The Ballad of Black Tom

Otis Tester is Tommy Tester’s father, and he represents Tommy’s moral center in the story. Otis is 41 years old and a retired bricklayer who lives with Tommy in Harlem. He has gnarled hands and a stooped back from his years as a construction worker (18). Otis has a disability and spends most of his time in his bedroom playing the guitar. Tommy’s mother was Irene Tester, a domestic worker and pianist who passed away when she was 37, and ever since her death, Otis has had no interest in leaving the apartment.

Otis is suspicious when Tommy tells him about Robert Suydam and his offer of $500 for Tommy to play at his party. He tells Tommy that he will need to protect himself and gives Tommy a straight razor that he used when he was riding the rails as a young man. “‘White man, Negro, or Red Indian was not going to get an easy shot at me’” (34), he says. He also teaches Tommy a song that his Irene taught him, as another form of protection. Otis’s death marks the turning point in Tommy’s character arc, removing his moral center and leaving a vacuum which Robert Suydam’s apocalyptic ideology fills.

The only major female character in the novella, Ma Att, is an older white woman who lives in Flushing, Queens. She has commissioned Tommy to deliver a book that she intends to use for spell casting. She is tall and gaunt with a prominent nose. She is a hermit—no one has ever seen her outside of her home—and generally unfriendly. When Tommy or the detectives come to her home, she cracks the front door open without letting them inside. Tommy refers to her as an “angry sorceress” (19).

In Part 2, Malone notes that Ma Att’s name is Egyptian, originally given to a woman from Karnak. Somewhat ironically, given her cantankerous nature and dubious motives, Ma Att’s name comes from the Egyptian goddess Maat, sometimes written Ma’at. The goddess Maat represents truth, harmony, balance, and justice. In Egyptian iconography, she sometimes has wings, which could explain the dark form Malone sees attached to her, though he likens it more to a tail.

Ma Att seems to embody precisely the opposite qualities of the goddess Maat, illegally procuring a mystical book, and thereby becoming part of a cycle that throws the universe into chaos. Because the book she seeks contains the Supreme Alphabet, an African American mystical language, LaValle presents her as another white character, along with Robert Suydam and, to some extent, Malone, who appropriates non-European wisdom and corrupts it in the process. The novella never explains how exactly Ma Att plans to use the book, but there is no chance that she will use it for good. Her banishment to other realms neutralizes her as a rival, suggesting that she, too, may have been planning to raise Cthulhu. Ma Att lacks Suydam’s white savior complex, and perhaps Tommy realizes that he will not be able to fool her the way he can fool Suydam by appealing to his white savior’s ego.

Buckeye, whose given name is George Hurley, is Tommy’s best friend. Buckeye reflects who Tommy is at the start of the narrative, a young, bright, African American man who loves Harlem and cares about his friends and family. He represents the lighthearted side of Tommy that Tommy loses after his father’s death. Buckeye and Tommy became friends after meeting at a club where Tommy was playing after Buckeye asked him where he’d learned to sing so badly: “Did it take lessons or was it a natural gift?” (27). This shows Buckeye’s sense of humor and that, initially, Tommy does not take himself too seriously. This is significant because after Tommy becomes Black Tom and meets with Buckeye a final time, Buckeye gets him to laugh in a carefree way like he used to. Buckeye tries to remind Tommy of who he is: “Your name is Tommy Tester. […] You’re my best friend and the worst singer I’ve ever heard” (148). He tries to ground Tommy in the reality he knows, but Black Tom regretfully acknowledges that it is too late.

Buckeye is Tommy’s connection to the Victoria Society and Harlem’s West Indies immigrants. The tension in Harlem between the African Americans and the immigrants points to the novella’s themes of racism and xenophobia more broadly. LaValle uses this dynamic to show that even though white society is openly racist toward the Black community, prejudice is complex and exists among communities of color as well.

Robert Suydam is the story’s antagonist. He approaches Tommy on the street when Tommy is playing guitar outside a church in Flatbush and offers him a large sum of money to play at his party. Tommy sees Suydam’s expensive shoes and lion-headed cane and believes he has found a mark; someone he can hustle. Suydam is as an older man, round and short, with fluffy white hair and a gray bristly beard. He wants to impress Tommy as a music insider, using the term “git-fiddle” (20) in reference to Tommy’s guitar. Tommy sees through the ruse but soon learns that Suydam is not someone with whom he can trifle. Suydam lives in a mansion “hidden by a disorder of trees” (20). This description symbolizes the hidden realms that Suydam can access as a powerful wielder of magic.

Suydam is obsessed with magical lore, in particular that which originates from people of non-Western descent. LaValle presents him as having a white savior complex, which is a racialized version of a god complex. Suydam only respects people of color as noble savages and sees it as his mission to control and enlighten them. He believes that only an intelligent white man can effectively harness their beliefs to create real magic. Suydam’s family is suspicious of his eccentric activity, which includes amassing a library of occult books and going into the dangerous dockside neighborhood of Red Hook to consort with “swarthy” (89) immigrants.

Suydam’s goal is to raise the Lovecraftian elder god Cthulhu, whom he refers to as the Sleeping King, from the underworld in which he is trapped and bring about the apocalypse. When Suydam meets Tommy, he has already made arrangements to invite 50 or so criminals from Red Hook to his home so he can unveil his plan to make them his minions in the new world. In the end, Suydam’s racism is his downfall. He underestimates Tommy, become Black Tom, as someone only fit to carry out his orders. Meanwhile, Black Tom plans to usurp him after using him to open Cthulhu’s portal. Suydam is the antagonist because he is the force luring Tommy away from his family, home, and values, at first with money, and then with the promise of otherworldly power. He is also a mentor figure who takes the place of Tommy’s father after his death.

Detective Malone is a white New York police officer who is tall and thin (21). Part 2 of the novella is from his point of view, and this positions him as a character foil for Tommy. Traditionally, the role of a character foil is to highlight qualities in the protagonist that the reader would not otherwise see. The only perspective Malone offers on Tommy is seeing him through the eyes of a white man. Rather than giving the reader insight into Tommy’s character, this functionally distances us from Tommy’s inner life. As the “Negro,” Tommy is nothing but another black man to Malone, even though they have significant interactions throughout the story.

Malone’s main character trait is curiosity. Like Robert Suydam, Malone is curious about the beliefs of the immigrant population in Red Hook, and like Suydam, he believes that his understanding of the arcane is superior to theirs: “These people, their superstitions and lowly faiths, were the lead a higher mind might transmute into the pure gold of cosmogonic wisdom” (91). This statement exemplifies Malone’s passive racism. He does not use violence or racial slurs, but he nonetheless sees people of color as intellectually inferior. In the fashion of passive racists, Malone sees himself as open-minded and more sensitive than his fellow officers. However, when Malone feels himself in danger from Black Tom, he reasserts the racial hierarchy, telling Black Tom he should stay in Harlem and threatening him with violence if he does not (105).

Malone’s role in the story is that of the witness. Black Tom’s punishment of cutting Malone’s eyelids off means that Malone can longer turn away from the things he does not want to see. Black Tom saw Malone as a hypocrite, someone who had pretensions of being an open-minded seeker but did not want to face the consequences of his actions. Without eyelids, Malone can no longer selectively look at the truth, even if it is horrifying.