The Gilda Stories

The book explores vampirism not as a curse but as a powerful force for good. In her introduction to the novel’s 25th anniversary edition, Jewelle Gomez writes that she first invented Gilda after an infuriating experience being sexually harassed on the streets of Manhattan. “In Gilda,” she says, “I created a character who escapes from her deep sense of helplessness as a slave and gains the ultimate power over life and death” (xii). This impetus is what makes The Gilda Stories an example of Afrofuturism, an artistic movement that explores the history and future of the African diaspora using the tools of speculative fiction, imagining utopian possibilities outside the dominant white cultural narrative. Gilda and her compatriots, most but not all of whom have African roots, begin their lives with little power in society due to racial and cultural oppression, and when they become vampires, they can outpace that society and thrive. However, they don’t use their power to replicate those systems of oppression. The word “vampire” only appears a handful of times in the book, a clear indication that it intends to reclaim the concept on its own terms.

One important way this is shown is through the selection and exclusion of certain traditional vampire tropes. Many do appear here: Gilda’s vampire family must survive on human blood and avoid direct sunlight. They have superhuman strength, healing powers, and the ability to read and influence minds. They must sleep on soil from their birthplaces and can only be killed by beheading, drowning, or having their hearts cut out. However, many of the more theatrical vampire qualities are absent from the novel—we see no flying or transforming into bats, no pointed teeth, and no invisibility in mirrors. The novel primarily employs the classic vampire qualities that magnify existing human strengths and cuts out those that would mark vampires as inhuman monsters.

Gilda often uses her unique strengths to upend oppression when she discovers it. Confronted by nightriders in the South, she uses her vampire abilities to turn the usual story backwards, actually whipping one of the men rather than being abused by them. When she and Bird discover the evil vampire Fox is treating his prostitutes like a slaveowner might, they break their strong aversion to killing and murder him. Vampirism allows an empowering rewriting of history in which a black woman can walk safely through the night in any era of history and end those who mean her harm.

Another major rewriting of the traditional vampire story is the way vampires feed. They do take blood from humans, but they don’t take life. When Gilda and her fellow vampires go out on the hunt, the novel refers to them as seeking “their share of the blood.” The word “share” is crucial, as these vampires make a point of exchanging blood for positive influence on the humans from whom they drink. When a blood-taking is depicted in the novel, the vampire will usually slip quietly into a sleeping person’s room, search their thoughts, and plant a positive idea or feeling in their mind before healing the wound and leaving undetected. Each chapter includes at least one scene of Gilda taking blood, and each time there is a brief but careful description of that person’s aspirations and character. The exchanges move the plot forward, like when Gilda is deeply moved by a young prostitute’s hopelessness as she takes her blood in St. Louis, leading to the realization that she cannot make Aurelia into a vampire and put an end to her hard-earned dreams. These vampires don’t see themselves as lords over human life but as students of it, and they have a profound responsibility to support it when they can.