"Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas" (1960/1962)

Lafferty is pretty divisive among readers, probably more so today than half a century ago: either you’re a fan of his stuff or you ain’t. I’m not a fan myself, really, but I’ll try anything once (or even twice). In the case of Lafferty it’s mainly because he’s Quirky™ that he has a love-him-or-hate-him reputation, although this same quirkiness also threw him into the midst of the New Wave, despite being politically and socially conservative and also already middle-aged, being about a generation older than most of his fellow New Wavers. — Online Person

“Oh, yes. All have names. Might as well take them all.” “Only people, Manuel.”

For a little over half of “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas,” the main character is Manuel, a poor and unqualified Mexican census taker, who is assigned to calculate the population of the Santa Magdalena sector. It is a harsh, torrid region in Texas that has a glassified crater known as Sodom. Told to count everyone but very pointedly told not to record animals, Manuel asks if he should include "little people." He gets approval from a supervisor unconcerned with the reality of the terrain:

“How about little people?” “Children, yes, that has been explained to you.” “Little people. Not children. Little people.” “If they are people, take them.” “How big they have to be?” “It doesn't make any difference how big they are. If they are people, take them.”

And off Manuel goes to record the area's nine regular human residents—plus himself. Had he considered his job finished right then, the narrator notes that he would have saved 10,000 lives. Instead, he makes a fateful decision: "Might as well take them all." Loading Mula with stacks of extra census forms, he climbs the purgatorial scarp above Lost Soul Creek, and then he takes a spade to the roof of a buried settlement called Nuevo Danae to count its tiny inhabitants.

The story then jumps. Manuel returns to the High Plains, where he received his commission, aged, shrunken, and near death, claiming to have been trapped on a treadmill by the tiny inhabitants for thirty-five years:

Three days later an incredible dwarf staggered into the outskirts of High Plains, Texas. He was followed by a dying wolf-sized animal that did not look like a wolf.A lady called the police to save the pair from rock-throwing kids who would have killed them; and the two as yet unclassified things were taken to the station house.

Mula dies upon arrival at the police station. Manuel, though, gives a microscopic list containing a million names to Mr. Marshal, the current census chief, who can’t believe his luck. Marshal has been facing pressure from a citizens' group to meet a 10,000-person population quota. He ignores the circumstances of Manuel's disappearance and physical state. The town officials certify the list of names and submit it to Washington. They annex Nuevo Danae and inflate the population of the High Plains. Manuel drops dead.

Later that night, Marshal gets a visitor in his bedroom. It is a four-inch-tall man who demands the return of the stolen list. The tiny intruder paralyzes Marshal and says his people hold the deed to Earth. They destroyed the local area called Sodom with a microscopic weapon because the human settlement was too close to theirs. But it is too late. The census list has already been mailed to Washington, prompting the tiny official to pass swift judgment on the town:

“A thing that size couldn't crack a walnut,” said Marshal. “You floundering fop, it will blast this town flat.” “And if it does, what will happen to you?” “Nothing. I don't even blink for things like that. I haven't time to explain it to you, you gaping goof. I have to get to Washington.”

The small man calls High Plains a nuisance and detonates another tiny explosive. The blast annihilates High Plains and reduces its population to zero, an event the public attributes to a giant meteor. Now there are two glassified areas that are later proposed as the site for a new Sodom and Gomorrah state park.

If you look at what people have written about “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas,” you find sharply diverging views. Some like it as a light tall tale. Others think it reads like a draft, or like magazine filler, and remains undercooked. The story was finished in July 1970 and sent to A. L. Fierst, and sold quickly. Because it sometimes takes a beating on blogs for being too short, and for the fault line some readers see where Manual dies, it is worth pausing over its virtues, especially if one remembers that this is early Lafferty. Most readers will catch at least four registers: bureaucratic comedy, mythic landscape, tall tale, and horror, all without a visible seam.

What one finds is tonal control. Its ideal reader probably laughs at the setup, accepts the fable logic of the middle, admires the brilliant regional writing, and arrives at the annihilation of the High Plains. It is a joke, a parable, and a political act in under four thousand words.

Someone has poked at the story for being politically insensitive about the word midget. He does not seem to realize that "midget" became a slur in the late 20th century, or that the Little People of America was founded in 1957 as the Midgets of America.

Today I want to push back a little against the political nonsense and show where the story’s real politics lie.

“Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas” is mostly told from the perspective of the people who caused its disaster, unaware they were doing so. The voices that control its world (or think they do; they are mistaken) are the census bureaucrats, the police, the citizens' committee, and Mr. Marshal. They are the voices of official English-speaking Texas. Manuel speaks, but when we see it, it is to them, in their space, to answer their questions. When he rides back into High Plains shrunken and in shambles, the officials' initial skepticism gives way to immediate, callous opportunism:

“You can't be Manuel,” said Marshal. “He can't be Manuel,” said the big policemen and the little policemen. “Maybe not then. I thought I was. Who am I then? Let's look at the other papers to see which one I am.” “No, you can't be any of them either, Manuel. And you surely can't be Manuel.” “Give him a name anyhow and get him counted,” said the head of the citizens group. “We got to get to that ten thousand mark.”

They don’t give a damn about Manual. They take his microfilm-like list of the little people. Then, Manual dies, and they try to find the place on a map.

Lafferty wrote the story after the April 1, 1960, census, and there is a relevant scriptural sidelight that matters for understanding what the story is doing. In 1 Chronicles 21, Satan, or God, depending on how one reads the passage, provokes David to number Israel. David wants to know how many fighting men there are. This has been interpreted in several ways, but two readings seem to matter most. The first is that David did not trust God to lead him to victory in battle and instead wanted to make the matter one of numbers. The second is that Israel belongs to God, and to count what belongs to God is, in some sense, to claim it.

One of the rules governing a census in the Old Testament appears in Exodus 30, which prescribes a half-shekel ransom for every person counted, so that “there be no plague among them when you number them.” It is something like an apology or a propitiatory gesture. David does not collect the ransom. God gives him three choices of punishment. David chooses the plague. God sends it. Seventy thousand die. Seven thousand die at the end in High Plains, Texas. In response to the complaint that the story becomes claustrophobic and narrows at the end, I would argue that this is the shape of trespass the story diagnoses. The reader is encouraged at the beginning to laugh at Manual, who does not see the difference between counting people and counting things like rabbits. But Lafferty is laughing at the dumb reader who does not see the instrumental perversity of quantifying persons in the first place.

Then there is the way Manual is an instrumentalized object used to instrumentalize others. He’s a Mexican man employed by a system that considers him barely competent but cheap enough to use. "He was poor and needed the work." He cannot read a map because maps are not how he knows the land. He knows it phenomenologically, not as something abstracted onto a sheet of paper with North at the top. He knows all nine people in 900 square miles well enough to fill out their census forms from memory because he sees them as people, not just as statistics. He says the animals have names, and there is a joke here when he calls his mule Mula because the name “mule” is an Adamic name, that is, one picks out an essence that differs from what makes persons persons, Lafferty’s theme that persons can be realized in different species, just two persons of the Trinity have nothing human about them. Manual knows that he is doing something shady, just as David does. We know this because he prays the Hail Mary in Spanish as he climbs toward the little people's town—pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death:

He called Mula from the thorn patch where she was grazing and gave her salt and loaded her again. Then they went to take the rest of the census — but in fear. There was a clear duty to get the job done, but there was also a dread of it that the superiors did not understand. There was reason also why Mula was loaded with packs of census forms till she could hardly walk.Manuel prayed out loud as they climbed the purgatorial scarp above Lost Soul Creek "—ruega por nosotros pecodores ahora"— the very gulches stood angry and stark in the hot early morning— "y en la hora de nuestra muerte."

The people in High Plains, Texas, are not like this at all. In fact, the citizens' committee does not care about census accuracy, Manuel, or the little people. They want to reach ten thousand for federal funding. "We declare that the place annexed forthwith. This will make High Plains the biggest town in Texas." That is annexing a sovereign community by bureaucratic fiat, for a population statistic, and it puts the story in conversation with other works by Lafferty that deal with the issue, such as Okla Hannali. Not that the little people are much better. Their head is angry because Manual stole the tax rolls. Manual doesn’t know that the list is a tax roll because, in part, he does not experience the world this way. He does not see that he is in the middle of a bureaucratic fight. The little people's representative reveals to Marshal a delusion of ownership rooted in a cosmic scam:

“Not belong on the world? We own the world. We can show written title to the world. Can you?” “I doubt it. Where did you get the title?” “We got it from a promoter of sorts, a con man really. I have to admit that we were taken, but we were in a spot and needed a world. He said that the larger bifurcates were too stupid to be a nuisance.”

They are delusional in their own way, but they do know that they are perpetrating a con in the claim. That is a counterpoint to the con that the people of the High Plains, Texas, want to run the government.

Now, the story does not make these politics the whole point—Lafferty never does that—but consider some really specific context. At the time, the Bracero Program was running. Mexican and Mexican-American laborers across South and West Texas lived under a system that used them for labor and excluded them from power. The 1960 census was the first to ask a direct question about Hispanic origin. The census was a tool of administrative control applied to people who had been on the land before the tool existed. Their survival and silence form the final, strategic act of defiance against the bureaucratic state:

When the final count was in, High Plains did not have the highest percentage gain in the Nation. Actually it showed the sharpest decline of any town — from 7313 to nothing. It is believed that High Plains was destroyed by a giant meteor. But there are eight, nine people in the Santa Magdalena who know what really happened, and they won't tell.

That ending where the nine residents are spared is the real ending of the story. But I'd wager most people don’t see that the second ending is a red herring. They settle for the voice of a brochure and the irony of its tourism pitch:

They were going to make a forest preserve out of the place, except that it has no trees worthy of the name. Now it is proposed to make it the Sodom and Gomorrah State Park from the two mysterious scenes of desolation there just seven miles apart.It is an interesting place, as wild a region as you will ever find, and is recommended for the man who has seen everything.

The person quoted at the beginning of this post is like that. He fixates on the sadism of “Sodom and Gomorrah,” declines to repeat the dreaded slur “midget,” and at one point writes, “‘Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas’ is not as good as ‘The Transcendent Tigers,’ for one because it’s not as funny, but also I feel like Lafferty has less of a point to make.” I cannot quarrel with his feelings. But the story has a much stronger point to make than "The Transcendent Tigers."

Sodom and Gomorrah Texas Notes.pdf

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