May 19, 2025, 9:30am
According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, for the third year in a row, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free* to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend:
P. Djeli Clark, “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington”
This story was an instant classic when it came out in 2018, winning the Locus and Nebula Awards (it was also a finalist for the Hugo), and the intervening years have only burnished its glow. As we watch American history get once again whitewashed and edited, it’s important to remember that speculative fiction isn’t just about the future—it’s about helping us better understand both our past and our present. So with this story, which takes true fact (George Washington paid for nine teeth from enslaved people) and runs with it, imagining possibilities both fantastical and shattering for those teeth’s provenance. I’m also a sucker for a title that sets up both the content and structure of the story to come, and Clark’s does exactly what it says on the tin.
The story begins:
The first Negro tooth purchased for George Washington came from a blacksmith, who died that very year at Mount Vernon of the flux. The art of the blacksmith had been in his blood—passed down from ancestral spirits who had come seeking their descendants across the sea. Back in what the elder slaves called Africy, he had heard, blacksmiths were revered men who drew iron from the earth and worked it with fire and magic: crafting spears so wondrous they could pierce the sky and swords with beauty enough to rend mountains. Here, in this Colony of Virginia, he had been set to shape crueler things: collars to fasten about bowed necks, shackles to ensnare tired limbs, and muzzles to silence men like beasts. But blacksmiths know the secret language of iron, and he beseeched his creations to bind the spirits of their wielders—as surely as they bound flesh. For the blacksmith understood what masters had chosen to forget: when you make a man or woman a slave you enslave yourself in turn. And the souls of those who made thralls of others would never know rest—in this life, or the next.
When he wore that tooth, George Washington complained of hearing the heavy fall of a hammer on an anvil day and night. He ordered all iron making stopped at Mount Vernon. But the sound of the blacksmith’s hammer rang out in his head all the same.
Read it here.
*If you hit a paywall, we recommend trying with a different/private/incognito browser (but listen, you didn’t hear it from us).