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The Comet
Du Bois's proto-science-fiction short story: a Black bank messenger sent into the vaults survives a comet's poison gas that seems to have killed everyone else in New York, and meets a white woman who is, for a few charged hours, his only equal in a suddenly empty world — until the city's white survivors return. Closes with 'A Hymn to the Peoples,' the book's closing prayer for the union of all races.
Proto-science-fiction and the color lineA world without race — and how fast it ends'A Hymn to the Peoples' (closing verse)