IF BLACK PEOPLE WROTE ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE THE WAY WHITE PEOPLE WROTE ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE: A SAMPLING OF AMERICAN FICTION
Note: I re-fashioned the following sample directly from the language and scenarios of existing American novels, but I reversed the racial power dynamic so that the subject or narrator is a black and the object is white. The race of the black narrator is assumed, in the same way the white narrator is assumed in much of American fiction.
1. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ADVENTURE NOVEL
I first encountered Derek Blackworthy, that enigmatic and legendary figure, in a small port town hidden among the islands of the Pale, where my vessel, the Pana Pua, lay at anchor. On the docks, a number of the Pale scurried about, their small eyes set far back in their heads, their long pink snouts seeming to lead them along. Their hair, dun or rusty or yellow, was like a sick animal’s pelt, for it sprouted in tufts on their faces and arms and even their hands but left patches of their bloodless flesh visible, and I shuddered with a sudden notion that I was now stranded for an uncertain period in a town of large, mangy opossums.
Seeking refreshment, I entered a den along the quay and requested a cup of the local draught. So dim was the room that I could barely make out the lipless, anemic female who approached to wipe the table with a dirty rag, her long stringy hair tied in a knot. A smell of rancid butter assailed me, followed by the layered and peculiar odors the woman radiated, as the Pale rarely wash either their woollen clothes or themselves.
Then I saw him, a big good-looking man whose vigor and almost preternatural health could be discerned in an instant. He hailed me from a table at the back of the room, smiling with strong white teeth. He did not seem to be enervated by the clammy weather. Indeed, he looked restless as he sat there.
“You and I have come to a fine place, Friend,” he said. “Are the Pale not a wonderfully wan and listless people? Is that woman who waits upon you not as comely as warmed-over-death?”
I said, “Ashen, waxy, pallid, colorless, unpigmented, peaky, languid, washed out, etiolated, lymphatic--use any epithet you like.”
“Perhaps they were forged in the likeness of some albino of the underworld,” the man said.
I mentioned my fancy about the town of opossums.
“That is too kind!” he laughed with a great bark. “In my country, there is a foul white rat that lives inside the Earth’s crust, its skin so transparent you can see the young inside the pregnant female’s belly. That is what these Pale people remind me of.”
I lowered my voice. “Indeed, are they people? I scarcely believe them to be made in God’s image at all.”
The handsome man’s face shone with a kind of strange rapture. “Ha ha!” he cried. “And if they are not really human, is not their world one great playground for black men like you and me? You--Possum!” he shouted. “Bring me another cup of mead.”
(Based on Jack London’s novel, A Son of the Sun, published in 1912)
