Read Online Atlantis: Three Tales by Samuel R. Delany - Free Book Online Page A

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 as asafœtida.
    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 on—fall 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 Siena, 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. Allmuffled 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 Papasocially at home. And nothing made a