The Gilda Stories (35 page)

“Effie and Julius, Anthony, Sorel. I don't imagine they wish to give up on me just yet.” Gilda smiled at Ermis fully for the first time since they came together.

They crossed the mountains side by side. A few more stars showed themselves, giving them assurance. Gilda stopped short and looked up at them with admiration, as if they could look down and see her. She felt her lungs expand with the air scented by the thick foliage. The night itself seemed green as the rustle of leaves grew louder. She closed her eyes, remembering those first glimpses of the road she had seen inside the woman who rescued her so long ago. It had been much like this one—narrow, winding, almost enveloped in the abundance surrounding it. She looked more closely at an enormous leaf, reaching forward from the darkness. The light veins and soft curves of its outline offered a universe unto itself, a wonder as yet unexplored.

She turned to Ermis. “We will build large campfires, then you must tell me your story. Who you've been and what life has been like for you. There will be stories and dancing again.”

They walked, and Ermis hummed in a low voice. She said, “My mother loved hymns, gospel music. She wasn't a religious sort at all, just loved the music. She said it was so pure, it made her think of the history. It was a funny sight, my mother and father crooning “Steal Away to Jesus,” snuggled together on the porch swing as if it was a romantic ballad.” They both laughed out loud.

“I think you'll enjoy our family. Julius knows every gospel song ever sung and every bit of slang since 1968. And Bird will have much history to give you about your home territory.”

Gilda stopped short. On a ridge to the south in the quickening sky she saw two figures in silhouette against a silver moonbow. Julius and Effie were parallel with them, moving eastward toward Machu Picchu. Gilda pointed, and Ermis' smile broadened. They turned southward to meet them. Gilda was no longer fleeing for her life.

The moment I met Gilda, I wanted to introduce her to my mother. And I did. My mother's copy of
The Gilda Stories
sits on her shelf next to countless self-help volumes. Of course
The Gilda Stories
is not a self-help book. I think of it as a classic novel. A precise and prophetic work. A neo-slavery escape narrative. An Afro-futuristic projection. Now, twenty-five years since it was first published, I also think of
The Gilda Stories
as a special kind of self-help book, one which teaches us how to create unforgettable characters, fuse genres and literary traditions, describe a room, and enter a conversation with the species and the planet from the perspective of a black woman who loves women and black people unapologetically.

My mother is a Trekkie (next generation), a fan of shows like
Highlander
and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Could it be that her passion for people who fly through space and encounter other worlds, who live past their generations and speak with anachronistic colloquialism, who save the world in the company of glamorous and daring beings every night while pretending to be regular workers every day is because she recognizes herself as part of a cohort of beings who never should have survived, but did? Are there connections between our heritage as the offspring of undocumented immigrants and our affinity for aliens? Is there a connection between the starkly lower life expectancies for women in our demographic and our identification with the undead?

I saw
The Gilda Stories
as a portal for our mother/daughter conversation. I hoped that reading the novel would give my mother a sense that my life as a queer black feminist is about something more than my choice of partners. It is also about a relationship to time and people and shared space. In different ways we are both like Gilda and the people in her communities. We were born on different soil than where we live, and share a longing to bring the dirt and sand of our ancestors with us. We are intuitive (she is a therapist, I am a community educator), attuned to the dreams and desires of people who don't always know these things about themselves. We thrive on the intimate work of listening and healing.

It is easy to imagine
The Gilda Stories
going the way of so many works of literature by black lesbian feminists published during that same era, which is to say out of print, marginalized, understudied, and forgotten. I mean, who was ready for a black lesbian vampire novel in 1991? Eyebrows still raise when I tell students the original publication date of
The Gilda Stories.
But the fact is that readers have passed this book to one other for all these years, across generations, classrooms, and café tables. A quarter century ago,
The Gilda Stories
provided an in-depth look at how the radicalized lesbian feminist political work of the 1970s and 80's were relevant to the end of the century. This edition is newly relevant because it anticipates some of the major preoccupations of contemporary literature today: blackness, speculation, re-definitions of family, and yes, vampires.

In 2016, vampire novels by black women writers exploring sex, sexuality, community, and violence are many. Someone could teach a course on novels in this category, and they should. But in 1991 there was nothing like it. Tannarive Due's numerous nuanced novels, Zane's experiments, Pearl Cleage's novel about the supermodel vampires who recruit Morehouse boys to replenish their fold, even Octavia Butler's
Tledgling
were all yet to come. What kind of bravery did it take to write a novel about a black woman vampire in an era when people were making their political careers off of depictions of how black women and their inner city offspring were sucking the lifeblood out of American capitalism? What kind of bravery did it take to write a black lesbian vampire novel in a time period when the rise of the religious right was impacting publication norms and restrictive public funding by equating lesbian and gay art with pornography?

There is another text that stood in defiance against the accusations of politicians who said that a future in which black women could reproduce themselves was worse than no future at all, the accusations from black nationalists that black lesbians would cause the death of the race, and the fears of straight black women of being perceived and cast out as lesbians. Audre Lorde's poem “Prologue,” which appears at the very end of her 1973 collection
From a Tand Where Other People Tive,
goes to the queer undead extreme: the perspective of a black lesbian vampire.

Jewelle Gomez says that she modeled her first book of poems
The Lipstick Papers
after Lorde's early publications, and was inspired by that vampire who appears on the very last page of
From a Land Where Other People Live.
(See her tribute to Audre Lorde in “Prologue: Audre Lorde, Word and Action”
http://www.the-feministwire.com/2014/02/prologue-audre-lorde-word-and-action/
.) Lorde asks whether the black community is ready for a black woman who defies limitations, and Gomez responds with Gilda, a black woman who moves across time and space, navigating different eras in black creative community. Gomez provides depth and flesh to the nightmares of narrow-minded people who police the definition of blackness, and steals back the power and threat of black feminine difference. In other words, if the definitions of blackness, femininity, and queerness are
death
in the eyes of the dominant culture, Gomez offers another way of being black, queer, and feminine by creating the
undead.
Policy makers are afraid of the black woman who keeps her family alive without access to food, but here is Gilda, living on wine and dreams in the dark. Black nationalists are afraid of the black woman who can be a man when she needs to be, but here she is wearing britches and sprinting through the Midwest. The white feminist movement is afraid of a black woman in control of her sexuality, but here is a black woman who can run a brothel and kill a rapist with the same skills. Black women are afraid that expressing their power will leave them isolated and alone, but here is a black woman who wrestles for generations with the need for space and intimacy, interdependence and agency. Black artists are ready to produce a poetics that is more than a reaction to the oppressive narratives of the man, and here is Jewelle Gomez, a poet, relevant for generations.

You could say that the life of this book parallels the life of its protagonist. She is never meant to survive and somehow she outlives almost everyone she knows by engaging intimately and consistently with human fantasy, need, and desire. Twenty-five years ago,
The Gilda Stories
provided a unique representation of the lives of urban black lesbians—women going out in the night, seeking something more. It also provided a map of the historical connection between sub-cultural spaces of possibility (antebellum brothels, gold rush bars, black women's uplift clubs, beauty salons, off-off-Broadway theaters, black lesbian living-room salons) and the resilience of black women who experience multiple levels of oppression.
The Gilda Stories
looks into the looming nuclear future and asks what the lessons learned in these spaces of resistance and intimacy have to offer the hugest challenge, which is whether the human species will maintain a relationship to the planet earth.

At this moment past peak oil, a large percentage of blockbuster movies are apocalyptic; superheroes are in vogue. What does the black imagination have to offer to the survival of human life on planet earth? What do explorations of the edges of humanoid existence have to do with the evolution of human relations? One of the enduring questions of Gilda's (after)life is how to relate to the weaknesses of human beings. Unlike many of the vampires in this story, who spend their eternal lives socializing with other vampires, Gilda is drawn into the day-to-day concerns of human beings. She is attracted to local community even though it requires risk and causes a certain form of isolation for her.

Walidah Imarisha, co-editor of the 2015 acclaimed anthology
Octavia's Brood: Science Tiction Stories from Social Justice Activists,
has created a character called A, a fallen angel who reminds me of Gilda. A has been cast out of heaven because she couldn't stand to watch the destruction of human life. She couldn't accept it as part of God's plan, so she was banished to earth to live resentfully among the human beings who had cost her so much, with their reckless destruction of each other and themselves.

Human beings are dangerous, and most of Gilda's chosen family choose to segregate themselves for convenience and safety. But Gilda wants to be in the beauty shops and the jazz clubs. She wants to offer black people their most basic needs, which include the dreams and confidence she offers as a blood exchange, but also the songs, stories, plays, and hairstyles that she finds necessary to a practice of transforming experiences of oppression into evidence of beauty and love.

As I write this introduction, the US Supreme Court has finally articulated that to exclude people from the right to marry based on gender is unconstitutional. In a time when reproductive technologies and the rights of LGBTQ people to have children, to keep their children, to collaborate with each other and across boundaries to create family is more visible, and as neoliberalism encourages privileged families to shape their lesbian and gay households in the image of hetero-patriarchy, Gilda's example of chosen family and queer reproduction is instructive.
The Gilda Stories
offers chosen, mostly consensual family ties, which cannot be touched by mutable structures of the state. The partnerships in the book are not based on gender or national origin but on affinity. She creates practices in which people can literally combine their home soils and lay down on top of them to create something new together. Gilda relates to the entire black community as a chosen family, as Bird relates to indigenous people in struggle around the planet as a chosen family. In a time when our questions about family, community, and how to structure our connections to each other strain under the pressure of forms of state inclusion that also reproduce exclusion, how can
The Gilda Stories
reflect on what it means to choose each other for life?

This 25th anniversary edition of
The Gilda Stories
emerges at a time when we have to consider the possibility that our species might not be able to survive one hundred more years on the planet. At the end of strategy how do we follow Gilda's lead and tap into the subconscious as a source of nourishment and direction? Audre Lorde required her students to keep dream journals to find resources and images, which the conscious mind couldn't tolerate. Gilda connects with the people whose blood she shared by tapping into their deepest dreams. What if beyond the blood that we are spilling on this planet, our dreams and subconscious desires become the resource that connects us to the larger environment, offering us a small chance at unearned longevity as a species? Can
The Gilda Stories
teach us how to transform blood money into blood relations?

Many of the prophecies in
The Gilda Stories
have already come true. We are talking to each other over computer screens, as this novel predicts. Indigenous people are rising up and creating coalitions to reclaim land and sovereignty. The fight for climate justice is being waged by people like Bird, who don't seem to sleep at night. What will we learn from Gilda this time? And who will we introduce her to, to save our own and each other's lives?