Atlantis: Three Tales by Samuel R. Delany

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 nickels dimes quarters and fifty-cent pieces in two thick canvas sacks metal fastenings at the top through the brass bars he exchanged them for an envelope of paper money out of which back at the store Mr. Harris carefully counted Sam’s nine dollars for the week the sales girl gum-chewing Missely’s twelve and put theenvelope with the rest in his inner suit coat pocket the only profit it looked like Mr. Harris allowed himself from the business Missely was Milly Pott’s weight and Milly Pott’s color but with not half Milly’s sense of humor two Fridays on Mr. Harris came in and unwrapped his scarf “Feels like snow again don’t it” and after hanging up the length of maroon wool on the coat rack’s brass hook said “Before you go downstairs Sam run over two buildings and hunt up Poonkin he’ll probably be in the cellar see if he got those boards he told me about and if he do you bring as many back here as you can carry I want to put me up some shelving downstairs in the back all right” and Sam said “A Mr. Poonkin” and Mr. Harris said “I don’t think there’s any ‘mister’ in with it just Poonkin” and he grinned gold tooth bright between the white ones in a face as deep a brown as Papa’s “Poonkin was in the Civil War you know ask him to tell you about it sometime but not on my time now get going” and in only his shirtsleeves Sam went out in the gelid noon through steely cold he hurried two buildings up the wooden planks of the cellar doors gaped between snow banks he ducked down they rose like green board wings beside him as he dropped one foot then the other to a lower step in deepening shadow “Mr. Poonkin . . .” because he was a well-bred boy and his father said you call a man mister now you hear me white or colored but especially a colored man a lot of people won’t call a colored man mister it shows you have breeding Sam stepped further down the ceiling of the cellar was crossed by tarred eight-by-ten beams bowed now and gray pipes the joints shiny with new solder low enough so that there’d be no standing easily here
    â€œ. . . Mr. Poonkin” as he trod on the cement floor that two feet on became earth a voice cracked like the ground beneath his shoes “What you want . . . ?” and the blades of light that came in at the ceiling’s edge from some cracks up to the street were much brighter it seemed than the aluminum light outside “Mr. Harris in the clothing store hesent me over here I work for Mr. Harris? and he told me to come over about some wood? you had for him? he wants to make some shelves—in his cellar?” the voice answered “Oh. Yeah . . .” and stepped forward the face wizened as a prune and what of it visible a moment passing through a beam not much bigger
    As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere