeth; more recently it had been a Harlem supermarket, and was now a Baptist church), Harlem citizens rallied, made speeches, sang, and made more speeches.

      It was the Supreme Court decision on integration. It was the first marches on Washington. It was Autherine Lucy. It was Sputnik and Little Rock, reported on the same September afternoon radio newscast. And from my rides to school each morning, I could see out the bus window that Harlem’s lower boundary was not nearly so well defined as it had been. Some information and plenty of emotion had broken through. Some people had even liked what they had learned; but most, on both sides, were more upset with it than not.

      The ’50s was also the decade I began reading science fiction.

      “Escape reading” was the term sometimes used for it, which lumped it with Westerns and romances—and the “Jalna” books, the “Claudia and David” novels, and the endless biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt my grandmother, who felt “serious reading” was bad for you, was given by her indulgent children and grandchildren for birthdays, for Christmas, and even, sometimes, for funerals. But what else was I reading? I read James Baldwin’s early essays that were to be first collected in Notes of a Native Son, and I thought they were as wonderful as … well, as science fiction. I also read Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go, and they seemed … well, history. They certainly didn’t take place in the world of freedom marches and integration rallies. Did they explain them? They certainly said that the condition of the black man in America was awful—somehow the black woman in these fictive endeavors got mysteriously shortchanged in a manner suspiciously similar to the way the white woman was getting shortchanged in the work of Wright’s and Himes’s white male contemporaries. (The black woman was somehow always the cause and the victim at once of everything that went wrong with the black man.) But Wright and Himes seemed to say as well that, in any realistic terms, precisely what made it so awful also made it unchangeable. And they said it with a certainty that, to me, dwarfed the moments of interracial rapprochement one found in books like John O. Killens’s Youngblood, no matter how much more pleasant Killens might have been for us youngsters to read. One began to suspect that it was precisely the certainty that no real change was possible that had made Wright and Himes as popular as they were with those strangely always-absent readers who establish books as classics. At least that’s what I seemed to read in them in a world that was clearly exploding with racial change from headline to headline.

      Did the science fiction I read at the time talk about the black situation in America, about the progress of racial change?

      Isaac Asimov’s famous “Robot” stories certainly veered close. The series, available today in four volumes (the short story collections I, Robot and The Rest of the Robots, and the novels Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun), deals with a future where humans and robots live side by side, though the prejudice and disdain the robot detective R-Daneel (one of the two main characters in The Caves of Steel) experiences is clearly an analog of some of the milder sorts of prejudice we experienced from whites. And Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics,” famous to young SF readers the world over, essentially amount to: Robots shall not harm, disobey, or displease humans—which, if you substitute white for human and black for robot, is clearly a white ideal of what the “good Negro” ought to be. And the stories, of course, gain most of their wit and interest from the ingenious ways the clever robots figure out to get around those laws without actually breaking them or getting into real trouble. Yet the stories touch on many other things beside, so that in the end the racial analog, rather than forming a central theme, seems more like a naked lightbulb on a loose cord, swinging back and forth, flickering on and off throughout the tales, sometimes illuminating the actions, sometimes clearly not in the least the concern of the writer.

      Well, then, how does one read these tales today? I can only give you the way one black СКАЧАТЬ