Who Goes There?

I think I mentioned earlier that I had never read a Miriam Allen deFord story before, which as it turns out is not true. I had read deFord’s savage little story “The Malley System” as part of Dangerous Visions, which is a perfectly dangerous little parable befitting that anthology, despite deFord being the oldest contributor by a good margin. DeFord was born in 1888, which would make her a few years older than the likes of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith; and yet despite her age, as well as not writing fiction regularly until the ’50s, she was by no means a square. This could be because deFord is one of the few openly leftist writers active in the field at the time, with her writing for feminist and socialist outlets going back to the years immediately following World War I. She was also, incidentally, a researcher for Charles Fort, which gave her a connection to genre SF long before she actually started writing SF herself. DeFord’s work is certainly worthy of further study, not least because today’s story, while very short, is a haunting fable that, while ostensibly SF, functions more as ghostly allegory. “The Voyage of the ‘Deborah Pratt’” is not to be missed.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s since been reprinted in the deFord collection Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow, as well as Terrors, Torments and Traumas (ed. Helen Hoke) and Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1964-1968) (editor not credited).

Enhancing Image

The narrator is some four generations removed from the story he’s telling, and by his own admission it “may be partly myth.” There is some truth to it, of course: Jemmy Todd really was the narrator’s grandfather’s grandfather, and Quashee was a real person. Jemmy and Quashee were friends from childhood, but there was one problem: Quashee was a slave. Or rather, Quashee was brought in on a ship as a slave, although as the narrator tells it Jemmy family did buy his freedom at some point. Immediately we’re told that the story we’re about to hear may not be entirely true—not because the narrator is unreliable but because it’s simply part of the passage of time, that things that happened over a century ago will get mixed up as one generation recites to the next—assuming the thing is remembered at all. We’re being told this story in what would’ve presumably then been modern times, but the story itself would take place in the very early 19th century, when slavery was legal in several states in the US, though there was a growing abolitionist movement. The “Deborah Pratt” of the title is a brig that was stationed in New Bedford, the port town where we spend the opening stretch of Moby-Dick and where slavery was illegal at the time. The “Deborah Pratt” and its captain, Captain Pratt, Jemmy’s uncle, brought in slaves across the Atlantic illegally; the ship had to be quite clean of slaves when it returned to New Bedford. Jemmy was an orphan, and as Captain Pratt was the only man able to take the boy in, Jemmy spent time aboard this slave ship. But due to circumstances that could have been foreseen the illicit purpose of the “Deborah Pratt” was to end soon.

(Just a note here, and I’m saying this as a compulsive writer and an amateur editor at heart; but should a ship’s name be italicized or in quotation marks? Usually I see it as the former, but if for example a ship’s name is part of a book title—itself italicized—then the ship’s name will be in quotation marks. But if not part of an italicized title then it seems the ship’s name should be without quotation marks. In the case of deFord’s story it seems she should’ve italicized “Deborah Pratt,” but for the sake of consistency I’m foregoing the italicizing in my review.)

While Captain Pratt worked with his crew, Jemmy would hang around the slaves, especially Quashee, one of the children among them and about Jemmy’s age. The two boys, despite not having a language in common, get along well. “They would laugh together over nothing, draw pictures with sticks in the ground, talk to each other by signs and gestures. There was nobody else around of their own age or near it, so they gravitated together.” This is a small bright spot in what is otherwise a grueling existence, and deFord is merciless with what little wordage she affords herself, as while “The Voyage of the ‘Deborah Pratt’” is not a horror story per se it does gaze, unblinkingly, into what is by its nature an abyss. The slaves are chained together and stripped of their clothing. Those who die mid-voyage are tossed overboard, and even living slaves will be tossed over the side if the “Deborah Pratt” is threatened with being caught with its illegal cargo. For the crew the Africans on the ship don’t represent human life but a monetary investment. The most horrifying passages are not SFnal but historical. You may be wondering, then, how this story takes a turn for the SFnal, and since this story is so short I really have no choice but to tell you now: it’s a blinding disease, a virus which may or may not exist. Something strange and quite disconcerting starts happening with the slaves, in that the adults seem to be losing their eyesight at a rapid pace, their eyes showing “blood-shot whites and sores running with thick, sticky, yellow mucus.” The ship’s solitary doctor doesn’t like the look of this one bit.

DeFord does something unusual with characterization, in that the narrator and (ostensible) protagonist are different people, yet they’re both passive in the story—the unnamed narrator because he’s simply retelling what he’s heard and Jemmy because he was a literal child at the time who didn’t quite know what was happening. The active characters then are Captain Pratt and the doctor, the latter spending much of his time very melancholy and very drunk. The doctor is a curious figure, as he’s clearly ambivalent with the business of slavery but nonetheless chooses to work aboard a slave ship; of course “officially” it’s not for slave-trading, but he’s perfectly aware of where the big money comes from. He even proves perceptive when it comes to the slaves’ mysterious and contagious blindness, saying they’re not really hurting from the failing eyesight but what he calls “nostalgia.” Which came first, the homesickness or the blindness? Did this virus come from Africa or is it not something that can be understood purely through science? The doctor informs the captain that he can’t find a cure for this virus, indeed that it seems to be incurable—and that it can spread easily. So we’re on a ship, in the middle of the ocean, with a virus that could render everyone onboard blind and helpless. The problem is that the slaves cost money, and even if they were to be thrown over now it would be quite costly. (I of course don’t have to mention that doing so would also be a crime against humanity, on top of the slave-trading.) The whites aboard are stuck with their infectious cargo, and things are only about to get worse.

There Be Spoilers Here

Quashee becomes both unchained and allowed to stray from his fellow Africans, which turns out to have spared him from the virus; but then it’s unclear if the virus only has an effect on adults. The adult slaves, which is to say every slave aboard the “Deborah Pratt” aside from Quashee, make the decision among themselves to commit suicide by throwing themselves over the edge as a group. Having lost their sight, both their vision and sight of their homeland, the slaves seem to have come to the conclusion that it’s better to die like this than be brought to the soil of slavers, where they might well be killed for their disability anyway. It’s a disturbing scene, not least because the slaves killing themselves does not stop the virus from spreading to the white crew, and by the time the ship is rescued by a British vessel on the high seas the whole crew (excepting Jemmy) has been rendered “totally and incurably blind.” The conclusion of the story is apparently factual, as the narrator was able to find contemporary newspaper articles on this event happening, although it’s left ambiguous if the crew was rendered blind because of some hitherto unknown virus or if it was perhaps something else. Still, the experience turns Jemmy into an abolitionist; he remains stationed in New Bedford with fellow abolitionists, and even helps in the Underground Railroad. The strange happenings aboard the “Deborah Pratt” had radicalized him. I wonder if something similar had happened with deFord to turn her to socialism as a young adult? Is there, in some metaphorical sense, a tinge of autobiography with this story?

A Step Farther Out

You could gripe about this story, that in-story it’s told by a white man, both from and for a white man’s perspective, and as written by a white women. The black slaves are not given words to speak, to express their anguish verbally, and even Quashee is not really a character. It’s a story about the inherent evil of black slavery, but it’s (probably) not written with the descendants of black slaves in mind. This is a criticism, however, that really can only be made from the standpoint of the present, now over sixty years removed from the story’s publication. As a story presumably written for white readers “The Voyage of the ‘Deborah Pratt’” is stunning in its economy, its ferociousness, and its unsparing use of SF-as-allegory to paint a venomous picture in fewer than ten pages. If the best of deFord is like this then rest assured I’ll be covering her again.

See you next time.