Who Goes There?

Something about history is that it’s full of lost opportunities and near-misses, and this applies to genre history as well. Rosel George Brown is one of those writers who seemed on her way to becoming at the very least a major figure in feminist SF writing, but her premature death stopped this in its tracks. She was born in 1926 and died in 1967, of lymphoma, just as the New Wave was kicking into high gear and feminism was becoming more entrenched in the field. Women’s Lib and all that. Brown debuted in 1958 and wrote at a somewhat sporadic pace for the next nine years, probably because she had a day job as a teacher and she would’ve gotten most if not all of her writing done during summer vacation; that Brown was a teacher is particularly relevant to today’s story. Of course, it’s hard to say if Brown would’ve become a major figure had she lived longer, given that her output of short fiction had slowed down to a trickle in the last few years of her life, presumably to do what pretty much every female genre writer at the time did: focus on novels. She co-wrote Earthblood with Keith Laumer, plus two solo novels starring the detective Sibyl Sue Blue. “David’s Daddy” was part of the meteor shower of short stories Brown wrote at the start of her career, it being a nominally SFnal classroom drama.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1960 issue of Fantastic. It’s been reprinted only twice, and one of those you can only access with the Wayback Machine. We have The 6th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F (ed. Judith Merril) and a digital reprint on the long-defunct Sci Fiction. Curiously all three editors who picked this story were women.

Enhancing Image

Lillian (I don’t think we ever get her last name) is evidently a young teacher who looks up to her older colleague, Ms. Fremen, primarily because Ms. Fremen has a perfect grip on her students. “The cadence was perfect. No face was sullen. No face rebellious.” Lillian is trying to learn “the Frown,” which she hopes can help get her students under control, to make them perfectly obedient. This is a telltale sign of the story being culturally set in the ’50s, even though it was published in 1960—granted that it would’ve been written a year or even two years earlier. The ’60s had not properly started yet. This was the age of (at least what the adults considered) out-of-control juvenile delinquency, a trend that seemed to continue through the JFK years. It’s this context, in which those of the silent generation (those born between, say, 1935 and 1945) sought to rebel against middle-class sprawl, that compelled Robert Heinlein to write Starship Troopers. Lillian, probably being around Brown’s own age at the time, is chiefly concerned not with her students’ happiness, or even their engagement with the material, but their capacity to follow orders. It’s easy to assume at first that we’re supposed to take Lillian’s draconian relationship with her students as a good thing, but we’re about to be shown (rather than told) that her desire for obedience at the expense of everything else is a character flaw.

“David’s Daddy” would be a totally non-genre slice-of-life narrative if not for two wrenches being thrown into the equation: the first is a boy named Jerome, one of Ms. Fremen’s students, who is implied to be telepathic. I’m not counting this as a spoiler since we’re introduced to Jerome and his weird gift early enough, but this is the one thing that makes the story SFnal, and only arguably at that. Ms. Fremen tells Lillian that Jerome has some kind of telepathic connection such that he is clairvoyant, although this gift is never given an SFnal explanation. I’m reminded of Stephen King’s Carrie, or more specifically how in the book Carrie’s telekinesis is explained as the byproduct of a very rare recessive gene (the book is, in fact, science fiction), whereas in the 1976 film we’re never given such an explanation. Jerome’s psi power may prove a problem in a different story, but in this story it will turn out to be an incalculably valuable asset. Not that Ms. Fremen or Lillian can make any sense of it. As Ms. Fremen says, in one of the story’s funniest lines, “I’ve been teaching for twenty years, […] I don’t have any imagination.” The other thing is that a strange man who looks like a bum has been loitering on school grounds, which Lillian finds concerning, yet apparently this is not enough to evacuate the school. “In this neighborhood, a good third of the daddies looked like bums. Hell, they are bums.” The bum in question, Mr. Mines, turns out to the father of David, one of the shyer kids in class. This does not make the situation better.

One thing I really like about “David’s Daddy” is how it balances a kind of breezy humor with what turns into a pretty serious situation—especially from a modern perspective, where school shootings have become depressingly commonplace. Evidently shootings on school grounds were not a major concern in the late ’50s, but bomb threats would’ve still been a thing, and some children did (as they do now) have to live with abusive parents. We never find out much about David or his daddy, but while the drunk-looking man is confirmed to be his father, the two don’t seem to have an idyllic relationship. Mr. Mines has come to school to pick up his son, for no clear reason given and well before class has ended. This in itself is concerning, only made more so because the school doesn’t seem to have any security to speak of. (Lillian considers telling Mr. Buras, the school principal, about the situation, but she’s doubtful he will actually do anything about it.) The whole thing is creepy, probably even more so with our current understanding of kids’ safety than it would’ve struck readers at the time. Brown writes Lillian as a flawed but relatable would-be heroine, with some self-deprecating humor about the thankless job of teaching thrown in. It’s a balancing act that she makes work in only ten pages.

The humorous and then creepy scenario takes a deadly serious turn, though: Mr. Mines has put a bomb somewhere in the school, and Jerome is the only person who might know where it is.

There Be Spoilers Here

Mr. Mines came to take David out of class before he bombed the place, but after Lillian distracts him enough it seems he’s grown content at the thought of killing his own son, along with his classmates. We never learn why Mr. Mines would do such a thing, other than that he is supposedly an alcoholic, maybe having grown tired of living as a bum. David’s relationship with his dad is only faintly implied, since David himself says very little, but the boy’s timidness generally and around his father especially implies an abusive relationship. So there’s a bomb, and Jerome with his psi power can track it down like a bloodhound—only he can’t do it alone. Lillian and Jerome have to work together to pinpoint the bomb before it’s too late, meaning Lillian has to trust the boy and his gift in order to save the day. Naturally they do, but it’s still a tense situation, one that requires Lillian be a model teacher and stop panic from spreading whilst keeping her own nerves in check. At one point the strain gets to her and breaks down in front of Jerome, a moment of emotional vulnerability that leaves her feeling ashamed. Teachers aren’t “supposed” to show emotions like that. “Children are terribly frightened when grown people lose control.” She ultimately finds that she can’t be the domineering statue of a woman she wants to be—she has to learn to be content simply as a woman with feelings. In a strange role reversal from what we usually see it’s the woman and not the man (or in this case boy) who has to accept emotional vulnerability.

A Step Farther Out

I said earlier that all the people who chose this story for publication were women, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. While not a feminist story of the flavor we would see later in the ’60s, “David’s Daddy” is very much a story about women’s experiences, as told by someone who knew very well what it was like. The only adult male characters are either dangerous (Mr. Mines) or useless (Mr. Buras), while the well-adjusted female teachers have to cooperate with their students. The male students who figure into the plot (Jerome and David) are also not delinquents or all that macho; indeed they’re soft-spoken kids who are strangely bereft of what we think of as typically boyish behavior. I’ve read a few Brown stories and there’s this running theme of not so much reconciling the sexes or even arguing for women’s rights, but trying to explain women’s experiences in a field that was very much male-dominated. Yet I don’t get prudish or conservatives vibes from Brown like I do with say, Zenna Henderson, although both writers were preoccupied with teachers and their students.

See you next time.