Tag: miriam allen deford

Short Story Review: “The Voyage of the ‘Deborah Pratt’” by Miriam Allen deFord

July 13th, 2024

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, April 1963.)

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.
Things Beyond: July 2024

July 1st, 2024
(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, March 1965.)

As I’ve said elsewhere, we’re gonna be covering the ’60s in this year-long tribute to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction this month. Picking stories to review for July proved a challenge, but in a good way. Over its 75-year history F&SF has gone through several editors, which is normal, but the ’60s were almost certainly the most tumultuous time in the magazine’s history, for a few reasons. At the beginning of the decade Robert P. Mills was editor, and for the few years he edited F&SF Mills was very capable, arguably even on par with Anthony Boucher; but Mills was an agent and publisher first, and editing wasn’t something he wanted to do as a career. So the torch was passed to Avram Davidson, which sounds like an odd choice with hindsight, but it probably made perfect sense at the time. Davidson was a well-respected writer out of the “new” generation; he was more literary than most of his contemporaries, but he was also… quirkier. For practical reasons more than anything Davidson’s editorship could not last, and so the torch was passed once again, this time to Joseph W. Ferman, with his son Edward assisting him. Joseph lasted about a year before passing the torch to Ed; and this time, by the beginning of 1966, the torch would stay in place, as Ed Ferman would remain editor for the next 25 years. By the last ’60s F&SF had found a new and comfortable niche.

The rapid changing of editors also coincided with a rapid changing of material and reader expectations at this time. The ’60s were the decade of a lot of things: the Vietnam War escalating, racial and socio-economic strife reaching a breaking point, the assassinating of left-leaning public figures, the coming of the hippies. More innocuously it saw the birth of the New Wave, which was spearheaded in the UK by Michael Moorcock and a small army of forward-thinking British writers (although, if it makes you feel better, quite a few important contributors to the New Wave were American), reinventing New Worlds to make it a boundary-pushing powerhouse of a magazine. The US scene was a bit slow to catch up. John W. Campbell and Frederik Pohl lamented the New Wave, but the rascally movement would eventually find a sympathizing magazine in the US with F&SF. Understandably the fiction published in F&SF during this time was a good deal more eclectic than what happened in the ’50s, so it also makes sense the lineup of authors for this month would be a bit eccentric. We have a few of the usual suspects, but we also have… Lin Carter? And Russell Kirk…? We have a New Waver with Brian Aldiss, although the story chosen is decidedly anticipatory of the New Wave rather than part of it. For the most part we have science fiction here, with some horror thrown in; this was not a great time for fantasy in F&SF. Still, I think it’s at least an interesting roster.

Let’s see what’s on our plate.

For the short stories:
1. “The Oldest Soldier” by Fritz Leiber. From the May 1960 issue. He’s baaaaack. Honestly it’s been too long—in fact it’s been exactly a year since we last covered Leiber. Of course in the interim I’ve not refrained from writing about him on a different outlet or two, and can you blame me? This time we have an entry in his Change War series, being one of the first examples of a time war in SF.
2. “Hothouse” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the February 1961 issue. Aldiss has a career that goes shockingly far back for someone who died fairly recently, having debuted in the ’50s and almost overnight becoming a force to be reckoned with. Hothouse is usually considered a novel, but as a series of linked stories it won Aldiss a Hugo. This first entry in the “series” is a much-needed reread for me.
3. “Subcommittee” by Zenna Henderson. From the July 1962 issue. There were quite a few female authors active in the early days of F&SF (more so than other SFF magazines), and one of the most prolific contributors was Henderson. Her fiction often involves families and the experiences of children, and she’s most known for her stories of “The People.” This story, however, is totally standalone.
4. “The Voyage of the ‘Deborah Pratt’” by Miriam Allen deFord. From the April 1963 issue. DeFord has one of the most curious careers of any old-timey SF writer, and in 1963 she was almost certainly the oldest living contributor to F&SF, being in her seventies. Prior to taking up genre writing she wrote for socialist and feminist publications, as well as conducting research for Charles Fort.
5. “Cynosure” by Kit Reed. From the June 1964 issue. Starting in the ’50s and remaining active until her death in 2017 (she lived to be 85), Reed’s work is often quirky, humorous, satirical, but also at times brutal. Her science was never hard, and her disposition makes one think of Shirley Jackson. Both are vicious when it comes to domestic portraits. In other words, Reed was perfect for F&SF.
6. “Uncollected Works” by Lin Carter. From the March 1965 issue. Acclaimed, if also controversial, as an editor, and pretty notorious as a writer, Carter is probably most responsible for reviving interest in pre-Tolkien fantasy in the ’60s and ’70s. He’d been active as a fan since the ’40s, but “Uncollected Works” was his first solo professional story, and it garnered him a Nebula nomination.
7. “Balgrummo’s Hell” by Russell Kirk. From the July 1967 issue. Kirk, at least when he was alive, was known more as a conservative political philosopher, and indeed Christianity is integral to both his fiction and non-fiction. But he was also a surprisingly accomplished writer of supernatural horror, and despite being very much an outsider he did sometimes appear in the pages of F&SF.
8. “They Are Not Robbed” by Richard McKenna. From the January 1968 issue. McKenna gained mainstream recognition with his one novel, The Sand Pebbles, but it seems he used science fiction as a training ground, such that he appeared semi-regularly in the magazines—both before and after his death. McKenna died in 1964, but he apparently had a small trove of stories waiting to be published.
9. “The Movie People” by Robert Bloch. From the October 1969 issue. Bloch is most known for writing Psycho, but his career started much earlier and much more embedded in the Lovecraftian tradition—indeed he and Lovecraft were correspondents when Bloch was a teenager. On top of writing bestsellers Bloch wrote for film and TV, even penning a few (horror-themed) Star Trek episodes.
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Tag: miriam allen deford

Short Story Review: “The Voyage of the ‘Deborah Pratt’” by Miriam Allen deFord

Things Beyond: July 2024