Review: Cahokia Jazz
- cepmurphywrites
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
By Gary Oswald.
The exact effect the smallpox epidemics had on the native populations of the New World is a deeply contentious historical argument. This is because there are no agreed upon population counts of how many Native Americans lived in the Americas prior to European contact in 1491. Alfred Kroeber suggested a number of around eight million people, Henry Dobyns however argued the number was above one hundred million, with David Henige splitting the difference and claiming forty million.
What we do know far more accurately is that by the 1600s, the figure was around five million. This could mean, depending on how high the figures started, death rates of less than 50% or above 95%. And given the evidence of reports by Spanish explorers of large civilisations that simple weren’t there a decade later, the modern consensus is that the true figure is almost certainly closer to the latter. This is an unspeakable tragedy, probably the worst mass death in human history and one that killed an estimated one-fifth of the Earth’s population and left a vast continent almost entirely depopulated and its cultures wiped out with the few shattered survivors left helpless against European invasion.
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And even after that series of plagues, European colonisation wasn’t easy, with the natives winning temporary victories and delaying their ultimate defeat in battles all across the New World. So, what if it was less devastating? What if Europe encountered civilisations that were shaken by the epidemics rather than annihilated by them?
It doesn’t mean they won’t still be conquered, Africa and Asia can point to that, but a continent with one hundred million people is significantly different to one with five million. And especially in North America, a surviving large and sophisticated Native population, one comparable in number to the descendants of white and black migrants, means European colonisation must be very different and so must the power structures that emerge from that.
This is the concept of the 2023 detective novel Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford, which won the most recent Sidewise award for best Alternate History long form book. In that book, thanks to a change in the movement of Spanish soldiers, the less deadly West African strain of smallpox hits the New World first, still killing people but a lot less and giving the surviving population resistance for when the deadlier strain followed afterwards.
For the record, this is explained only in the afterword. The book is set in 1922 and just asks you to accept that the ancient Mississippian city of Cahokia is now a Native American majority thriving metropolis dealing with the racial tension of Jim Crow America (the Ku Klux Klan are one of the major bad guys). The history of the city and its people are drip-fed throughout the book, including how it joined the USA, but the exact POD is never mentioned within the actual text and the only clue as to how Cahokia survived the epidemics is a folk story about a fleeing Aztec prince which is only mentioned by an academic so he can dismiss it as obvious nonsense not supported by the historical record.
By and large Spufford is conservative about what he changes. He does not save the Incan or Aztec Empires or have Metacomet drive the New English into the sea; the white folk still win for the same reason they did all around the world, but the numbers are different. We are told that by the 1860s, there are around ten million Native Americans in the modern USA (which is smaller than our version), compared to twenty-five million white people and five million black people (or as the book solely refers to them, Takouma, Taklasa and Taklousa). This obviously is a very different power dynamic to OTL but crucially still has the racial minorities as minorities.
So I am attracted to that as a novel set up for an AH story and in terms of a review, I must start by saying that I think this is a genuinely brilliant book.
Alternate history is a genre based around setting, in the way fantasy is, and as such tends to borrow its story beats from other genres, much like fantasy stories do wherein they can be romance books but with vampires or war books but with orcs. Most often AH imitates the beats of normal history books, with Robert Sobel’s For Want of a Nail being perhaps the most famous example; it is written in the style of a nonfiction beak just about things that didn’t happen. But that sort of thing has a natural ceiling as the style distances the reader from the characters and the action.
The second most common form of AH is crime mystery. Robert Harris’ Fatherland is probably the most famous example, in that it follows a cop in a victorious Nazi Germany who stumbles upon evidence of the largest mass murder in human history. This structure, of a policeman investigating a crime in an AH society and stumbling upon the dark secrets and political conflicts at its heart, has become a standard one in AH, as it allows an organic exploration of the setting and its people by giving us a protagonist who has to ask questions and follow leads. It’s a structure that Cahokia Jazz uses superbly.
This is a great noir crime book, with a strong murder mystery at its core, some genuinely shocking revelations of the corruption at the core of the city and, above all else, a wonderful cast of characters including our main pair of detectives, Joe Barrow, a Native American raised in an orphanage and so ambivalent about his racial identity, and Phineas Drummond, a cynical veteran suffering from nightmares. Barrow in particular gets a hugely effective and complicated personal story of trying to find his place in the world, which does not end the way you might expect.
But a great crime novel which does not effectively use its AH background is a waste of it. This isn’t the case here because Cahokia Jazz is also a great AH book which really works to build a city and thinks about how the influence of a much greater surviving Native cultures would affect how that city works on every level. The sport teams, the churches, the trade unions, the bootlegger gangs, the way and each and everyone would work differently in this city is something Spufford has considered and came up with an answer for.
The Cahokia he imagines is arguably more successful than is plausible (if you accept that the initial POD wouldn’t prevent widespread European colonisation at all), its rulers are unrealistically smart in terms of constantly making the right call and not being doomed in the way Angola’s Kingdom of Kongo (a state that Cahokia, as an early convert to Christianity, bears a lot of resemblance to) or the Miskito Kingdom of Central America were, but it’s also not a Wakanda or an Everfair. As a major character admits near the end of the book, the city’s notables are surviving against the tide of an ideology that has conquered most of the rest of the world and, to keep what they have, they need to win every time, whereas the forces of white supremacy only need to win once.
The setting in the 1920s, the nadir of American race relations, rather than the present day, is also very deliberate. The main characters are also deliberately awful in some ways, in particular in terms of sexual harassment, while also it being explained how they got there. This is in many ways, a fundamentally pessimistic book, which can only posit small tainted victories but those victories feel earned because of that and Cahokia is a beautiful creation, a genuine attempt at creating a society that is believable to its influences and feels both lived in and unique.
I would have voted for this to win the Sidewise too.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.