Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). Anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.
Every now and then the timing is right and I end up reading two stories with similar themes or structures or what-have-you in two different publications and realize I need to blog about them together. That happened last week with two reprinted stories: “Ah Been Buked” by Maurice Broaddus, which originally appeared in the author’s short story collection Voices of Martyrs and will be reprinted in the December 2020 issue of Lightspeed Magazine (#127), and “The Night Doctors,” which originally appeared in Eyedolon and is reprinted in the November 2020 issue of Nightmare Magazine (#98). Both stories trade on the history of collecting slave narratives and folktales and add fantasy/supernatural elements.
Admittedly, the fantasy/supernatural element of Maurice Broaddus’ “Ah Been Buked” is almost non-existent, practically an afterthought. The spirit stone is more a framing device, a reason for former slave Viney Scott to tell her story while standing over the grave of the man she loved (and have it recorded by someone named John Henry Freeman, presumably sent by the Federal Writers Project to collect slave narratives, but who we never see or hear from in the story itself). “Ah Been Buked” is, fantasy aside, the story of how one woman lost almost everything – parents, friends, lover – to a cruel plantation master, but has survived to tell her tale. Viney’s voice is colloquial and engaging. Every time I read this story (and this makes probably the fourth or fifth time I’ve done so), I cannot turn away until Viney’s story is done. Each time, I notice something different in the way people are described or events are reconstructed, the way she draws out some moments and leaves others to be implied. The anguish of living under slavery is prevalent, but so is the love with which she describes her father, her favorite aunt, and her lover. The twist at the end is more horror than fantasy, giving a satisfactorily dark conclusion to Viney’s story (but not to her life, which has clearly carried on but of which we get only hints). I probably say this a lot, but this is one of those stories I would love to see performed as a monologue. Preferably by Cecily Tyson or Phylicia Rashad.
The narrator of P. Djèlí Clark’s “Night Doctors” has also been tasked by the Federal Writers Project to collect slave narratives, and we find him in Durham NC in 1937 (two years later and several states southeast of the setting of “Ah Been Buked”). But for this Mister Bisset, collecting those narratives is a convenient cover story. What he’s really searching for is proof the folkloric Night Doctors really exist. Night Doctors are night-time beings who steal slaves away for nefarious research purposes. Some believed they were plantation owners just out to scare slaves into not running away, while others believed they were actual white doctors stealing (or being given) slaves or the dead bodies of slaves to perform medical research. Bisset believes there’s more to them than that, if he can only find a way to meet them. Which of course he does in this story, thanks largely to conversations with a former slave. The supernatural and horror elements of this story are far from subtle. Clark’s description of the Night Doctors is eerie and disturbing and lingers well after the story is done – I can still sort of see them out of the corner of my eye while thinking about other things. But there’s also the very human horror of Bisset’s actions when he’s not interviewing former slaves – bloody revenge writ large and in detail (in one scene, at least), trading on the folklore Bisset is in Durham to investigate. I suspect this is another of those stories that will reveal more of itself to me upon multiple rereads. It should also be noted that while “Night Doctors” stands complete in itself, it also serves as something of a prequel to Clark’s recent novella Ring Shout, which I reviewed recently. The two stories come at slave folklore and the power of Story from very different directions but complement each other.