Maurice Broaddus has been achieving some good notes with his latest book, the Afrofuturist space opera novel Sweep of Stars. We’re not looking at that particular work just now. Nor are we looking at the ambitious trilogy of novels that put him on the sf/f map, the Breton Court trilogy that mashes up the Arthurian legend with the gritty street level drama of The Wire. Instead, we’ll be looking at one of the author’s stepping stone books that appeared between these two better known points on his career path: a slender but evocative novella called Buffalo Soldier.
Desmond Coke is a man on the run. A proud Jamaican, he’s left his home country on a mission of mercy, delivering a quiet lad to the borders of Tejas. Lij is not a normal kid, he’s quiet and deep, and his conception was a scientific one instead of a more naturally occurring process. Desmond is not a father, but he’s a responsible man, and that responsibility extends toward this young ward even if it means he must shirk the responsibilities to nation, to his Rastafarian faith, and to his Niyabingi allegiance.
By the time the pair reach the town of Abandon, they are hunted both by the Jamaicans who want their experiment back as well as curious agents of the sprawling Albion empire. The pair cannot rest their heads for long, have to keep moving. Desmond is accustomed to thinking on his feet. He’s a sort of trouble shooter, a Jamaican James Bond with a sword cane.
If they can make it to that stretch of country north of Tejas, the lands held by the Five Civilized Tribes, they might seek Asylum and get a measure of safety. But the trek is not an easy one, and the tribes are not open to accepting just anyone into their company. Especially threats. Just who (or what) is Lij to be stirring up such hostility and political intrigue?
In the steampunk/weird western novella Buffalo Soldier, Broaddus rewrites world history, finding an interesting hook to hang his story on. Or should that be stories. The narrative is overflowing with different yarns. On the surface, we have Desmond’s quest, but along the way he shares a couple of stories from his homeland, tales that achieve a mythic resonance. In fact, a driving theme is the importance of shared stories, which Desmond admits to:
“One day, all that will be left of us is our stories. When our tribe has become little more than a faded dream with only our tales left to shape our children and our children’s children. But a story only needs a teller for it to be remembered. At night, when the road is free of travelers and the villages are silent, the dream of us will fill the land. There is no death, only movement between worlds.
“Our stories live on after us.”
Buffalo Soldier, 103-104
The concept is one that many an author has tackled before, sometimes subtly and sometimes boldly. However, Broaddus brings the concept into sharp focus here—this specific quote is the finale of a story he’s recounting in order to save his life as well as the life of his charge. It’s posited as a piece of mythic reality, a well-known statement of fact that sometimes needs to be repeated in order to sink in to the newer generations.
The lives we touch are stories in the making, something we sometimes forget and need reminding of. It’s especially well positioned here, as the nugget of a fairy tale, told by one character to another. That fairy tale is, in turn, told by Desmond who is repeating his own spin on a story told to him years before. This story is nested inside a narrative from storyteller Broaddus And if this weren’t already deep enough, Broaddus’s dedication for this particular work is to his Mother, remarking “Thanks for all of the stories (I was listening even when you thought I wasn’t)” suggesting the story Broaddus has nested within the narrative may well be linked to or in some part inspired by his own family roots in Jamaica. (5)
However, aside from the quote itself, the resonance in this text and its author is all subtle. Broaddus knows how to get out of the way of his own story, letting the action and characters speak for themselves. If his novella has wisdom to share, it is not through some heavy handed and tidy moral, it is found from taking the tale on its own ground and parsing out how the pieces fit together.
Desmond Coke is an active hero, but he’s not comfortable in his role as guardian. This is made explicit in the opening pages. However, he’s the sort of guy who accepts the responsibilities he’s been handed, doing the best he can to see them through. To most, Lij is a potentially dangerous enigma, a powerful experiment with unknown abilities who might be able to change the world. To Desmond, however, he’s a child first. A young man in need of guidance and help. It is unsurprising that Broaddus himself is a father; he manages to bring up the anxieties of that particular role quite nicely. As a father myself, I can see so many subtle, familiar elements, things that make me nod in sympathy. The fatherhood role is not an easy one for those who take it seriously.
One of the pleasant surprises in reading this work is in trying to pin down just when this story takes place in terms of time. Characters remark about what we’d consider historical figures, though the wounds associated with their decisions seem still fresh. Lij includes Toni Morrison among his favorite authors, alongside James Baldwin and Shakespeare. People use steam powered horses, but there are data bases capable of identifying a person via their fingerprints. Pistols and swords abound, but so do walking tanks in the form of steammen. The world is a hodgepodge of ideas and concepts, plucked from across the nineteenth, twentieth, and possibly twenty-first centuries, a science fiction of incongruous anachronisms that work together in unexpected fashion, illuminating our history and our present in creative ways. One imagines the author as an eager child dumping all of his favorite toys into the middle of the living room rug and seeing how he can fit them together into a single narrative. Folks who prefer to have a more upfront understanding of when a story is supposed to take place may be disoriented to the point of dissatisfaction, but if we go along with the story, we’ll find the narrative more than satisfying enough.
In terms of writing, Broaddus has a knack for evoking his settings and character. His dialogue flows well, and his characters are larger than life. Action seems to be his preferred mode, and he does a fine job of it. As an example, we will consider the chaos and thrills to be found in the bar fight that erupts during the opening quarter. To set the scene, Desmond and Lij are invited to dinner in by the mysterious Mr. Hearst. They are accompanied by a Cayt, a feisty woman who might also be an undercover Pinkerton agent. Things get hot when Desmond notes a gaggle of baddies secreted around the room (including a rude fellow they first met upon arriving in the city), waiting for their chance to strike:
“If they are armed like the last agent who attacked us, their weapons are probably set to stun in order to not risk hurting the boy.”
“Mine aren’t,” she said. “Besides, they might be hesitant to fire with their ringleader here with us.”
“Are you even armed?”
“A lady never tells. You?”
“Swords don’t have stun settings.” Desmond slowly turned the handle of his cane and withdrew his blade underneath the table.
“You seriously brought a sword to a gunfight?”
“I held out hope that all I’d have to fight tonight was an overdone steak.”
The weight of a person creeping down the stairwell caused a step above them to creak. With the flick of her wrists, twin modified Colt Mustangs slid into Cayt’s hands along mechanical arm braces hidden by her dangling sleeves. She fired twice above them and a body tumbled over the bannister. Desmond overturned their table.
“Thirteen, then,” he said.
The men in the saloon scrambled for cover and began to fire. The air sizzled. Electric pulses from handheld weapons battered the overturned table. Desmond stretched his neck to the left, then to the right, slowly popping his joints. He glanced from Cayt’s drawn weapons to her eyes. She gazed from his sword back to his eyes. With a nod, they established the barest of truces.
Cayt dove. Sliding from behind the table, she fired from her side. Two men yelped in response.
Desmond lunged toward the nearest table. The rude man took cover behind a wooden pole near his table. Desmond leapt at him before he could fire. With his free hand, Desmond took him by the hair and slammed his head into the table. Desmond kept moving. The man who could have been kin to the rude one fumbled in bringing his weapons to bear. Desmond rammed the hilt of his cane into the side of the man’s skull.
I guess there’s a stun setting after all, he thought.
Desmond whirled to scoop up LIj and make a break for the door. When he turned, a man clutched the boy to him. His weapon trained at Lij’s head.
The man started to speak. “Now, you just …”
A weapon fired. The man’s face grew quizzical, as if not understanding what happened. A neat hole perforated his forehead. His eyes rolled skyward and his body dropped where it stood. Desmond turned and nodded. Cayt returned the gesture.
She leapt and ran along the bar, firing her weapons madly. Yet she hit targets with a preternatural ease. Four more bodies dropped. When she ran out of bullets, Cayt flung the guns as a distraction. She laughed wildly as she pounced on several men.
Buffalo Soldier, 47-49
Instead of diving headlong into the fray, Broaddus takes a moment to let his characters trade quips. The action starts mid paragraph, and the ensuing chaos is handled through broad brush strokes. This is not a lovingly detailed series of creative mayhem moments. It is a collection of beats, of faceless baddies who serve as little more than obstacles between Desmond and his goal of escape. The action continues past this point, with shotguns blazing and a surprise quartet of electricity gun toting folks called Kabbalist agents showing up to add pyrotechnics. The battle is handled with the same thrilling brevity, giving us a sense of movement and action as a series of photographs instead of a smoothly running film.
On the surface, Buffalo Soldier is a thrilling tale of derring-do, a novella overflowing with good deeds and some sneer worthy antagonists. Under the surface, it is an intriguing and incongruous collection of inspirations and influences, a sometimes surreal cocktail of weird western and contemporary espionage yarn, heroic fantasy with a degree of emotional honesty that subgenre is not necessarily known for achieving, and a treat for the mind’s eye.
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Buffalo Soldier is available in eBook and paperback editions.
Next week, we will take an early peek at Ramsey Campbell’s forthcoming novel of the dark fantastique. Fellstones is available for pre-order in eBook, paperback and hardcover editions.
WORKS CITED
Broaddus, Maurice. Buffalo Soldier. Tordotcom. New York: 2017.
“Our Stories Live On After Us: Maurice Broaddus’s Buffalo Soldier” is copyright © 2022 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the Tordotcom paperback edition, released 2017.
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