Far Beyond the Stars

by Steven Barnes

  "Go on," Mulkahey said. "Move it."

  Benny walked on, with as much dignity as he could muster. But he could hear the two cops behind him:

  "I tell you, Kevin. This city's going to hell in a hand basket."

  "God damned shame …"

  Yeah, we're all going to hell, Benny thought. But you first.

  CHAPTER 12

  BENNY TOOK the subway uptown. At first the car was mostly filled with white people, but as it passed further and further north, the whites exited through the hissing doors, replaced by darker faces.

  And as they did, Benny found himself relaxing, relaxing in a way that he never could downtown. At every stop, there were fewer and fewer white faces, until the last few Caucasian men and women remaining seemed to shrink into themselves.

  The Negroes who boarded were mostly working folk, just like the whites were, but as the last few pale faces scrambled to get off at the last stop before Harlem, he saw a look in their eyes that he sometimes saw in his own when he was downtown.

  It's no fun, is it? he thought, and realized that his internal voice was not entirely kind. It's no fun to be surrounded by aliens, is it? You wonder if they hate you. You wonder why they hate you. You know that you've done nothing, but you can feel, can sense the otherness around you, and it pulls you into yourself, doesn't it?

  And as the train rocketed along its tracks, he wondered to himself if the others in the office had any idea what his secret was, any idea what it was that made his work special and made it, in fact, second only to Herbert's in reader popularity.

  I know the alien mind. I've been an alien my whole life. Oh, every human being feels that they don't belong. But not every man can get beaten or lynched just for looking another man in the face.

  I've been an alien my whole life. Around my own people, brown people, they wondered why I had the dreams I had. They wondered why I liked all types of music. Why I could look at white heroes in movies and cheer for them. Why I could love Rocky Marciano as much as I did Joe Louis. And I couldn't tell them. I don't know myself, even though I know it has something to do with that summer in 1940.

  But any white man might be able to say he feels alienated. But take that same white man and plunk him into the middle of Harlem. Make it so that everything that he could ever dream of, aspire to, hope for, belongs to the ones who don't look like him.

  Worse yet. Take that white man to a church where the Jesus he prays to is black. Make him spend money with black men's faces on the dollars. Make him listen to speeches by the men who run the country—and let all of them be black. Show him endless pictures of the beautiful people, the ones who hold the American Dream—and all of those smiling men and women and happy children are black. Give him history books where every hero he is supposed to model himself after, every president who led his country, every philosopher who ever uttered a word worth remembering, every inventor who pushed back the night for the human race was black.

  Do all of these things before you tell me that you understand what it is to be the outsider.

  I can write aliens because I understand them. More, I can write aliens because I long for a world where we are all alien. In such a world, none of us are alien. We are just all living things, afraid of death and loneliness. And maybe, just maybe, in order to alleviate that fear we will reach out to each other, and find the human heart within the alien breast.

  If we are all aliens, then none of us are.

  The last white face left the subway car, and as it did, the entire car seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, seemed to settle into another rhythm. He felt the tension leave his body, no longer held himself in the slight rigidity which kept his natural physical ease in check, the long, rhythmic stride that seemed to anger white men and intimidate (or intrigue) white women so effortlessly.

  He was home.

  Yeah, Benny. Home. But how many Negroes, "your own people," understand your dreams? If you are honest with yourself, don't you feel more at home with Kay and Herbert, even Pabst? You have no home, except the inside of your head.

  So thank God there is room enough in there for you, and all of your friends, real and imagined, because otherwise it would be a lonely existence indeed.

  The car came to a halt, and Benny was at his stop. He passed out of the doors and hopped up the stairs. He always felt about ten pounds lighter in Harlem than he did downtown, as if a great and secret weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

  Harlem is a neighborhood in Manhattan, bounded to the north by the Harlem River, to the east by Fifth Avenue, to the south by 110th Street, and to the west by Morningside and St. Nicholas avenues. Its neighborhoods are called Bradhurst, Striver's Row, Manhattanville, Hamilton Heights, and Sugar Hill.

  Originally settled by Dutch farmers who named it Nieuw Haarlem, it had a checkered history: At Harlem Heights in 1776 the Continental Army defeated British troops advancing to the city. During the 1840s and 1850s many farms were deserted and taken over by Irish squatters.

  During the 1880s elevated railroads were extended along Second, Third, Eighth, and Ninth avenues, tenements were built in East Harlem, apartment buildings of the Upper West Side. As the population rose the neighborhood became predominantly German. Attractive "new law" tenements and spacious apartment buildings with elevators were erected between 1898 and 1904, when subway lines were extended along Lenox Avenue.

  About this time Negroes first moved to the neighborhood, where they found better housing, a more attractive environment, less racism and violence than in other parts of the city. Most settled near 135th Street.

  The neighborhood started falling apart during the First World War—by 1920 most Jews were moving to newer neighborhoods in the West Side and in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Between 1920 and 1930 the Negro population of Harlem skyrocketed to over 200,000, while white faces became as rare as an honest politician. Blacks from throughout the nation were soon attracted to the area by economic opportunities and a flourishing cultural life.

  Benny still remembered stories of those days, old timers talking about Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and other writers holding readings and throwing parties that even the rich white folks came uptown to attend.

  There were art showings by Romare Bearden, William H. Johnson, and Richmond Barthe; comedy and jazz at theaters on every corner of every neighborhood. Oh, things were swinging then. The names: Jackie "Moms" Mabley, Pigmeat Markham, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller and Willie "the Lion" Smith (oh, that Harlem Stride!), Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Chick Webb.

  The legends: Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith on the same stage at the Apollo. Coleman Hawkins tearin' it down across the street from the theater where Ethel Waters blew the ceiling to kingdom come.

  The Cotton Club, Connie's Inn, Small's Paradise, and the Savoy Ballroom. And the Bebop days, just after the Second War, when giants like Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk reigned supreme.

  Benny had read the Amsterdam News and the New York Age, the biggest Negro publications in the country. He heard impassioned civil rights speeches by A. Philip Randolph and W.E.B. Du Bois, and remembered his aunt talking about the one who started it all—Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican immigrant who started America's first Back-to-Africa movement.

  But Harlem would be no cornerstone for black progress: the Depression devastated it. Negroes continued to settle in Harlem although work was scarce, and because the rents remained high, apartments were subdivided into ever smaller units; at one point the population density in Harlem was more than twice that of New York as a whole. Harlem was a shadow of its former self, but it was still the world that Benny Russell knew best.

  It was almost nine o'clock at night, and there were only a few pedestrians on the street. He knew some, and nodded acknowledgments to some of them, a murmured "Hey, Delroy" or "Gloria—how are the kids?" as he passed among them, heading toward his apartment.

  It was strange the way one part of him seemed to go to sleep, and ano
ther part awaken when he was here. Different music played from the radios, and the entire world seemed to move to an eccentric rhythm. And it was something that called out to him, exerting a pull as powerful as the stars in Benny's imagination. These streets were his past and present. The stars, his future.

  Yes, he liked the sound of that. Perhaps there was a title there …

  There was a little crowd up ahead, perhaps six people, standing and listening to a man who stood atop a wooden box, lecturing in a strident, resonant voice to any and all who walked by.

  The lecturer wore a black suit with a high collar, and his eyes were as piercingly black as his skin. He seemed to be a creature of the night, and Benny could not guess his age. He had seemed old when Benny had first seen him as a boy, old when they had bumped into each other at the fair, and old when Benny had returned from the war, thinking of shattered bodies and death, and dreaming of freedom. Old.

  And old now. But not looking that much older. He was known the neighborhood over simply as The Preacher, and he was in fine form this night.

  He roared out to them: "And he said to me: These words are trustworthy and true. And the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel, has sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place."

  "Amen, Brother," someone in the little crowd said.

  "Preach it!" said another.

  The words had a kind of dreamy quality, as if Benny had heard them before, long ago in another place. The Preacher pointed at Benny as he approached, and some of the people in the crowd turned to look, curious. "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped." He said, "Praise the Lord, open their eyes. Help them to see!"

  Confused, Benny tapped a forefinger on his own chest. "Are you talking to me?"

  "Oh, that my words were now written! Oh, that they were printed in a book!" His eyes burned, and narrowed as he gazed at Benny. "Write those words, Brother Benny. Let them see the glory of what lies ahead."

  "I've never understood," Benny said, laughing in spite of his confusion. "How do you know who everybody is? What we do? Who we are?"

  "I see, Brother Benny. I have always seen. It is the curse and the blessing of the Prophets so to do."

  Benny looked at the old man's eyes blazing from age-hollowed sockets. And finally, all he could do was nod. "All right, man. It's cool."

  "Go now, and write the truth that's in your heart. The truth that 'shall set them free!'" The Preacher gave Benny a last hard look, and Benny went on his way.

  Strange about the old man: You might see him once a week, or once a year. No one knew where he lived, but he seemed to know everything, and everyone. Somehow, his words both disturbed and comforted Benny, and as he watched the old man walk away, his mind played its trick on him again. And the old man looked like … he saw in the old man's eyes . . .

  Joseph Sisko. Yes. The father of Benjamin Sisko, the Space station commander.

  Father? Benny had barely known his own father. How odd to look at this wild creature, this thing of the streets, and think of him as someone's father.

  The truth shall set them free …

  "Hallelujah," Benny said quietly. And finished the rest of the walk to his apartment.

  Benny's apartment was a small, shabby one-room hole-in-the-wall. But it was his, and it was home. Books were crammed everywhere, cluttered everywhere, along with a rich and varied collection of native African artifacts. He loved collecting them, and thought the obsession had something to do with that World's Fair exhibit he had seen, so long ago.

  Hung on his living room wall to the right of his desk was a Dogon door, barrier against evil spirits. A Zulu medicine mask graced the wall nearby, and another Dogon artifact, a burial urn shaped like a bird, sat somberly on a kitchen shelf.

  His Remington and a radio sat on the kitchen table, near the window. Articles on astronomy and physics were pinned on the walls everywhere, and a periodic table of the elements was fastened to the icebox by a round magnet. There were a few cheaply framed Incredible Tales covers, all prominently featuring illustrations of his own stories. An Earth globe hung suspended from the ceiling above his desk, low enough to study as reference. It was cozy on a good day, cramped on a bad. Regardless of which it was at any given time, it was definitely home.

  He turned on the radio and diddled the dial while the tubes warmed up, faint sounds at first, growing louder slowly, and he dialed until he found something familiar—the sweet, warbling sax of Charlie Parker. It was like balm on scalded nerves.

  He walked over to the upright piano over in the corner, and he sat down at the bench. The piano's surface was marred and scuffed, but as he flipped the lid up and began to run his fingers over the keys, it responded as if it understood loss, but had never known it.

  It had been his father's, the only thing left behind when "Fox" Russell disappeared. Then it belonged to his mother, who died soon afterwards. Then his aunt, who was his only family in the world and who had passed just last year, leaving the piano to him.

  He rested his head on his hands. He couldn't go down that lane. He just couldn't. But he could take that pain, he could take that loss, and he could do the only thing that he knew which could stop the anguish. He could give it to one of his characters and, through working of the story, show how they had managed to turn travail into power. Show how they had grown in spite of their loss. It was his most powerful weapon. It would not fail him now.

  He pushed himself away from the piano. He might be alone in the world, but he was not the only one who felt so, and perhaps it was the task of the writer, of the artist, to take human pain and transform it into understanding.

  Well, then … who in his story might have suffered loss? He couldn't give the character loss without triumph. That was unfair to his readers. Too many of them had known loss. It was his job to help them to make sense of their lives, or at least to honestly try to make sense of his own, and then put the results, whatever they might be, onto paper.

  It was the Captain, it was this man Sisko who had known loss. Yes. He had lost his wife … on the Space Station? No. He had lost his wife on another station, where he had served, during an enemy attack. There had been … fire … and death, and he had been helpless to save her.

  With an unsteady hand, Benny rolled a sheet of paper into the carriage. He looked at the paper, and then began to type:

  Captain Benjamin Sisko sat looking out the window of Deep Space Nine, his ebony reflection staring back at him. There was a job to do, but as with all men, sometimes memories of the past intruded upon the present. These memories were painful. Any memory of the only woman he had ever loved was painful. And yet he would not have given them up for all the Tarkelean Tea in the Galaxy . . .

  Benny typed for almost an hour without stopping, finding his way into another world, a world where the faucets did not leak, where the paper-thin walls did not conduct the sound of the nightly, vicious domestic quarrel from the neighboring apartment. Where racist cops didn't roust men just for breathing their precious air. He slipped deeper and deeper into a world where honor and intelligence and courage were the measure of a being—whether human or alien, male or female. Black or white. A better world than the one in which he lived.

  When he looked up, there was a half-inch stack of paper on the table before him. He had fed sheet after sheet into the typewriter without thinking. He glanced at his watch: it was after midnight. He really should be thinking about bedtime. He really should.

  But then Benny looked over into the window, and saw something that, despite his fatigue, despite his weariness, made him smile. The image, in his mind, was not that of Benny Russell, middle-aged Negro science fiction writer. No Ralph Ellison. No Richard Wright. Perhaps a hack, but a sincere hack, and that had to be worth something.

  No, what he saw in the window was a proud black man wearing a Starfleet uniform. A man who had never bowed. Who had known loss but not defeat, depression but not despair.

/>   Benjamin Sisko. Starfleet officer.

  Benny took a deep breath, regaining more than his composure. He had regained, just for that precious moment, his identity.

  With renewed energy, he began to type. His fingers struck the keys in a blur, tirelessly, long into the night, long after the couple next door had stopped arguing, until the only sound in the entire building was the steady, burring slap of cast-iron typeface against white paper.

  SHUFFLE

  CHAPTER 13

  1940

  MR. COOLEY and his group found their way to the amusements area, where Benny was guided away from the dancing girl shows. ("I don't think those white men would greatly appreciate Negro boys looking at those half-naked white girls" Cooley said. Little Cassie was more direct and explicit about it and expressed, strongly, the opinion that there wouldn't be anything in there worth seeing at all.)

  Despite stupendous crowds, through a fluke they actually managed to catch one of Robinson's musical shows. A rumor ran through the mob that Mae West was appearing at the main pavilion. It was considered possible—that stage had seen Abbott and Costello and the Marx Brothers earlier in the week. As it turned out, that had been a false rumor, but it did thin the crowd for the music theater. Cooley's class, including Benny, Jenny, and Cassie, had been able to find seats. When the curtain went up, for the next forty minutes Benny was thrilled more than he would have believed possible by the dancing of the legendary Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. Never in his life had he seen such an exhibition of grace and ease of motion, and for just an instant, he craved the fluidity of dance for himself, craved to be able to move with the kind of ease men like Robinson and Willie Hawkins displayed so effortlessly.

  He looked over at Jenny and was just a little lost at the way she gazed at Robinson, felt searing envy that mere dancing could wring that kind of response from a woman. What would he have to have, what would he have to do before he could ever hope to trigger such admiration? He didn't know, but he knew that he wanted it.