The Ballad of Black Tom

“Robert Suydam wasn’t paying five hundred dollars for Tommy’s voice. For what, then?” 

Tommy assumes the wealthy old man he meets in Flatbush will be an easy mark, but Robert Suydam plans to use Tommy for his own ends, which at this point Tommy cannot even imagine. This quote represents Suydam’s strategy of stringing Tommy along with large sums of money until he can convince Tommy to join his undertaking.

“Buckeye ran numbers for the most famous female gangster in New York City, so why wouldn’t the Victoria Society be like those legendary opium dens? Or had Tommy simply assumed terrible things about this wave of West Indian immigrants?” 

The Victoria Society becomes a place of solace for Tommy after he overcomes his prejudices. When Suydam hosts the rowdy criminals from Red Hook at his home, Tommy realizes that he imagined such dubious characters filled the tearoom. Ironically, Suydam’s seemingly respectable mansion is the place where Tommy faces the greatest danger, representing that judging people by race or socio-economic status often leads to mischaracterizing those who are truly dangerous. 

“A Negro walking through this white neighborhood at damn near midnight? He might as well be Satan strolling through Eden.” 

Each time Tommy travels to a white neighborhood he faces increasing danger, especially at night. Policing of racial boundaries, i.e. keeping Tommy in Harlem, is one of the novella’s central themes. Suydam’s family sees him as possibly insane for crossing racial lines into Red Hook, but Suydam never faces the same dangers as Tommy for being somewhere that people do not think he belongs.

“When you ran to the library doors and breached them, I feared my years of planning had failed because of one panicked Negro!” 

Suydam repeatedly insults Tommy’s race, even though he realizes that Tommy is intelligent and has insight into otherworldly forces. Ultimately, Suydam only sees Tommy and the dark-skinned people of Red Hook as potential minions. By the end of the novella, his underestimating of Tommy because of his racist beliefs proves his undoing.

“When [the Sleeping King] returns, all the petty human evils, such as the ones visited on your people, will be swept away by his mighty hand. Isn’t that marvelous?” 

This passage encapsulates Suydam’s white savior complex. The “petty human evils” he speaks of are not oppression and injustice, but the biological inferiority of African Americans and other people of color. Suydam becomes angry because he cannot fathom that his characterizations of Tommy and the people of Red Hook are wrong.

“What was indifference compared to malice

After Mr. Howard murders Tommy’s father, claiming that he feared was holding a rifle, Tommy begins to consider the possibility that the Sleeping King’s indiscriminate destruction of humanity might be better than living in a society where people like him and his father do not have protection under the law. The injustice of his father’s death catalyzes Tommy’s transformation into Black Tom.

“For the first time in Tommy’s life, he didn’t play for the money, didn’t play so he could hustle. This was the first time in his life he ever played well.” 

The second step in Tommy’s transformation into Black Tom is mastering the conjuring song his father taught him to perform at Suydam’s party. It becomes the source of the mystical hum that precedes Black Tom’s hypnotic spells. Tommy’s smashing of his guitar before he leaves Suydam’s gathering symbolizes both that he has mastered the magic song and that he has departed from his father’s values. 

“The room babbled with languages. English and Spanish, French and Arabic, Chinese and Hindi, Egyptian and Greek, patois and pidgin.” 

The defining features of New York at this time are both its diversity and its segregated neighborhoods. Suydam, Malone, and the police force see Red Hook as particularly dangerous and degenerate because many nationalities live there together. This is theme LaValle takes from Lovecraft’s short story, in which race mixing symbolizes the fall of civilization.

“Mankind didn’t make messes; mankind was the mess.” 

As Suydam promises the crowd at his party a new, enlightened era under his reign, but Tommy realizes there is no cure for humanity’s evils. Racism, injustice, and crime will develop in any society no matter who is in charge. While Lovecraft’s story expresses the belief that non-Europeans will destroy Western civilization, Tommy has become nihilistic and believes that regardless of race, humanity is destined to destroy itself. 

“The two men watched the Negro guitarist stumble off after being informed of his father’s death, then Malone made a point of thanking the Harlem detectives who called him in one more time.” 

The first reference to Tommy in Part 2 shows that, from Malone’s point of view, he is only an afterthought, a nameless “Negro.” Distancing the reader from Tommy’s perspective also gives the reader a clue into Tommy’s state of mind: after his father’s death, Tommy sees himself the way the rest of the world sees him, which is why he affixes “Black” to his new name. 

“The words of the Negro guitarist remained with [Malone]. Don’t you understand why I kept that page from her? Don’t you understand what she can do with that book? What did the Negro know?” 

Like the other white characters, Malone’s racism distorts his view of Tommy. His inability to see Tommy as an individual makes it impossible for him to take Tommy’s warning seriously, which could have prevented events from unfolding as they did. 

“These people, their superstitions and lowly faiths, were the lead a higher mind might transmute into the pure gold of cosmogonic wisdom.” 

Malone sympathizes with Suydam’s project of gathering mystical lore from the Red Hook immigrants in order to reach a higher truth. He believes that, like Suydam, he possesses a superior intellect and feels entitled to appropriate their wisdom. This appropriation is one of Lovecraft’s themes that LaValle critiques in the novella.

“Poets should be dreamers, cops should be tough.”

Malone never fit in with his fellow officers because he does not fall into the neat binary this quote describes. At the same time, Malone overestimates his exceptionalism and is affronted when the Red Hook locals avoid him, treating him like any other white police officer. In the end, Malone proves that despite his sensitivities, he is just as racist as the rest of the New York police.

“The property had been overtaken by the local demigods of crime and debauchery. Something worse than the patrolmen ever experienced brewed at those premises. All in the service of Mr. Robert Suydam.”

LaValle uses irony to show that, though the police fear Red Hook, the wealthy, well-educated Suydam is the most dangerous criminal overlord in the area. When the press reports the raid, however, they portray Suydam as an innocent victim corrupted by Red Hook’s underworld.

“‘Black Tom is what they all call him,’ one of the patrolmen said. ‘Everywhere he goes, he carries this bloodstained guitar.’”

This is the first mention of Tommy’s new identity. The police do not know what to make of Black Tom because he does not have a criminal history. Only Malone knows who Black Tom really is and what the blood-stained guitar symbolizes.

“The Negro spoke with open disdain and returned Malone’s stare so directly that it was Malone who looked away.” 

Malone is used to Tommy yielding to his authority, but when he meets Black Tom outside Suydam’s building, he is stunned by Black Tom’s open disdain. The reversal of this power dynamic shows that, having taken Suydam as a mentor, Black Tom has become more powerful than the police, although he had to abandon his beliefs to do so. 

“The young woman continued, shouting really, the words flowing faster but never becoming clear. Why hadn’t he ever learned how to speak with these people?” 

In the chapters leading to the climax, Malone realizes that he is an outsider in Red Hook, but even this knowledge does not change his belief in his superiority.

“Now, instead of black faces, he saw white faces, but the numbers were nearly the same.” 

One of the novella’s themes is that people love to spectate disaster. Malone realizes the white crowd of people around Ma Att’s house acts with the same indifference as the black crowd that gathered in Harlem when someone shot Tommy’s father. When the police move into Red Hook, LaValle describes the crowd there as being curious or excited by the violence, rather than caring about their neighbor’s welfare. 

“‘A Negro walked into the house,’ she said. ‘I watched him from my window […]. ‘I was concerned because we have two children. I want them to be safe.’” 

The Flushing woman’s fearful reaction to seeing Black Tom enter Ma Att’s house emphasizes how whites ascribe almost magical powers of evil to Tommy as a black man. The irony is that, having internalized their view of him, Black Tom has become a force of true evil.

“Finally, [Malone] added, the Negro likely kidnapped the old woman and dragged her back to a dusky tenement basement to commit crimes of a degraded nature.” 

Claiming that Black Tom intends to rape a white woman assures Malone of his colleagues’ cooperation. Notably, he leaves Suydam out of this accusation even, though he identified Suydam as the ringleader of their criminal operations. LaValle suggests that Malone is playing into white America’s deep-seated fear of the black man as a sexual predator, even though nothing in the narrative about Tommy (or Black Tom) supports this.

“At the sight of the heavy machine guns the whole neighborhood gasped as one. These guns were designed to shoot airplanes out of the sky. Much of the local population had fled countries under siege, in the midst of war, and had not expected to find such artillery used against citizens of the United States.” 

One of the novella’s themes is the police treating immigrants and people of color as enemy combatants. During the raid, police shoot and arrest people indiscriminately, regardless of whether they are criminals or not. This passage is one of the few that shows the situation from the Red Hook locals’ point of view.

“‘Don’t hide your eyes now,’ Robert Suydam called from the basement. ‘If you are indeed a seeker, then come find true sight.’” 

Throughout the narrative, Malone considers himself a seeker and allows his curiosity to draw him into Suydam’s activities. This passage foreshadows Malone’s ultimate inability to meet darkness face to face, and in the end, Black Tom punishes him by cutting off his eyelids so that he cannot look away from the evil he helped to create.

“‘I bear a hell within me,’ Black Tom growled. ‘And finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.’” 

Though Black Tom had the potential to stop Suydam’s plans with his immense power, his downfall was deciding to give himself over to his anger. Even if Black Tom’s anger is justified, LaValle shows the fighting evil with a greater evil can only lead to destruction.