Editors Note: This essay features a horrific historical event, a lynching that took place well over a century ago. We at Speculative Nonfiction do not take lightly the dissemination of traumatic images, but in this case, we wish to honor the author’s wishes to include this image with his essay. You might feel that such an image would be too confronting for you, and so we wanted to give you this warning. Although images of racialized and ethnic hatred are all too available to us each and every day, we should never become inured to them.
By Isaiah Rivera
“Henry Smith was another demigod - a handyman, an eclipse charged with forcing its darkness onto a new planet, a Negro burned at birth by his Phaethonic gene - and he was scorched during the worst lynching period in United States history. But there was no Zeus to save Henry from his brilliance, no redemptive thunderbolts, no weeping poplars to witness their brother burn.”
Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer was right. I am all other men, any man is all men…
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Shape of the Sword’
//
We are concerned with light. Whether it be artificial or natural, spectral or spiritual, light consumes the whole of our existences. We are interested in purity, in divinity, in the godly sheen of inspiration, but the light that burns brightest - or darkest, as it were - is not simply holy. It is the light of madness, of despair, of death. The kind that blinds with its belligerence - a light so pure that it renders your gaze dark, striking you with optical blankets of black. This is the light of poetry and fiction, of entire worlds constructed in the dark safety of our disembodied REM cycles; the light of gods and angels, of ancient verse, of inspired worship in temples and shrines; the light of the sun, our cosmic golden boy bestowing his blistering beams upon us all.
This is not pristine, easy white light; but instead, a violent brilliance that kills, so radiant it destroys you completely, exploding your brains into a million illuminations which shoot across the atmosphere, past our universe and into new ones, and then keep going. A light that produces darkness - a light that necessitates darkness. A mutual, gaping wide expanse of polarities: absence and presence, progression and regression, reality and fantasy. The lines blur within light shadowed by darknesses so profound, so heavy, they could crush a mind, return it back to that unnameable place where the unborn dwell.
That is the light I want, the light I need - which means, too, that I want its concomitant darkness, perhaps more so. Perhaps at the core of a quest for light is a quest for darkness - the clean comfort of a blank slate, the freedom of the void. Light and dark constitute our realities, right down to the elements. The two of them, in tandem, are the only way anything can be discovered.
//
It is light that brings us to our elements.
Helium was first discovered in 1868 by French astronomer Pierre J. C. Janssen while observing a total eclipse in what is now Andhra Pradesh. Deep in the darkness, Janssen noticed bright yellow spectral lines in the chromosphere, the colorful second layer of the sun’s atmosphere. Later that year, English astronomer Norman Lockyer surmised that these bands of light could not have been produced by any known element at the time; thus, a new element was born. Lockyer, in collaboration with chemist Edward Frankland, named the unknown element ‘helium’ after the Greek personification of the Sun, helios.¹
Darkness reifies light; light is defined by the dark.
//
In Greek mythology, Helios is the son of titans Hyperion and Theia, crowned with a radiant diadem that shimmers across the firmaments every day and night as he drives the sun, tucked away inside his chariot, pulled by what ancient Greek lyric poet Pindar described as ‘fire-darting steeds’ with equally ablazen names: Pyrois (‘fiery’), Aeos (‘air’), Aethon (‘burning’, ‘blazing’, or ‘shining’), and Phlegon (‘to burn brightly or shine like a fire’).
Helium, too, is a fire-darting steed, leading the way for its nuclear titan that is the sun, energy explosions and galactic blasts of protons emitting from every direction. The color of the sun’s celestial beams dictate what elements are present in the atmosphere. Electron energy levels are visible through the use of a prism, which splits up and slows down white light to create a rainbow spectrum. Whichever rainbow bands are missing from the pattern become the defining elements to name, hence helium’s discovery. Once he observed that which already existed in the dark, Janssen saw beyond the light. It is only through absence that new elements may be found.
//
Helios is not a very remarkable Greek figure, compared to the fall of his son Phaethon (from the Greek phaethô, ‘to shine’). A restless youth, Phaethon begged for just one joyride in his father’s chariot until Helios acquiesced. C’est la vie - Phaethon lost control of the reins and crashed into the earth, engulfing us in fire. The worst of the blaze struck Africa, whose fruitful plains were scorched to dry desert and whose men were charred ebony as an eclipse.
The Earth called to the heavens for protection from further destruction wrought by an insolent young demigod; accordingly, Zeus struck down a fatal thunderbolt that flung Phaethon’s flaming black body into the muddy river-waters of the Eridanos.² After Phaethon’s extinction, the Heliades (‘children of the sun’) gathered in grief, and the gods mercifully transformed each of them into poplar trees, to forever weep amber tears for their dead black brother.
//
Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe. It is colorless, odorless, and so light that gravity cannot hold it down. It is the most effective element to inflate balloons because unlike others, if exposed to fire, helium does not burn.
//
It started like it always does, with a lie - a black man accused of raping and murdering a white girl. Myrtle Vance, 4 years old, daughter of veteran police officer Henry Vance, known to be a hard and brutal man. Vance arrested Henry Smith, a mentally disabled local worker known to be innocuous and serviceable to his white counterparts, for murder; a sentence already bad enough to warrant execution, but Vance and company decided to exaggerate the facts of the case, declaring that Myrtle had been violated before death. A local figurehead, Bishop Haygood, completely falsified an account of her disarticulation: “First outraged with demoniacal cruelty and then taken by her heels and torn asunder in the mad wantonness of gorilla ferocity.”
In fact, Myrtle’s poor little body merely had neck lacerations, likely the result of strangulation. She hadn’t been sexually assaulted by anyone, let alone Smith. But the local white community clung to this bit of fake news to justify what happened next. Later in a sobering polemic, anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells would write of the killing: “Never in the history of civilization has any Christian people stooped to such shocking brutality and indescribable barbarism as that which characterized the people of Paris, Texas, and adjacent communities on the first of February, 1893.”³
February 1st, 1893. The day Thomas Edison built the world’s first movie studio, The Black Maria, with a retractable roof meant to let in as much light as possible.
February 1st, 1893. The day a different kind of light let itself into Henry Smith’s body and shattered into a luminous genealogy soaked in paraffin, licked by the flames of history, undone by time.
//
When we swallow helium instead of air to change how we talk, we actually speed up the sound of our voices. Normally when we speak, our vocal folds vibrate in our voice box and the specific sounds they make come together with our particular vocal tracts to give our voice a timbre, our own distinct sound quality. Helium particles flatten that timbre. The more we swallow, the less ourselves we become. If too much is swallowed, you could lose yourself completely.⁴
//
The day after his death, The New York Sun reported the details of Henry Smith’s lynching. The reportage took on an almost epic quality, as Smith’s torture and execution were relayed:
The negro was placed upon a carnival float in mockery of a king upon his throne, and, followed by an immense crowd, was escorted through the city so that all might see the most inhuman monster known in current history. The line of march was up Main street to the square, around the square down Clarksville street to Church street, thence to the open prairies about 300 yards from the Texas & Pacific depot. Here Smith was placed upon a scaffold, six feet square and ten feet high, securely bound, within the view of all beholders. Here the victim was tortured for fifty minutes by red-hot iron brands thrust against his quivering body. Commencing at the feet the brands were placed against him inch by inch until they were thrust against the face. Then, being apparently dead, kerosene was poured upon him, cottonseed hulls placed beneath him and set on fire. In less time than it takes to relate it, the tortured man was wafted beyond the grave to another fire, hotter and more terrible than the one just experienced.
What does hell look like for an already scorched man, condemned to life on earth? How bright must that fire beyond the grave glow in its endless rage? How can someone be burned again and again for eternity, never to stop sizzling? Would there be an audience? Could there be an audience? And would they stand in silent admiration, or applaud?
The Sun’s account of Henry Smith’s death is the closest any of us will get to an answer:
Words to describe the awful torture inflicted upon Smith cannot be found. The Negro, for a long time after starting on the journey to Paris, did not realize his plight. At last when he was told that he must die by slow torture he begged for protection. His agony was awful. He pleaded and writhed in bodily and mental pain. Scarcely had the train reached Paris than this torture commenced. His clothes were torn off piecemeal and scattered in the crowd, people catching the shreds and putting them away as mementos. [Myrtle Vance’s] father, her brother, and two uncles then gathered about the Negro as he lay fastened to the torture platform and thrust hot irons into his quivering flesh. It was horrible - the man dying by slow torture in the midst of smoke from his own burning flesh. Every groan from the fiend, every contortion of his body was cheered by the thickly packed crowd of 10,000 persons. The mass of beings 600 yards in diameter, the scaffold being the center. After burning the feet and legs, the hot irons - plenty of fresh ones being at hand - were rolled up and down Smith’s stomach, back, and arms. Then the eyes were burned out and irons were thrust down his throat.
That kind of hell is unfathomable, yet it happened right here on our chariot-charred earth in Paris, Texas. Henry Smith’s tormentors donned its light, white and pernicious, with pride. Imagine hating someone so much that it required you to not only kill them, but to torch them, inside and out, to blind them, and, most insidiously, to mute them, even knowing that, had you simply left them alone before it all, they’d still be just as voiceless.
//
Henry Smith was another demigod - a handyman, an eclipse charged with forcing its darkness onto a new planet, a Negro burned at birth by his Phaethonic gene - and he was scorched during the worst lynching period in United States history. But there was no Zeus to save Henry from his brilliance, no redemptive thunderbolts, no weeping poplars to witness their brother burn. The Texan demigods were not powerful enough to grant such a comfort. They were primordial creatures, drunk with country, armed with iron brands. Vance and his family, along with the white crowd, possessed no empathy, no restriction, no mercy. They drenched Henry Smith with oil and lit him on fire. They burned him. Then, thinking he deserved more, they forced the scorch into his eyes and throat, the ultimate explosion of light. They tormented him until he was little more than a snuffed-out torch. Henry gave his best effort to escape; he could only dream of being a noble gas, free from the wrath of fire. Perhaps he thought that on him, God would shine a holy light that would, if not save him, ease the pain of his imminent fate. Perhaps God did - perhaps that light radiated from within his trembling body; perhaps it gushed from his emptied eyes and blackened throat, and then the townspeople pulled him back into the flames.
//
For a long time, I wanted to die. I wanted the most garish, unforgettable curtain call you could imagine, so that all of my tormentors would see me and be starstruck, humbled even, by the sight of my broken bones and splattered innards across an imaginary stage. I always knew I was a marked man, in more ways than one. After all, faggots and poplar trees burn with similar verve. I knew what was destined for men like Henry, like me, and before getting scorched by angry white throngs, I wanted my body to join the elements.
For hours, I search for ways to expire in the most theatrical manner possible. That’s when I found helium.
Since 2007, deaths by helium have been steadily rising.⁵ If you were to suck helium from a pressurized tank, that could potentially be your last breath. The results would be brutal. Your body would burst like a balloon touched by a flame - ruptured lung tissue, concentrated gas in the bloodstream lodging into the brain, initiating stroke, seizure, and death. No chance of recovery. No more burning light - only the soft consolation of darkness.
I took comfort in that knowledge. What a spectacle of carnage I’d be - bloody bits of black demigods shooting across the violaceous morning skies, looping around the sun with ethereal prominence. Such a dark discovery I’d be. My light would be unbearable. No souvenirs to be found.
//
On a rickety stage, I stand before a legion of top-hats and umbrellas baying for my blood. Thousands of nondescript salmon faces, yellow grins, and red-shocked eyes teeming to the rafters. Before me sits a table covered in a black sheet. In the crowd, horses whinny and children cry. A breeze wafts across my neck, cooling my pulse as I raise my left hand. With my right, I reveal what’s beneath the sheet. A crude display of annihilation: knives, drills, hammers, pliers. A gun lying next to a flamethrower. A buzzsaw beside a crossbow. The top-hats cheer, tossing popcorn in the air. I run my finger along each one, considering its might, the crowd jeering me. Then I flip the table on its side. The weapons clatter around me as the crowd protests. They whistle, they spit, they moan. They begin to chant, “Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood.” But I have a trick up my sleeve; or rather, down my throat. I face off the crowd, open my mouth, and expel a stadium’s worth of helium. My body becomes lighter and lighter as my throat swells with gas. The audience breathes in my performance, writhing and sputtering, churchgoers inspired by a rousing sermon. Elsewhere, I hear the rapt sound of a singular pair of hands clapping. When I am finally empty, the lights cut out. In the rising darkness, I extend my arms and sigh. It is time for the show.
//
It’s been years since I first learned what light can do to a person like me. And still, the reverie of its power haunts me as presently as a fresh, gaping wound. Still, the anguished cries of men I’ve never met, whom I very well may meet again in that hereafter that burns along an infinitude of stars, echo in my ears. Still, those Boschian lynching crowds engulf my thoughts with a rapt immediacy, as real as the blood flowing in my veins, the sun on my skin, the light I can never escape.
Notes
¹ Matson, Michael and W. Orbaek, Alvin. Inorganic Chemistry For Dummies. 2013. 1st Edition.
² Coolidge, Olivia E. Greek Myths. 1949.
³ Ida B. Wells-Barnett. The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. 1895.
⁴ Matthew Soniak. ‘Why Does Inhaling Helium Make Your Voice Sound Funny?’ Mental Floss. 2009.
⁵ Karolina Nowak, Pawel Szpot, and Marcin Zawadzki. ‘Suicidal deaths due to helium inhalation.’ Forensic Toxicology, 37, pp. 273-287. 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11419-019-00473-2
What does one do when language fails to express what fire does to the body? Scream? Sit in silence? Speculate. But speculation is not a method, nor a cure. It is a wish; the kind you make with your eyes closed, expectant, knowing that, no matter the outcome, you have made the concerted effort to blow that fire out. In this piece, I wish for another kind of light, via three cultural reference points: the discovery of the element helium, the Greek myth it takes its name from, and the lynching of a disabled black man in Texas whose death was photographed, souvenired, phonographically reenacted and commercially disseminated for over a decade. I wish for a different dispersal of Henry Smith's death, because I believe Dionne Brand and Christina Sharpe when they tell us to defend the dead. I wish for a new passage of death, a funeral rite, a ceremony for men like Smith, like myself, whose mythologies have been irrevocably bloodied by the imperialist settler-colonial history of the United States empire. I wish to honor the stories of those to whom history cannot—will not—pay respects: the genocided, the deracinated, the ostracized, the always-already unmade masses. It is up to us, the inheritors of that explosive light, to tend to those fires and those graves. This is our debt. This is my attempt.
Isaiah Frost Rivera (He/They) is a scholar, maker, and black digital speculator hailing from the forgotten borough of Staten Island, New York. He is currently pursuing his PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Isaiah's fiction has been featured in the online magazine Lolwe, and his poem "The Commuters" won first prize in the 2018-2019 CUNY Labor Arts "Making Work Visible" contest. To read more of their work, visit Isaiah's WordPress blog The Poetic Xenolith, where he writes critical essays about film, horror, and popular media.