Title: The Comet
Author: W.E.B. DuBois
Date of First Publication: 1920
Place of Publication: Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace & Howe)
Bibliographic Reference: isfdb
Type: Short story
Keywords: POSTHUMAN; RACE and POLITICS; SYMPATHETIC MONSTER
Critical Summary: “The Comet” serves to conclude DuBois’ larger collection of essays, poetry, and autobiography called Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. Darkwater deals with the political implications of the color-line, a project that anchors “The Comet.” The story fits in with speculative apocalyptic tales in the vein of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and recontextualizes many of the same questions about humanness raised in Frankenstein, making explicit political connections to race in the United States.
“The Comet” takes place in New York City, tracking an African-American bank worker, Jim Davis. While all New York anticipates the arrival of a strange new comet, Jim’s white supervisors send him on an errand to retrieve missed documents from the bank’s basement vault. Like Frankenstein’s Creature, he believes those over him consider him less valuable. After Jim descends, the secret vault door closes on him, putting out his lamp and leaving him to blindly grope for the exit.
After some time, he emerges, only to discover all the employees and customers lying dead, their corpses contorted. His horror only grows when he steps outside to find a mass of smashed-together bodies all along Broadway and Wall Street. Everywhere he looks he sees corpses frozen. To calm himself, he snatches food from a restaurant, realizing they would not have served him if they had been alive (in a moment strikingly reminiscent of Frankenstein’s Creature’s first understanding of society’s repulsion at him).
He starts for the subway when he gleefully considers he could simply take a car. He begins driving past countless dead when a female cry from a window above the street stops him. He frantically hastens up to her. When they meet, she (a white woman) is surprised to find him black. Like the Creature, Jim’s humanity is immediately questioned because of his physique. The woman initially feels he is alien, but quickly realizes he may be the only other human alive, and they join together.
Seeking their families, Jim searches Harlem only to discover that he has lost everybody. They drive to the workplace of the woman’s father and find a note explaining he went driving. Jim uses wire communication and rockets to send signals in hopes of other survivors replying. The woman begins acknowledging Jim’s humanity: “He did not look like men…but he acted like one and she was content.” In many ways, the story emphasizes Jim’s alien appearance but distinctly human qualities and actions.
The woman suddenly despairs, growing fearful of Jim—“alien in blood and culture”—and fleeing him fearfully (mirroring Frankenstein’s initial reaction to his Creature, or the De Lacey’s fearful reaction). On realizing the deathly desolation of the city—and the loss of seemingly all humanity—she returns to Jim, still afraid. They drive somewhere to send off another electronic signal for help, and eventually warm to each other. They climb the roof of her father’s office and Jim serves her dinner before he sends off more rocket flares.
From their urban vista, the woman has a “vision of the world” in which she is “primal woman” and Jim is “All-Father of the race to be.” They cry together – “Long live the–” but are cut off by a car horn. It is her father. Jim is re-alienated, and they discover that New York alone was decimated. Julia, the woman, leaves Jim with respectful words, but the other white folk at the scene deride him. Alone, he fingers the baby cap he retrieved from his home. Suddenly a black woman holding a baby’s corpse emerges on the roof, calls his name, and they joyfully embrace.
Jim, the story seems to argue, is undeniably as human as any other white man or woman. Julia realizes this, but ultimately no one else white does. The possibility of de-segregation remains as idealized as Julia’s primal vision.
Administrative Notes: Ian Heisler, CSUF. Edited by Adriana Lora and Samuel Ortiz