Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (50 page)

I leave my sew station she’s set up in her home for me, a small table in the laundry room, and walk into the kitchen where she’s eating a lunch of boiled pork sausage cut into squares.

“I’m sorry, darling, but we won’t be needing you here anymore.” She avoids looking at me completely, just turns her head in my general direction, plays nervously with the spoon in her pea soup. This has to do with Jacob, I feel it in the air, this tension making her display nervous habits I’ve never seen before.

My eyes become ice, let her know that I know this is nothing but her mean old husband, convinced in his prejudice that my brother did something he did not. “That’s fine, Ma’am. It’s been my pleasure.” I offer a slight smile and make my exit, her still sitting there, pea soup on her bib and pity in her eyes, and I almost feel bad for her.

“We have to leave. Tonight,” I tell Essie and Jacob when I get home, both packed for the train leaving in the morning. It’s not hard to convince them. Everyone is packed by 8 p.m., and we have an hour to get to the station. Our neighbor John has agreed to take us for a rather handsome fee that I am more than happy to pay.

The night is balmy, September arriving with a breeze that offers reprieve from the particularly scorching summer. Relief thins the air as we load our things, our books, the lone photo we have of our parents, one my father had taken when Jacob was just six and I was no bigger than Elizabeth. We gather as much food as we can carry for the long trip. I send thoughts to Booker, thank him again for this amazing gift.

The small wagon has just begun its journey when we hear that familiar rumbling. The entire neighborhood is empty save for us, as the word has reached ears throughout the community that Jacob is a wanted man.

I’ve been waiting for this.

Resolve settles in my spirit, a coolness seeping into my bones as I turn in my seat, focus on the road, the field, in the direction of the sound. It gains momentum, grows louder as they near, sounds like a hundred ancient trees collapsing in defeat behind us. I tell John to stop, to let me off the wagon. When he refuses, I fling myself off, roll along the gravel until I am standing again, facing the robed army.

There, with the wailing and pleading of my family for me to return to the wagon behind me and the thunderous roar of fifty angry white men before me, I see only the road, the field, and orange. My eyes narrow, focused as Booker’s that night in my small room, and I feel the ground nearly trembling beneath my feet. My heart is a drum on fire, and still the coolness, the breeze like a slow fan floods my arteries, settles in my chest.

And then.

The earth listens. Miraculously a thick trail of beautiful, brilliant orange erupts from the swaying grass, from the pebbled dirt road, neat and straight between me and the angry mob. It snatches across, blazing left and right as far as I can see. The men halt, clumsily fall over themselves with fear and bewilderment as the flames begin to grow and change colors, become long ropes of blinding, hot, white. Tails of white form every few yards, reach out to them like tongues. I see the glowing fear in their eyes and keep my stare, dare them to come closer. They bumble, turn and flee, tumble backwards on horses, fall into flames of pure white, perish to dust before my eyes.

I know at this moment what Booker meant. I know now, that this is his goodbye.

Detroit is nothing like Charlotte.

A bustling, smart city, rich with people and tall, tall buildings. We arrive with uncontainable joy. The money lasts; seems each time I unfold a bill, another shows up between the thin pages of the old book Booker left. We are able to rent the upper floor of a home, and Jacob takes a job at an automobile factory. It is not easy by any means. Our skin is still black, and there are many who do not want us here, on their streets, in their neighborhoods, at their jobs. But we smile in the face of it all, because it is… better.

I’ve settled into a life in the north now, finding work as a seamstress in a textile factory, with wages I am saving to create dresses I will sell in my own dress shop soon. Life is better, still.

That is when I see him.

Two years after leaving, when the smell of the wind in North Carolina is no longer in every inhalation, and I do not remember the cool soil under my feet nor the exact path to Mrs. Davidson’s home, I see him. Plain as the cold day we are in, a tall, gangly man with a big, toothy smile. He stands across the road, buying a newspaper from a small black boy manning a local stand, black overcoat accompanying his ever present leather satchel and shiny shoes. I march over to him, awestruck, tears gathering to cloud my eyesight.

“You devil!” I slap the padded shoulder of his thick coat and he turns, startled, facing me. His face is his face, but both younger and older somehow, a mature youth resting in his eyes.

He looks me over, smiles that big smile.

“Well that’s not much of an introduction.” His voice is deeper than I remember, smooth like warm coffee has softened his vocal chords.

“Introduction? It’s me, Charlotte, fool.” My hand travels to my hair, newly coiffed and pinned to my head at the sides, it’s a different look for me. A new hairstyle can’t possibly be preventing him from recognizing me, can it?

“I’m not sure I understand,” he says. “But it’s very, very nice to meet you, Charlotte. I’m Samuel. It’s not everyday a beautiful woman walks up to you and slaps you silly.”

“But…” I start.

“Here, do you have somewhere pressing to be right now? Let me buy you a coffee.” He folds his paper and places it under his left arm, leads me to a small storefront shop in a building at least ten stories high.

My head is shaking. I rub my temple, stare and try to make sense of this Booker that isn’t Booker.

“So, you are not Booker… but you look just
like
him,” I say, a question and a statement in one.

He pauses, head tilts to the side, eyes narrow with confusion like I am playing a joke on him.

“I… am not.” He shifts on his stool as two coffees are placed in front of us on the long counter. “Did you say Booker?”

“Yes. Booker. From North Carolina.” I look at him expectantly. He meets my gaze and confusion is still there in his eyes.

“Hm. My grandfather’s name was Booker. He was a slave in North Carolina. My mother says I look just like him, but I never met him. He died in a fire when he was nineteen, right after she was born.

“My goodness.” My heart beats so fast I can hardly hear him speak, one hand covers my mouth.

“Yeah. His name is a sort of legend in those parts. They say people took to calling him the Magical Negro, used to sneak into the big houses and kill the masters without a sound. No one knew how he did it. My father says he saved a lot of Negro lives along the way. I’m proud to look like him. But this is… strange, don’t you think?”

And suddenly it makes sense. I’m terrified and relieved and panicked and… happy. I cannot stop the tears that well as understanding filters in, floods my senses.

I reach out, touch this stranger’s face, make sure he is real. “I’m sorry.” I say, smiling through clouded eyes. “But… I think that we were
supposed
to meet, somehow.”

His face pushes up and away, makes room for that wide grin. Booker smiles at me. His eyes wide, glistening like they used to under that big oak tree.

“I am inclined to agree, Miss Charlotte, I think I do agree.”

Art by Eric Orchard

1900
Rural village outside Shandong province, China

“Your daughter wants a husband,” Mother says one day, after they have found another dead chicken. “I know it.”

“How can you know it?” Father asks her, smiling small. Father always has small smiles for Mother, even while he stares at the bottom of a bowl of hard rice with no chicken or fish or egg in it. “How can anyone presume to know what she wants? The minds of
all
children are unknowable.”

Mother’s eyes become narrow and black. She thinks he is making fun of her. Or else this is just how her eyes go when Father smiles, now. “She brings me dreams… terrible, urgent dreams that I can never quite remember when I wake. Dreams where everything we have becomes a black ruin, and all our family living and dead wanders like lost ghosts…”

Father’s smile spreads dolefully. “I do not think you need our daughter to bring your dreams of ill omen these days,” he says, and pats her hand in the way that tells her he will not talk of this anymore.

But Mother will not have her hand patted today. “She brings sickness, Husband! To my stomach, to my head. The only pains greater are my hunger pains.”

Father relinquishes what is left in his rice bowl. He eats less and less as the days pass. “It is this house. The wind-and-water of this house has always been bad. We should have gone from here long ago.”

“Wind-and-water does not kill our chickens!”

“No,” Father agrees, “the drought kills our chickens. And makes our neighbors to sell their houses off piece by piece, and makes our neighbors’ children to fill their bellies with dry grass and tree bark like in the years of the Great Famine…”

“You see? She even visits misfortune upon our neighbors!”

Father laughs, which makes Mother’s eyes turn to slits. Mother understands his laughs as little as she understands his smiles. “You have always been soft with her, and blind,” declares Mother, “always turning your head when she made mischief, praising the vain thing straight to her face. It’s as though you thought she was a son–”

“I never mistook her for our son,” says Father, now without a trace of laughter. “I know where our son is as well as you.”

He is so grave that Mother is silent a moment before she chooses her next words. “Then you know that a daughter cannot stay,” she says. “A daughter belongs in her husband’s house, with her husband’s mother. Where they will not starve to feed her.”

Father’s gaze lowers. He did not know until now that Mother watches every scrap placed at my tablet with narrow black eyes. He makes no immediate reply, and this or something else makes Mother suddenly go hard in the face. “It must be time,” she says with pinched determination. “She must be old enough. I have seen it done for daughters much younger. I have
seen
it.”

“All places are not Taiwan,” Father reminds her, in a voice far away. “Who would take our poor unlucky daughter to wife in this place, in these bad days? Who would keep her? There is almost no one left here, living
or
dead.”

They think I will not hear them, where I am. My tablet is small, and made of a cheap, warped wood. It faces a wall, behind a door, where no guests will see. And so they think I will not hear, facing the wrong way. But the tablet is not where I truly live. Not truly. In the place where I truly live, I hear almost everything that is said, whether I want to or not. Words leave living mouths so carelessly, and we come across them all sooner or later, here in the City of the Ghosts, floating on and on forever into space.

For one day out of the year, on the fifteenth day of the month they call Ghost Month, we are allowed out. This is the day of our Festival, the day the world opens for us. No matter who we are now in the City, even if we are now the wildest and hungriest of Hungry Ghosts, we are permitted on this day to go among the living, and see the sights, and hear the sounds, and smell the smells of who we were.

If I concentrate, if I send enough intention to my arm and hand, I can even touch things.

And so, on the day of my eighth Festival, just days after I have heard Mother and Father plotting my marriage through the little warped-wood window of my tablet, I am walking in the village where I once lived and died, touching everything I can find to touch: cobbles and straw, and birds’ feathers and hot coals, and warm dung. The heads of some small boys who turn from pissing their names on a wall to see who has touched them, and find that there is no one there. I will collect it all. I will not lose one single thing.

I walk better now that I am dead. I am not so small, and toddling and bowlegged. And now that I am dead, I am free to walk where I will. I am free to smell the dust of the road, the damp of the water, the woodsmoke of a thousand different ovens, without anyone saying to me, “Little Ling, where do you go in the road all by yourself? You will be run down by a horse and cart!” or “Little Ling, the bottom of a river is nowhere you want to go! Stay there, where the bank is dry!” or even “Little Ling, don’t you see this flame burns blue and hot? Stand back, stand back!” For this one day, it is like I have been allowed to grow up, and to learn what there is to learn about the world.

You cannot learn very much about the world when you have only been alive in it for four years. And no one ever did say to me, “Little Ling, you must be very careful of a fever! A fever may come hot and cold at night, and take you faster than horses and carts, or rivers, or blue flames.” And so now I have to do my walking and growing up and learning while I can, while the sun shines on this day.

This one, small day. In the month which has been called ours. Oh, the living are so generous, so extravagant to believe we might be allowed to stay with them so long. But in this even the Ancestors must obey.