Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas — Background and Themes

A Census Taker Who Cannot Read a Map

The excerpts establish Manuel's character through his interaction with the official. He does not know what a map is, and when told north is at the top, he knows better. He writes a nice round hand, like a boy's hand, and speaks Spanish and enough English. The official instructs him to count only people, but Manuel repeatedly asks about animals: lobos, tejones, zorros, mulos, conejos. Each time the official says no. Then Manuel asks about "little people," not children. The official, exasperated, says if they are people, take them. This exchange is the hinge of the story.

Lafferty's narrator comments that the official gave a snap judgment, and it led to disaster. The instructions are not clear: nowhere does it say how big they have to be to be counted as people. The story thus turns on a bureaucratic ambiguity, not a supernatural event. The excerpts do not reveal what Manuel finds, but the tension is set.

The Landscape of Sodom and Gomorrah

The Santa Magdalena is described as a scrap of bald-headed and desolate mountains, steep but not high, so torrid in the afternoons that old lava sometimes begins to writhe and flow again from the sun's heat alone. In the center valley are five thousand acres of slag and vitrified rock from some forgotten old blast that melted the hills and reduced all to a terrible flatness. This is called Sodom. It is strewn with low-lying ghosts as of people and objects, formed when the granite bubbled like water.

Away from the dead center, ravines are body-deep in chaparral, and hillsides stand gray-green with old cactus. Stunted trees are lower than giant bushes and yucca. The place is named after the biblical cities of sin, but the destruction here is geological, not divine. The narrator calls it a forgotten old blast, leaving the cause ambiguous. The ghosts are not spirits but shapes in the rock, a natural phenomenon rendered eerie by the naming.

Mula the Mule and the Genus Problem

Manuel's mule, Mula, is described as a round easy man and a sparse gaunt mule. The narrator notes an oddity in her ancestry: her paternal grandfather had been a goat. Manuel once told Mr. Marshal about this, but Mr. Marshal did not accept it. The narrator explains: "She is a mule. Therefore, her father was a jack. Therefore his father was a jack." The logic is circular, and the claim of a goat grandfather is left unresolved.

This detail echoes the story's central question of classification. If a mule can have a goat grandfather, then the boundaries between species are porous. The official's instruction to count only people becomes impossible when the definition of "people" is unclear. The excerpts do not reveal what Manuel finds, but the mule's ancestry suggests that the story's world operates on different taxonomic rules. The reader is left to wonder what other beings might be counted.

Lafferty's story uses the mundane framework of a census to question how we define humanity. The excerpts offer no resolution, only the setup: a flawed census taker, a landscape marked by past catastrophe, and a mule with improbable lineage. Readers should attend to the precise wording of instructions and the narrator's asides, which carry the story's weight. The fantasy here is not in magical creatures but in the literal application of rules to a world that resists neat categories.

Manuel’s map-blindness stays with me—how a person can be so careful and still mistake a ghost for a neighbor. It reminded me of another quiet haunting, the one in The Woman in Black — Story, Setting & Ideas, where the marsh itself seems to hold its breath. Both books ask what we owe the unseen, and I still think about that census form, unfinished.