Drapetomania
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Excerpt
I first heard the running at school. Jackson had been fidgeting all week, though the rest of us pretended not to notice. He raised his hand for the bathroom, leaving us hunched over a midterm exam, and we heard footsteps circling the hall for the rest of the period. No one went to check on him. Even Ms. Price soldiered on, gripping the chalk so hard it snapped in half as she marked the time we had remaining.
Maybe we should have acted sooner, understood the danger when the first reports of manic running appeared on our timelines and newsfeeds. At first people thought it was a prank, some viral stunt for media attention. Parents started taking their kids’ phones and petitions were circulated to ban the latest social media. We were two weeks into the semester when the first runners began to collapse. Interludes between classes were hashed out in fierce whispers as we huddled around videos of them, crumpled on the ground, coughing up blood.
Jackson didn’t come to school the next day. During attendance Ms. Price stared at her clipboard, then at her students. She had everyone seated behind Jackson move up a row. We swallowed his absence and moved on to the next lesson.
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William Lohier
William Lohier is a master’s student at Oxford from Brooklyn, NY. He is a recent graduate from Harvard College and is currently working on a collection of short stories. He was the 2017 NYC Youth Poet Laureate and is represented by Madeline Ticknor at Janklow & Nesbit.
Manuel Gonzales on “Drapetomania”
I’ll admit that before reading William Lohier’s stunning new story, “Drapetomania,” I didn’t know what drapetomania meant or that it meant anything, and certainly didn’t know it was a term invented in 1851 by Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright to describe the “psychological disorder” (ha) that caused enslaved Blacks to run away from the men who claimed to own them. In his story, Lohier runs with this notion (ha, ha), brings it forward in time, and turns a horrifyingly self-serving neologism into a powerful and unsettling piece of fiction.
In Lohier’s story, men, women, children, young adults—if they are Black—are susceptible, can fall prey to a new disease, one that (at first) only targets Black bodies and causes those bodies to run, incessantly, maniacally, without breath or pause, until they’ve run farther than can be sustained, until their hearts, or their feet, or their legs, or their lungs, or their entire bodies quit—until they’ve run themselves out.
Lohier has given us a subtle piece of horror fiction, one full of grief, loss, sadness, fear, and a deep sense of the historical dovetailing with our present, all-too horrific moment.
Q&A by Manuel Gonzales
- MG: Let’s start with the title—to be honest, I didn’t know about the ‘mental illness’ drapetomania until I read your story, and it’s such a ridiculous notion and then you take that notion and spin it into this unsettling and horrifying and gorgeous story—can you talk about when you learned about drapetomania, how the notion itself became the kernel for this story?
- WL: I learned about the term “drapetomania” in a class on Morrison, Ellison, and Faulkner. Halfway through the semester we were sent home because of the pandemic. I began the story as part of the final paper for the class, since the term seemed to connect much of the historical violence we were reading about with the horrors of the present.
- MG: I’m curious, too, about the narrator and the narrative voice you adopt for this story. The narrative voice has such a neutral, observational distance to it—and still manages to find a lyricism and beauty in its language—but it maintains this distance even when observing the world falling apart around it—did this voice arrive with the story or did you find your way to the voice, and how do you think its almost cool, detached feel operates on the reader as they move through the world you’ve given us?
- WL: The voice came with the story. The events are so grotesque that the telling itself didn’t necessitate too much complexity. Early on, the most difficult narrative decision was whether to write in present or past tense. I went back and forth a few times, but I like the way the narrator lives beyond the end of the telling, despite the implication that she contracts the mania and dies. It presented a generative paradox that keeps the story from succumbing to despair.
- MG: The way you describe the running and the bodies of those who have run themselves out—well, there’s a real violence in your descriptions, and it’s something fearful, that any of these characters might become infected with the all-consuming need to run—but underneath all of this, I also sense a kernel of desire or maybe it’s relief attached to succumbing to the need to run—and maybe it’s all in my own head, my own reading of the story—but can you speak to the complexities of how the narrator relates to the running pandemic? Relates to that fear that she or her mom or TomTom might contract it, that Jai might, but also how we might read the last line of the story?
- WL: There’s a constant negotiation when writing about Black bodies between attending to the personhood of characters, of people, and responding to the ways Blackness has been historically rendered as flesh, something fungible and libidinal, and an abject locus of suffering. Running, in the story, speaks to that negotiation for me. The running mania hijacks bodies and becomes a worlding in its own right, but by the end of the story, the running comes almost as a relief. The characters all struggle to negotiate agency within an apocalyptic scenario.
- MG: Are you a runner?
- WL: Yes!
- MG: Is this story part of a collection—are you working on a collection?—and if so, how does it fit within the rest of the stories you’re crafting?
- WL: Yes! The collection, Black Star Line, is mostly SF or speculative stories about young Black people navigating various captures and freedoms in futuristic settings. The title speaks to imaginations of Black utopia that were the impetus of the Garvey’s historical movement. The story takes this theme to an extreme, literalizing survival as itself a utopian ideal.
- MG: There is a growing and evolving movement of writers of color digging deeper and deeper into mixed-genre narratives to stunning effect—and look, it’s been around for a while, it’s not new, but it’s almost as if it’s being newly discovered or held up as something—but we have authors shifting in and out of genre like Victor LaValle, N. K. Jemisin, Ed Park, Helen Oyeyemi, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Puloma Ghosh, even Jordan Peele is getting into the literary action, releasing Out there Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, which he edited and released with Random House fall 2023—how do you think of your own writing in terms of when to dive into genre, how you’re using genre, where you see yourself in relation to these other writers, and how your storytelling benefits from surreality or horror or whatever you want to call it?
- WL: Genre was helpful while writing “Drapetomania” because I felt horror with a speculative bent spoke to the time I was writing in—the surreal news cycles, the constant body horror. I wrote my master’s thesis on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Trickster and her story “Speech Sounds” was very instructive on how to write a pandemic story. I’ve also been a fan of Black SF, fantasy, and speculative fiction writers like N.K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, and Samuel Delany for a while now, so having a sense of the breadth of the Black lit that exists makes it easier to take risks and experiment.
- MG: What are you working on now?
- WL: Besides rounding out Black Star Line, I’m exploring several ideas I’ve had for novels. I’ve also just finished school, so I’m gearing up to move and bracing myself to enter the dreaded job market.
