So Long Been Dreaming (21 page)
As Hurston slept, Kage’s mind raced. What she needed: clothes, rations, Ident scan. She’d have to keep an eye on Hurston. It wasn’t unknown that the traders snatched back their goods before taking off to the next market. But after that they’d be free and clear.
Then the work would begin.
What would she tell Altzar? Her impulse, as always, was for the truth. She laughed inwardly. Suicide, the easiest way out of this cesspool. Yet Kage was not so sure. What was it about Altzar that made her trust her? Altzar never asked questions. What kind of soldier was she? But a soldier never asks why, just points a gun and blasts away.
It was more than that, Kage knew. Altzar had been the first human face she had seen since the destruction of the Ark. On the Caravan, Kage had only been barter, a piece of meat traded, trucked from post to post. Altzar had chosen her, saved her from death on the line. She didn’t beat her or rape her, not like some of the other Corpsmen with their seconds. Altzar’s demands seemed reasonable, a benevolent master, yet still a master. Kage checked herself. She mustn’t forget that. Not when someone has the power to swap you to the fleshbowls in exchange for promo or trancers, or sell you down the line. Kage was still a slave, always a slave. But this place, the mindfuck of this place, you needed an emotional retreat, or a stable if not safe anchor. This prison stripped you of everything you were and what you took was what was given. Identification with your captors. The Eye, the fucking Eye, chipping away at your soul. Kage realized she depended on Altzar’s silences, her distance, her stony self-sense. That and the promise of the Ark.
What would she tell Altzar? Something she would understand. For Kage had spent years watching that meza third class gunnar. She would give her a sliver of the truth. That Kage was lonely. And that she had chosen Hurston.
The following two stories are largely allegorical. “The Grassdreaming Tree” by Sheree Renee Thomas is a twist on the tale of the ever-familiar schism between parents and children, told from the point-of-view of a group of black colonists. “The Blue Road: A Fairy Tale” by Wayde Compton shows the contorted shapes we become as we’re forced to live according to the dictates of the powerful.
A native of Memphis,
Sheree Renée Thomas
is the editor of the anthology series
Dark Matter
, winner of the World Fantasy Award and named a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year. Her short stories and poetry appear in
Mojo: Conjure Stories
,
Role Call: A Generational Collection of Social and Political Black Literature & Art
,
Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam
,
Meridians: feminism race transnationalism
,
2001: A Science Fiction Poetry Anthology
,
Obsidian III
,
Cave Canem
,
African Voices
,
Drumvoices Revue: 10th Anniversary Anthology
, and
Renaissance Noire
. She is a 2003 New York Foundation of the Arts Poetry Fellow and recipient of the Ledig House/LEF Foundation Prize in Fiction for Bonecarver. Her work was also nominated for a Rhysling Award and received Honorable Mention in the
Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Sixteenth Annual Edition
. She teaches at the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in Manhattan and the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, and is currently leading Eldersongs, an oral history poetry project, and other works designed to uplift, engage, and enlighten the community. For more information, email
[email protected]
.
The Grassdreaming Tree
Sheree R. Thomas
That woman was always in shadow; no memory saved her from the dark. True, her star was not Sun but some other place. Nor did she come from this country called life. Maybe that’s why she always lived with her shoulders turned back, walked with the caution of strangers – outside woman trying to sweep her way in. The grasshopper peddler, witchdoctor seller, didn’t even have no name, no name. So folks didn’t know where to place her. For all they know, she didn’t even have no navel string, just them green humming things, look like dancing blades of grass. They look at her, with her no name self, and they call her grasswoman.
Every morning she would pass through the black folks’ land, carrying her enormous baskets. These she made herself, ’cause nobody else remembered. And they were made from grass so flimsy, they didn’t even look like baskets, more like brown bubbles ’bout to pop. What they looked like were dying leaves dangling from her limbs, great curled wings that might flutter away, kicked up by a soft wind. Inside the baskets, the grasshoppers fluttered around and pranced, blue-green winged, long-legged things. The
click-clack, tap-tap
of the hoppers’ limbs announced her arrival. A tattoo of drumbeats followed the grasswoman wherever she went, drumbeats so loud they rattled the windows and flung back shades:
Mama,
the children cried,
Mama, look! Grasswoman comin’!
And the hoppers would flood the streets. Their joy exchanged: the grasshoppers shouted and the children jumped, one heartbeat at a time. The woman would pull out her mouth harp and put the song to melody. The whole world was filled with their music.
But behind curtains drawn shut in frustration, the settlers suck-teethed dissatisfaction. They took the grasswoman’s seeds and tried to crush them with suspicion, replacing the grasswoman’s music with their own dark song – who did that white gal think she was? Where she come from and who in the world was her mama? Who told her she could come shuffling down their street, barefooted and grubby-toed, selling bugs and asking folk for food? The white ought to go on back to her proper place.
But the bugs are so sweet
, the children insisted. The parents shut their ears and stiffened their necks: No, no, and no again.
But the children didn’t pay them no mind. The grasswoman’s baskets were too full of songs to forget to play. One little girl, hardheaded than most, disobeyed the edict and devoted herself to the enigmatic grasswoman. Her name was Mema, a big-eyed child with a head like a drum. She would wake early, plant her eyes on the cool window pane, waiting for the grasswoman to walk by. When the woman would come into view, Mema would rush down the stairs,
skip hop jump
. Bare feet running, she’d fly down the road and disappear among the swarm of grasshoppers spilling from the great leaf baskets. The Sun would sink, a red jackball sky, and still no word from Mema. Not a hide nor a hair they’d see, and at Mema’s home, her folks would start pulling out their worries and polishing them up with spite.
Running barefoot, wild as that other.
Her daddy picked his switch and held it in his hand. Only her mama’s soft words brought relief to the little girl’s return. Hours later in the fullness of night, her daddy insisted on a reason, even if it was just the chalk line of truth:
Where she stay? Did you go to her house? Do she even have a house?
Her dwelling was an okro tree. She laid her head in the empty hollow of its great stone trunk. Mema told them the tree was sacred, that God had planted its roots upside down so they touched sky.
Daddy turned to his wife, pointing the blame finger at her.
See, the white’s been filling her head. That
tree
ain’t got no roots. Whole world made of stone, thick as your head. Couldn’t grow a tree to save your life.
The girl spoke up, hoppers hidden all in her hair.
It’s true, Mama, it’s true. The tree got a heart and sometime it get real sad. The old woman say the okro tree can kill itself, say it can do it by fire. Even if nobody strike a match.
Mama just shook her head. Daddy roll his eyes.
Stone tree dead by fire?
Child say,
It’s true.
What foolishness,
the mama say and she draw her daughter close to her, tucking her big head under her chin, far and away from her daddy’s reach. Then the man left, taking his anger with him, and he handed it over to the other settlers. At the lodge, they all agreed: the grasswoman’s visits had to end. They couldn’t kill her – to do so would offend the land and the children and the women, so whatever was done, they agreed to give the deed some thought.
Next day, the grasshopper seller returned. The drumbeats-of-joy wings and legs swept through the air. Even the settlers stopped to listen. Spite was in their mouths, but the rhythm took hold of their feet. After all, that white was bringing with her such beauty none had ever seen. None could resist her grasshoppers’ winged anthem, nor their blue-greened glory, shining and iridescent as God’s first land. The sight was like nothing else in this new and natural world. They’d left their stories in that other place and now the grasshopper peddler was selling them back.
The folk began to wonder: where in the name of all magic did she get such miraculous creatures? Couldn’t have been from this land where the soil was pink and ruddy, and no grass grew anywhere save for under glass-topped houses carefully tended by the science ones. They had packed up all their knowledge and carried it with them in small black stones that were not opened until they’d settled on this other shore with its two bright stars folk just looked at and called Sun ’cause some habits just hard to break.
And where indeed? Whoever heard tale of grasshoppers where they ain’t no grass? Where, if they themselves had already brought the most distant of their new land to heel?
The grasshopper peddler only answered with a chuckle, her two cheeks puffed out like she ’bout to whistle. But she don’t speak, just smiling so, skin all red and blistered, folk wonder how she could stand one Sun, let alone two. They began to weigh their own suspicions, take them apart and spread them in their hand: Could it be that white gal had a right to enter a world that was closed to them? And how she remember, old as she is, if they forget? But then they set about cutting her down: the woman lived in trees, nothing but grasshoppers as company, got to be crazy laying up there with all them bugs. And where they come from anyway?
Whether it was because folk couldn’t stand her or they was puzzled and secretly admired her strangeful ways, the grasswoman became the topic of talk all over the town. Her presence began to fill the length of conversations, unexpected empty moments great and small. The more people bought from her, dipping their hands in the great leaf baskets, the more their homes became filled with the sweet songs of wings, songs that made them think of summers and tall grass up to your knees, and bushes that reach out to smack your thighs when you walk by and trees that lean over to brush the top of your hand, soft like a granddaddy’s touch, land that whispered secrets and filled the air with the seeds of green growing things.
Such music fell strangely on the settlers’ ears that bent only to hear the quickstep march of progress. In a land of pink soil as hard as earth diamonds, it was clear that they held little in common with their new home. And could it be that the grasswoman’s hoppers were nibbling at the settlers’ sense of self, turning them into aliens in this far land they’d claimed as their own? Or was it that white gal at fault, that non-working hussy who insisted on being, insisting on breathing when most of her seed was extinct, existing completely outside their control, a wild weed of a thing, and unaware of the duties of her race? The traitors who traded her singing grasshoppers for bits of crust and crumbs of food hidden in pockets, handed out with a side-long glance should have known that after all that had been given, as far as they had travelled, leaving the dying ground of one world, to let the dead bury their dead, there was no room for the old woman’s bare-toed feet on their stone streets.
The head folk were annoyed at such disobedience, concerned at the blatant disrespect for order and decorum, blaming it on the times and folks giving in to the children’s soft ways, children too young to remember the hardness of skin, how it could be used like a thick-walled prison to deny the blood within. Too young to remember how the sun looked like wet stars in morning dew, and how it walked on wide feet and stood on the sky’s shoulders, spreading its light all over that other place. How it warmed them and baked them like fresh bread, until their brown skins shone with the heart of it.
