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

social situation more uncomfortable for Sam. It turned everything you did into a performance, and always left him somewhere between tongue-tied and belligerent.
    â€œ
I’d
like 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.
    â€œGo
on
, Sam!” Hubert said. “That’s what you brought it over here for—to
show
people!”
    â€œNo!”
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.
    â€œI don’t know.” Corey smiled. “Can you?”
    â€œWould 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?”
    â€œWhat movie?” Elsie asked.
    â€œThat movie,” Mr. Carter said, “where you two got into all that trouble?”
    â€œSix years ago?” Elsie said. “What movie does he—”
    â€œOh, 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!”
    â€œBut . . . what happened?”
    â€œMight as well go ahead,” Hubert said. “After all this time, everybody ought to know.”
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œThat 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—”
    â€œOh!” Elsie said. “That awful movie—that made everybody go out and start lynching all those people!”
    â€œIt didn’t
start
them lynching,” Corey said. “But it certainly made them go out and lynch more.”
    â€œWhat did you have to do with it?” Sam asked.
    â€œWe were picketing—a peaceful picket line. With a lot of other Negroes.”
    â€œWith a lot of other
angry
Negroes, I bet,” Hubert said. “That’s what I heard.”
    â€œWe
were
angry,” Dr. Corey said. “Who wouldn’t be angry, at a movie like that?”
    â€œHow did a movie make people lynch people?” Sam wanted to know.
    â€œIt 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