Fantastic Fiction: Finding Your People: Zenna Henderson

Pilgrimage: The Book of the People is a fix-up collection of six stories about the People, Zenna Henderson’s immigrant aliens who escaped the destruction of their home planet and crash-landed in the American Southwest. These stories were originally published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1952 and 1959, and one of them, “Captivity,” was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959. Through these curiously gifted aliens Henderson explored themes of difference and belonging that still have relevance today.

The People have a number of gifts, which they refer to as “the Persuasions and Designs,” such as telekinesis and telepathy, and it is these powers, rather than technology, that enabled them to build their ships and travel across space to find a new home. As second- and third-generation settlers, the People we meet in Pilgrimage are concerned with continuing to hide their powers from the humans they live among or encounter, because their racial memory results in many of them retaining the experiences of their ancestors’ persecution upon first arriving on Earth; they have learned the hard way that, as one character recites, “different is dead—and one death is never enough.”

While each story touches on what it is to be excluded, isolated, or to feel oneself as other, Henderson’s focus is specifically on the joy of finding community and making connections. Her characters are predominantly teachers (Henderson was herself a teacher in Arizona) and children or young people in small ghost towns, with the teacher-student relationship playing a central role in the search for belonging. Henderson’s characters are sympathetically drawn: Her teachers are not perfect, but they are observant, and they care about the children in their charge, however unruly; her children and young people are often rebellious or uncommunicative as they wrangle both with growing up and with being different or meeting difference for the first time.

These stories are, however, small in scope. They don’t address the events in the wider world of the late 1950s, and Henderson was content to draw upon what she knew—the heat, the landscape, the smells and sounds of the Southwest are beautifully evoked. She also perhaps drew on her Mormon upbringing when she imagined her People in their scattered but close-knit communities; certainly, there is a spiritual slant to how they think and speak about their “Persuasions and Designs” and in their general attitude towards others, whether Outsiders or of one of their own groups.

And despite past experiences, the People actively search for others of their kind and welcome some Outsiders into their community. While determined to keep their culture and memories of Home alive, they also recognize that they have been and are being changed by their new home. Overall, these are charming, generous stories that argue for the value of difference and the importance of individuality even (especially!) in the face of discrimination. Henderson writes empathetically about the internal struggles we all face and about our need to belong, making Pilgrimage a comforting read in these troubled times and a reminder that we can all find our people.

Perhaps you might give it a read to find your own solace in the months before we come together to imagine and build yesterday’s tomorrow in the present and celebrate our people: the fans, creatives, and academics that comprise the Worldcon community,