The right way to tackle racism in sci-fi/fantasy: The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle

 I have been grumbling lately about the excesses of "woke" culture, but with CPAC going on, um... no.  Let's take another perspective today.  This morning, let's have a look at an interesting piece I read quite recently that does the whole "wokeness" thing very insightfully.  If you are not familiar with Victor LaValle, he has been making quite a name as a science fiction/fantasy writer, and justifiably so.  The man can write.  And as opposed to a hack like me, he can write well.

One of the observations that has been beaten like a dead horse, though, is the observation that H.P. Lovecraft was racist.  Did you know that Lovecraft was racist?  Just askin', in case you didn't know.  That... he was racist.  Like actually, completely over-the-top, Trump/Limbaugh-style racist.  And in fact, he was.  However, that horse isn't just dead.  It's glue at this point.  Whatever you think you're getting by beating this horse, well, you gotta find the horse first, and the glue has been bottled, sold, applied to arts and crafts projects, and is currently getting huffed by loonies at CPAC in an attempt to come up with crazier and more racist hallucinations than whatever went through Lovecraft's head as he dreamed up his eldritch-racist horrors.

Point being, Lovecraft was very influential, but if your only real point is that he was racist... well, too late.  But Lovecraft's mythologies were fascinating, and playing around in this space creates an opportunity for someone willing to put in the hard work of doing more than saying, "hey!  Look!  I discovered that Lovecraft was actually racist!"  Enter Victor LaValle, and his novella, The Ballad of Black Tom.

The Ballad of Black Tom is a play on Lovecraft's The Horror at Red Hook, which was a particularly odious story from Lovecraft.  If you want to see Lovecraft's xenophobia in all its ugliness, that'd be an example.  The story is about Robert Suydam, and his magical shenanigans.  Creepy, old wizardly dude in Brooklyn, 1920s, who starts messing around with evil magic.  He gathers some power, sets up shop in a neighborhood of immigrant gangs-- Red Hook-- and you get yourself a showdown with the cops.  That's the short version.  I'm skipping through it, because it is simple, you don't need to know it beyond the xenophobia, and because LaValle's version is so much better.

And let's start with that final observation.  I'm sick of remakes and reboots.  Enough.  Do something new.  Mostly.  The justification for a reboot/remake/whatever?  If you can improve on something, or put it in a new light.  LaValle does both.  Not only does he shift your perspective on The Horror of Red Hook, but his story is a better story.  Now, credit where credit is due, standing on the shoulders of giants, and all that.  Lovecraft created a genre.  The whole thing about eldritch, extra-dimensional, ancient gods like Cthulu, the creepy magic surrounding them, and all that... we wouldn't have this without Lovecraft.  But not only was he a shit, not all of his stories were up to snuff as stories, and Red Hook... no.  LaValle just did it better.

So what'd he do?  He shifted perspective dramatically, to "Black Tom."  That's Tommy Tester.  OK, give me a "jazz age" story with a new take on Lovecraft, and I'm already half way there.  Me and music?  Oh, yeah.  So Tommy.  Tommy is a musician and hustler, but... he's a bad musician.  Like... terrible.  It's actually quite funny.  It's part of his hustle.  He plays the image of the street busker and small-time hustler, and part of that is that sucking at music kind of works for him.  This is a subtle thing, but it would have been so easy to make the main character a virtuoso, but no.  I love it when writers make smart choices like this.  Anyway, the story follows, not Suydam, but Tester as he eventually gets hired by Suydam, but through the power of some music, winds up overtaking Suydam as the Big Bad, while being written off by the cops as nothing more than a minor henchman because their basic racism makes it impossible for them to believe that a black man could be anything more.

This is so much better than Lovecraft.

So there is a very obvious element to what is happening here.  Instead of Lovecraft's racist, xenophobic portrayals of those in Red Hook, LaValle writes about the racism of the cops, and the social structures of the 1920s.  That, though, is the obvious stuff.  Had LaValle stopped there, the story would have been a dud.  What makes the novella so good is that LaValle writes compellingly about how the racism of the police and society more generally help to turn Tommy from a slightly sketchy but basically decent hustler into a truly horrifying villain-- Black Tom.  And in order for this to work, the character does have to be villainous.  He brutally tortures and disfigures a cop at the end, in order to complete a ritual that will ultimately bring forth Cthulu.  He muses that he doesn't know how long it will take, but basically, Black Tom is responsible for climate change and rising sea levels, which is all prelude to Cthulu.  And... Cthulu is not good.  We don't want Cthulu here.  That's apocalypse.  So, Tommy's story arc is that he starts as a basically decent but slightly sketchy hustler, but the pressures of society and all of the racism drive him towards Suydam and evil magic, and he ultimately becomes the bigger magical threat, taking vengeance by enacting the ritual murder of a bunch of people, torturing and disfiguring a cop so that he can complete a ritual that will ultimately bring forth Cthulu through climate change and rising sea levels.

Can... we agree that Black Tom is the bad guy, even though racism is bad?  I hope so.  I'm pretty sure LaValle intended it that way.  And anyone still cheering for Tommy at the end... dude.

And this is a vital point.  No matter how much vile shit Tommy endured, regardless of the murder of Tommy's father by the cops (who swore he was reaching for a gun, of course...), that does not justify what he eventually does.  He is the villain, by the end.  LaValle does not shy away, either from the racism about which he writes in the creation of Black Tom, as the villain, nor the villainy of Black Tom.

Would Lovecraft, himself, look at the ultimate destination of Tommy, his evil at the end, and say, "I told you so?"  One could imagine the racist reading of LaValle's version, and asserting that Tommy's end was predetermined by the Lovecraftian assessment of race.  That would, of course, be wrong.  We see the cast of characters, and how they live, but more importantly, we see the story arc, and the causal nature of the events.  A leads to B leads to C.  Tommy becomes Black Tom for a reason.  A set of reasons.

Is this an argument that racism produces reciprocal villainy?  Such an argument could go to some dark places, but that, too, has incomplete support in LaValle's text.  After all, plenty of characters endured racism without becoming Black Tom.  Rather, it is a villain's origin story, and a relatively common one.  Magneto and the Holocaust comes to mind, although Magneto's villainy was rarely as complete as Black Tom's.

Understanding that perspective, though, is important.  Some people are sociopaths, but not very many.  The rest of the time, when you see people doing bad things, it is the result of a wide variety of factors.  Some of those factors may be societal, yet to observe this is not to excuse the behavior.

Making that observation, and doing so while fully condemning both the societal evils and the behavior itself is difficult.  Doing so while taking a new twist on Lovecraft, and the dead horse of his racism?  This is how you do it.  This is how you write woke sci-fi/fantasy.  Victor LaValle.  This guy is good.  Get to know him.

And for today's music selection, one of the key pieces of music in the novella is "Grinnin' In Your Face," so here's one of my favorite versions.  Son House, "Grinnin' In Your Face."