Atlantis: Three Tales by Samuel R. Delany Read Free Book Online Page A

was ludicrously too small), they shuffled before the woman, like wounded angels or emissaries from another world, up between the lines of Christmas mailers loaded with letters and packages to be sent by sea and rail and air to where and wherever.
    Postage on all Sam’s three shopping-bags full came to two dollars and seventeen cents.
    Turning from the window, the bags at his side empty and all in onehand now, flapping like wind-abandoned sails, Sam saw the big clock on the wall above the door. It was circled in eight concentric rings of metal, each one set back from the next (for the eight planets, perhaps?), the face a ninth and central wafer, whiter than ice, arrow-tipped hands upthrust, long one right and short one left, telling him it was five past eleven.
    That noon was the first time Sam tried to find the underground magic shop at Forty-second Street. For most of his exploration, he kept making the same turns and going along the same underground alleys, even as he tried to get somewhere new, finally to give up: he didn’t want to be late for dinner at Corey and Elsie’s. When he was unsure of what train he was actually supposed to take to get back to Harlem, he asked an elderly Negro in a suit with baggy knees and the jacket and vest grayed with powdered plaster, who was carrying a chest of tools on the platform—and came home.
    New Year’s Day was practically balmy. For a while Sam retained a memory of strolling down Lenox Avenue, just a sweater under his suit jacket. Hands in his pants pockets, he whistled jets of music and condensed breath, ambling by the pine trees discarded that morning at the curb over soiled snow clutching the sidewalk’s rim. Wooden stands were still nailed to the trunks: crossed planks, a board square, or some more complicated contrivance with braces. The needle-bare branches transformed the trees into long-slain carcasses.
    The next day the temperature dropped to a previously unknown and, till then unbelievable, paralytic cold. What had been snow and slush became a rind of ice over the city. That night, ears stinging and face a mask of pain from the wind, Sam hurried toward Mount Morris past a mound of trees, delicately afire in the corner lot, one still with ornaments on its charring branches, black before crackling flame.
    Late in February’s icy circuit, when Sam answered the door, Clarice came in, waving a newspaper, cheeks blotched red with cold. “You’ve got to see this. This is too much. This is, I tell you, the living end!”
    Hubert got up from the wing chair. “What is it?”
    â€œWhat
is
it?” The room was chill; and though Clarice’s coat was open, she didn’t shrug it off. “Here—now did you believe you were ever going to live to see something like this in a paper—even a New York City paper?”
    The picture took up a quarter of the second page.
    White actress Mary Blair knelt on the ground beside a seated, twenty-six year old Negro actor, Paul Robeson, kissing his hand! The play was Eugene O’Neill’s
All God’s Chillun Got Wings
, scheduled to open at the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village sometime that spring. Robeson played a young, Negro law student—
    â€œSee. He was a lawyer, Hubert—like you.”
    â€œHe
plays
a lawyer,” Hubert corrected. “In the play.”
    Sam read over Clarice’s shoulder.
    â€œNo, he really
was
a lawyer,” Clarice said. “Before. But he gave it up for the theater!”
    â€œHe wasn’t a lawyer; he was a football player!” Sam said. “See.” Football was Sam’s own sport—he had played center in high school, till Papa—when John’s brother broke his leg in the game, the sharp bone coming through his brown, bloody shin—decided it was too rough and had forbidden him: everyone at home had encouraged him to go out for basketball, for which Sam had no particular love. “It says he