Edited by, p.50
Edited By, page 50
10.
You know when I said Sonny was not a handsome man? Well, I also said Muhammad Ali was an angel. He was a black man’s angel, an avenging angel, a messenger from a better future. He was theway and thepath, man, and they marked him for sacrifice, because he was a warrior god, a Black Muslim Moses come to lead his people out of Egypt land.
And the people in power like to stay that way, and they have their ways of making it happen. Of making sure the sacrifice gets chosen.
Go ahead and curl your lip. White man born in the nineteenth century, reborn in 1905 as the Genius of the Mississippi of the West. What do I know about the black experience?
I am my city, and I contain multitudes. I’m the African-American airmen at Nellis Air Force Base, and I’m the black neighborhoods near D Street that can’t keep a supermarket, and I’m Cartier Street and I’m Northtown and I’m Las Vegas, baby, and it doesn’t matter a bit what you see when you look at my face.
Because Sonny Liston died here, and he’s buried here in the palm of my hand. And I’m Sonny Liston too, wronged and wronging; he’s in here, boiling and bubbling away.
11.
I filled his glass one more time and splashed what was left into my own, and that was the end of the bottle. I twisted it to make the last drop fall. Sonny watched my hands instead of my eyes, and folded his own enormous fists around his glass so it vanished. “You’re here on business, Jackie,” he said, and dropped his eyes to his knuckles. “Nobody wants to listen to me talk.”
“I want to listen, Sonny.” The scotch didn’t taste so good, but I rolled it over my tongue anyway. I’d drunk enough that the roof of my mouth was getting dry, and the liquor helped a little. “I’m here to listen as long as you want to talk.”
His shoulders always had a hunch. He didn’t stand up tall. They hunched a bit more as he turned the glass in his hands. “I guess I run out of things to say. So you might as well tell me what you came for.”
At Christmastime in 1970, Muhammad Ali—recently allowed back in the ring, pending his appeal of a draft evasion conviction—was preparing for a title bout against Joe Frazier in March. He was also preparing for a more wide-reaching conflict; in April of that year, his appeal, his demand to be granted status as a conscientious objector, was to go before the United States Supreme Court.
He faced a five-year prison sentence.
In jail, he’d come up against everything Sonny Liston had. And maybe Ali was the stronger man. And maybe the young king wouldn’t break where the old one fell. Or maybe he wouldn’t make it out of prison alive, or free.
“Ali needs your help,” I said.
“Fuck Cassius Clay,” he said.
Sonny finished his drink and spent a while staring at the bottom of his glass. I waited until he turned his head, skimming his eyes along the floor, and tried to sip again from the empty glass. Then I cleared my throat and said, “It isn’t just for him.”
Sonny flinched. See, the thing about Sonny—that he never learned to read, that doesn’t mean he wasdumb. “The NAACP don’t want me. The Nation of Islam don’t want me. They didn’t even want Clay to box me. I’man embarrassment to the black man.”
He dropped his glass on the table and held his breath for a moment before he shrugged and said, “Well, they got their nigger now.”
Some of them know up front; they listen to the whispers, and they know the price they might have to pay if it’s their number that comes up. Some just kind of know in the back of their heads. About the corn king, and the laurel wreath, and the price that sometimes has to be paid.
Sonny Liston, like I said, he wasn’t dumb.
“Ali can do something you can’t, Sonny.”Ali can be a symbol.
“I can’t have it,” he drawled. “But I can buy it? Is that what you’re telling me, Jack?”
I finished my glass too, already drunk enough that it didn’t make my sinuses sting. “Sonny,” I said, with that last bit of Dutch courage in me, “you’re gonna have to take another fall.”
12.
When his wife—returning from a holiday visit to her relatives—found his body on January fifth, eleven days after I poured him that drink, maybe a week or so after he died, Sonny had needle marks in the crook of his arm, though the coroner’s report saidheart failure.
Can you think of a worse way to kill the man?
13.
On March 8, 1971, a publicly reviled Muhammad Ali was defeated by Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden in New York City in a boxing match billed as the “Fight of the Century.” Ali had been vilified in the press as a Black Muslim, a religious and political radical, a black man who wouldn’t look down.
Three months later, the United States Supreme Court overturned the conviction, allowing Muhammad Ali’s conscientious objector status to stand.
He was a free man.
Ali fought Frazier twice more. He won both times, and went on to become the most respected fighter in the history of the sport. A beautiful avenging outspoken angel.
Almost thirty-five years after Sonny Liston died, in November of 2005, President George W. Bush awarded America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to the draft-dodging, politically activist lay preacher Muhammad Ali.
14.
Sonny Liston never looked a man in the eye unless he meant to beat him down. Until he looked upon Cassius Clay and hated him. And looked past that hate and saw a dawning angel, and he saw the future, and he wanted it that bad.
Wanted it bad, Sonny Liston, illiterate jailbird and fighter and standover man. Sonny Liston the drunk, the sex offender. Broken, brutal Sonny Liston with the scars on his face from St. Louis cops beating a confession from him, with the scars on his back from his daddy beating him down on the farm.
Sonny Liston, who loved children. He wanted that thing, and he knew it could never be his.
Wanted it and saw a way to make it happen for somebody else.
15.
And so he takes that fall, Sonny Liston. Again and again and again, like John Henry driving steel until his heart burst, like a jockey rolling over the shoulder of a running, broken horse. He takes the fall, and he saves the King.
And Muhammad Ali? He never once looks down.
Sonny Liston Takes the Fall
Elizabeth Bear wrote the marvelous “Sonny Liston Takes the Fall” for The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It’s unlike anything else I had read, or have read by her.
Technicolor
by John Langan
(From Poe: 19 New Tales of Suspense, Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2009)
Come on, say it out loud with me: “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” Look at that sentence. Who says Edgar Allan Poe was a lousy stylist? Thirteen words—good number for a horror story, right? Although it’s not so much a story as a masque. Yes, it’s about a masque, but it is a masque, too. Of course, you all know what a masque is. If you didn’t, you looked it up in your dictionaries, because that’s what you do in a senior seminar. Anyone?
No, not a play, not exactly. Yes? Good, okay, “masquerade” is one sense of the word, a ball whose guests attend in costume. Anyone else?
Yes, very nice, nicely put. The masque does begin in the sixteenth century. It’s the entertainment of the elite, and originally, it’s a combination of pantomime and dance. Pantomime? Right—think “mime.” The idea is to perform without words, gesturally, to let the movements of your body tell the story. You do that, and you dance, and there’s your show. Later on, there’s dialogue and other additions, but I think it’s this older sense of the word the story intends. Remember that tall, silent figure at the end.
I’m sorry? Yes, good point. The two kinds of masque converge.
Back to that sentence, though. Twenty-two syllables that break almost perfectly in half, ten and twelve, “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death” and “held illimitable dominion over all.” A group of short words, one and two syllables each, takes you through the first part of the sentence, then they give way to these long, almost luxurious words, “illimitable dominion.” The rhythm—you see how complex it is? You ride along on these short words, bouncing up and down, alliterating from one “d” to the next, and suddenly you’re mired in those Latinate polysyllables. All the momentum goes out of your reading; there’s just enough time for the final pair of words, which are short, which is good, and you’re done.
Wait, just let me—no, all right, what was it you wanted to say?
Exactly, yes, you took the words out of my mouth. The sentence does what the story does, carries you along through the revelry until you run smack-dab into that tall figure in the funeral clothes. Great job.
One more observation about the sentence, then I promise it’s on to the story itself. I know you want to talk about Prospero’s castle, all those colored rooms. Before we do, however, the four “d”’s. We’ve mentioned already, there are a lot of “d” sounds in these thirteen words. They thread through the line, help tie it together. They also draw our attention to four words in particular. The first three are easy to recognize: they’re capitalized, as well. Darkness, Decay, Death. The fourth? Right, dominion. Anyone want to take a stab at why they’re capitalized?
Yes? Well…okay, sure it makes them into proper nouns. Can you take that a step farther? What kind of proper nouns does it make them? What’s happened to the Red Death in the story? It’s gone from an infection you can’t see to a tall figure wandering around the party. Personification, good. Darkness, Decay, (the Red) Death: the sentence personifies them; they’re its trinity, its unholy trinity, so to speak. And this godhead holds dominion, what the dictionary defines as “sovereign authority” over all. Not only the prince’s castle, not only the world of the story, but all, you and me.
In fact, in a weird sort of way, this is the story of the incarnation of one of the persons of this awful trinity.
All right, moving on, now. How about those rooms? Actually, how about the building those rooms are in, first? I’ve been calling it a castle, but it isn’t, is it? It’s “castellated,” which is to say, castle-like, but it’s an abbey, a monastery. I suppose it makes sense to want to wait out the Red Death in a place like an abbey. After all, it’s both removed from the rest of society and well-fortified. And we shouldn’t be too hard on the prince and his followers for retreating there. It’s not the first time this has happened, in literature or life. Anyone read The Decameron? Boccaccio? It’s a collection of one hundred stories told by ten people, five women and five men, who have sequestered themselves in, I’m pretty sure it’s a convent, to wait out the plague ravaging Florence. The Black Death, that one.
If you consider that the place in which we find the seven rooms is a monastery, a place where men are supposed to withdraw from this world to meditate on the next, its rooms appear even stranger. What’s the set-up? Seven rooms, yes, thank you, I believe I just said that. Running east to west, good. In a straight line? No. There’s a sharp turn every twenty or thirty yards, so that you can see only one room at a time. So long as they follow that east to west course, you can lay the rooms out in any form you like. I favor steps, like the ones that lead the condemned man to the chopping block, but that’s just me.
Hang on, hang on, we’ll get to the colors in a second. We need to stay with the design of the rooms for a little longer. Not everybody gets this the first time through. There are a pair of windows, Gothic windows, which means what? That they’re long and pointed at the top. The windows are opposite one another, and they look out on, anybody? Not exactly: a chandelier hangs down from the ceiling. It is a kind of light, though. No, a candelabra holds candles. Anyone else? A brazier, yes, there’s a brazier sitting on a tripod outside either window. They’re, how would you describe a brazier? Like a big metal cup, a bowl, that you fill with some kind of fuel and ignite. Wood, charcoal, oil. To be honest, I’m not as interested in the braziers as I am in where they’re located. Outside the windows, right, but where outside the windows? Maybe I should say, What is outside the windows? Corridors, yes, there are corridors to either side of the rooms, and it’s along these that the braziers are stationed. Just like our classroom. Not the tripods, of course, and I guess what’s outside our windows is more a gallery than a corridor, since it’s open to the parking lot on the other side. All right, all right, so I’m stretching a bit, here, but have you noticed, the room has seven windows? One for each color in Prospero’s Abbey. Go ahead, count them.
So here we are in this strange abbey, one that has a crazy zig-zag suite of rooms with corridors running beside them. You could chalk the location’s details up to anti-Catholic sentiment; there are critics who have argued that anti-Catholic prejudice is the secret engine driving Gothic literature. No, I don’t buy it, not in this case. Sure, there are stained-glass windows, but they’re basically tinted glass. There’s none of the iconography you’d expect if this were anti-Catholic propaganda, no statues or paintings. All we have is that enormous clock in the last room, the mother of all grandfather clocks. Wait a minute…
What about those colors, then? Each of the seven rooms is decorated in a single color that matches the stained glass of its windows. From east to west, we go from blue to purple to green to orange to white to violet to—to the last room, where there’s a slight change. The windows are red, but the room itself is done in black. There seems to be some significance to the color sequence, but what that is—well, this is why we have literature professors, right? (No snickering.) Not to mention, literature students. I’ve read through your responses to the homework assignment, and there were a few interesting ideas as to what those colors might mean. Of course, most of you connected them to times of the day, blue as dawn, black as night, the colors in between morning, noon, early afternoon, that kind of thing. Given the east-west layout, it makes a certain amount of sense. A few more of you picked up on that connection to time in a slightly different way, and related the colors to times of the year, or the stages in a person’s life. In the process, some clever arguments were made. Clever, but not, I’m afraid, too convincing.
What! What’s wrong! What is it! Are you all—oh, them. Oh for God’s sake. When you screamed like that, I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I thought I’d need a new pair of trousers. Those are a couple of graduate students I’ve enlisted to help me with a little presentation I’ll be putting up shortly. Yes, I can understand how the masks could startle you. They’re just generic white masks; I think they found them downtown somewhere. It was their idea: once I told them what story we would be discussing, they immediately hit on wearing the masks. To tell the truth, I half-expected they’d show up sporting the heads of enormous fanged monsters. Those are relatively benign.
Yes, I suppose they do resemble the face the Red Death assumes for its costume. No blood splattered on them, though.
If I could have your attention up here, again. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Where was I? Your homework, yes, thank you. Right, right. Let’s see…oh—I know. A couple of you read the colors in more original ways. I made a note of them somewhere—here they are. One person interpreted the colors as different states of mind, beginning with blue as tranquil and ending with black as despair, with stops for jealousy—green, naturally—and passion—white, as in white-hot—along the way. Someone else made the case for the colors as, let me make sure I have the phrasing right, “phases of being.”
Actually, that last one’s not bad. Although the writer could be less obtuse; clarity, people, academic writing needs to be clear. Anyway, the gist of the writer’s argument is that each color is supposed to take you through a different state of existence, blue at one end of the spectrum representing innocence, black at the other representing death. Death as a state of being, that’s…provocative. Which is not to say it’s correct, but it’s headed in the right direction.
I know, I know: Which is? The answer requires some explanation. Scratch that. It requires a boatload of explanation. That’s why I have Tweedledee and Tweedledum setting up outside. (Don’t look! They’re almost done.) It’s also why I lowered the screen behind me for the first time this semester. There are some images I want to show you, and they’re best seen in as much detail as possible. If I can remember what the Media Center people told me…click this…then this…
Voila!
Matthew Brady’s Portrait of Edgar, taken 1848, his last full year alive. It’s the best-known picture of him; were I to ask you to visualize him, this is what your minds’ eyes would see. That forehead, that marble expanse—yes, his hair does make the top of his head look misshapen, truncated. As far as I know, it wasn’t. The eyes—I suppose everyone comments on the eyes, slightly shadowed under those brows, the lids lowered just enough to suggest a certain detachment, even dreaminess. It’s the mouth I notice, how it tilts up ever-so-slightly at the right corner. It’s hard to see; you have to look closely. A strange mixture of arrogance, even contempt, and something else, something that might be humor, albeit of the bitter variety. It wouldn’t be that much of a challenge to suggest colors for the picture, but somehow, black and white is more fitting, isn’t it? Odd, considering how much color there is in the fiction. I’ve often thought all those old Roger Corman adaptations, the ones Vincent Price starred in—whatever their other faults, one thing they got exactly right was Technicolor, which was the perfect way to film these stories, just saturate the screen with the most vibrant colors you could find.
I begin with the Portrait as a reminder. This is the man. His hand scraped the pen across the paper, brought the story we’ve been discussing into existence word by word. Not creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, creation…if my Latin were better, or existent, I’d have a fancier way to say out of the self, or out of the depths of the self, or—hey—out of the depth that is the self.
