Up The Line

2.

He was really black. The family had been working at it for five or six generations now, since the Afro Revival period. The idea was to purge the gonads of the hated slave-master genes, which of course had become liberally entangled in Sam’s lineage over the years. There was plenty of time for Massa to dip the wick between centuries seventeen and nineteen. Starting about 1960, though, Sam’s people had begun to undo the work of the white devils by mating only with the ebony of hue and woolly of hair. Judging by the family portraits Sam showed me, the starting point was a cafe-au-lait great-great-grandmother. But she married an ace-of-spades exchange student from Zambia or one of those funny little temporary countries, and their eldest son picked himself a Nubian princess, whose daughter married an elegant ebony buck from Mississippi, who—

“Well, my grandfather looked decently brown as a result of all this,” Sam said, “but you could see the strain of the mongrel all over him. We had darkened the family hue by three shades, but we couldn’t pass for pure. Then my father was born and his genes reverted. In spite of everything. Light skin and a high-bridged nose and thin lips — a mingler, a monster. Genetics must play its little joke on an earnest family of displaced Africans. So Daddo went to a helix parlor and had the caucasoid genes edited, accomplishing in four hours what the ancestors hadn’t managed to do in eighty years, and here I be. Black and beautiful.”

Sam was about thirty-five years old. I was twenty-four. In the spring of ’59 we shared a two-room suite in Under New Orleans. It was Sam’s suite, really, but he invited me to split it with him when he found out I had no place to stay. He was working then part time as an attendant in a sniffer palace.

I was fresh off the pod out of Newer York, where I was supposed to have been third assistant statutory law clerk to Judge Mattachine of the Manhattan County More Supreme Court, Upper. Political patronage got me the job, of course, not brains. Statutory law clerks aren’t supposed to have brains; it gets the computers upset. After eight days with Judge Mattachine my patience eroded and I hopped the first pod southbound, taking with me all my earthly possessions, consisting of my toothflash and blackhead remover, my key to the master information output, my most recent thumb-account statement, two changes of clothing, and my lucky piece, a Byzantine gold coin, a nomisma of Alexius I. When I reached New Orleans I got out and wandered down through the underlevels until my feet took me into the sniffer palace on Under Bourbon Street, Level Three. I confess that what attracted me inside were the two jiggly girls who swam fully submerged in a tank of what looked like and turned out to be cognac. Their names were Helen and Betsy and for a while I got to know them quite well. They were the sniffer palace’s lead-in vectors, what they used to call come-ons in the atomic days. Wearing gillmasks, they displayed their pretty nudities to the bypassers, promising but never quite delivering orgiastic frenzies. I watched them paddling in slow circles, each gripping the other’s left breast, and now and then a smooth thigh slid between the thighs of Helen or Betsy as the case may have been, and they smiled beckoningly at me and finally I went in.

Sam came up to greet me. He was maybe three meters tall in his build-ups, and wore a jock and a lot of oil. Judge Mattachine would have loved him. Sam said, “Evening, white folks, want to buy a dream?”

“What do you have going?”

“Sado, maso, homo, lesbo, inter, outer, upper, downer and all the variants and deviants.” He indicated the charge plate. “Take your pick and put your thumb right here.”

“Can I try samples first?”

He looked closely. “What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing in a place like this?”

“Funny. I was just going to ask you the same thing.”

“I’m hiding out from the Gestapo,” Sam said. “In black-face. Yisgadal v’yiskadash—”

“—adonai elohainu,” I said. “I’m a Revised Episcopalian, really.”

“I’m First Church of Christ Voudoun. Shall I sing a nigger hymn?”

“Spare me,” I told him. “Can you introduce me to the girls in the tank?”

“We don’t sell flesh here, white folks, only dreams.”

“I don’t buy flesh, I just borrow it a little while.”

“The one with the bosom is Betsy. The one with the backside is Helen. Quite frequently they’re virgins, and then the price is higher. Try a dream instead. Look at those lovely masks. You sure you don’t want a sniff?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

“Where’d you get that Newer York accent?”

I said, “In Vermont, on summer vacation. Where’d you get that shiny black skin?”

“My daddy bought it for me in a helix parlor. What’s your name?”

“Jud Elliott. What’s yours?”

“Sambo Sambo.”

“Sounds repetitious. Mind if I call you Sam?”

“Many people do. You live in Under New Orleans now?”

“Just off the pod. Haven’t found a place.”

“I get off work at 0400. So do Helen and Betsy. Let’s all go home with me,” said Sam.