The Gilda Stories Read online

  “This revolutionary classic by a pioneer in black speculative fiction will delight and inspire generations to come.”

  —Tananarive Due, author of Ghost Summer

  “The Gilda Stories is groundbreaking not just for the wild lives it portrays, but for how it portrays them—communally, unapologetically, roaming fiercely over space and time.”

  —Emma Donoghue, author of Room

  “The Gilda Stories was ahead of its time when it was first published in 1991, and this anniversary edition reminds us why it’s still an important novel. Gomez’s characters are rooted in historical reality yet lift seductively out of it, to trouble traditional models of family, identity, and literary genre and imagine for us bold new patterns. A lush, exciting, inspiring read.”

  —Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet

  “The Gilda Stories has been vitally important for the development of a generation of dreamers engaged in radical imagination. It has filled the desires of oppressed and marginalized peoples for stories of the fantastic that wear our faces. It helps so many to understand how to take these mythologies that speak to us, pull them into our flesh, and breathe out visionary communities of resistance.”

  —Walidah Imarisha, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood

  “Gilda’s body knows silk, telepathy, lavender, longing, timeless love, and so much blood. With sensory, action-packed prose and a poet’s eye for beauty, Jewelle Gomez gives us an empathy transfusion. This all-American novel of the undead is a life-affirming read.”

  —Lenelle Moïse, author of Haiti Glass

  “Jewelle Gomez’s sense of culture and her grasp of history are as penetrating now as twenty-five years ago, and perhaps more so, given the current challenges to black lives. From ‘Louisiana 1850’ to ‘Land of Enchantment 2050,’ from New Orleans to Macchu Pichu, through endless tides of blood and timeless evocations of place, Gilda’s ensemble of players transports me through two hundred years and a second century of black feminist literary practice and prophecy.”

  —Cheryl Clarke, author of Living As A Lesbian

  “Jewelle Gomez’s big-hearted novel pulls old rhythms out of the earth, the beauty shops, and living rooms of black lesbian her-story. Gilda’s resilience is a testament to black queer women’s love, power, and creativity. Brilliant!”

  —Joan Steinau Lester, author of Black, White, Other

  “I devoured this 25th anniversary edition of The Gilda Stories with the same hunger as I did when I first read it. I feel a connection to Gilda—her tenacity, her desire for community, her insistence on living among humanity with all its flaws and danger. These stories remain classic and timely.”

  —Therí A. Pickens, author of New Body Politics

  “The Gilda Stories does what vampire stories do best: hold up a larger-than-life mirror in which we can see our hopes, fears, dreams, and flaws. Gilda provides us with a perspective that is too often lost in American history, and a multicultural vision of a better future for us all, human and vampire alike.”

  —Pam Keesey, author of Daughters of Darkness

  “Jewelle Gomez sees right into the heart. In Gilda’s stories she has created a timeless journey, taken us back into history and forward into possibility. This is a book to give to those you want most to find their own strength.”

  —Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

  “In sensuous prose, Jewelle Gomez uses the vampire story as a vehicle for a re-telling of American history in which the disenfranchised finally get their say. Her take on queerness, community, and the vampire legend is as radical and relevant as ever.”

  —Michael Nava, author of The City of Palaces

  “With hypnotic prose, Jewelle Gomez shows the immense power of fantasy and the untold stories of American history.”

  —Cecilia Tan, author of Black Feathers

  The Gilda Stories

  Jewelle Gomez

  AFTERWORD BY ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS

  City Lights Books | San Francisco

  Copyright © 1991, 2016 by Jewelle Gomez

  Afterword copyright © 2016 by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

  All right reserved

  Cover design by em-dash

  First published in 1991 by Firebrand Books.

  First City Lights edition 2016.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gomez, Jewelle, 1948- author.

  Title: The Gilda stones / Jewelle Gomez; afterword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

  Description: Expanded 25th anniversary edition. | San Francisco : City Lights Publishers, [2016] | “1991

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015042172 | ISBN 9780872866744 (softcover) Subjects: LCSH: Lesbian vampires—Fiction. | African Americans—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / African American / General. | FICTION / Lesbian. | FICTION / Fantasy / General. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Horror fiction. | Science fiction. | Fantasy fiction. Classification: LCC PS3557.0457 G5 2016 | DDC 813 /.54—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/ 2015042172

  City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore

  261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133

  www.citylights.com

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Louisiana: 1850

  Chapter Two

  Yerba Buena: 1890

  Chapter Three

  Rosebud, Missouri: 1921

  Chapter Four

  South End: 1955

  Chapter Five

  Off-Broadway: 1971

  Chapter Six

  Down by the Riverside: 1981

  Chapter Seven

  Hampton Falls, New Hampshire: 2020

  Chapter Eight

  Land of Enchantment: 2050

  Afterword

  Blood Relations: Gilda and the Stakes of our Future

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  A sincere thanks to those who encouraged and assisted me during this long process that has traversed many lifetimes: Cheryl Clarke, Dorothy Allison, Elly Bulkin, Marianne Brown, Sandra Lara, Leslie Kahn, Alexis DeVeaux, Evelynn Hammonds, Audre Lorde, Gregory Kolovakos, Michael Albano, Katie Roberts, Barbara Smith, Nancy Musgrave, Lucy Loyd, Jonathan Leiter, Robin Hirsch, Marilyn Hacker, Maria Lachina, Eric Garber, Arlene Wysong, Morgan Freeman, Gloria Stein, Eric Ashworth, Zuri McKie, Marty Pottenger, Linda Nelson, Laurie Liss, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Michele Karlsberg, Amy Scholder, Elaine Katzenberger, Stacey Lewis. My family in Pawtucket, at 146 West Newton Street and the SFPL. The Beard’s Fund, the Barbara Deming/Money for Women Fund and the Lambda Literary Foundation. And Diane Sabin.

  As always my work is dedicated Gracias Archelina Sportsman Morandus, Lydia Mae Morandus, Dolores Mae Minor LeClaire, and Duke Gomes.

  At night sleep locks me into an echoless coffin

  sometimes at noon I dream

  there is nothing to fear….

  Audre Lorde

  Foreword

  One summer evening BC (before cell phones), my home telephone was out of order so I strolled down to the corner in the musky urban night air of Manhattan to call a friend from a phone booth. As I was talking two male passersby started telling me in lewd detail what sex acts they would like to perform on me. I thought about the fact that women go through this debasement regularly, routinely. How we usually steel ourselves and block it out. But this time, on that evening long ago, rage welled up in me like a tidal wave. I told my friend on the other end of the line to hold on.

  I turned on the two men and began screaming like a mythical banshee. I could see that they thought I was overreacting—they were “just being guys.” But my harangue exploded uncontrollably, stripping away their macho posturing. One man yelled
desperately to the other, “Brother, she’s crazy!” He clutched at his friend’s arm and they fled down the street away from me. I was shaking with the pent-up fury of all the women who’ve ever been harassed on the street. I came back to myself when I heard my friend, terrified that I was being murdered, shouting my name through the telephone receiver. I thought with shock that if I had had a weapon in hand I would have gleefully beaten or shot or stabbed or bombed those two guys. Instead I went back to my flat and wrote the first installment of what would become The Gilda Stories.

  In Gilda, I created a character who escapes from her deep sense of helplessness as a slave and gains the ultimate power over life and death. She becomes a witness over time to the injustices that humans visit upon one other. Alone on the road she is ill-equipped to protect herself from the brutal and predatory paddy roller who would return her to slavery. The trauma of the escape and the violence that surrounds her path to freedom is a weight she must bear through time. Each new decade brings reminders that the culture has not yet healed the wounds left from slavery and bigotry. Gilda must learn to leave those she loves behind without bending under the further weight of loneliness. Throughout her journey she tries to hold on to her humanity and help others to find theirs.

  There were those who didn’t think a black lesbian vampire story—benevolent or not—was such a good idea politically. Some writer friends and activists—African American and lesbian—thought connecting the idea of vampires with vulnerable communities was too negative. Even as I explained that The Gilda Stories would be a lesbian-feminist interpretation of vampires, not simply a story about a charming serial killer, people found the idea hard to accept. The archetype of the vampire is so deeply imbedded in the culture it was difficult for a new vision to replace it, or so we thought.

  I was anxious the first time I read a chapter at the Flamboyant Ladies Salon in Brooklyn, having no idea how people would respond to a tale of an escaped slave girl who becomes a vampire. The only thing I felt sure of was that the audience, assembled by founders Alexis DeVeaux and Gwendolen Hardwick for monthly salons in their home, would be kind. They were that and more. Their engaged, illuminating questions led me to do years of research on vampire mythology and women’s relationship to blood and social history. Rereading Octavia Butler’s work convinced me there was a place for women of color in speculative fiction. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s books showed me that vampires could be more than opera-caped predators. Soon I published that first Gilda chapter in the Village Voice. After reading it, Joanna Russ sent me a post card of encouragement, which confirmed for me that lesbian feminism was a legitimate lens through which to develop an adventure story. Women’s stories, long considered to reign only in the realm of the domestic, had been stepping out into the larger world for years. Yet few were grounded in such a traditional horror genre as vampires because that would require a complete reframing of the mythology itself.

  What began with fury has become a decades long pursuit in search of meaningful responses to these political and philosophical questions: What is family? How do we live inside our power and at the same time act responsibly? How do we build community? How do we connect authentically across gender, ethnicity, and class lines?

  A repeating refrain I wrote for Bones & Ash, the theatrical adaptation of this novel, is the spine upon which the story rests: “We take blood, not life, and leave something in exchange.” In order to answer any of the questions the book raises we must take blood—metaphorically speaking. That is, we must learn how to break through the surface, find the deep dangerous place where blood flows without hurting one other, and share all that we know and love in order to survive. This is a lifelong pursuit for all of us. I hope another couple of generations will take this journey with Gilda at their sides as I do.

  Jewelle Gomez

  July 2015

  Chapter One

  Louisiana: 1850

  The Girl slept restlessly, feeling the prickly straw as if it were teasing pinches from her mother. The stiff moldy odor transformed itself into her mother’s starchy dough smell. The rustling of the Girl’s body in the barn hay was sometimes like the sound of fatback frying in the cooking shed behind the plantation’s main house. At other moments in her dream it was the crackling of the brush as her mother raked the bristles through the Girl’s thicket of dark hair before beginning the intricate pattern of braided rows.

  She had traveled by night for fifteen hours before daring to stop. Her body held out until a deserted farmhouse, where it surrendered to this demanding sleep hemmed by fear.

  Then the sound of walking, a man moving stealthily through the dawn light toward her. In the dream it remained what it was: danger. A white man wearing the clothes of an overseer. In the dream the Girl clutched tightly at her mother’s large black hand, praying the sound of the steps would stop, that she would wake up curled around her mother’s body on the straw and cornhusk mattress next to the big, old stove, grown cold with the night. In sleep she clutched the hand of her mother, which turned into the warm, wooden handle of the knife she had stolen when she ran away the day before. It pulsed beside her heart, beneath the rough shirt that hung loosely from her thin, young frame. The knife, crushed into the cotton folds near her breast, was invisible to the red-faced man who stood laughing over her, pulling her by one leg from beneath the pile of hay.

  The Girl did not scream but buried herself in the beating of her heart alongside the hidden knife. She refused to believe that the hours of indecision and, finally, the act of escape were over. The walking, hiding, running through the Mississippi and Louisiana woods had quickly settled into an almost enjoyable rhythm; she was not ready to give in to those whom her mother had sworn were not fully human.

  The Girl tried to remember some of the stories that her mother, now dead, had pieced together from many different languages to describe the journey to this land. The legends sketched a picture of the Fulani past—a natural rhythm of life without bondage. It was a memory that receded more with each passing year.

  “Come on. Get up, gal, time now, get up!” The urgent voice of her mother was a sharp buzz in her dream. She opened her eyes to the streaking sun which slipped in through the shuttered-window opening. She hopped up, rolled the pallet to the wall, then dipped her hands quickly in the warm water in the basin on the counter. Her mother poured a bit more bubbling water from the enormous kettle. The Girl watched the steam caught by the half-light of the predawn morning rise toward the low ceiling. She slowly started to wash the hard bits of moisture from her eyes as her mother turned back to the large, black stove.

  “I’ma put these biscuits out, girl, and you watch this cereal. I got to go out back. I didn’t beg them folks to let you in from the fields to work with me to watch you sleepin’ all day. So get busy.”

  Her mother left through the door quickly, pulling her skirts up around her legs as she went. The Girl ran to the stove, took the ladle in her hand, and moved the thick gruel around in the iron pot. She grinned proudly at her mother when she walked back in: no sign of sticking in the pot. Her mother returned the smile as she swept the ladle up in her large hand and set the Girl onto her next task—turning out the biscuits.

  “If you lay the butter cross ’em while they hot, they like that. If they’s not enough butter, lay on the lard, make ’em shine. They can’t tell and they take it as generous.”

  “Mama, how it come they cain’t tell butter from fat? Baby Minerva can smell butter ’fore it clears the top of the churn. She won’t drink no pig fat. Why they cain’t tell how butter taste?”

  “They ain’t been here long ’nough. They just barely human. Maybe not even. They suck up the world, don’t taste it.”

  The Girl rubbed butter over the tray of hot bread, then dumped the thick, doughy biscuits into the basket used for morning service. She loved that smell and always thought of bread when she dreamed of better times. Whenever her mother wanted to offer comfort she promised the first biscuit with real butter. The Girl im
agined the home across the water that her mother sometimes spoke of as having fresh bread baking for everyone, even for those who worked in the fields. She tried to remember what her mother had said about the world as it had lived before this time but could not. The lost empires were a dream to the Girl, like the one she was having now.

  She looked up at the beast from this other land, as he dragged her by her leg from the concealing straw. His face lost the laugh that had split it and became creased with lust. He untied the length of rope holding his pants, and his smile returned as he became thick with anticipation of her submission to him, his head swelling with power at the thought of invading her. He dropped to his knees before the girl whose eyes were wide, seeing into both the past and the future. He bent forward on his knees, stiff for conquest, already counting the bounty fee and savoring the stories he would tell. He felt a warmth at the pit of his belly. The girl was young, probably a virgin he thought, and she didn’t appear able to resist him. He smiled at her open, unseeing eyes, interpreting their unswerving gaze as neither resignation nor loathing but desire. The flash-fire in him became hotter.

  His center was bright and blinding as he placed his arms—one on each side of the Girl’s head—and lowered himself. She closed her eyes. He rubbed his body against her brown skin and imagined the closing of her eyes was a need for him and his power. He started to enter her, but before his hand finished pulling her open, while it still tingled with the softness of her insides, she entered him with her heart which was now a wood-handled knife.

  He made a small sound as his last breath hurried to leave him. Then he dropped softly. Warmth spread from his center of power to his chest as the blood left his body. The Girl lay still beneath him until her breath became the only sign of life in the pile of hay. She felt the blood draining from him, comfortably warm against her now cool skin.