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Bettina Jansen

NARRATIVES OF
COMMUNITY IN
THE BLACK BRITISH
SHORT STORY
 Narratives of Community in the Black British
Short Story

“Jansen’s new book is a brilliant critical response to the social and cultural
­transformations in contemporary Britain, providing a rigorous critical answer to
the urge of posing solutions to social conflict. Covering a wide range of authors,
here Jansen articulates the first systematic analysis of the black British short story
through the adequate lens of postcolonial and philosophical concepts of commu-
nity in what stands out as an essential thorough examination of both “black British
literature” and the short story, thus constituting an illuminating contribution to
the field.”
—Laura Mª Lojo-Rodríguez, Senior Lecturer in English,
University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and coeditor of
Gender and Short Fiction: Women’s Tales
in Contemporary Britain (2018)
 Bettina Jansen

Narratives
of Community
in the Black British
Short Story
Bettina Jansen
TU Dresden
Dresden, Germany

ISBN 978-3-319-94859-1 ISBN 978-3-319-94860-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94860-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018947412

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
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 Acknowledgements

This book began life as a Ph.D. thesis at TU Dresden, Germany.

Therefore, I owe my thanks to the community of scholars at the uni-
versity’s English Department of which I have been a part. My supervi-
sor Stefan Horlacher gave me the freedom to follow my fascination with
British short story writing and to make the black British short story
the main subject of my academic research. He encouraged me to work
towards an innovative theoretical framework and offered helpful advice
along the way. Moreover, I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss
my findings with the participants in the Department’s postgraduate
colloquium, and I am indebted to the questions, suggestions, and reas-
surances from my colleagues and friends at the Department, especially
Mirjam Frotscher, Christina Kegel, Andrea Kiel, Ulrike Kohn, Thomas
Kühn, Wieland Schwanebeck, Robert Troschitz, and Gesine Wegner.
My expertise in the field of short story research has been crucially
shaped by my membership in the Society for the Study of the Short
Story in English, and the European Network for Short Fiction Research.
I am particularly obliged to the inspiration, encouragement, and sup-
port I received from Laura Lojo-Rodríguez (University of Santiago de
Compostela). Furthermore, my research has profited from its critical dis-
cussion at a number of international conferences; I would like to thank
especially Hywel Dix (Bournemouth University) and Elke D’hoker (KU
Leuven) for their insightful criticism and recommendations for fur-
ther reading. In the final stages of preparing this book, I have greatly

v
vi    Acknowledgements

benefited from the advice and support I received from Mita Choudhury
(Purdue University).
My thanks are also due to the staff of the Saxon State and University
Library Dresden, who knowledgeably and patiently helped me trace sin-
gle short stories in diverse newspapers and magazines at the outset of my
research, and Allie Troyanos and Rachel Jacobe at Palgrave Macmillan,
whose professionalism made the publication of my findings an enjoyable
experience.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents Susanne and
Gernoth Schötz for awakening my love of literature and sparking my
enthusiasm for British culture, and for encouraging me to pursue
these interests academically. My sister Juliane Weidmüller and her fam-
ily helped me not to forget the life outside of fiction. And my husband
Sebastian and our son Johann have brought so much joy into my life and
have shown great patience as I completed this book.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Theories of Community 35

Part I The Early Black British Short Story, c 1950–1980

3 The West Indian Immigrant Community: Samuel Selvon 67

4 The Emergence of a Black British Community:

Farrukh Dhondy 89

Part II Hanif Kureishi and the Black British Short Story

since the 1980s

5 “A New Way of Being British”: Kureishi’s ‘Ethnic’

Short Stories 117

6 Human Commonalities: Kureishi’s ‘Postethnic’

Short Stories 131

vii
viii    Contents

Part III The Local Black British Short Story since the 1990s

7 Scottish Singular Plurality: Jackie Kay 153

8 Scottish Community between Essence

and (De-)Construction: Suhayl Saadi 185

9 Accidental Englishness: Zadie Smith 207

Part IV The Cosmopolitan Black British Short Story

since the 1990s

10 Tour du Monde: Hari Kunzru 257

11 The World as Singular Plural Composite: Suhayl Saadi 279

12 Conclusion 309

Index 325
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The question of community, the question of how we want to live

together, is one of the crucial questions of our times. Our contemporary
era is shaped by struggles over race relations and concepts of community.
Although migration, cross-cultural exchange, and transnational coopera-
tion have become inherent aspects of our globalised lives, growing num-
bers of migrants as well as political refugees lead to periodic eruptions of
racist and nationalist sentiments in many countries across the world. In
Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy warningly notes a global resurgence
of “patriotism and ethnic-absolutism” (2005, 65). In Britain, too, the
increase in Islamist terrorist attacks and the perceived threat of uncon-
trollable immigration have resulted in a racist backlash. The historic
Brexit referendum was arguably won by an Islamophobic and anti-
immigration leave campaign that revived the myth of a quintessentially
white, monocultural, and homogeneous ‘British culture’. As a conse-
quence, more than half of the British population feel that “ethnic minor-
ities [threaten] their ‘culture’” (Hirsch 2017) and have become hostile
towards both newly arriving refugees and British-born minorities.
What populist and nationalist evocations of an ‘original’ ethno-racial
community conceal, however, is that human history is a history of migration
and that the nation-states in their presently existing forms are fairly recent
‘inventions’ (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Anderson [1983] 1991). As
early as in 1701, Daniel Defoe reminds his fellow countrymen that there
is no “True-Born Englishman,” for “from a Mixture of all Kinds began,/
That Het’rogeneous Thing, An Englishman” ([1701] 1974, 42–43).

© The Author(s) 2018 1

B. Jansen, Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94860-7_1
2 B. JANSEN

The right-wing notion of a hereditary and eternal English or British national

community is a fabricated fiction, the myth of “community as essence”
(Nancy [1986] 1991, xxxviii). Nevertheless, traditional, essence-based
notions of community have real-life consequences for those excluded,
who suffer from discrimination, violence, and, in extreme cases, systematic
persecution.
In order to arrive at new, peaceful, and respectful paradigms of liv-
ing together, it is necessary to deconstruct conventional conceptions of
community that associate a sense of belonging with a shared territorial,
ethno-racial, and/or spiritual essence. The thinking of community, the
French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy argues,

can no longer be a matter of figuring or modeling a communitarian

essence in order to present it to ourselves and to celebrate it, but […] it is
a matter rather of thinking community […] beyond communitarian mod-
els or remodelings. ([1986] 1991, 22)

What is at stake, then, is a redefinition of “[t]he very concepts of homo-

geneous national cultures […] or ‘organic’ ethnic communities” (Bhabha
[1994] 2004, 6–8). We need to rethink existing social and cultural for-
mations in order to replace the traditional ideology of homogeneity
and ethno-racial as well as cultural purity with an acknowledgement of
heterogeneity and a general openness towards others. Ultimately, the
postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha rightly argues, refugees just like post-
colonial migrants, diasporic peoples, and exiles are currently initiating “a
radical revision in the concept of human community itself” (ibid., 8).
Literature plays an important role in this deconstruction of preva-
lent notions of community because literature, Nancy stresses, “[opens]
community to itself” ([1986] 1991, 80). By inscribing community’s
“infinite resistance to everything that would bring it to completion,” lit-
erature exposes alternative, non-essentialist models of community (ibid.,
81). The black British writer and critic Caryl Phillips, too, points to the
immense potential that literature holds for a renegotiation of commu-
nity. In his essay “Colour Me English” (2011), he calls for an inclusion-
ary and polycultural1 understanding of British and European community,
urging us to “remind ourselves of the lesson that great fiction teaches
us as we sink into character and plot and suspend our disbelief: for
a moment, ‘they’ are ‘us’” (16). Literature encourages us to change
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

perspectives and relate to the supposed other, discovering that they are
not so different from ourselves but, in fact, “fellow human beings” (17).
Phillips emphasises that “[a]s long as we have literature as a bulwark
against intolerance, and as a force for change, then we have a chance”
(16). Not only does fiction possess “the moral capacity […] to wrench us
out of our ideological burrows and force us to engage with […] a world
that is peopled with individuals we might otherwise never meet in our
daily lives,” but “literature is [also] plurality in action” (ibid.). It presents
various characters and gives voice to their thoughts and feelings without
judging or even ranking them. Ultimately, Phillips argues, literary texts
“[implore] us to act with a compassion born of familiarity towards our
fellow human beings, be they Christian, Jew, Muslim, black, brown or
white” (16–17).
The German literary theorist and cultural critic Ottmar Ette sim-
ilarly argues that literary texts store a wealth of “knowledge for living
together” (2010, 989). He contends that “[t]he time is right to under-
stand literary scholarship as a science for living together” (991). Ette
urges literary scholars to use their analytical access to literary storehouses
of knowledge in order to partake actively in the contemporary discourse
about “how radically different cultures might live together” (983). He
states:

Although the literatures of the world have always been concerned with
knowledge for living together, literary scholars have yet to mine this
resource in any extensive and systematic fashion. Nor have they contrib-
uted any of this knowledge to recent public debates on the subject of
life. But literary criticism and critical theory should be at the forefront
of such discussions as we face the most important, and at the same time
riskiest, challenge of the twenty-first century: the search for paradigms of
coexistence that would suggest ways in which humans might live together
in peace and with mutual respect for one another’s differences. (989)

Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story responds to

Ette’s appeal in a number of ways. The book conducts an “extensive
and systematic” study of the “paradigms of coexistence” that contempo-
rary black British short fiction explores. Indeed, black British literature
seems to be of particular relevance at the present moment. Produced
by writers who are themselves in one way or another part of an earlier
wave of mass immigration to Europe, namely the postwar migration
4 B. JANSEN

from the Commonwealth to Britain, black British writing has reima-

gined community and suggested new models of social possibility since its
beginnings in the 1950s. We will see that the specific form of the black
British short story has proved particularly innovative in the experimen-
tation with alternative kinds of communal belonging. By foreground-
ing black British short fiction’s profound knowledge for living together
across cultural differences, this book wishes, as Ette demands, to con-
tribute to the public discourse on respectful, just, and peaceful ways of
communal living in Britain and beyond.

1  The Term ‘Black British Literature’

Any discussion of black British writing must start with a reflection on
the term ‘black British literature’ because it has been disputed by writ-
ers and critics alike and has come to mean very different things. Authors
like Salman Rushdie and Fred D’Aguiar early on warned that the term
tends to marginalise the writers thus categorised “in […] relation to
what might be called ‘white British literature’” (Ledent 2009, 16) and to
restrict them in the choice of their subject matter (Rushdie 1987, 37–38;
McLeod 2006, 95). More recent criticism points to the term’s overgen-
eralisation of the writers’ cultural diversity and its failure to “allow for
full consideration of individual ethnic identities” (Upstone 2010, 2; see
Arana 2009, xviii). Accordingly, several scholars differentiate between
‘black British’ literature penned by writers of African and Afro-Caribbean
descent, and ‘British Asian’ or ‘Asian British’ literature written by
authors of Asian or Indo-Caribbean descent (cf. Nasta 2002; Ellis 2007;
Innes 2008; Upstone 2010).
In contrast to such a racial conception of ‘black’ as denoting a writer’s
African heritage, I understand black in the British context as a political
and cultural term. Following scholars like Procter (2003), Stein (2004),
Arana (2007), and McLeod (2010), I use ‘black British literature’ as a
highly inclusive and heterogeneous category that refers to texts by “writ-
ers with African, South Asian, Indo-Caribbean, and African-Caribbean
backgrounds (backgrounds which could be further subdivided)” (Stein
2004, xiv). Such a wide understanding of black is indebted to the term’s
original usage as a “unifying framework” (Hall [1989] 1996, 441) for
Britain’s non-white population in their fight against racism (see Gilroy
[1987] 1995, 230, 236). My conception of black, then, acknowledges,
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

as Procter demands, black British literature’s “political, positional his-

tory” (2003, 10). Moreover, my broad definition of the term allows
for a comparative, transcultural approach to the short fiction originat-
ing from various non-white British backgrounds. It is only when “Asian
and African-Caribbean literature [are considered] collectively as a com-
munity of black writings” that the “rhetorical and intertextual relations”
(Procter 2003, 10) existing between these texts can be explored. In
order to distinguish my political and inclusive understanding of black,
which is unique to the British context, from the racial connotations that
the term carries in African American literary and cultural studies, black is
spelt with a lower-case initial throughout this monograph (cf. Low and
Wynne-Davies 2006, 3).

2   Black British Literature, Culture, and Politics

since 1948

This book does not consider black British short story writing in isolation,
but is interested in the cultural work that these short stories are doing
and seeks to outline their contribution to the contemporary discourse on
community. Therefore, it seems necessary to sketch the historical, polit-
ical, and cultural context in which black British literature has been pro-
duced in the second half of the twentieth and at the beginning of the
twenty-first centuries.
Historical evidence suggests that the history of black life in Britain
already begins with the Roman invasion in AD 43 when African soldiers
came to the island as part of the Roman armies (Innes 2008, 7). Yet, it is
the arrival of 492 West Indians on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 that
marks a watershed in black British history. The Empire Windrush signals
the beginning of large-scale immigration from, above all, the Caribbean
Islands, Africa, and South East Asia. Following recruitment campaigns
from successive British postwar governments (Green 1990, 3; Innes
2008, 180–181), an unprecedented number of Commonwealth immi-
grants arrived in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. Many migrants
readily embraced the British offer to fill empty jobs in the British textile,
shipbuilding, and automobile industries as well as the transport, health,
and postal services (Korte and Sternberg 1997, 17–18; Innes 2008, 180)
because it provided them with an escape from poverty, unemployment,
and political unrest in their newly independent home countries.
6 B. JANSEN

In 1951 the Caribbean and South Asian population in Britain

amounted to eighty thousand people, by 1971 it had already grown to
1.5 million.2 Within the next twenty years, it further increased to just
over three million people (Paxman 1999, 72). According to the 2011
Census for England and Wales, the last two decades again saw a con-
siderable rise in ethnic minority population: eight million people or 14%
of the population identify themselves either as belonging to ‘mixed or
multiple ethnic groups’, or as being ‘Asian’ or ‘Asian British’, ‘black’,
‘African’, ‘Caribbean’, or ‘black British’, or as belonging to any other
non-white ethnic group (ONS 2012). While Britain has become
“the most multiracial of European countries” (Phillips 2011, 216),
there are considerable geographical differences. The vast majority of
Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants live in the West
Midlands and the southeast of England (Paxman 1999, 73), with
London being the most ethnically diverse city in the UK (ONS 2012).
In Northern England, the West Yorkshire cities Leeds and Bradford but
also Manchester and Sheffield have significant BME populations, too (cf.
Elevation Networks 2016, 2). Conversely, Commonwealth immigrants
are “comparatively absent from Scotland and Wales” (Paxman 1999,
73; cf. ONS 2012). At present, more people of Commonwealth descent
are being born in Britain than migrate there, growing up as second- and
third-generation children of immigrants (Döring 2008, 164).
The substantial growth in ethnic minority population within a rela-
tively short amount of time has caused increasing racial tensions from
the very beginning, which have regularly culminated in violent race riots.
Commonwealth immigrants have suffered from discrimination in terms
of housing and employment,3 as well as open and concealed forms of
institutional racism. In his essay “The New Empire within Britain”
(1982), Rushdie argues that “every major institution in this country is
permeated by racial prejudice to some degree” ([1982] 1992, 134). He
famously observes:

It sometimes seems that the British authorities, no longer capable of

exporting governments, have chosen instead to import a new Empire, a
new community of subject peoples of whom they think, and with whom
they can deal, in very much the same way as their predecessors thought of
and dealt with “the fluttered folk and wild,” the “new-caught, sullen peo-
ples, half-devil and half-child,” who made up, for Rudyard Kipling, the
White Man’s Burden. (130)
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Rushdie succinctly expresses the pervasiveness of racial prejudice in the

1980s when he contends that “Britain is now two entirely different
worlds, and the one you inhabit is determined by the colour of your
skin” (134). That this situation had not changed one decade later was
officially acknowledged by the Macpherson Report (1999). This report
enquired into the murder of eighteen-year-old Stephen Lawrence in
1993 and the seemingly half-hearted attempts of Scotland Yard to give
first aid to the victim and to solve the crime. The Macpherson Report
publicly denounced the police services and the criminal justice system as
prone to institutional racism (ch. 47; Colls 2002, 179–180).
At the beginning of the new millennium, race relations reached a new
crisis in the summer of 2001 when several violent riots erupted in the
Northern cities of Oldham, Burnley, and Bradford (Smyth 2007, 223).
Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and particularly 7/7, there
has been a drastic increase in Islamophobia that has resulted in
discrimination and institutional racism against British Muslims (Hasan
2015). The more recent IS terror attacks in Europe have exacerbated
this anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain, and since 2009 several far-right,
Islamophobic, and xenophobic movements have been formed like the
English Defence League (EDL), Pegida UK, or the party Britain First.
The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) describes the current extent of
racial inequality, discrimination, and institutional racism thus:

In the twenty years since the death of Stephen Lawrence, we can report
that 106 people have lost their lives in […] racist attacks […], that black
people are twenty-eight times more likely than white to be stopped and
searched by the police […], that in 2009/10 black people were over three
times more likely than white to be arrested, that black and those of mixed
ethnicity are over twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, that three
quarters of 7-year-old Pakistani and Bangladeshi children are living in pov-
erty compared to one in four whites, and that those classifying themselves
as ‘Other Black’ are six times more likely than average to be admitted as
mental health inpatients. (IRR 2013)

In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in 2016, the number of hate

crimes and racist attacks soared to new dimensions (Dodd 2016), and
the persistent structural disadvantagement of ethnic minorities came to
the fore of public debates once again. Had the black British writer Hanif
Kureishi, like many others, celebrated Britain previously as “a cultural
8 B. JANSEN

force in Europe […] because of [its] multiculturalism and diversity”

(quoted in McCrum 2014), one year after the referendum he worriedly
observes the development of an “utterly misconceived and misplaced and
vile” form of racism and Islamophobia, concluding that the middle class
“[is] more racist than [it] [has] ever been” (quoted in Clark 2017). The
black British writer Jackie Kay similarly notes “a lurch to xenophobia”
and a “very worrying insularity and racism” (quoted in Brooks 2016) in
contemporary Britain.
Until the 1990s, British politics had responded to racial tensions
mainly by passing Immigration Acts intended to reduce the number of
Commonwealth immigrants and by implementing Race Relations Acts
that made discrimination unlawful (cf. Green 1990, 408–409; Korte and
Sternberg 1997, 19–20; BBC 2006, 310). The most rigorous change to
civil law was implemented in 1981, when the British Nationality Act sub-
stituted the principle of the ius soli, or the allocation of citizenship by
place of birth, with the principle of partiality, thereby “discarding nine
hundred years of legal precedent” and transforming Britain into “a gene-
alogical community” (Baucom 1999, 8). Even though the Act repealed
one of the most ancient rights, “the birthright of every one of us, black
and white, and of our children and grandchildren,” it was passed with-
out arousing considerable opposition because, as Rushdie argues, it
seemed to be “expressly designed to deprive black and Asian Britons of
their citizenship rights” ([1982] 1992, 136). The atmosphere in which
the British Nationality Act was passed had been prepared, in a way, by
the infamous comments of two influential Conservative politicians. In
1968 Enoch Powell predicted in his “Rivers of Blood” Speech that mass
immigration will lead to racial violence (see Baucom 1999, 15–24), and
ten years later the future prime minister Margaret Thatcher warned that
Britain “might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”
(quoted in Korte and Sternberg 1997, 23).
Starting in 1997, New Labour introduced a radical change in the
political discourse on immigration. The party evoked Britain’s alleged tra-
dition of liberalism, tolerance, and cultural exchange in order to envision
a multicultural ‘Cool Britannia’ that celebrates cultural diversity (Paxman
1999, 238–240). In 2001 Foreign Secretary Robin Cook hailed plural-
ism in his famous “Chicken Tikka Masala” Speech as “a unique asset for
Britain in a modern world” and he urged British people to “create an
open and inclusive society that welcomes incomers for their contribu-
tion to our growth and prosperity.” Such a multicultural ‘New Britain’,
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

prime minister Tony Blair emphasised, will become “a beacon to the

world of racial equality” (quoted in Bevan and Rufford 1999, 232).
Yet, David Cameron’s speech at the Munich Security Conference
in 2011 marked a renewed change in tone. Cameron openly declared
that “the doctrine of state multiculturalism” has failed in Britain. In
the speech that coincided with one of the biggest anti-Muslim EDL
marches in England, Cameron controversially judged the condition of
British multiculturalism by focusing on British Muslim extremists only.
He attributed the increase in Islamist extremists to multiculturalism’s
“passive,” “hands-off tolerance” towards others that has “encour-
aged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and
apart from the mainstream.” He called for an “active, muscular liberal-
ism” that promotes a predefined set of British values to which all citi-
zens should adhere in order to forge a “strong society” with a “strong
identity” (Cameron 2011). By expecting ethnic minorities to assimilate
to the status quo set by white Britain, Cameron’s rhetoric effectively
referred back to the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of the Global
Financial Crisis and the severe cuts to the British welfare system, this
rhetoric fell on fertile ground. Ironically, it seems to have paved the way
for the success of the leave campaign in the 2016 referendum, which
promised ‘to get our country back’ from Europe as much as from immi-
grants and British-born ethnic minorities.
The periodic revival of racial tensions and anti-immigration sentiment
in the course of the past seventy years indicates that the ‘Windrush gen-
eration’ and its successors have posed a severe challenge to traditional
anglocentric and monocultural notions of Britishness. Already in 1982,
Rushdie astutely remarks that “Britain is undergoing a critical phase of
its postcolonial period” because it is faced with “a crisis of the whole
culture, of the society’s entire sense of itself” ([1982] 1992, 129). As
Commonwealth immigrants have visibly challenged the myth of white
Britishness, British residents have had to learn that a nation is “an
imagined political community” (Anderson [1983] 1991, 6) rather than
an essentialist given. It is a deliberate construction that functions primar-
ily through the “invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983),
and therefore remains continuously open to renegotiation, reinvention,
and redefinition. The difficulty of adjusting to this new conception of
nationhood has been increased by the massive changes that British
society has been undergoing in the postwar period. Internationally,
Britain ceased to be a major global player as imperial, military, and
10 B. JANSEN

manufacturing power; and it entered new alliances, becoming a member

of the European Union in 1973. But, Colls reminds us, Britain has also
faced “fundamental shifts [at home] in contemporary patterns of work,
family, authority, household, residence, region, communication” and, of
course, “ethnic and religious composition” (2002, 4).
Since its beginnings in the 1950s, black British literature and culture
have partaken in the struggle for a polycultural British society. Black
British artists have contested the prevalent understanding of Britishness
and added an entirely new perspective to the established canon of white,
anglocentric, and middle-class British art. Although “black and Asian writ-
ers […] have made a home in Britain and made their voices heard” since
1750—the earliest being Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, and Dean
Mahomed—, in A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain C.L.
Innes persuasively shows that the literature produced before 1948 does
“not so much [constitute] a tradition, as little is passed on from one writer
to the next, as a series of recurring preoccupations and tropes” (2008, 2).
Thus, the mass immigration from the Commonwealth in the wake of the
Empire Windrush heralded the beginning of a new era in the history of
black writing (ibid., 233–234). Contrary to earlier black authors who had
chiefly addressed a white British audience as individual representatives of
their cultures of origin, in the second half of the twentieth century writers
“increasingly spoke of and to a black and south Asian community within
Britain” (234). Their literary texts have been less concerned with the rec-
reation of “a community distant in time and place”; instead, they have
intended “to create [a] community here and now in Britain” (ibid.).
In its earliest phase, the 1950s and 1960s, black British literature was
predominantly written by Caribbean and Asian immigrants who “worked
their experiences of settling in London into partly autobiographical nov-
els” (Reichl 2002, 22). Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) is
a classic example of the literature produced by these writers, who were
usually single men who considered themselves transient residents in
Britain (Innes 2008, 238).
It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that a specifically
black British identity and culture emerged, initiating the second phase
of black British literature. Against the backdrop of anti-immigration leg-
islation, particularly the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968 and
the Immigration Act of 1971, and influenced by the US Black Power
movement, the term ‘black British’ was coined by the Caribbean Artists
Movement (Reichl 2002, 34; Stein 2004, 12). This London-based
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

group of West Indian writers and artists was instrumental to “the transi-
tion from West Indian to black British arts” (Walmsley 2010, 90). Stein
explains:

At its inception […] black British was used in an overarching sense, refer-
ring to distinct groups of West Indian migrants from Trinidad, Jamaica,
Guyana, and Barbados, etc., with distinct backgrounds. It thus included
African Guyanese, Indo-Guyanese, and Sino-Guyanese people, for exam-
ple. Later the concept was used to include migrant groups from other
parts of the world. (2004, 12)

In his seminal essay “New Ethnicities” (1989), Hall stresses that the
term ‘black’ was coined in order to reference non-white minorities’
“common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain,” and “to
provide the organising category of a new politics of resistance, among
groups and communities with, in fact, very different histories, traditions
and ethnic identities” ([1989] 1996, 441; see Gilroy [1987] 1995, 236).
Contrary to the US American context, in Britain ‘black’ thus became a
political category that united people of Caribbean, African, and Asian
descent. As such, it subverted the logic of racial discourse. Mercer
elaborates:

The rearticulation of /black/ as an empowering signifier of Afro-Asian

alliances was initially a subversive act of disarticulation in which the nodal
metaphor of racist ideology (white/non-white) was displaced out of its
fixed and centred position and appropriated into a counter-hegemonic
discourse of black community resistance. (1994, 256)

This second phase of black British literary and cultural production crit-
icised “the way blacks were positioned as the unspoken and invisible
‘other’ of predominantly white aesthetic and cultural discourses” (Hall
[1989] 1996, 441). Black artists and cultural workers demanded “access
to the rights to representation” (442) in order to become the subjects of
cultural representations of black lives. They intended to use this access
to establish “a ‘positive’ black imagery” that contests the “fetishization,
objectification and negative figuration” of images of blacks in white
British culture (ibid.). Therefore, the few artists who gained access to
British cultural discourses “[had] to carry the burden of being ‘repre-
sentative’” (Mercer 1994, 236). They were “expected to speak for the
12 B. JANSEN

black communities as if she or he were its duly appointed public ‘repre-

sentative’” (240, cf. 248). Hence, black British literature of this period
tends to portray blacks uncritically and positively in a realist aesthetic
(Procter 2004, 127, 130), adhering to the “unspoken internal impera-
tive that, as black subjects, we should never discuss our ‘differences’ in
public: that we should always defer and delay our criticism by doing our
‘dirty laundry’ in private” (Mercer 1994, 238). Dub poet Linton Kwesi
Johnson’s collections Voices of the Living and the Dead (1974), Dread
Beat an Blood (1975), and especially Inglan Is a Bitch (1980) are instruc-
tive examples of the positive, uniform, and highly politicised portrayal of
black Britons prevalent at the time.
The mid-1980s saw “a significant shift […] in black cultural politics”
(Hall [1989] 1996, 441) that ushered in a new phase of black British
cultural productivity. Functioning as a “unifying framework” in the
1970s and early 1980s, black identity had “[become] ‘hegemonic’ over
other ethnic/racial identities” (ibid.) and, in fact, had come to operate in
essentialist terms, confronting “an essentially bad white subject” with “an
essentially good black subject” (Procter 2004, 123). According to Hall,
this “innocent notion of the essential black subject” came to an end as
people became increasingly aware of the fact that “‘black’ is essentially a
politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded
in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories and
which therefore has no guarantees in nature” ([1989] 1996, 443).
Accordingly, in this third phase black British literature and cultural
production are characterised by a postmodern aesthetic that questions
the notion of authenticity and reveals ‘black’ as “a discursively produced
category constructed through representation” (Procter 2004, 127). As
black British artists gained more and more access to cultural discourses,
the ‘burden of representation’ became lighter (ibid., 129) and art-
ists increasingly refused “to represent the black experience in Britain as
monolithic, self-contained, sexually stabilised and always ‘right on’—in
a word, always and only ‘positive’” (Hall [1989] 1996, 449). For, as
Rushdie argues,

the real gift which we can offer our communities is not the creation of a
set of stereotyped positive images to counteract the stereotyped negative
ones, but simply the gift of treating black and Asian characters in a way
that white writers seem very rarely able to do, that is to say as fully realised
human beings, as complex creatures, good, bad, bad, good. (1987, 41)
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

As people began to recognise “the extraordinary diversity of subjec-

tive positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose
the category ‘black’” (Hall [1989] 1996, 443; see Gilroy [1987] 1995,
230–231), literary and cultural representations of the black British expe-
rience grew more complex. Previously marginalised speaking positions
gained visibility, including South Asian, female, feminist, and queer
perspectives. Finally, what distinguishes this phase of black British writ-
ing from earlier periods is its tremendous popularity with both reading
audiences and academia. “Suddenly,” Bhabha observes, “the intimate
lives and concerns of London’s migrants and minorities emerge as major
metropolitan themes and, in this translated terrain, they become agents
of a historic transformation,” promising that the excluded will seize a
place and time “and make it their own and yours” (2000, 142). Famous
examples of this period of black British writing include Hanif Kureishi’s
negotiation of a hybrid British Asian identity in The Buddha of Suburbia
(1990) and The Black Album (1995), as well as Jackie Kay’s transgender
novel Trumpet (1998).
In his contribution to the Wasafiri special issue on “Black Britain:
Beyond Definition” (2010), John McLeod contends that the begin-
ning of the new millennium marks the emergence of yet another phase
of black British literature. He rightly argues that black British writing of
the late twentieth century was chiefly concerned with the subjectivity
of black Britons in a multicultural society (46–48, 51). Written by sec-
ond-generation immigrants, the texts represented “the transformation
of a vexed Black British identity” (47) as an individual, solipsistic, and
diverse experience. In contrast, the literature penned after 2000 renego-
tiates “an understanding of the nation and its people that is prompted
by, but ultimately supersedes, exclusively Black British concerns” (46).
McLeod emphasises that “[m]any writers today nurture a distinctly
polycultural sense of the national that does not necessarily prioritise the
political and psychological needs of a particular constituency of (racial-
ised, black) Britons” (ibid.) but instead speaks to all Britons. According
to McLeod, post-bildungsroman novels like Diana Evans’s 26a (2005)
develop a postracial, transcultural, and deconstructive understanding of
the nation as a space characterised by sameness and singularity, stressing
the “equivalence, correspondence and resemblance” of its inhabitants,
“without denying divergence and difference” (48). Thus, mixed-race
characters do no longer function as affective, psychological portrayals
of individual experiences but personify an alternative sense of the nation
14 B. JANSEN

as a whole. They suggest “a postracial alternative to myths of racial and

national purity that is open to everyone” (49). In order to acknowl-
edge this shift “from a preoccupation of Black British identity […] to
an engagement with the identity of the UK conceived internationally
and transculturally for the benefit of all” (ibid.), McLeod coins the term
‘contemporary black writing of Britain’ (46). To him, the category ‘black
British literature’ has become unsuitable inasmuch as post-2000 writing
is no longer exclusively concerned with ‘black Britain’.
In my readings of contemporary black British short stories I, too,
trace a shift towards postracial British themes. Indeed, I will argue that
this development is observable in the black British short story from its
very beginnings in the 1950s, and with particular force since the 1980s.
What is more, I will show that contemporary black British short story
writers tend to go one step further and supersede exclusively British con-
cerns in order to pose questions of communal identity on a more gen-
eral, even ontological level. They foreground our human commonalities
and interconnectedness without, however, denying people’s singularity.
Yet, unlike McLeod, I continue to use the term ‘black British’ and dis-
cuss the texts under scrutiny here as pieces of ‘black British literature’
because I consider the emergence of a postethnic and arguably humanist
stance in the black British short story an important development within
the history of black British writing.

3  Negotiations of Community in the Short

Story Form
Through the lens of genre theory, the black British short story’s inno-
vative renegotiation of community seems hardly surprising. Short story
research suggests that the form is particularly suited to experiment with
alternative conceptions of community. Hanson regards the short story
as “the form for innovation” (quoted in Brosch 2007, 46) and Liggins,
Maunder, and Robbins concur that “short fiction offer[s] an opportunity
to explore new ways of being” (2011, 9). Many practitioners and the-
orists argue that the short story can “subvert dominant ideologies and
propose another form of discourse” (Bardolph 1988, ii) because it gives
voice to the marginal, the ex-centric, and the outsider (Liggins et al.
2011, 15). By presenting “submerged population groups” (O’Connor
[1963] 1976, 88), the short story tends to challenge prevalent notions
of communal identity.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

Although the short story cannot be regarded as “the nonpareil form

of marginality and otherness” (Hunter 2007, 139; cf. Korte 2003, 10;
Malcolm 2012, 49), Hunter observes that “the short story is, and always
has been, disproportionately represented in the literatures of colonial
and postcolonial cultures” (2007, 138). Indeed, there appears to be a
pronounced affinity between the short story and the postcolonial condi-
tion. Various scholars contend that the form has a propensity to explore
specifically postcolonial themes like marginalisation, displacement, immi-
gration, ethnic identity, and the transnational experience.4 All of these
themes are more or less directly linked with the exploration of commu-
nity. Accordingly, Viola points out that “relationships with the commu-
nity” are of “paramount importance” (2001, xi) among the thematic
concerns of postcolonial short fiction. More precisely, March-Russell
observes that the postcolonial short story is typically characterised by a
“desire for a new social contract […], in which the acknowledgement of
all the members that constitute the territory will revise its shape” (2009,
257). Short stories written in postcolonial contexts such as postwar
Britain, then, tend to deconstruct outdated monolithic conceptions of
national identity and imagine an inclusive “social contract.”
The short story’s thematic affinity with questions of community
results from its specific formal qualities. Owing to its brevity, the short
story can be relatively quickly produced so that it is able to respond
without delay to the pressing issues of our times (cf. Hensher 2015, xxii–
xxv). As “a seismograph of our world” (Larriere 1998, 197; cf. Ingman
2009, 225–226), the short story can reflect on societal changes such as
mass immigration and the resurgence of patriotism. It can problematise
the all-too simplistic logic of Self versus Other that inevitably leads to
racial tensions, and imagine alternative, non-essentialist models of com-
munity. Since the short story is “a type of fragment” (March-Russell
2009, viii), it is not required to present a conclusive or comprehensive
vision of community but is free to experiment with various, even provi-
sional notions of human coexistence.
Due to its flexibility (Bates 1976, 74) and “limitless possibility”
(Matthews [1901] 1994, 77), the short story form invites a higher
degree of “experimentation and subversion of the norms of the main-
stream” (Liggins et al. 2011, 16) than, for instance, the novel. Its ellip-
tical and synecdochal nature (Louvel 2004, 249) allows the short story
writer simultaneously to explore a concrete example of community
on the surface level of the narrative and to allude to larger questions
16 B. JANSEN

of human coexistence on a deep-structural level. Rohrberger aptly

remarks that the short story is “philosophic at bottom” (1998, 205).
Furthermore, many short story theorists foreground the form’s quintes-
sential hybridity. The short story is of “mixed origins” (Shaw 1983, 20)5
and displays an affinity with many different literary and visual art forms.6
As such, the form seems particularly suited to negotiate non-essentialist,
heterogeneous, and inclusive models of communal belonging.
Apart from the single short story, the particular form of the short
story cycle appears to lend itself to the exploration of community. The
short story cycle presents a polyphony of voices, whereby the protagonist
of each individual story is “part of the interdependent network of the
community” (Zagarell 1988, 499) that the cycle as a whole imagines.
The story cycle thus functions as a ‘narrative of community’ (Zagarell)
that “give[s] expression to a sense of community and ethnic identity
through multiple perspectives” (Knepper 2011, 88; cf. Hestermann
2003, 28–31).

4  The Scholarly Neglect of the Black

British Short Story
The tremendous success of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia
and, at the turn of the millennium, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000),
Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (2002), and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
(2003) has brought black British writing to the fore of public and aca-
demic discourses, stimulating extensive research and establishing black
British literature and culture as a field of study in its own right (see Low
and Wynne-Davies 2006, 2). Since the mid-1990s a number of mono-
graphs and essay collections on black British literature have appeared,7
which are predominately concerned with the black British novel and
occasionally consider black British poetry and theatre. However, until
now hardly any attention has been paid to the black British short story.
This seems to be partly due to the fact that research into British
short fiction is generally still at an early stage, even though the short
story currently enjoys “unprecedented” (Yentob 2014, viii) popular-
ity with British readers and publishers. Maunder emphasises that “[t]he
acknowledgment of the short story’s place in Britain’s literary history is
one of the most striking developments of recent years” (2007, v). For
a long time, American short fiction has played a pre-eminent role in
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

short story research, which, in turn, has been dominated by US schol-

ars, most famously Charles E. May, Mary Rohrberger, and Susan Lohafer
(see Lohafer 1998, x). Systematic research into British short fiction only
began after 2000. The two most comprehensive studies of the British
short story to date are Korte’s The Short Story in Britain (2003) and
Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins’s The British Short Story (2011). While
Korte traces the development of British short fiction from its earliest
beginnings in the sixteenth century to its most recent examples at the
end of the twentieth century, the joint publication by Liggins, Maunder,
and Robbins focuses on the history of the British short story from the
Victorian Age to the present.
But within this newly evolving field of research, too, the black British
short story has received little attention. Neither does the term ‘black
British short story’ exist as a recognised category of literary analysis,
nor has the sheer number and variety of black British short stories been
acknowledged. There is no book-length study of the black British short
story and previous criticism on the genre is confined to brief mention-
ings, single case studies, or individual book chapters. Korte is the first
to observe that the “[g]rowing awareness of the diversification of British
society and culture has made ‘ethnicity’ [a] prominent theme in recent
British literature,” giving rise to, among others, “[t]he Black and Asian
British short story” (2003, 166–167). In her recent contribution to The
Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story (2016), she observantly
elaborates that the short story has been “an important genre for explor-
ing and questioning the legacy of the empire in Britain itself” (52). By
discussing a wide range of examples, including stories by Muriel Spark,
Samuel Selvon, E.A. Markham, Jackie Kay, Courttia Newland, Salman
Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, and Manzu Islam, Korte shows that the British
short story has captured the multifaceted experiences of postcolonial
migrant life in diverse ways (see 52). Yet, she does not take up her ear-
lier notion of a genuinely ‘Black and Asian British short story’. What is
more, through her primary concern with the short story’s negotiation
of race, ethnicity and migration, Korte insufficiently acknowledges the
extent to which contemporary black British short fiction addresses a
great variety of postethnic themes that appeal to all Britons and even all
human beings.
Similarly, Parker’s essay on “Hybrid Voices and Visions” (2008) offers
insightful case studies of short fiction by E.A. Markham, Ben Okri,
Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Patricia Duncker, as well as Jackie Kay,
18 B. JANSEN

but is strikingly oblivious to the existence of a larger tradition of black

British short story writing. Published in 2009, March-Russell’s gen-
re-theoretical monograph on The Short Story implicitly comments on
the black British short story in the chapter on postcolonial short fiction.
March-Russell briefly mentions Samuel Selvon’s Ways of Sunlight (254),
detects in Pauline Melville’s stories a yearning “for a new social arrange-
ment” (255), and investigates the portrayal of “identity, migration, his-
tory and myth” (256) in Rushdie’s (1994) story collection East, West.
Two years later, Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins provide the first
lengthy discussion of black British short fiction in their subsection
on “Black British writers and multiculturalism: Jackie Kay and Hanif
Kureishi” (2011, 247–254). But they do not acknowledge the ways in
which Kay and Kureishi are part of a larger tradition of black British
short story writing. More importantly, this book will show that it is lim-
iting and even wrong to consider Kay’s and Kureishi’s short stories pri-
marily as “narratives of multicultural life” (246). Inspired by the authors’
biographies, Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins read Kay’s and Kureishi’s
short stories as contemporary responses to “the race question” (247) and
overlook that the large majority of their stories are not primarily con-
cerned with race or ethnicity. Kay’s and Kureishi’s narratives attack the
logic of multiculturalism and explore alternative, postethnic modes of
coexistence that appeal to all people living in Britain regardless of skin
colour, religion, or nationality.
Finally, Malcolm indirectly draws attention to the existence of black
British short story writing in his British and Irish Short Story Handbook
(2012). Malcolm includes Hanif Kureishi in his list of “Key Authors”
in the history of the British and Irish short story (120–121) and he
discusses Kureishi’s short story “We’re Not Jews” as a “Key Work”
(322–323). Malcolm, too, wrongly reads Kureishi’s stories above all as
explorations of “the complexities of being Asian-British in the late twen-
tieth century” (120). However, he acknowledges the postethnic dimen-
sion of Kureishi’s short fiction when he concludes: “But, even if Asian
themes are prominent in [Kureishi’s] writing, he also speaks directly
to the experiences of the young (and not so young) and displaced and
uncertain in Britain’s metropolis” (121).
The scholarly neglect of black British short fiction seems surprising,
given that there has been an increasing acknowledgement of the genre
by prize judges, publishing houses, and journalists in recent years. In
the context of widespread attempts at the beginning of the twenty-first
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

century to “Save Our Short Story” and promote the form in Britain
(see Maunder 2007, vi; Cox 2011, xvii), short stories by Jackie Kay,
Hanif Kureishi, and Zadie Smith were shortlisted for the newly launched,
prestigious National Short Story Award.8 The publication of Jackie Kay’s
first collection of short stories Why Don’t You Stop Talking (2002) was
greeted enthusiastically by the Irish Times, who proclaimed: “if stories
like these can still be written, the much-maligned short story form must
still be alive, not to say kicking” (quoted in Kay 2002, dust jacket).
And her second collection Wish I Was Here (2006) even earned her
the British Book Awards Decibel Writer of the Year Award. Moreover,
Suhayl Saadi’s story “Ninety-nine Kiss-o-grams” won the second prize in
the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition in 1999 and
his only story collection The Burning Mirror (2001) was shortlisted for
the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award.
Black British short story writing has also gained growing recognition
from publishers. Both Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru have come to the
attention of literary agents with short stories, and on account of these
stories have received huge advances for their first novels from publish-
ing houses (Walters 2009, 280; Aldama 2006, 110, 112). Smith’s
and Kunzru’s talents as short story writers were also acknowledged by
Penguin in 2005 when they were asked to contribute a mini collection of
short stories to the publisher’s seventieth anniversary Pocket series. Five
years later, Hanif Kureishi’s publishing house Faber and Faber showcased
his achievements in the short story form by editing his Collected Stories.
Accordingly, critics have recently begun to acknowledge that “[s]ome of
Kureishi’s best writing is in his short stories” (Smith 2013). In 2013,
Zadie Smith even pulled off the coup of publishing a single short story as
a hardback, The Embassy of Cambodia. This is an extraordinary achieve-
ment for a short story writer because this mode of publication celebrates
the individual short story as a unique piece of art and allows for an inten-
sified reading experience, uninterrupted by commercial advertisements
in magazines and irrespective of other stories in a collection. Hamish
Hamilton’s unconventional decision to print Smith’s story independently
and charge no less than £7,99 has powerfully highlighted Smith’s skills
as a short story writer and it has foregrounded the existence of black
British short fiction more generally. Most recently, The Penguin Book
of the British Short Story (2015, vol. 2), edited by Philip Hensher, has
acknowledged the contribution that black British writers have made to
the development of the British short story by including short stories by
20 B. JANSEN

Samuel Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, and Zadie Smith. In the introduction to his
well-devised and varied anthology, Hensher celebrates Smith as one of
“the best short story writers now at work” (2015, xxvi) and he explicitly
mentions Jackie Kay’s achievements in the form even though he does not
include a story by her (see xxxii).

5  Objectives and Text Selection

Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story offers the first
systematic and comprehensive study of black British short story writing.
It sets out to shed light on a thriving literary genre that attracts aspir-
ing as well as established writers but has received little attention from
literary scholarship. In doing so, this book wants to further the debate
about black British literature, stimulate research into new facets of black
British writing, and contribute to the emerging field of British short fic-
tion research. Apart from establishing the black British short story as a
multifarious and substantial literary genre, this study aims to show that
contemporary black British short fiction is permeated by questions of
community. Black British writers use the short story form to combat
deeply entrenched notions of community and experiment with non-
essentialist alternatives across differences of ethnicity, culture, religion,
and nationality. It is my contention that the short format invites a higher
degree of experimentation with alternative forms of communal belong-
ing than, for instance, the widely studied black British novel. Indeed,
different from black British writing in other genres, black British short
stories have early on tended to surpass their specific black British and
postcolonial context and reimagined community on a more general, even
ontological level.
This book traces the black British short story from its postwar
beginnings until today, putting special emphasis on contemporary black
British short stories published after 1980. The study’s broad historical
perspective allows for an understanding of the black British short story as
a narrative genre in its own right with a distinct tradition and salient fea-
tures. Having established Samuel Selvon’s pathfinding role in the 1950s
and Farrukh Dhondy’s contribution to the development of the genre in
the late 1970s, the book primarily examines the work of the present-day
writers Hanif Kureishi, Jackie Kay, Suhayl Saadi, Zadie Smith, and Hari
Kunzru. These authors have used the short story most creatively to
destroy the easy binaries of Self and Other, black and white, immigrant
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

and resident, which cannot explain the complexities of social formations

in the postmodern era. The book charts how these writers, each with his
or her very distinctive style and agenda, articulate novel ways of imagin-
ing community. It delineates similarities in their renegotiation of com-
munity and points to semantic and aesthetic differences, developing a
typology of the black British short story.
Through an innovative approach that combines postcolonial con-
cepts of community with deconstructive philosophies of community,
Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story seeks to con-
tribute to the conceptual development of research into black British
writing. So far, black British literature has mostly been read through the
lens of postcolonial theory, especially when scholars focus on questions
of immigration, ethnic identity, and communal belonging. My analyses
intend to show that other theoretical approaches to community yield
insightful results, too. Indeed, postcolonial theories of community are
of limited relevance for an understanding of contemporary black British
short stories because the majority of these stories surpass the realm of the
postcolonial in order to enquire into mechanisms of human coexistence.
Their ontological revision of monolithic conceptions of community calls
for the application of contemporary philosophies of community, which
similarly aim to deconstruct traditional notions of homogeneity, shared
essence, and infinity both on a concrete political-ethical and a general
ontological level. The ensuing discussions rely on Jean-Luc Nancy’s the-
ory of a singularly plural ‘inoperative community.’ Nancy is one of the
crucial thinkers of our times, whose philosophy of community seems
highly pertinent to literary analysis because it culminates in a theory of
literature.
Overall, this book is the outcome of the meticulous analysis of 172
short stories and the critical reading of many more that could not be
included in this study. That is to say, Narratives of Community in the Black
British Short Story is far from offering an exhaustive study of black British
short fiction. Rather, it aims to discuss the most representative examples
of black British short story writing, with a particular focus on contempo-
rary black British short stories after 1980. As I map the development of
the black British short story from the 1950s to the present, I necessarily
simplify its trajectory. Naturally, the short story has been used in multiple
ways at any one time in its history, and the typology I develop should sim-
ply be understood as an attempt to chart the general evolution of black
British short fiction. There are overlaps between phases and categories
22 B. JANSEN

and at any point in time it is possible to find black British writers who use
the form differently. For instance, Pauline Melville’s award-winning short
story collection Shape-Shifter (1990) and its follow-up The Migration of
Ghosts (1998) appeared in the 1990s, but they share many features with
black British short story writing of an earlier period. Like Samuel Selvon’s
short stories of the 1950s, Melville’s stories are frequently concerned with
the colonial past and postcolonial present of the Caribbean, and they nar-
rate stories of migration and border-crossing.
The authors I have selected for closer scrutiny have worked in the
short story form for some time and have produced a considerable num-
ber of short stories. In an attempt to go beyond the existing canon of
black British writers established by Lee (1995), Procter (2000), Donnell
(2002), Arana and Ramey (2004), King (2004), Stein (2004), Sesay
(2005), and Arana (2009), among others, I thoroughly researched
the British Council’s “Writers Directory,” an online database of more
than 750 contemporary British writers. This research identified Hanif
Kureishi, Jackie Kay, Zadie Smith, and Hari Kunzru as short story writers
proper. All of them have written short stories over a considerable period
of time, “really work[ing] hard at working small” (Smith 2005, ix), and
they have produced a substantial short story oeuvre. Kay and Smith
have also promoted the genre by commenting on the form in interviews
and essays, editing short story anthologies,9 and acting as judges on the
board of short story competitions. Kay has even emerged as an outright
spokesperson for the short story, praising it as “the perfect form for
our times” (“A Writer’s View”). In addition to these well-known black
British authors, my search of the Writers Directory revealed Suhayl Saadi
as a scholarly neglected but equally productive short story writer and edi-
tor of short fiction (cf. Saadi 2002).
Conversely, I have not included writers who have experimented with
the short story briefly before turning to other literary genres or who
have only published a small number of stories. Therefore, for instance,
Diran Adebayo’s highly perceptive negotiation of communal identity
in “P Is for Post-Black” (2005) and Andrea Levy’s Six Stories and an
Essay (2014) will not be discussed in the following pages. Nor are Helen
Oyeyemi’s first story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (2016)
or Irenosen Okojie’s debut collection Speak Gigantular (2016) taken in
consideration. It is too early to assess Oyeyemi’s and Okojie’s use of the
short story form, and it remains to be seen whether they continue to
work in the genre.
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

The book’s special focus on black British short fiction after 1980 is
due to my interest in the stories’ contribution to the contemporary dis-
course about community. The origins of the present debate date back
to the 1980s, when a group of French philosophers begun to rethink
the notion of community radically. But ‘1980’ is also a firmly established
dividing line in the study of black British literature. It has become cus-
tomary to distinguish between early black British writing by first-gen-
eration immigrants published between 1950 and the late 1970s, and
contemporary black British literature by second- and third-genera-
tion immigrants produced since the 1980s (Sommer 2005, 293). For,
early migrant fiction differs considerably from contemporary writing by
authors who grew up in Britain, both in terms of thematic concerns and
aesthetic strategies (ibid.). This book’s particular interest in contem-
porary black British short story writing therefore entails that it mainly
focuses on the work of second- and third-generation immigrants.
It is for this reason that E.A. Markham’s six volumes of short fiction
are not included, although their dates of publication between 1986 and
2009 seem to fit the design of this study. Markham is a first-generation
immigrant who came to Britain in the 1950s but only turned to the
short story form in the 1970s. His stories are strongly reminiscent of
Samuel Selvon’s Trinidadian and early black British short stories pub-
lished in the 1950s. They, too, are mainly concerned with the Caribbean,
particularly the fictional island of St Caesare, or they portray the expe-
riences of Caribbean immigrants in Britain. The stories’ predomi-
nant depiction of Caribbean characters and settings even suggests that
Markham’s short fiction is more accurately understood as Caribbean
rather than black British writing.
Finally, it is beyond the scope of this study to discuss children’s,
young adult, or genre fiction. These are distinct kinds of literature that
would merit book projects in their own right. Thus I have, for instance,
excluded Courttia Newland’s short fiction. Newland is certainly a pro-
ductive short story writer, who has published two collections of short
stories, Music for the Off-Key: Twelve Macabre Short Stories (2006) and
A Book of Blues (2011), and has a third, Cosmogramma, forthcoming.
Moreover, he is an important promoter of the short story form, who
has co-founded the Tell Tales initiative and co-edited a number of short
story anthologies (Newland and Parkes 2004; Balasubramanyam and
Newland 2005; cf. Newland and Sesay 2000). Newland’s short sto-
ries raise many important questions with regard to the intersections of
24 B. JANSEN

class and ethnicity. But they often play with the conventions of African
American crime fiction (Procter 2010), circling around (male) experi-
ences of growing up on a working-class estate, poverty, gang life, music,
drug consumption, crime, violence, and racial abuse. His latest collection
Cosmogramma promises to be a foray into science fiction.

6  Chapter Outline
After these introductory remarks, Chapter 2 develops the commu-
nity-theoretical framework for my discussion of black British short
stories. It traces the history of the Western discourse on community
from Aristotle’s definition of the human being as a zōon politikon to
the present day. The chapter focuses especially on postcolonial con-
ceptions of community, namely Hall’s ‘new ethnicities’ and Bhabha’s
‘third space’, and deconstructive philosophies of community, particu-
larly Nancy’s ‘inoperative community’. We will see that it is fruitful
to combine both approaches to community because the majority of
contemporary black British short stories transcend the confines of the
postcolonial in order to address questions of community on a more
general, even ontological level. They arguably problematise community
not as an exclusively black British theme but as a general human con-
cern. Through recourse to Nancean philosophy, it will be possible to
expose the ways in which these stories tend to challenge the ‘myth’ of
an essentialist, homogeneous notion of community and imagine alter-
native modes of coexistence.
The actual discussion of black British short fiction is divided into four
parts which reflect the typology of black British short story writing that
this study proposes. Part I discusses the negotiation of community in
early black British short stories between the 1950s and late 1970s to pre-
pare the ground for an understanding of short story writing after 1980.
In order to recognise the particularities of contemporary black British
short stories and acknowledge their indebtedness to literary forerunners,
it is necessary to begin by looking back at the origins of black British
short story writing. Chapter 3 focuses on the founding text of the genre,
Samuel Selvon’s Ways of Sunlight (1957). It examines how Selvon’s
‘London stories’ imagine an inclusive and heterogeneous West Indian
immigrant community. Chapter 4 discusses Farrukh Dhondy’s two story
collections East End at Your Feet (1976) and Come to Mecca and Other
 1 INTRODUCTION 25

Stories (1978) in order to trace an important shift in black British short

story writing, from a concern with immigration and migrant communi-
ties to the imagination of a black British community of adolescents born
or brought up in Britain.
Part II is entirely dedicated to Hanif Kureishi’s short fiction writ-
ten since the mid-1980s. Kureishi’s short stories arguably mark some-
thing of a watershed in the development of the black British short
story because they introduce the postethnic mode of narration that
will come to characterise contemporary black British short fiction more
generally. Kureishi’s stories are also the first to rigorously deconstruct
the traditional premises of community, i.e. shared origin, homogene-
ity, and immutability. While Chapter 5 concentrates on the small group
of ‘ethnic stories’ that combat the prevalent myth of white Britishness,
Chapter 6 discusses Kureishi’s exploration of human commonalities in
his ‘postethnic stories’.
Both Part III and Part IV are concerned with short stories produced
at roughly the same time, that is between the mid-1990s and the pres-
ent. I argue that the black British short story simultaneously comes to
function as a vehicle to negotiate localised and worldwide communities.
Part III looks at what I call the ‘local black British short story’. Against
the background of the devolution of powers in the UK, black British
short fiction shows a pronounced interest in regional identity. While
Chapter 7 discusses Jackie Kay’s innovative renegotiation of Scottishness,
Chapter 8 explores how some of Suhayl Saadi’s stories contest pre-
conceived notions of urban Glaswegian and Scottish national identity.
Conversely, Chapter 9 examines the revision of English communal iden-
tity in Zadie Smith’s short stories. Kay’s, Saadi’s, and Smith’s exploration
of locale is also, of course, a response to globalisation and the growing
interconnectedness of the world.
The impact of these developments on our conception of community is
addressed in Part IV, which studies the ‘cosmopolitan black British short
stories’ written by Hari Kunzru and Suhayl Saadi. Chapter 10 argues that
Kunzru’s short stories are best read together as a multifaceted vision of
human life across the world. Time and again, they point to human com-
monalities and thereby underline our global connectedness. Chapter 11
contends that the vast majority of Saadi’s short stories are similarly
engaged in the negotiation of cosmopolitanism. They, too, imagine a
worldwide community of singular yet connected human beings.
26 B. JANSEN

Each of the chapters in Parts I–IV offers case studies of representative

stories in order to illustrate the semantic and aesthetic strategies of negoti-
ating community characteristic of a certain period or type of black British
short story writing. This book closes with a summary of the study’s main
findings and an outlook onto future fields of research into black British
short fiction. It is my hope that Narratives of Community in the Black
British Short Story succeeds in demonstrating the great wealth and variety
of black British short story writing and will encourage scholars to explore
this genre further.

Notes
1. Here and in the following I prefer the term ‘polycultural’ to ‘multicultural’.
Since multiculturalism is connected with a view of cultures as essences (see
Bhabha [1994] 2004, 49–50), the term ‘polycultural society’ is more fit-
ting with the deconstructive notion of community that I will trace in
contemporary black British short fiction. The term ‘polycultural’ consists
of a Greek and a Latin morpheme rather than, as is the case with ‘mul-
ticultural’, two Latin morphemes, and is therefore from a linguistic per-
spective particularly suited to signify Bhabha’s notion of cultural difference
(cf. Schoene 1998, 126, endnote 3).
2. Apart from economic migrants, between 1965 and 1972 there was a
heavy increase in East African Asians who sought political refuge in Britain
because they were expelled by the newly independent African states Kenya
and Uganda (Green 1990, 5; cf. Korte and Sternberg 1997, 20–21).
3. Cf. Green (1990, 4), Korte and Sternberg (1997, 17–18), Colls (2002,
179), Innes (2008, 181).
4. Cf. Bardolph (1988, ii), Hestermann (2003, 27), Reckwitz (2005, 361–
362), Knepper (2011, 88–89), Awadalla and March-Russell (2013, 3).
5. Cf. Brosch (2007, 11, 25). The international origins of the British short
story are discussed in Liggins et al. (2011, 5).
6. Cf. Reid ([1977] 1994, 3), Bowen ([1937] 1976, 152), Shaw (1983,
12–15).
7. Cf. Lee (1995), Dabydeen and Wilson-Tagoe (1997), Nasta (2002),
Reichl (2002), Procter (2003), Arana and Ramey (2004), Stein (2004),
McLeod (2004, 2010), Sesay (2005), Low and Wynne-Davies (2006),
Arana (2007), Ellis (2007); as well as Upstone (2010).
8. Kay’s “How To Get Away with Suicide” was nominated for the prize in
2006, Kureishi’s “Weddings and Beheadings” in 2007, and Smith’s “Miss
Adele Amidst the Corsets” in 2014.
9. Cf. Kay (2004), Smith (2001a, b, 2003, 2007).
 1 INTRODUCTION 27

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Smyth, Gerry. 2007. “Ethnicity and Language.” In British Cultural Identities,
edited by Mike Storry and Peter Childs, 207–236. London: Routledge.
Sommer, Roy. 2005. “Von der Einwandererliteratur zum multikulturel-
len Millennium.” In Kulturgeschichte der englischen Literatur: Von der
Renaissance bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Vera Nünning, 291–301. Tübingen:
A. Francke.
Stein, Mark. 2004. Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus:
Ohio State University Press.
Upstone, Sara. 2010. British Asian Fiction: Twenty-First-Century Voices.
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Zagarell, Sandra A. 1988. “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a
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 CHAPTER 2

Theories of Community

‘Community’ is one of the most frequently used catchwords in

contemporary society (Rosa et al. 2010, 9). The term has entered aca-
demic, political, and private discourses, where it is employed in such
diverse ways that its meaning has become vague. The term’s ambiguity
is exacerbated by the surprising lack of a coherent theory of community
(ibid., 11). Within the past three decades, the concept of community has
become an object of research in a great variety of disciplines, ranging
from philosophy and theology to sociology, anthropology/ethnology,
psychology, political science, and history onto cultural studies, literature,
and fine arts. However, so far no attempt has been made to consider the
produced knowledge in relation to one another and develop a systematic,
transdisciplinary theory of community.
The origin of the Western discourse on community can be traced
back to Classical Greek philosophy, namely to Plato and Aristotle. In The
Republic (approx. 370 BC), Plato argues that the individual is necessarily
reliant on fellow human beings and the organisational structures of the
polis (Rosa et al. 2010, 18). His disciple Aristotle takes up this thought
and famously defines the human being as a zōon politikon (Aristoteles
2006, ch. I 2, 1253a2f.), a being that constitutes and lives in commu-
nities (Rosa et al. 2010, 19). In Politics (approx. 325 BC), Aristotle
characterises the human being as articulate, sensible, as well as ethical,
and he maintains that it can only realise itself fully within a (political)
community (Rosa et al.: ibid.).

© The Author(s) 2018 35

B. Jansen, Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94860-7_2
36 B. JANSEN

Aristotle’s notion of the zōon politikon has had a lasting impact on

the history of the idea of community in the West. Rosa et al. distinguish
two distinct discourses that have developed in the aftermath of Aristotle
and that continue to shape our understanding of community until the
present day. Depending on the translation of the term zōon politikon
either as ‘communal being’ or as ‘political being’ (cf. Höffe 2011, 23),
community has been treated as an ontological or a political-ethical cat-
egory (Rosa et al. 2010, 20). Thinkers such as Cicero, Seneca, Thomas
Aquinas, Leibniz, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger,
and Nancy have understood community primarily as an ontological
category, arguing that sociality is a primordial, ahistoric feature of all
human beings without, however, implying the existence of universally
shared values, feelings, or traditions (ibid., 22). Conversely, many thinkers
have followed the example of Aristotle’s analysis of the Greek polis and
regarded community as a political-ethical category that can be used to
conceptualise and describe concrete examples of human coexistence,
spanning from small communities like the family or the circle of friends to
large communities like the state or a transnational union (ibid., 27–28).
The existence of two different discourses on community—a more
abstract, theoretical one and a concrete, political-ethical one—underlines
the complexity of the concept of community. Frequently, as was the case
with Aristotle, theories of community simultaneously partake in both dis-
courses, which further increases the convolution of existing theories and
scholarship.
In the second half of the twentieth century, community research
came to a temporary standstill. After the horrendous misuse of the term
in the Nazi ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft, the notion of commu-
nity became highly problematic, especially in the German context, and
was often replaced by other terms like ‘group’, ‘network’, or ‘collective
identity’ (Rosa et al. 2010, 53). Both fascism and Stalinism had made it
blatantly apparent how easily the vague term community can be charged
with ideological meaning and utilised for totalitarian purposes. Since the
1970s, however, the concept of community has experienced a consider-
able renaissance (ibid., 58). Through a number of societal and political
developments, questions of community have acquired a renewed urgency
(cf. 58–60). The 1960s had seen the beginning of a ‘second’ (Beck
1986) or ‘liquid’ (Bauman [2000] 2012) modernity that has eroded
long-standing ‘metanarratives’ (cf. Lyotard [1984] 1994) and exposed
individual and communal identity as changeable sociocultural and
 2 THEORIES OF COMMUNITY 37

discursive constructions. As traditional conceptions of the family, gender

roles, sexuality, and the nation became untenable in postmodernity, peo-
ple began to call for new forms of communal existence. The 1970s, in
particular, were dominated by the identity politics of ethnic minorities,
women, lesbian and gay people, who fought for recognition, legal equal-
ity, and equal opportunities. They set in motion the ongoing struggle to
overcome the cultural hegemony of a white, Christian, and male perspec-
tive in the West (cf. Rosa 2007, 47, 52–53).
Internationally, too, questions of community have become highly rele-
vant. Fundamental political changes like the decolonisation of the British
Empire or the fall of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have resulted in
extensive, at times extremely violent fights over the demarcation of eth-
nic, national, and political communities in many parts of the world.
Furthermore, the processes of globalisation, the worldwide threat of
political extremism and religious fundamentalism, the Global Financial
Crisis of 2008, the steady increase in migrants and refugees across the
world, and global initiatives towards a joint environment policy like the
Paris Agreement have challenged the logic of the nation and brought the
idea of a postnational global community progressively to the fore.
In the British context, it was predominantly in reaction to the mass
immigration from the former British colonies after the end of the Second
World War that community has become a major issue of debate. By the
late 1970s, the largely African, Caribbean, and South Asian migrants and
their descendants had become a visible black British presence that forced
white Britain to “confront its postcolonial history […] as an indigenous
or native narrative internal to its national identity” (Bhabha [1994]
2004, 9). Black British writing vitally partakes in this renegotiation of
Britishness. Interestingly, black British short stories have early on used
their location in-between different cultures creatively in order to surpass
their specific black British and postcolonial context and reimagine com-
munity on a more general, postethnic, and even ontological level.
In my analyses of black British short story writing, it will therefore
be necessary to supplement postcolonial concepts of community with
deconstructive philosophies of community. Black British writing is
mostly read through the lens of postcolonial theory as literature that
explores and rethinks community from a minority perspective; and we
will see that postcolonial theories like Hall’s notion of ‘new ethnicities’
and Bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space’ provide valuable insights into
the mechanisms of black British short fiction. But it is only through
Another random document with
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He proceeded directly to the local headquarters of the Army of the
Church of the Emancipation. There, he inquired whether a Saint
Annabelle Leigh were assigned to any of the local chapels. A white-
faced clerk replied in the affirmative, and referred him to the Saint
Julia Ward Howe chapel on Redemption Street.
In common with all Church of the Emancipation chapels, the Saint
Julia Ward Howe chapel was an unpretentious wooden building, long
and narrow, with crossed Confederate and Union flags hanging
above its entrance. Entering, Drake walked down a narrow aisle
between two rows of backless benches and paused in front of a small
pulpit upon which a crude lectern stood. Beyond the lectern there was
a curtained doorway, and above this doorway two more crossed-flags
hung. Presently the curtains parted, and a tall, pale man with a
seamed and narrow face and gray and quiet eyes stepped onto the
pulpit. "I am Saint Andrew," he began, then stopped in staring
consternation.
"I'm Nathaniel Drake, the captain of the Fly by Night," Drake said.
"I've come about Saint Annabelle Leigh."
Comprehension supplanted the consternation on Saint Andrew's lined
face—comprehension and relief. "I am so glad you came, Mr. Drake. I
am but just returned from the port, where I was informed that you had
just left. I—I refrained from asking them about Saint Annabelle. Tell
me, is she all right? Did you put her down on Iago Iago? I have been
half out of my mind ever since I heard what happened to you and
your ship."
"I had bad news for you," Drake said. "Saint Annabelle Leigh is
dead."

The whispering of the worms crept into the room. Saint Andrew's
immaculate blue-gray uniform seemed suddenly several sizes too
large for him. "Dead? Please tell me that's not true, Mr. Drake."
"I can't," Drake said. "But I can tell you how it happened." He did so
briefly. "So you can see it wasn't my fault," he concluded. "I couldn't
put her down on Iago Iago. It would have meant jeopardizing my
pilot's license, and piloting a ship is all I know how to do. It isn't fair to
ask a men to put his livelihood on the block—it isn't fair at all. She
should have contacted me before she stowed away. You simply can't
hold me responsible for what happened."
"Nor do I, Mr. Drake." Saint Andrew wiped away a tear that had run
halfway down his cheek. "She did what she did against my advice,"
he went on presently. "The information she had received concerning
a resurrection on Iago Iago was of dubious origin to say the least, and
I was dead set against her stowing away on board your ship in any
event, but she was very set in her ways. None of which in the least
alleviates the cruel fact of her death."
"She left much to be desired as a saint then?" Drake asked.
"On the contrary, she was one of the finest persons I have ever
indoctrinated. One of the kindest and the gentlest. And in all my years
of service in the Army of the Church of the Emancipation I have never
seen a more dedicated and selfless soldier than she was. Her—her
passing grieves me immeasurably, Mr. Drake."
Drake looked at the floor. He felt suddenly tired. "May I sit down,
Saint Andrew?" he said.
"Please do."
He sank down on the nearest bench. "Was she a native of Forget Me
Not?"
"No. She came from the vineyards of Azure—from a little province
called Campagne Piasible." Saint Andrew sighed. "I remember vividly
the first time I saw her. She was so pale and so thin. And her eyes—I
have never seen torture in anyone's eyes that could compare to the
torture I saw in hers. She walked in here one morning, much in the
same way you yourself walked in, and she knelt down before the
lectern and when I appeared, she said, 'I want to die.' I stepped down
from the pulpit and raised her to her feet. 'No, child,' I said, 'you do
not want to die, you want to serve—else you would not have come
here,' and it was then that she lifted up her eyes and I saw the torture
in them. In the two years that followed, much of the torture went
away, but I knew somehow that all of it never would." Saint Andrew
paused. Then, "There was a quality about her which I cannot quite
describe, Mr. Drake. It was in the way she walked. In the way she
talked. Most of all, it manifested itself when she stood up here behind
the lectern and spread the Word. Would you like to hear one of her
sermons? I taped them—every one."
"Why—why yes," Drake said.
Saint Andrew turned, parted the curtains behind the lectern, and
disappeared into the room beyond. He reappeared a few moments
later, bearing an archaic tape-recorder which he placed upon the
lectern. "I selected a tape at random," he said, flicking the switch.
"Listen."

For a while there was no sound save the whispering of the worms,
and then above the whispering came her rich, full voice. Sitting there
in the dim chapel, Drake pictured her standing straight and tall behind
the lectern, her stern, blue-gray uniform trying vainly to tone down the
burgeoning of her breasts and the thrilling sweep of her calves and
thighs; her voice rising now in rich and stirring resonance and filling
the room with unpremeditated beauty ... "I have chosen to speak to
you this day of the Potomac Peregrination, of the walking of His ghost
upon the land; of the rising of His stone figure from the ruins of the
temple where it had sat in silent meditation for three score and
seventeen years, and of its coming to life to walk down to the blood-
red sea, there to fall asunder on the beach. They will tell you, No, this
did not happen, that the broken statue was borne there by men who
wished to immortalize Him, and they will supply you with pseudo-
scientific data that will seem to prove that the Planet of Peace that
hovered above His head and then came down and absorbed His
ghost and bore it from the face of the earth was no more than a
mass-figment in the minds of the beholders. Yes, they will tell you
this, these cynical-minded people will, these fact-stuffed creatures
who are incapable of believing that a man can become immortal, that
stone can transcend stone; that this kindest of men was the strongest
of men and the greatest of men and the most enduring of men, and
walks like a giant in our midst even unto this day. Well let it be known
by all present, and let it be bruited about, that I believe: I believe that
stone can take on life and that this great man did rise from the ruins
of His desecrated temple to walk upon the land; like a towering giant
He walked, a giant with the fires of righteousness burning in His eyes,
and He did raise His voice against the bombs falling and He did wipe
the incandescence from the hellish heavens with His terrible gaze,
and the thunder of His tread did set the very earth to trembling as He
walked down the Potomac to the sea, 'Lo, I have arisen,' He
proclaimed. 'Lo, I walk again! Look at Me, ye peoples of the earth—I
have come to emancipate you from your shackling fears, and I have
summoned the Planet of Peace from out of the immensities of space
and time to transport My ghost to the stars. Lo, I force peace upon
you, ye peoples of the earth, and I command you to remember
always this terrible day when you drove Kindness from your
doorsteps and threw wide your portals to Perdition....' Yes, He said
these things, I swear unto you He said them as He walked down the
Potomac to the sea beneath the brief bright bonfires of the bombs,
the Planet of Peace shining high above His head, and if you cannot
believe in the walking of His ghost upon the land and in His
ascension to the stars, then you are as one dead, without hope,
without love, without pity, without kindness, without humanity, without
humility, without sorrow, without pain, without happiness, and without
life. Amen."

The sad susurrus of the worms crept softly back into the room. With a
start, Drake realized that he had bowed his head.
He raised it abruptly. Saint Andrew was regarding him with puzzled
eyes. "Have you notified her family, Mr. Drake?"
"No," Drake said. "I mentioned the matter to no one."
"I'll radio them at once then, and tell them everything."
Saint Andrew rewound the tape, removed it from the recorder, and
started to slip it into his pocket. "Wait," Drake said, getting to his feet.
Again, the puzzled regard. "Yes?"
"I'd like to buy it," Drake said. "I'll pay you whatever you think it's
worth."
Saint Andrew stepped down from the pulpit and handed him the tape.
"Please accept it as a gift. I'm sure she would have wanted you to
have it." There was a pause. Then, "Are you a believer, Mr. Drake?"
Drake pocketed the tape. "No. Oh, I believe that the War of Nineteen
Ninety-nine came to a halt on the very day it began all right. What I
don't believe is that the nuclei of the enemy warheads were negated
by the 'terrible gaze' of a second Christ. I've always gone along with
the theory that they were negated by the bombardment of a Lambda-
Xi field that 'slipped its moorings' and wandered into the area—the
same kind of a bombardment that nearly negated me."
"And a commendable theory it is too—but basically isn't it as
dependent upon divine intervention as the Potomac Peregrination?"
"Not necessarily. Such concurrences seem providential merely
because we try to interpret the macrocosm on a microcosmic scale.
Well, I have to be on my way, Saint Andrew. The powers-that-be at
Pastelsilks should have come to some decision concerning my
transparent cargo by this time. Thank you for the tape, and for your
trouble."
"Thank you for bringing me news of Saint Annabelle, Mr. Drake. Even
though it was bad. Goodbye."
"Goodbye," Drake said, and left.

The offices of Pastelsilks, Inc. were as many as they were

magnificent, and the building that houses them pre-empted almost an
entire acre. The whispering of the worms was absent here, shut out
by sound-proof construction or devoured by the sterile humming of
air-conditioning units. "Right this way, Mr. Drake," a frightened office
girl said. "Mr. Pompton is waiting for you."
The vice president of Pastelsilks, Inc. gave a start when Drake
entered, but Drake was accustomed by this time to the reactions his
appearance gave rise to and no longer paid them any heed. "Good
news or bad news, Mr. Pompton?" he said.
"Bad news, I'm afraid. Please sit down, Mr. Drake."
Drake did so. "But surely my cargo must be worth something."
"Not to us, it isn't. Nor to Dernier Cri Garments. And there's no way it
can be salvaged. But you just might be able to dispose of it on one of
the more backward planets, and to this end Pastelsilks, Incorporated
is willing to defer demanding restitution from your bonding company
for six months."
"Six months doesn't give me very much time to peddle a thousand
bolts of invisible silk," Drake said.
"I consider it a very handsome gesture on our part. Of course if you're
not interested, we can—"
"I'll give it a try," Drake said. "Which of the backward planets would
you recommend?"
"Marie Elena, Dandelion, Little Sun, Dread—"
"Is Azure a possibility?"
"Why yes, Azure ought to provide a potential market. Its peoples are
largely members of the peasantry, and it's conceivable that they might
be attracted by bolts of colored mists and pastel nothingness."
"Good," Drake said, getting to his feet. "I'll be on my way then."
"One minute, Mr. Drake. Before you leave, I would like to make a
suggestion with regard to your appearance."
Drake frowned. "I don't see what I can do about it."
"There are quite a number of things you can do about it. First of all,
you can buy yourself some clothing that is not translucent. Secondly,
you can buy yourself a pair of skin-tight gloves. Thirdly, you can buy
yourself a flesh-colored rubber mask that will align itself to your
features. You can, in other words, cease being an apparition in the
eyes of everyone you meet, and become a perfectly presentable silk
salesman."
Drake shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "I'm afraid I can't
do any of those things," he said.
"You can't? In the name of all that's wholesale, why not?"
The word "penance" came into Drake's mind, but he ignored it. "I
don't know," he said. He turned to go.
"One more minute please, Mr. Drake. Will you enlighten me on a little
matter before you leave?"
"All right."
Mr. Pompton cleared his throat. "Are you of Dutch descent by any
chance?"
"No," Drake said, and left.

Azure
The best way to build a mental picture of Azure is to begin with a
bunch of grapes. The bunch of grapes is cobalt-blue in hue and it is
part of a cobalt-blue cluster of similar bunches. The cluster hangs
upon a vine which is bursting with heart-shaped leaves, and the vine
is one of many similar vines that form a verdant row, in turn, is one of
many similar rows that form a verdant vineyard. You see them now,
do you not?—these lovely vineyards rolling away, and the white, red-
roofed houses in between?—the intervals of green and growing fields
in the blue swaths of rivers and the sparkling zigzags of little
streams?—the blue eyes of little lakes looking up into the warm blue
sky where big Sirius blazes and little Sirius beams? Now, picture
people working in the fields and in the vineyards; picture trees, and
children playing underneath them; picture housewives coming out
back doors and shaking homemade rugs that look like little rainbows;
picture toy-like trains humming over anti-grav beds from town to town,
from city to city, tying in the entire enchanting scheme of things with
the spaceport at Vin Bleu. Finally, picture a narrow road winding
among the vineyards, and a man walking along it. A man? No, not a
man—a ghost. A tall gaunt ghost in spectral space-clothes. A ghost
named Nathaniel Drake.
He had come many miles by train and he had visited many towns
along the way and talked with many merchants, and each time he
had unfolded the sample of pastelsilk he carried and held it up for
inspection, and each time the word had been no. In the town he had
just left, the word had been no too, and he knew by now that
wherever he went on Azure the word would be no also, but right now
he did not care. Right now he was about to carry out the ulterior
purpose of his visit, and the ulterior purpose of his visit had nothing to
do with the selling of silk.
He could see the house already. It sat well back from the road. In it,
she had grown up. Along this very road, she had walked to school.
Between these verdant vineyards. Beneath this benign blue sky.
Sometimes during those green years she must have sinned.
Like all its neighbors, the house was white, its roof red-tiled. In the
middle of its front yard grew a Tree of Love, and the tree was in
blossom. Soon now, the blossoms would be falling, for autumn was
on hand. Already the time for the harvesting of the grapes had come.
Had she picked in these very vineyards? he wondered. Clad in
colorful clothing, had she walked along these growing banks of green
and heaped baskets with brilliant blue? And had she come home
evenings to this little white house and drenched her face with cool
water from that archaic well over there, and then gone inside and
broken bread? And afterward had she come outside and waited in the
deepening darkness for her lover to appear? Nathaniel Drake's pulse-
beat quickened as he turned into the path that led across the lawn to
the small front porch. No matter what Saint Andrew had said, Saint
Annabelle Leigh could not possibly have been all saint.
A girl in a yellow maternity dress answered the door. She had
hyacinth hair, blue eyes and delicate features. She gasped when she
saw Drake, and stepped back. "I've come about Annabelle Leigh," he
said quickly. "Did Saint Andrew radio you about what happened? He
said he would. I'm Nathaniel Drake."
The girl's fright departed as quickly as it had come. "Yes, he did.
Please come in, Mr. Drake. I'm Penelope Leigh—Annabelle's sister-
in-law."
The room into which he stepped was both pleasant and provincial. A
long wooden table stood before a big stone fireplace. There were
cushioned chairs and benches, and upon the floor lay a homemade
hook-rug that embodied all the colors of the spectrum. A big painting
of the Potomac Peregrination hung above the mantel. The marble
figure of the Emancipator had been huge to begin with, but over the
centuries the minds of men had magnified it into a colossus. Artists
were prone to reflect the popular conception, and the artist who had
painted the present picture was no exception. In juxtaposition to the
towering figure that strode along its banks, the Potomac was little
more than a pale trickle; houses were matchboxes, and trees, blades
of grass. Stars swirled around the gaunt gray face, and some of the
stars were glowing Komets and Golems and T-4A's re-entering the
atmosphere, and some of them were interceptors blazing spaceward.
The sea showed blood-red in the distance, and in the background,
the broken columns of the fallen Memorial were illuminated by the
hellish radiance of the funeral pyre of Washington, D.C. High above
the ghastly terrain hovered the pale globe of the Planet of Peace.
"Please sit down, Mr. Drake," Penelope said. "Annabelle's mother and
father are in the vineyard, but they will be home soon."
Drake chose one of the cushioned chairs. "Do they hate me?" he
asked.
"Of course they don't hate you, Mr. Drake. And neither do I."
"I could have averted her death, you know," Drake said. "If I'd put her
down on Iago Iago as she asked me to, she would still be alive today.
But I valued my pilot's license too highly. I thought too much of my
daily bread."
Penelope had sat down in a cushioned chair that faced his own. Now
she leaned forward, her blue eyes full upon him. "There's no need for
you to justify your action to me, Mr. Drake. My husband is a Suez
Canal tech, and he can't pursue his profession without a license
either. He worked very hard to get it, and he wouldn't dream of
jeopardizing it. Neither would I."
"That would be Annabelle's brother, wouldn't it? Is he here now?"
"No. He's on Wayout, working on the 'leak'. I say 'working on it', but
actually they haven't found it yet. All they know is that it's on the
Wayout end of the warp. It's really quite a serious situation, Mr. Drake
—much more serious than the officials let on. Warp seepages are
something new, and very little is known about them, and Ralph says
that this one could very well throw the continuum into a state of
imbalance if it isn't checked in time."
Drake hadn't come all the way to Campagne Paisible to talk about
warp seepages. "How well did you know your sister-in-law, Miss
Leigh?" he asked.
"I thought I knew her very well. We grew up together, went to school
together, and were the very best of friends. I should have known her
very well."
"Tell me about her," Drake said.

"She wasn't at all an outward person, and yet everyone liked her. She
was an excellent student—excelled in everything except Ancient Lit.
She never said much, but when she did say something, you listened.
There was something about her voice...."
"I know," Drake said.
"As I said, I should have known her very well, but apparently I didn't.
Apparently no one else did either. We were utterly astonished when
she ran away—especially Estevan Foursons."
"Estevan Foursons?"
"He's a Polysirian—he lives on the next farm. He and Annabelle were
to be married. And then, as I said, she ran away. None of us heard
from her for a whole year, and Estevan never heard from her at all.
Leaving him without a word wasn't at all in keeping with the way she
was. She was a kind and gentle person. I don't believe he's gotten
over it to this day, although he did get married several months ago. I
think, though, that what astonished us even more than her running
away was the news that she was studying for the sainthood. She was
never in the least religious, or, if she was, she kept it a deep dark
secret."
"How old was she when she left?" Drake asked.
"Almost twenty. We had a picnic the day before. Ralph and I, she and
Estevan. If anything was troubling her, she certainly gave no sign of
it. We had a stereo-camera, and we took pictures. She asked me to
take one of her standing on a hill, and I did. It's a lovely picture—
would you like to see it?"
Without waiting for his answer, she got up and left the room. A
moment later she returned carrying a small stereo-snapshot. She
handed it to him. The hill was a high one, and Annabelle was outlined
sharply against a vivid azure backdrop. She was wearing a red dress
that barely reached her knees and which let the superb turn of her
calves and thighs come through without restraint. Her waist was
narrow, and the width of her hips was in perfect harmony with the
width of her shoulders—details which her Church of the Emancipation
uniform had suppressed. Spring sunlight had bleached her hair to a
tawny yellow and had turned her skin golden. At her feet, vineyards
showed, and the vineyards were in blossom, and it was as though
she too were a part of the forthcoming harvest, ripening under the
warm sun and waiting to be savored.
There was a knot of pain in Drake's throat. He raised his eyes to
Penelope's. Why did you have to show me this? he asked in silent
desperation. Aloud, he said, "May I have it?"
The surprise that showed upon her face tinged her voice. "Why—why
yes, I suppose so. I have the negative and can get another made....
Did you know her very well, Mr. Drake?"
He slipped the stereo-snapshot into the inside breast-pocket of his
longcoat, where it made a dark rectangle over his heart. "No," he
said. "I did not know her at all."

Toward twilight, Annabelle's parents came in from the vineyard. The

mother, buxom of build and rosy of cheek, was attractive in her own
right, but she was a far cry from her daughter. In order to see
Annabelle, you had to look into the father's sensitive face. You could
glimpse her in the line of cheek and chin, and in the high, wide
forehead. You could see her vividly in the deep brown eyes. Drake
looked away.
He was invited to share the evening meal, and he accepted.
However, he knew that he would not find what he was searching for
here, that if there had been another side of Annabelle she had kept it
hidden from her family. Estevan Foursons was the logical person to
whom to take his inquiries, and after the meal, Drake thanked the
Leighs for their hospitality, said good by, and set off down the road.
Estevan Foursons lived in a house very much like the Leighs'.
Vineyards grew behind it, vineyards grew on either side of it, and
across the road, more vineyards grew. The sweet smell of grapes
ripening on the vine was almost cloying. Drake climbed the steps of
the front porch, stood in the artificial light streaming through the
window in the door, and knocked. A tall young man wearing pastel
slacks and a red-plaid peasant blouse came down the hall. He had
dark-brown hair, gray eyes, and rather full lips. Only the mahogany
cast of his skin betrayed his racial origin—that, and his unruffled calm
when he opened the door and saw Drake. "What do you want?" he
asked.
"Estevan Foursons?"
The young man nodded.
"I'd like to talk to you about Annabelle Leigh," Drake went on "It was
on my ship that she—"
"I know," Estevan interrupted. "Penelope told me. Nathaniel Drake, is
it not?"
"Yes. I—"
"Why are you interested in a dead woman?"
For a moment, Drake was disconcerted. Then, "I—I feel responsible
for her death in a way."
"And you think that knowing more about her will make you feel less
responsible?"
"It might. Will you tell me about her?"
Estevan sighed. "I sometimes wonder if I really knew her myself. But
come, I will tell you what I thought I knew. We will walk down the road
—this is not for my wife's ears."
Beneath the stars, Drake said, "I talked with the saint who
indoctrinated her. He thought very highly of her."
"He could hardly have thought otherwise."
Estevan turned off the road and started walking between two starlit
rows of grapevines. Disappointed, Drake followed. Had Annabelle
Leigh never done anything wrong? It would seem that she had not.
For some time the two men walked in silence, then Estevan said, "I
wanted you to see this place. She used to come here often."
They had emerged from the vineyard and were climbing a small
slope. At the top of it, Estevan paused, and Drake paused beside
him. At their feet, the ground fell gradually away to the wooded shore
of a small lake. "She used to swim there naked in the starlight,"
Estevan said. "Often I came here to watch her, but I never let on that I
knew. Come."
Heartened, Drake followed the Polysirian down the slope and through
the trees to the water's edge. Drake knelt, and felt the water. It was
ice-cold. A granite outcropping caught his eye. Nature had so shaped
it that it brought to mind a stone bench, and approaching it more
closely, he saw that someone had sculptured it into an even greater
semblance. "I did that," Estevan said from behind him. "Shall we sit
down?"

Seated, Drake said, "I find it difficult to picture her here. I suppose
that's because I associate saints with cold corridors and cramped little
rooms. There's something pagan about this place."
Estevan did not seem to hear him. "We would bring our lunch here
from the vineyards sometimes," he said. "We would sit here on this
bench and eat and talk. We were very much in love—at least
everybody said we were. Certainly, I was. Her, I don't know."
"But she must have loved you. You were going to be married, weren't
you?"
"Yes, we were going to be married." Estevan was silent for a while;
then, "But I don't think she loved me. I think she was afraid to love
me. Afraid to love anyone. Once, it hurt me even to think like this.
Now, it is all past. I am married now, and I love my wife. Annabelle
Leigh is a part of yesterday, and yesterday is gone. I can think now of
the moments we spent together, and the moments no longer bring
pain. I can think of us working together in the vineyards, tending the
vines, and I can think of her standing in the sun at harvest time, her
arms filled with blue clusters of grapes and the sunlight spilling
goldenly down upon her. I can think of the afternoon we were rained
out, and of how we ran through the rows of vines, the rain drenching
us, and of the fire we built in the basket shed so that she could dry
her hair. I can think of her leaning over the flames, her rain-dark hair
slowly lightening to bronze, and I can think of the raindrops
disappearing one by one from her glowing face. I can think of how I
seized her suddenly in my arms and kissed her, and of how she
broke wildly free and ran out into the rain, and the rain pouring down
around her as she ran.... I did not even try to catch her, because I
knew it would do no good, and I stood there by the fire, miserable and
alone, till the rain stopped, and then went home. I thought she would
be angry with me the next day, but she was not. She acted as though
the rain had never been, as though my passion had never broken
free. That night, I asked her to marry me. I could not believe it when
she said yes. No, these moments give me no more pain, and I can
recount them to you with complete calm. Annabelle, I think, was born
without passion, and hence could not understand it in others. She
tried to imitate the actions of normal people, but there is a limit to
imitation, and when she discovered this limitation she ran away."
Drake frowned in the darkness. He thought of the tape Saint Andrew
had given him, of the picture that he carried in his left breast-pocket.
Try as he would, he could correlate neither of the two Annabelles with
the new Annabelle who had stepped upon the stage. "Tell me," he
said to Estevan, "when she ran away, did you make any attempt to
follow her?"
"I did not—no; but her people did. When a woman runs away
because she is afraid of love, it is futile to run after her because when
you catch up to her she will still be running." Estevan got to his feet. "I
must be getting back—my wife will be wondering where I am. I have
told you all I know."

He set off through the trees. Bitterly disappointed, Drake followed. In

trying to discredit the woman he wanted to hate, he had merely
succeeded in vindicating her. The new Annabelle might be
inconsistent with the other two, but she certainly was not inconsistent
with saintliness, and as for the other two, for all their seeming
disparity neither of them was inconsistent with saintliness either. It
was a long step from the girl on the hill to the girl he had locked in the
storeroom to die, but it was not an illogical step, and therefore it could
be made. Two years was more than enough time to transform the
surcharged fires of spring into the smoldering ones of fall—
Two years?
That was the length of time she had served under Saint Andrew. In
the cabin of the Fly by Night, however, she had given her age as
twenty-three.
The two men had reached the road. Suddenly excited, Drake turned
to Estevan. "How old was she when she left?" he asked. "Exactly how
old?"
"In two more months she would have been twenty."
"And when she left, did anybody check at the spaceport? Does
anybody know positively that she went directly to Forget Me Not?"
"No. At the time it never occurred to anyone—not even the police—
that she might have left Azure."
Then she could have gone anywhere, Drake thought. Aloud, he said,
"Thank you for your trouble, Estevan. I'll be on my way."

He proceeded by anti-grav train to the spaceport at Vin Bleu, only to

find that the records he desired access to were unavailable to
unauthorized personnel. However, by distributing a quantity of his
fast-dwindling capital (he had drawn out the second half of his bi-
planetary nest egg on Forget Me Not), he managed to bring about a
temporary suspension of the rule. Once handed the big departure log,
he had no trouble finding the entry he wanted. It was over three years
old, and read, 9 May, 3663: Annabelle Leigh via Transspacelines to
Worldwellost, class C. Departure time: 1901 hours, GST.
Hope throbbed through him. There were no Army of the Church of the
Emancipation missions on Worldwellost. Worldwellost was a mecca
for sinners, not saints.
In a matter of hours, Azure was a blue blur in the Fly by Night's rear
viewplate.
On the chart table in his cabin, Madame Gin sat. Drake regarded her
for some time. For all her refusal to help him in his time of need, he
still found her presence indispensable. Why, then, did he not go to
her at once and enrich his intellect with her fuzzy philosophies?
Presently he shrugged, and turned away. He propped the picture
Penelope had given him against the base of the chart lamp; then he
incorporated the tape Saint Andrew had given him into the automatic
pilot and programmed a continual series of playbacks over the
intercom system. He returned to the table and sat down. Ignoring
Madame Gin, he concentrated on the girl on the hill—
"I have chosen to speak to you this day of the Potomac Peregrination,
of the walking of His ghost upon the land; of the rising of His stone
figure from the ruins of the temple where it had sat in silent meditation
for three score and seventeen years, and of its coming to life to walk
down to the blood-red sea...."

In common with Azure, Worldwellost is one of the inner planets of the

vast Sirian system. However, it has little else in common with Azure,
and in Nathaniel Drake's day it had even less.
Before the commercial apotheosis of its lustrous neighbor, Starbright,
it had flourished as a vacation resort. Now, its once-luxurious hotels
and pleasure domes had fallen into desuetude, and the broad
beaches for which it had once been renowned were catchalls for
debris, dead fish, and decaying algae. But Worldwellost was not dead
—far from it. The rottenest of logs, once turned over, reveal life at its
most intense, and the rotten log of Worldwellost was no exception.
Nathaniel Drake put down in the spaceport-city of Heavenly and set
forth upon his iconoclastic quest. Annabelle Leigh's trail, however,
ended almost as soon as it began. She had checked into the Halcyon
Hotel one day, and checked out the next, leaving no forwarding
address.
Undaunted, Drake returned to the port, distributed some more of his
fast-dwindling capital, and obtained access to the departure log. He
found the entry presently: 26 June, 3664: Annabelle Leigh via
Transspacelines to Forget Me Not, class A. Departure time: 0619
hours, GST.
Spacetime was synonymous with earth time and, while it was used in
calculating all important time periods, such as a person's age, it
seldom coincided with local calendars. Therefore, while the month
and the year on Worldwellost might seem to indicate otherwise,
Drake knew definitely that Annabelle Leigh had left the planet over
two years ago, or approximately one year after she had arrived.
Judging from her change in travel-status, she had bettered herself
financially during that period.
Had she spent the entire year in Heavenly? he wondered.
When all other attempts to obtain information about her failed, he had
a photostat made of the stereo-snapshot Penelope had given him,
presented it to the missing persons department of Heavenly's largest
3V station, and engaged them to flash a daily circular to the effect
that he, Nathaniel Drake, would pay the sum of fifty credits to anyone
providing him with bona fide information concerning the girl in the
picture. He then retired to his room at the Halcyon Hotel and waited
for his visiphone to chime.
His visiphone didn't, but several days later, his door did. Opening it,
he saw an old man clad in filthy rags standing in the hall. The old man
took one look at him, lost what little color he had, and turned and
began to run. Drake seized his arm. "Forget about the way I look," he
said. "One hundred of my credits makes a Rockefellow the same as
anyone else's, and I'll pay cash if you've got the information I want."
Some of the old man's color came back. "I've got it, Mister—don't you
worry about that." Reaching into the inside pocket of his filthy coat, he
withdrew what at first appeared to be a large map folded many times
over. He unfolded it with clumsy fingers, shook it out, and held it up
for Drake to see. It was a stereo-poster of a girl, life-size and in color
—the same girl who had had her picture taken on a hill on Azure—
Only this time she wasn't wearing a red dress. She was wearing a
cache-sexe, and except for a pair of slippers, that was all she was
wearing.
Drake could not move.
There was a legend at the bottom of the poster. It read:
Mary Legs, now stripping at King Tutankhamen's
Abruptly Drake came out of his state of shock. He tore the poster out
of the old man's hands. "Where did you get it?" he demanded.
"I stole it. Ripped it off the King's billboard when nobody was looking.
Carried it with me ever since."
"Did you ever see her ... perform?"
"You bet I did! You never saw anything like it. She'd—"
"How long ago?"
"Two-three years. Big years. She's the one you want, ain't she? I
knew it the minute I saw the picture on 3V. Sure, the name's different,
I says to myself, but it's the same girl. You should have seen her
dance, Mister. As I say, she'd—"
"Where's King Tutankhamen's place?" Drake asked.
"In Storeyville. As I say, she'd—"
"Shut up," Drake said.
He counted out fifty credits and placed them in the old man's hand.
The old man was regarding him intently. "You're the Jet-propelled
Dutchman, ain't you."
"What if I am?"
"You don't look like a Dutchman. Are you?"
"No," Drake said, and re-entered the room and slammed the door.

The anti-grav trains of Worldwellost were as rundown as the towns

and cities they connected. Drake rode all night and all the next
morning. He didn't sleep a wink throughout the whole trip, and when
he got off the train at the Storeyville station he looked even more like
a ghost than he had when he had got on.
His appearance provoked the usual quota of starts and stares.
Ignoring them, he made his way to the main thoroughfare. Tall and
gaunt and grim, he looked up and down the two rows of grimy
façades, finally spotted the neoned name he wanted, and started out.
A knot of 'teen thieves formed behind him as he progressed down the
street. "The Jet-propelled Dutchman," they cried jeeringly. "Look, the
Jet-propelled Dutchman!"
He turned and glowered at them, and they ran away.
The exterior of King Tutankhamen's had a rundown mien, but it
retained traces of an erstwhile elegance. Within, dimness prevailed,
and Drake practically had to feel his way to the bar. Gradually,
though, as the brightness of the afternoon street faded from his
retina, he began to make out details. Rows of glasses; rows of
bottles. Obscene paintings on the wall. A pale-faced customer or two.
A bartender.
Outside in the street, the teen thieves had regrouped and had taken
up their jeering chant again. "The Jet-propelled Dutchman, the Jet-
propelled Dutchman!" The bartender came over to where Drake was
standing. He was fat, his skin was the color of nutmeg, and his hair
was white. "Your—your pleasure, sir?" he said.
Eyes more perceptive now, Drake looked at the obscene paintings,
wondering if she were the subject of any of them. She was not. He
returned his gaze to the bartender. "Are you the owner?"
"King Tutankhamen at your service, sir. I am called 'the King'."
"Tell me about Annabelle Leigh."
"Annabelle Leigh? I know of no such person."
"Then tell me about Mary Legs."
The light that came into the King's eyes had a sublimating effect upon
his face. "Mary Legs? Indeed, I can tell you about her. But tell me
first, have you seen her lately? Tell me, is she all right?"
"She's dead," Drake said. "I killed her."
The King's fat face flattened slightly; fires flickered in his pale eyes.
Then his face filled out again, and the fires faded away. "No," he said,