Back in the mists of time, around a decade ago, there was a plan for an ever-expanding online collection of short critical essays on key works of the fantastic. The plan fizzled and died, but not before I wrote nine pieces for it (which I just found). This is another of them.
First edition: New York: Macaulay, 1931
Edition used: New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969
Frequently praised by HL Mencken as
the most competent Negro journalist […] the most competent editorial writer now in practice in this great free Republic[1]
Schuyler has been largely neglected in histories of sf, partly because of the difficulty of penetrating his pseudonyms (including Samuel I Brooks, Rachel Call, Edgecombe Wright), partly because sf constitutes only a tiny fraction of his massive output, partly because he was published outside of the regular pulp venues, and partly because his politics were somewhat at odds with genre norms. So, for example, his novellas ‘The Black Internationale’ and ‘Black Empire’ (1936–38; later collected as Black Empire), which depict a conspiracy of black professionals manipulating national and international politics to reclaim Africa as a black homeland, did not appear in Amazing or Astounding but in the Pittsburgh Courier – not a publication to which sf historians would necessarily think to turn.
The neglect of Black No More, first published in book form at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance in 1931 (when sf books were few and far between), is perhaps harder to explain, although it would not have been promoted as sf and many might have found its dedication off-putting:
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO ALL CAUCASIANS IN THE GREAT REPUBLIC WHO CAN TRACE THEIR ANCESTRY BACK TEN GENERATIONS AND CONFIDENTLY ASSERT THAT THERE ARE NO BLACK LEAVES, TWIGS, LIMBS OR BRANCHES ON THEIR FAMILY TREES.
When, on New Year’s Eve 1933, Max Disher is spurned by a white woman at the Honky Tonk Club, he decides to take Dr Junius Crookman’s revolutionary BLACK-NO-MORE treatment to turn him white. Adopting the name Matthew Fisher, he returns to his hometown of Atlanta in pursuit of her. There, pretending to be an anthropologist, he takes up with the Reverend Henry Givens, an ex-officer of the Ku Klux Klan, who is starting up the Knights of Nordica, an organisation of
White Men and Women […] Fight[ing] for White Race Integrity. (60)
To Max’s delight, the white woman turns out to be Givens’ daughter, Helen. Fearing Max’s growing popularity in his rapidly expanding organisation, Givens is happy to see them married. Meanwhile, Max has been joined by his newly-whitened friend Bunny Brown, and together they make the Knights of Nordica into a major political power, effectively taking over the Anglo-Saxon Association and the Democratic Party. As the black population of America disappears, the central plank of the Knights election strategy is to demand compulsory genealogical testing and race-based social stratification. Crookman and his associates join forces with the Republicans to keep open the BLACK-NO-MORE centres and lying-in hospitals (where any baby born black is turned white so as to avoid social embarrassment). On the eve of the election, Dr Buggerie’s genealogical research – which suggests that if there were as few as one thousand African-Americans who could
pass for white […] fifteen generations ago […] their descendants now number close to fifty million souls (197)
– is stolen, and published in the newspapers:
DEMOCRATIC LEADERS PROVED OF NEGRO DESCENT
Givens, Snobbcraft, Buggerie, Kretin and Others
of Negro Ancestry, According to Old
Records Unearthed by Them. (210)
Max, Bunny and their loved ones manage to escape. Buggerie and Snobbcraft are not so fortunate. Fleeing though Mississippi in blackface disguise, they are nearly lynched; only after they have proven who they are and that they are white, do the newspapers arrive…
Black No More is a remarkable work of satire, as sprightly and as timely now as when it was written. Its great strength lies in its dyspeptic vision of the absurdity of racism and the hypocrisy with which race is used as a means of obtaining and maintaining power, wealth and influence by some people regardless of colour. This latter is at its most pointed in the sequence in which Max blackmails Blickdoff and Hortzenboff, the owners of Paradise Mill in South Carolina, into paying him to break the imminent strike – a feat he then achieves by seeming to side with the workers, most of them Knights of Nordica who wish to unionise, while hinting that among them are probably some whitened blacks who are constitutionally incapable of not betraying the strike:
Rumor was wafted abroad that the whole idea of a strike was a trick of smart niggers in the North who were in the pay of the Pope. The erstwhile class conscious workers became terror striken by the specter of black blood. You couldn’t, they said, be sure of anybody any more, and it was better to leave things as they were than to take a chance of being led by some nigger. If the colored gentry coudn’t sit in the movies and ride in trains with white folks, it wasn’t right for them to be organizing and leading white folks. (134)
Once the strike is over, the mill owners
took immediate steps to make their workers more satisfied with their pay, their jobs and their little home town. They built a swimming pool, a tennis court, shower baths and a playground for their employees but neglected to shorten their work time so these improvements could be enjoyed. They announced that they would give each worker a bonus of a whole day’s pay at Christmas time, hereafter, and a week’s vacation each year to every employee who had been with them more than ten years. There were no such employees, of course, but the mill hands were overjoyed with their victory. (136)
Because Schuyler’s satire is so wide-ranging, because he treats leaders as cynical manipulators and followers as dupes, because none of his characters seem capable of good or pure motives, it would be easy to label Black No More misanthropic. However, to do so would be to misintepret a comic vision that finds so much humour in venality because those who think they are acting in their own self-interest so frequently are not. Such a perspective produces the kind of absurdism which defines Black No More and which reaches its pinnacle in the last few pages – a few years after the events the novel recounts, it is discovered that those who underwent the BLACK-NO-MORE treatment are in fact lighter in colour than ‘white’ people; consequently, in the desire not to be taken for blacks, people begin to darken their skin colour to look like whites…
The other eight entries I wrote were:
Voltaire, Candide
Godwin, Caleb Williams
de Maistre, Voyage Around My Chamber
France, Thais
London, The Iron Heel
Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+
Smith, The Skylark of Space
Sturgeon, Venus Plus X
Notes
[1] Both quotations can be found in Schuyler, Black Empire (Boston: Northeaatern University Press, 1991), p.312, n.15.
Mark Bould 