The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021)

by Oghenechovwe Ekpeki

  “Leenie, come’yuh, lemme get them knockers out your head,” Gramma would call out from her porch on those muggy summer days. Between Gramma’s knees, Leenie fidgeted, feeling those rough hands pulling her pigtails and stretching her kinky hair like she always did to train it against shrinkage.

  “Gramma, could you tell me about the banduns again?”

  “If you keep still,” Gramma said, bouncing her right leg, which used to be for dancing, but now had a strange habit of losing feeling. She was tired all the time, too. But she could talk from sunup to sundown about her kin: the Gullah-Geechee people, descendants of enslaved Africans who survived and thrived for centuries on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. How back in the day, after the praise meeting, they would gather round to take part in the legendary ring shout.

  A songster kicked things off, call-and-response style; a stickman played the beat, slow at first, then faster, faster; as the joyful congregation moved in a circle, hand-clapping, feet-tapping, shouting and shuffling, dancing on the devil till he begged for sweet mercy, Gramma would say.

  “But every now and again,” she said, looking around, then leaning forward to make sure no one else could hear, “some sanctified body would step in that ring there, wailing, flailing all furious-like. And lo and behold, that man, filled with the spirit, would up and start growing.”

  “Growing like a beanstalk?” Leenie asked every time.

  “Child, bigguh than a beanstalk. Bigguh than anything in this whole world. Hold this.” She handed Leenie her blue knockers. “Just kept growing and growing till they was big enough to reach for the clouds, then climb up to the sky and gone ’way.”

  “Gone where?”

  Gramma lifted a hand to the heavens. “Off into the big black yonder.”

  Sitting there on the porch, Leenie cupped the knockers in her palm. Staring into the little blue orb, she pictured a far-away world. A land of banduns. A place where she might, for once in her life, feel free and feel big and feel like she belongs. Or find her mother.

  “Put them knockers in the box ’fore you lose them,” Gramma said.

  She did as she was told and tucked her small world in a container with the other worlds. And it was these stories of free Black giants that inspired Leenie to learn all she could about the “big black yonder.” In the process, she learned a bigger truth: Gramma, too, was a liar.

  At the heart of every belief is a lie. A stretched truth. Facts distorted like the space inside a wormhole. Vows made to be broken. Like when somebody promises to return and never does. This, she learned, was the real world, so she did what disillusioned optimists do: Leenie grew up.

  Never again would she fall victim to faith, be betrayed by hope, or led astray by love. Which is why, outside the Mount Wilson Observatory, when Dave popped the question . . .

  . . . she popped him on the head. “What are you thinking?!”

  “I’m thinking it’s high time you and I settle down for real for real, do the family thing.”

  “Dave . . . I can’t do that. I told you I don’t want to be a wife, I don’t want kids.”

  “What kinda woman don’t want kids?”

  “My kind,” she said, closing the ring box and the conversation.

  It wasn’t him. Not all him. Somewhat him, but not all. He was a good man. Not educated in the conventional sense, not extremely ambitious, but a laid-back, lighthearted type of man. The type who knew to ask how she wanted to be touched and where, and allowed himself to be shown.

  There he goes now, up on stage in the spotlight, wailing, while she’s down in the shadows, clapping. But this is no ring shout. This was the night they met in New York at some underground jazz club with Dave on the sax. She watched his cheeks puff up, a man possessed. And, being a scientist-in-training, she wanted to test out a hypothesis: that a player who could maneuver his fingers and fix his lips to make that instrument scream could do the same to hers. No strings, just a release. She initiated, he obliged. For seven years he obliged, tuning her body between the sheets. But as she moved up in status, he fell back on old habits.

  An old habit, like history, repeats itself. What goes around comes around like a satellite. A record. Needles dropping. Heroin and insulin. Dave and Gramma, injecting and rejecting shots, respectively. Two peas in the wrong pods. Putting faith in false gods.

  “Baby, that’s all in the past,” Dave told her the first week of his twelve-step program. And by the sixth week, he figured he could replace his defunct jazz band with a wedding band.

  But what is marriage if not another drug? A lifelong dependence on a manmade substance that ultimately leads to abuse?

  She’d heard that song time and time again. Lamentations of belittled women. Givers of life beaten down, swallowed whole by the vacuum of the fragile male ego. Born-to-be brides. Born-again wives. Ever-shrinking women with self-deflating voices who were raised to submit (from the Latin submittere: “to yield, lower, let down, put under, reduce”), to keep silent and to take up as little space as possible.

  But not Dr. Jenkins.

  She is not the one. She wouldn’t follow in the fading footsteps of those who walk down the aisle and wind up getting walked over. Didn’t matter how magical his fingers felt on the nape of her neck, how musical his lips felt massaging the length of her labia. She refused to sacrifice her identity on the altar of intimacy. She rejected a ring on her finger to see the rings of Saturn because life is too short to live in the land of make-believe.

  “Wake up, Dr. Jenkins,” Rigel says.

  And roused from hypersleep, she sees before her “The Ringed Planet,” grander and more glorious than she ever imagined, a swirling pastel ball with bands of clouds running around it. But how is this possible? Reading her confused expression, Rigel declares: “We are now approaching Saturn. Destination: Titan.”

  She unstraps herself.

  “It is advised that you remain strapped in, Dr. Jenkins.”

  No. Something’s not right here. Why does the computer show a flight time of only four years, one month and seventeen days? Is she seeing things?

  “Rigel,” she says, her voice like gravel, “how long has it been since the launch?”

  “This is the forty-seventh day of the fourth year,” Rigel confirms. “The Jupiter assist gave us a bigger boost than—”

  Right then, an alarm goes off as the spacecraft’s autopilot tries to maneuver through tiny particles running from or being sucked into the delicate, narrow outer band of Saturn’s F ring, herded by the shepherd-moon Prometheus. Stray pieces batter the composite shell of Orion II like sleet.

  “A change of course is advised,” Rigel says.

  “No, no, stay on current trajectory.”

  “Dr. Jenkins, at this rate, you won’t be able to sustain—”

  “Stay on course, I said!”

  Keeping her eyes dead ahead, the AR interface labels the various satellites in view and right there, like a ripe Carolina peach bobbing in a deep, dark sea, the big, bright moon draws her nearer, as the warning alarm keeps ringing in her ears.

  “‘Giant Steps!’” Dave shouted the day he saw the viral Titan photos.

  This was last fall in the living room of their downsized apartment in Berkeley. Dave was bouncing baby Trane on his right leg, a twelve-month-old girl with curious wide brown eyes, as Dr. Jenkins stood over them, projecting a hologram of images from her palmtab.

  “No, Dave, these . . . these aren’t footprints.” She sighed. “I mean, they could be anything: impact craters, land erosion, shadows from methane clouds—”

  “Nah,” he said. “You not hearing me. See this right here? Look at this. See that pattern? Yeah, I’d recognize those opening chords anywhere. That’s Trane.” He tickled the baby girl. “That’s you, huh? Huh, little star?”

  Dr. Jenkins knew legendary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane was his idol, his influence, the namesake of their newborn. But he was taking this too far. Was he using again?

  “Charlene.”
He set the girl down on the self-cleaning carpet. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “I’m not looking at you like anything.”

  He walked out, leaving Dr. Jenkins alone with the baby. She’d only held her a few times since giving birth. Now she watched the little girl lift herself to stand and start sort-of-walking. But she kept falling back, then smirking up like she’d get in trouble for trying to defy gravity.

  Gramma wasn’t walking either by then. She was on bed rest, post-amputation.

  “The Lawd ain’t through with little ol’ me,” she proclaimed on more than one occasion. “I’ll be back on my feet in no time, you watch.”

  Which Dr. Jenkins determined was a lie for three reasons:

  1) “The Lawd” isn’t real.

  2) Gramma didn’t have feet, plural. Diabetes hijacked her right foot. She had one left.

  3) By the time she did leave that bed, she had to be carried out, never to tell a story again.

  “Check this out here,” Dave said, coming back into the living room with sheets of paper. “You’ll appreciate this. I’m finna blow your mind right here. You know what this is?”

  Before she could answer, he explained: It was a diagram of Coltrane’s Tone Circle, a variation of the classic “Circle of Fifths” with a pentagram and vanishing point in the middle. “Been listening to these jazz and physics audiobooks, right?” he said. “And this Coltrane circle, it’s drawing on the same geometric principles your boy Einstein was working with. Quantum theory, mathematics, relativity—all that heavy-duty scientific shit you went to school for.”

  “Dave, what does this have to do with anything?”

  “I’m saying, it’s all connected, everything’s connected.” He set the palmtab next to the diagram on the legless LeviTable and ran over to stop the little girl from climbing up the stairs. “Trane was out of this world, we know that. Straight-up transcendent. But I always thought to myself: What if that cat was, you know, channeling? Like possessed?”

  She stifled a laugh to spare his feelings. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Why not though? The way he improvised? Go listen to Ascension and Interstellar Space. Listen to Om and tell me I’m lying.” He lifted the little girl’s arms to help her walk. “What if, tucked under those ‘sheets of sound,’ Trane was tryna tell us the truth?”

  “And what truth would that be, my dear? Aliens?”

  “Could be. Or a warning. Instructions on how to be free, hell, I don’t know,” he said. “You the big, bad scientist.”

  Never copulate with a conspiracy theorist. An obscure scientific law she learned too late. She never told Dave about the banduns. The man believed everything he heard, never bothering to fact-check. In this day and age, you can’t afford not to fact-check. Dr. Jenkins volunteered to fly 1.2 billion kilometers just to fact-check.

  “Brace for impact,” Rigel says.

  A massive chunk of ice comes out of nowhere, slamming into Orion II like a fist. Knocking the craft off its trajectory. Dr. Jenkins, her heart pounding, looks around to find Titan, but the AR interface has shut off.

  “Return to course,” she commands.

  “Shields down to seventy-five percent,” Rigel says. “Life support systems damaged.”

  “Return to course, return to course, go to Titan!”

  “Navigation offline.”

  “You ain’t told him?” Gramma asked from her hospital bed and soon-to-be deathbed. “That man’s the father of your child, for crying out loud!”

  “He didn’t tell me he was planning to get hooked on smack. How come he gets to do what he wants when he wants and I can’t?”

  “That’s a cross you gotsta bear.”

  “But that’s not . . . look, it was his idea. He wanted to have a baby. Now I need to do what I need to do for me. I don’t wanna be one of those kind of women—”

  “What women is that, huh?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Oh no, no, don’t get all hush-mouthed now. What kind of women? You don’t wanna be like me is what you saying. Tell the truth, shame the devil.”

  “Gramma . . . I have big dreams.”

  “And what? You think I didn’t?”

  “You’ve lived in that same house since before I was born, weaving sweetgrass baskets, whipping up some Frogmore Stew, humming your spurrituals. You always said you wanted to get out of Carolina and dance on a big stage, and you could have. You really could have, but you never did. And now you’re refusing to get a bionic foot.”

  “First off, don’t worry ’bout my foot. And second, best believe I chose to be here. Everybody and they mama got to migrating, up and over to the big cities, fooling theyselves thinking they could outrun racism. But I wasn’t fixing to leave my people like that. No ma’am, not me. I stayed my Black behind right here so I could raise you and this the thanks I get?”

  “Gramma, this isn’t about you. This is about me. I want to explore.”

  “’Clare to Gawd. So what, you think you Neil Armstrong? Hopscotching ’round the heavens like ain’t nothing better to do? ‘You wanna explore.’ Shuh. How ’bout you go explore being a mother? That’s some uncharted territory for that ass.”

  “I’m not supposed to be here.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. Are you the Creator of the Universe? Didn’t think so. So who is you to say where you s’posed to be, huh?” Gramma sighs, then scoots over in bed and pats the mattress. “Leenie, come’yuh. Come sit.”

  Dr. Jenkins shakes her head, staring at her single foot wiggling under the white sheets.

  “Child, I know you scared. Seeing me all shriveled up like this, with one foot literally in the grave. Thinking ’bout Dave and his crookety self. You worried you’ll be left to raise that child by your lonesome, I understand that—”

  “The only thing I’m scared of is looking back on my life and realizing I was too scared to live. You raised me, Gramma. By yourself. You’re the one who taught me to think bigger.”

  “Bigguh don’t mean running from your motherly duties.”

  “I’m not running, I’m trying to grow!”

  And as she said this, it dawned on her: Of the countless times Gramma sat on that porch, telling the story of the banduns, she never ever described these free Black giants as women. Leenie never pictured them as women. Never even thought to ask if any of them were women. The same way most people assume “Dr. Jenkins” is a man.

  “I want to grow, Gramma. Like the banduns.”

  Gramma shook her head, chuckling to herself. “You so smart, huh? ‘Like the banduns.’ You even know why they was called banduns?”

  Silence. Dr. Jenkins never thought to ask that question either.

  “Means abandon,” Gramma said. “As in: Your mother abandoned you to quote-unquote find herself and what happened? She fell off a cliff in them Himalayas.”

  More silence.

  The space between them filled by the ever-expanding agony of unforgotten grief.

  Dr. Jenkins wanted to say something. Something like “I’m not her” or “She only went out there to escape from that monster she married.” These words wouldn’t matter to Gramma.

  “Know what your problem is, Leenie? Got your head all swell-up with facts and figures, only believing what you can see and prove, but child,” she tapped her ear, “you not listening.”

  “Listening to what?”

  Gramma gestured as if to say, “My point exactly.” And passed away three months later. Two months after that Dr. Jenkins was boarding Orion II. Not depressed or guilty or ambivalent like one might expect. She was ready.

  “Go to Titan now!” she commands again.

  “Shields down to fifty percent,” Rigel says. “Navigation still offline.”

  She plugs the coordinates to the target site into the computer manually: 78° N, 249° W. “Initiate emergency landing procedures!”

  “Initiating emergency landing procedures.”

  She was ready.

  But right now, as the single-perso
n spacecraft plummets toward Titan, she wonders if she made the biggest mistake of her life. Did she come on this mission to discover something? Or prove something? Maybe both. But why? Why this constant need to prove herself? Why couldn’t she escape the long shadow of feeling less-than? Inferior? The feeling that no matter how high she climbs in her career, she’ll always be looked down on, a speck of a speck of a speck in spacetime and the eyes of society. And that the slightest misstep will cause irreparable damage, not just to her life, but the lives of others like her.

  Who can live in those conditions? Under that kind of pressure?

  The nitrogen-rich tholin haze wouldn’t break her fall. The dense methane shroud of clouds wouldn’t break her fall. Nothing would break her fall, save the moon’s freezing surface. She pictures herself outside herself, like a methane droplet in a chemical downpour, falling, in a tragically slow descent toward the north polar region.

  Falling . . .

  “I want to make an impact,” she said. “Why can’t you understand that?”

  “What I understand is, you going through a lot right now,” Dave said. This was the night after Gramma’s funeral, at Gramma’s house, as they were packing up Gramma’s belongings. “C’mon now, let’s be serious.”

  Falling . . .

  “I’m dead serious.”

  “How you talking ’bout going to space and your grandma’s body not even cold yet?”

  “This is my chance to do something that matters.”

  Falling . . .

  “Oh, so this don’t matter?” He moved his right hand in circles, like tracing an orbit, referring to him, her, and sleeping baby Trane. “We don’t matter?”

  She was about to say, “That’s not what I meant,” but right then, her eyes caught something in one of Gramma’s sweetgrass baskets. It was the box. She snuck outside to peek at her childhood in private. On the porch, in the warm solitude of the starry night as male crickets called out for mates, she opened the box and inside, all those colorful knockers, all those small worlds were still clustered together, though much smaller than she remembered. With her thumb and index finger, she held the orange one up to the clear new moon sky.