An Apocalyptic Du Bois Story That Resonates Today

The 1920 science-fiction tale “The Comet” tells us much about our current pandemic.

a comet in a black starry sky
Comet NEOWISE, March 27, 2020 in Antequera, Málaga, Andalusia, South of Spain (Getty Images)

In 1920, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a short story titled “The Comet.” The protagonist is a young African American bank messenger in New York named Jim, who is seen as completely inconsequential by the other employees and excluded from social spaces at every turn. (And informal Jim Crow prevailed even in cities like New York in the early 20th century.) On this day, everyone in the bank is chattering about a comet that is supposed to strike the Earth. Jim is sent into the filthy basement to retrieve documents that must be protected. But this unpleasant task turns out to be fortuitous. While he is below, the comet releases a noxious gas that kills everyone.

The story then takes on the standard features of the postapocalyptic tales we know. It appears he is alone in the world until he encounters a young wealthy white woman. The social barriers that divided them just an hour prior have suddenly completely eroded. Together, they search the city with terror. The world as they know it is over.

Strikingly, Du Bois has Jim enter places from which he would have been prohibited in the living world, which are now fully available to him in this dead society. The obvious point: The differences we make in life are, in the end, inconsequential. As the old saying goes, “You can’t take it with you.” But Du Bois is also making more subtle provocations. What does it mean that certain freedoms could only be possible for Jim in death—the death of the society, that is? One could read the story as a riff on the biblical claim that the meek shall inherit the earth.

Jim and the young woman, named Julia, grow an immediate emotional intimacy, reflecting both on their dramatically different social positions and their shared lot. Facing disaster, a gentle interdependence grows between them. It appears they are destined to face the postapocalypse together.

But this potential is dramatically disrupted when the young woman’s father, and her suitor, find them. Immediately they suspect that Jim has attempted to sexually assault her, and they threaten him with lynching and insult him with slurs. She defends him, quietly, but the connection is broken.

As it turns out, the comet has only destroyed New York. And Jim’s wife is living, but not his child. Death is a cracked window; the return to life is a shut door. Relief at reconnecting with loved ones doesn’t diminish the feeling that the story is written as a tragedy that extends far beyond a killer comet.

Six years later, Du Bois would write an essay titled “Criteria of Negro Art.” In that piece, he insists that all Black art ought to be a form of propaganda, that it should always serve the cause of the liberation of Black people from oppression. It appears to me that “The Comet” was an early example of this sensibility. He wanted readers to think hard about how easily race could become inconsequential.

Du Bois wasn’t the first to write a story of this sort. There were many examples in early African American literature in which characters, in a moment of crisis, tore down the barriers of racism and the color line. The lesson was usually twofold: 1) There are some fundamental commonalities to the human condition, despite social barriers, and those commonalities expose how absurd it is to shut African Americans out of civil society, and 2) Black people serve essential social needs, and the truth is that Jim Crow rules could be easily violated by white Americans when Black help was necessary.

What strikes me as especially powerful about “The Comet” is how the disaster initiates a dramatic reversal in Jim’s life. He experiences what it’s like to be respected—and immediately he is robbed of that respect, when his aid is no longer necessary. There’s an aperture, and then a slammed door.

I have been thinking about this story because it suggests that death might be the great equalizer. Of course, in a society that once segregated graveyards, that’s extremely hopeful thinking. Still, early in the pandemic I did have some hope that the linked fate we were experiencing across the globe, our common vulnerability, could lead to some major social transformations. I was probably too naive, but I do think some “fellow feeling” grew in those terrifying early days. Right now, after all we’ve weathered and how we’ve learned to live with the pandemic, it seems that the inequality in terms of who can access vaccines, high-quality masks, and appropriate medical intervention, and who is able to stay home when sick, has deepened our social hierarchies rather than eroded them. And that breaks my heart. But I believe we have the opportunity to be transformed as we live through waves of fear, illness, and premature death. We can move closer to being in the right relation to one another. Service workers like Jim, like people in the caring professions, are too often treated cruelly, as little more than repositories for the fear and frustration felt by more affluent Americans. We can and must do better.

There’s a moment in “The Comet” that resonates with this sentiment. When they believe they might be the last two people on the planet, Jim’s companion speaks:

“I have always been idle,” she said. “I was rich.”

“I was poor,” he almost echoed.

“The rich and the poor are met together,” she began, and he finished: “The Lord is the Maker of them all.”

“Yes,” she said slowly; “and how foolish our human distinctions seem—now,” looking down to the great dead city stretched below, swimming in unlightened shadows.

“Yes—I was not-human, yesterday,” he said.

Jim is wrong. He was human before and after the comet, when befriended and when friendless in the world. But he should never have been made to doubt his own humanity.

Imani Perry is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Unsettled Territory. Perry is also the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, and her most recent book is South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.