Victor came upon the sign at dusk, on a wooded stretch of road somewhere in the Allegheny
Mountains. The sign was a rebus, two glyphs drawn in black tar on a boulder: a long-
Tucked into the back of the journal Victor carried with him was a reference sheet marked “Things to watch out for,” and if he’d had any trouble interpreting the sign he could have looked it up there. But he already knew what it meant: he could go no farther along this road, not safely anyway.
The problem, as he was only too well aware, was that he could not go back safely, either.
* * *
Victor had found the ad in the colored section of the Chicago Tribune’s Help Wanted pages:
He’d called the number, and the next day presented himself at the storefront office
of Berry Publishing. George Berry, the proprietor, turned out to be an old high-
“Let’s talk about that,” George said, and explained about the Guide.
Victor was familiar with the basic concept. It was a subgenre of American travel literature that most Americans had never heard of: directories for Negro motorists, listing hotels and restaurants across the country that would accept their business. Victor kept one such directory—Green’s Guide for Avoiding Peril and Outrage on the Road—in the glove box of his car, and consulted it often.
It was a competitive publishing niche, but George had an idea for breaking into it.
The existing Negro travel directories were all cheaply printed, no-
George wanted to guarantee that his list of Negro-
“So this job,” Victor said. “You want me to drive around the country knocking on white peoples’ doors and seeing whether they’re happy to see me?”
“I was going make it sound nobler than that,” George said. “So what do you say? I’ll pay you ten dollars a day, plus expenses.”
Victor laughed. One passion he and George had shared as far back as high school was
pulp-
“Ten dollars a day plus expenses, huh? Like Philip Marlowe?”
“Yeah,” George said smiling. “Philip Marlowe of the open road.”
“Yeah well,” said Victor, “Philip Marlowe gets twenty-
“Huh.” George’s smile never wavered. “Twenty-
“Yeah,” Victor said. “I know.”
* * *
George gave him fifty dollars’ expense money up front; a list of businesses and addresses,
organized by state; a journal for recording his findings; and, as promised, maps,
a big cardboard box full of them. “All forty-
Victor’s route was his own to choose but George suggested he start with Wisconsin, “a big state but a small job”: the Wisconsin section of the list contained only four motels, three of them in Milwaukee. The fourth, a tourist lodge in Fond du Lac, promised “breathtaking views” of Lake Winnebago, which it had; but when Victor got there, there was a new sign out front, and though the parking lot was empty, the lodge had no vacancies.
Victor found a secluded spot by the lakeshore and dug into the map box. Young Horace,
it seemed, was a swords and sorcery fan. In transcribing George’s “road conditions,”
he’d used the iconography of fantasy. Sundown towns and suspected Klan strongholds
were ringed by moats of fire or spiked stone walls; belligerent sheriffs and highway
patrolmen were drawn as knights on flame-
He decided not to go that way. Instead he thought he’d double back through Chicago and zigzag south. Returning to the box for Illinois and Indiana, Victor discovered a jumble of books underneath the maps. At first he took this for a surprise gift from George, but when he sorted through the volumes there wasn’t a detective novel among them. The covers all bore pictures of men digging in graveyards or recoiling from tentacled horrors: weird tales.
That night, Victor stayed at one of the Milwaukee motels. The white man who rented him the room was overly solicitous, asking Victor repeatedly about his plans: “So, you’ll be moving on in the morning? Bright and early?” The room itself, though nice enough, had no radio, and the only reading material was a nightstand Bible, so Victor decided to try one of George’s books. He picked a collection of short stories whose author’s name—Lovecraft—hinted at a bit of romantic action on the side.
But if “Lovecraft” was a pseudonym, it was a poorly chosen one: there was no love in these tales, or even any women. The stories all seemed to follow one of two basic plots. In the first, the protagonist died or went crazy after discovering that alien beings were trying to take over the world. In the second, the protagonist learned that his blood was tainted and that he was devolving into something less than human. Victor couldn’t help thinking there was a hidden message here.
Still, it was something to read in the small hours. In the nights that followed Victor
read more of it, not just Lovecraft but Derleth, Bloch, Smith, and Frank Belknap
Long, whose author biography said he came from Harlem. These fellows all seemed to
belong to the same writing club, so that many of their monsters had the same names.
Victor became especially enamored of Nyarlathotep, a black-
In daylight he drove from Gary to Fort Wayne to Indianapolis to Bloomington-
Rest stops presented the usual challenge. George’s list included addresses for service stations, but you didn’t need a directory to find gasoline. White people would always sell you that, or fill your tires or your radiator, the better to help you keep moving. Convincing them to let you use a toilet, though, was a trick that even Nyarlathotep might have found daunting. An astonishing number of gas stations had washrooms that were broken, or to which the key had been lost, or which didn’t even exist, really, though you thought you could see them.
After Springfield, Victor crossed the Mississippi into St. Louis. Missouri was a
Jim Crow state, which meant that whites-
Victor called George collect and reported his findings to date. George congratulated
him on a job well-
He headed south to Memphis and found a hotel just blocks from the city center. The
hotel manager told him that checkout was at noon and described matter-
Driving east the next day he was stopped four times by the Tennessee state police. Victor had no idea what had upset them so, but by Nashville he was sick of it. He took a left turn, cut up across Kentucky, and without really wanting to, passed back into the north.
In Cincinnati he found a diner that would serve him, though he had to sit at a small booth in the back. As he was eating, two white men slid in across from him, and after making polite introductions, asked if he could settle a bet about the size of black men’s private parts. Victor wasn’t sure afterwards just how he got out of there—by the time he was thinking clearly again he was ten miles down the road, and he realized with dismay that he’d left his detective novel behind.
He dug into the box again and pulled out a last weird tale, a book he’d been saving. Dracula told the story of a working man sent abroad into a foreign and hostile country, a country whose most dangerous inhabitant greets him with false courtesy. Victor found this suited his mood.
Then the scene shifted to London—London, England in the novel, London, Ohio in the
real world. As Victor sat on the front bumper of his car, reading and sipping a Coke,
a young white couple walked past him. Before Victor knew what was happening, he found
himself in an argument about what, exactly, he was staring at: the book in his hand,
or the young woman’s ankles. Fortunately the young man turned out to be a coward:
when Victor stood up and proved to be half a head taller, the fellow retreated, but
the look on his face said he’d be back soon with friends. Once more Victor hit the
road, managing thirty-
When Victor returned to the novel—Dr. Van Helsing was explaining how the monster could be destroyed, how it must be destroyed before it finished preying on the women of London—his sympathies had become confused. One detail in particular bothered him. Victor had always understood that sunlight was fatal to vampires, but in Dracula’s case, that wasn’t so. Sunlight didn’t kill him, it just rendered him powerless. Victor imagined the Count abroad on a bright day like today, minding his own business, thinking everything was fine, even as the hunters closed in—and when they got him, there’d be no changing into a bat or a mist to escape.
Victor’s hands started shaking again. He set down the book and reached for his maps.
North of here was only Michigan and the terra incognita of Canada. South was Jim
Crow, whose plain-
First he had to get across Pennsylvania. On the map it looked treacherous. Between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia there were no safe havens, and the Allegheny range had inspired young Horace to an artistic frenzy. He’d covered the mountains with icons whose significance Victor was left to guess at: Goblins. Imps. Werewolves. Witches. Vampires...
Victor decided he was OK with the vampires. For the rest, he’d just have to see.
By late afternoon he was on the Lincoln Highway headed into the Alleghenies. He stopped to buy gas. The gas station restroom was out of order. Victor told himself it wasn’t a problem—he’d just go up the road a ways and pull off onto the soft shoulder, do his business in the bushes. He’d done it before.
But as he drove away from the station, he picked up a tail. A police car that had been parked on the gas station verge followed him at a distance of perhaps a quarter mile, not running its siren, just trailing him the way they did sometimes. So now he couldn’t pull over without getting into a conversation with the law, and he couldn’t speed up, either.
The highway curved, and for a moment the police car was lost from view. Victor spied an unpaved access road leading off the side of the highway into the woods. On impulse he took it. As he passed into the shadow beneath the trees, he cut his engine and coasted to a stop. A moment later the police drove past on the highway; seeing that Victor had disappeared, they belatedly switched on their siren and raced off in hot pursuit.
Victor had a good chuckle at that, until he realized he’d outsmarted himself. What was he going to do now, get back on the highway and hope the cops found it humorous when he came up behind them? He studied the road—“track” might describe it better—winding away into the wilderness before him. Seeing no other option, he followed it.
This was of course an even bigger mistake, but by the time he was willing to accept that, the track had already forked several times, so that even if he could have gotten the car turned around he doubted his ability to retrace his path. He kept going, trying, as much as he had a choice, to stay headed in an easterly direction.
The sky behind him had turned a deep red by the time he came upon the woodcarver’s cottage. The cottage stood in the middle of a clearing, and judged on its own, by the slightly odd angle of its walls and the gleaming cobwebs stretched beneath its eaves, it might have been taken for the abode of one of Horace’s witches. But it was obvious that whoever lived here spent a lot of time at work with hatchet and chisel. The clearing was crowded with figures of the kind often seen at roadside craft stands: animals of every description, wooden soldiers, clowns, Indians ready for the cigar store. There were a great many pickaninnies as well, bucktoothed and grinning, holding slabs of watermelon, their knobby legs disappearing into the stumps of the logs from which they’d been carved. A group of them were arranged like sentinels at the head of the path leading to the cottage’s front door; they regarded Victor mockingly as he pulled up alongside them.
There was no light on in the cottage, no sign of life. Victor thought about knocking
on the door anyway. He thought about it. He imagined it as a scene in a pulp-
A shadow fell across the car. Victor looked up into the rearview mirror and saw a pale shape approaching from behind, carrying a long slender object like a broomstick in one hand. Victor’s brain was still struggling to make sense of what he was seeing when his right foot figured it out and stepped down hard on the gas pedal. The car lurched forward, sideswiping a line of pickaninnies as it swerved back onto the track. In the rearview, the woodcarver raised the “broomstick” to his shoulder. There was a pop, like a wood knot exploding in a fire, and a bullet starred the glass of the car’s back window.
Then Victor was back among the trees, driving much too fast, the stones in the track
battering the car’s tires and threatening to shatter the axles. Victor didn’t slow
down. The track forked again; Victor took the left-
The promise of civilization set Victor off into another reverie. He imagined coming to the far side of the ridge and seeing the lights of Philadelphia spread out below him. It was pure fantasy—he still had half the state to cross—but that was OK, he’d settle for getting back on the highway.
It was then that he saw the sign, two glyphs on the side of a boulder, painted with the same tar used to pave the road. Victor brought the car to a halt, his fists tightening on the steering wheel. He stared at the glyphs and worked the rebus in his head: Black donkey. Black sunset. Have your black ass out of here before nightfall.
Sundown town ahead.
The red dusk-
“Safe Negro Travel Guide,” Victor said. The utter absurdity of it struck him as it had not before, and he began to laugh, a hysterical sound that grew too loud and went on too long. The motion of his body shook the car, shuffled the contents of the box. An idea came to him.
He couldn’t continue along this road, not now. Not now, while the village peasants were still awake and glancing fearfully up into the hills, wondering what strange creatures lurked there. But if he waited—waited for the villagers to tuck themselves into bed, for the moon to follow the sun below the horizon, waited until it was too dark to see those baleful glyphs—then he might have a chance. He could dim his headlamps, glide down the far side of the ridge, catch the knights and the guardian trolls nodding at their posts, and so slip past, not safe, never safe, but intact.
It was a theory.
Victor backed up the car, found a place where he could pull off the road, with a stand of trees he could hide behind and a gap that would let him see anything coming before it saw him.
He settled in and picked up his copy of Dracula. He didn’t open it; already there was too little light to read by, and anyway he didn’t think he’d like the ending. Instead he just sat there, holding the book like a talisman. He watched the road. And awaited the coming of night, when his powers would return.
Copyright 2008 by Matt Ruff
“Safe Negro Travel Guide”
Author’s note: This piece was commissioned by Richard Hugo House for their 2008 Literary Series. Information about Hugo House and the Literary Series can be found here. Additional background on the story itself can be found here. I’m grateful to Hugo House and Program Director Alix Wilber for asking me to write this.