The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven

by Jonathan Strahan

  RED DIRT WITCH

  N. K. Jemisin

  N. K. JEMISIN (www.nkjemisin.com) lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been nominated for the Hugo (three times), the Nebula (four times), and the World Fantasy Award (twice); shortlisted for the Crawford, the Gemmell Morningstar, and the Tiptree; and she has won a Locus Award for Best First Novel and Romantic Times’ Reviewer’s Choice Award (three times). In 2016, she became the first black person to win the Best Novel Hugo for The Fifth Season. Jemisin has published seven novels, including the Inheritance trilogy and Dreamblood duology, and the first two in the Broken Earth trilogy—Hugo winner The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate. The final book in the series is due out in 2017. Jemisin’s short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Postscripts, Strange Horizons, Baen’s Universe, and various print anthologies. She also currently writes a New York Times book review column, Otherworldly, in which she covers the latest in science fiction and fantasy.

  THE WAY TO tell the difference between dreams that were prophecy and dreams that were just wasted sleep was to wait and see if they came three times. Emmaline had her third dream about the White Lady on the coldest night ever recorded in Alabama history. This was actually very cold—ten degrees below zero, on a long dark January Sabbath when even the moon hid behind a veil of shadow.

  Emmaline survived the cold the way poor people everywhere have done since the dawn of time: with a warm, energetic friend. Three patchwork quilts helped too. The friend was Frank Heath, who was pretty damn spry for a man of fifty-five, though he claimed to be forty-five so maybe that helped. The quilts were Em’s, and it also helped that one of them had dried flowers (Jack-in-thepulpits) and a few nuggets of charcoal tucked under each patch of leftover cloth. That made for a standing invitation to warmth and the summertime, who were of course welcome to pay a visit and stay the night anytime they liked. Those had come a-calling to the children’s beds, at least, for which Emmaline was grateful; the children slept soundly, snug and comfortable. That left Em and Frank free to conduct their own warmthmaking with an easy conscience.

  After that was done, Emmaline closed her eyes and found herself in the Commissary Market down on Dugan. Dusty southern daylight, bright and fierce even in winter, shone slanting onto the street alongside the market, unimpeded by cars or carts—or people. Pratt City wasn’t much of a city, being really just the Negro neighborhood of Birmingham, but it was a whole place, thriving and bustling in its way. Here, though, Emmaline had never seen the place so empty in her life. As if to spite the cold, the market’s bins tumbled over with summer produce: watermelons and green tomatoes and peaches and more, along with a few early collards. That meant that whatever this dream meant to warn her of, it would come with the heat of the mid-months.

  Out of habit, Em glanced at the sign above these last. Overpriced again; greedy bastards.

  “Why, greed’s a sin,” said a soft, whispery voice all around her. “Be proper of you to punish ’em for it, wouldn’t it?”

  This was one of the spirits that she’d tamed over the years. They liked to test her, though, so it was always wise to be careful with ’em. “Supposin’ I could,” she said in reply. “But only the store manager, since the company too big to go after. And I can’t say’s I truly blame the manager, either, since he got children to feed same as me.”

  “Sin’s sin, woman.”

  “And let she who is without sin cast the first stone,” Em countered easily. “As you well know.” Then she checked herself; no sense getting testy. Illwishing opened doors for ill winds to blow through—which was probably why the voice was trying to get her to do it.

  The voice sighed a little in exasperation. It was colorless, genderless, barely a voice at all; that sigh whispered like wind through the stand of pines across the street. “Just tellin’ you somebody comin’, cranky old biddy.” “Who, Jesus Christ? ’Bout time, His slow ass.”

  Whispery laughter. “Fine, then—there a White Lady a-comin’, a fine one, and she got something special in mind for you and yours. You ready?”

  Em frowned to herself. The other two dreams had been more airy-fairy than this—just collections of symbols and hints of a threat, omens and portents. It seemed fate had finally gotten impatient enough to just say plain what she needed to hear.

  “No, I ain’t ready,” Em said, with a sigh. “But ain’t like that ever made no mind to some folk. Thank you for the warning.”

  More laughter, rising to become a gale, picking Emmaline up and spinning her about. The Market blurred into a whirlwind—but through it all, there were little ribbons that she could see edging into the tornado from elsewhere, whipping about in shining silken red. Truth was always there for the taking, if you only reached out to grasp it. Thing was, Em didn’t feel like grasping it; she was tired, Lord have mercy. The world didn’t change. If she just relaxed, the dream would let her back into sleep, like she wanted.

  But... well. Best to be prepared, she supposed.

  So Em stretched out a hand and laid hold of one of the ribbons. And suddenly the street that ran through the market was full of people. Angry people, most of ’em white and lining the road, and marching people, most of ’em black and in the middle of the road. The black ones’ jaws were set, their chins high in a way that always meant trouble when white folks were around, because Lord didn’t they hate seeing pride. “Trouble, trouble,” sang-song the voice—and before the marchers appeared a line of policemen with billy clubs in their hands and barking dogs at their sides. Emmaline’s guts clenched for the blood that would almost surely be spilled. Pride! Was it worth all that blood?

  Yet when she opened her mouth to shout at the marchers for their foolishness, the whispery voice laughed again, and she spun again, the laughter chasing her out of dreams and up to reality.

  Well, this was what she’d wanted, but she didn’t much like it because reality was dark and painfully cold on her mouth and chin, which she’d stuck outside the covers to breathe. Her teeth were chattering. She reached back.

  “Ain’t time to get up,” muttered Frank at her stirring, half-dreaming himself.

  “You got Sunday to rest,” said Emmaline. “You want to live ’til then, you get to work.”

  His low, rich laugh warmed her more than his body ever could. “Yes ma’am,” he said, and did as he was bid.

  And because they had set to, Emmaline missed that her only girlchild Pauline got up and walked the hall for awhile, disturbed by bad dreams of her own.

  SINCE THE SPIRITS had given her a full season’s warning, Em spent the time preparing for the White Lady’s arrival. This meant she finished up as much business as possible in the days right after the dream. The cold passed quickly, as cold was wont to do in Alabama. And as soon as the weather was comfortable again, Emmaline set Pauline to grinding all the herbs she’d laid in since November, then had her boy Sample put her shingle out by the mailpost, where it read HERBS AND PRAYERS, FOR ALL AND SUNDRY. This brought an immediate and eager stream of customers.

  First there was Mr. Jake, who’d gotten into a spat with his cousin over Christmas dinner and had wished death on him, and now was regretting it because the cousin had come down with a wet cough. Emmaline told him to take the man some chitlins made with sardine oil and extra garlic. Then she handed him a long braid of garlic heads, ten in all, from her own garden.

  “That much garlic?” Jake had given her a look of pure affront; like most men of Pratt City, he was proud of his cooking. “I look Eye-talian to you?”

  “All right, let him die, then.” This elicited a giggle from Pauline, who sat in on most of Em’s appointments these days.

  So, grumbling, Jake had bought the garlic from Emmaline and gone off to make his amends. People talked about Jake’s stanky, awful chitlins ’til the day he died—but his cousin ate some of the peace offering, and he got better.

  And there was Em’s cousin Renee, who came by just to chat, and conveniently told Emmaline all the goings-on in and around Pr
att City. There was trouble brewing, Renee said, political trouble; whispers in the church pews, meetings at the school gym, plans for a boycott or two or ten. Way up in Virginia, folks were suing the government about segregation in the schools. Em figured it wouldn’t come to nothing, but all the white folks was up like angry bees over the notion of their precious children sitting next to Negro children, competing next to Negro children, befriending Negro children. It was going to get ugly. Many evils came riding in on the tails of strife, though—so here, Emmaline suspected, would be their battleground.

  Then there was Nadine Yates, a widow who like Emmaline had done what she had to do to keep herself and her children alive through the cold and not-so-cold days. Nadine was afraid she might be pregnant again. “I know it’s a sin,” she said in her quiet, dignified voice while Emmaline fixed her some tea. For this one, she’d sent Pauline off to the market with her brothers; Pauline was still just a girl, and some things were for grown women’s ears only. “Still, if you could help me out, I’d be grateful.”

  “Sin’s makin’ a world where women got to choose between two children’ eatin’ and three children starvin’,” Emmaline said, “and you sure as hell didn’t do that. You made sure he wasn’t some fool who’ll spread it all over, didn’t you?”

  “He got a wife and a good job, and he ain’t stupid. Gave my boys new coats just last week.”

  A man who knew how to keep a woman-on-the-side properly. But then wouldn’t it be simple enough for him to just take care of the new child too? Emmaline frowned as a suspicion entered her mind. “He white?”

  Nadine’s nearer jaw flexed a little, and then she lifted her chin in fragile defensiveness. “He is.”

  Emmaline sighed, but then nodded toward the tea cooling in Nadine’s hand. “Drink up, now. And it sound like he can afford a guinea-hen, to me.”

  So a few days later, after the tea had done its work, Nadine dropped by and handed Emmaline a nice fat Guinea fowl. It was a rooster, but Em didn’t mind. She pot-roasted it with dried celery and a lot of rosemary from her garden, and the rind of an orange that Pauline had found on the road behind a market truck. Emmaline had smacked the girl for that, because even though ‘finding’ wasn’t ‘stealing’, white folks didn’t care much for making distinctions when it came to little colored girls. But Pauline—who was smart as a whip and Em’s pride—had glared at her mother after the blow. “Momma, I followed the truck to a stop sign and offered to give it back. I knew that white man wouldn’t want it ’cause I touched it, and he didn’t! So there!”

  Smart as a whip, but still just a child, and innocent yet of the world’s worst ugliness. Emmaline could only sigh and thank God the truck driver hadn’t been the kind who’d have noticed how pretty Pauline was becoming. As an apology for the smack, she’d let Pauline have half the orange while the boys got only a quarter each. Then she’d sat the girl down for a long talk about how the world worked.

  And so it was, as the brief winter warmed toward briefer spring and began the long slow march into Southern summer. By the time the tomato plants flowered, Em was as ready as she could be.

  “OH, MISS EMMALINE!” called a voice from outside. An instant later Jim and Sample, Emmaline’s boys, ran into the kitchen.

  “It’s a red lady outside,” Sample gushed.

  “Well, go figure,” Emmaline said. “Ain’t like you ain’t a quarter red yourself.” Her papa had been Black Creek, his hair uncut ’til death. “Not that kinda red,” said Sample, rolling his eyes enough to get a hard look from Emmaline. “She askin’ for you.”

  “Is she, now?” Emmaline turned from the pantry and handed Sample a jar of peach preserves. “Open that for me and you can have some.” Delighted to be treated like a man, Sample promptly sat down and began wrestling with the tight lid.

  “I don’t like this one,” said Jim, and since Jim was her artist—none of the dreaming in him, but he saw things others didn’t—Emmaline knew the time had come. She wiped her hands on a cloth and went out onto the porch to meet the White Lady.

  She smelled the lady before she saw her: a thick waft of magnolia perfume, too cloying to be quite natural. Outside, the perfume wasn’t as bad, diminished and blended in among the scents of Em’s garden and the faint sulfurous miasma that was omnipresent in Pratt City on still days like this—that from the Village Creek, polluted as it was with nearly a century’s worth of iron and steel manufacturing waste. The woman to whom the perfume belonged stood on the grassy patch in front of Em’s house, fastidiously away from the red dirt path that most people walked to reach her front porch. Why, this lady was just as pretty as a flower in a full-skirted dress of cotton print, yellow covered in white-and-green lilies. No crinoline, but nearly as old-fashioned, with layers separated by bunched taffeta and edged in lace. Around the heartshaped bodice, her skin was white as pearl—so white that Em figured she’d have burned up in a minute if not for the enormous parasol positioned over her head. And here was why Sample had called her red: the confection of her hair, spun into an elegant chignon behind her head and topped with a crown of white flowers, was nearly as burgundy as good wine.