When I was seven, I asked her if the ocean could kill me.
“There’s no ocean here. We made it up, Rosie.”
That made no sense. I saw it there on the screen, big enough to surround the ship, like liquid, tangible space, a space that could chase you down the street and surround you. She took me down to the soundstage on Eight Deck, where they were filming a movie called Serena. I know now they were still triaging, filming every important movie to the best of their recollection, eight years out from the Blackout, based on scripts rewritten from memory in those first desperate years. Those are the only versions I’ve ever known.
She showed me how a sea was not a sea, a sky was not a sky. I got to sit on a boat that was not a boat, and in doing so learn what a boat was.
“Why are you crying, mama?” I asked her later that evening, wandering from my bunk to my parents’ bed.
My father picked me up and squeezed me tight. “She’s crying about something she lost.”
“I’m not tired. Can we watch the movie again?”
We sat and watched my young mother as she met and fell in love with someone else, someone pretend. As they raced a rush of water that I had already been assured would never threaten me or my family. As the ship sank —it’s not real, there’s no sea, nothing sinks anymore— and the lifeboats disappeared and the two lovers were forced to huddle together on a floating door until their dawn rescue.
◉ ◉ ◉
When I was sixteen, my mother joined a cult. Or maybe she started it; NewTime is as direct a rebuttal to my grandmother’s mission as could exist. They advocated erasing the entertainment databases again, forever, in the service of the species.
“We’re spending too much creative energy recreating the things we carried with us,” she said. I listened from my bunk as she calmly packed her clothes.
“You’re a Shakespearean! You’re supposed to recreate.” My father never raised his voice either. That’s what I remembered most about their conversation afterward: how neither ever broke calm.
“I was a Shakespearean, but more than that, I’m an actress. I want new things to act in. Productions that speak to who we are now, not who we were on Earth. Art that tells our story.”
“You have a family.”
“And I love you all, but I need this.”
The next morning, she kissed us both goodbye as if she was going to work, then left with the NewTime for Fourteen Deck. I didn’t know what Advisory Council machinations were involved in relocating the Fourteen Deck families to make room for an unplanned community, or what accommodations had to be made for people who opted out of jobs to live a pure artistic existence. There were times in human history where that was possible, but this wasn’t one of them. Those are questions I asked later. At that moment, I was furious with her.
I don’t know if I ever stopped being angry, really. I never went to any of the original plays that trickled out of the NewTime; I’ve never explored their art or their music. I never learned what we looked like through their particular lens. It wasn’t new works I opposed; it was their idea they had to separate themselves from us to create them. How could anything they wrote actually reflect our experience if they weren’t in the community anymore?
They never came back down to live with the rest of us. My mother and I reconciled when I had Natalie, but she wasn’t the person I remembered, and I’m pretty sure she thought the same about me. She came down to play with Nat sometimes, but I never left them alone together, for fear the separatist idea might rub off on my kid.
The night I saw Natalie’s short-lived band perform, the night I hid in the darkness all those years ago so she wouldn’t get mad at me for coming, it wasn’t until I recognized “Wind Will Rove” that I realized I’d been holding my breath. Theirs wasn’t a NewTime rejection of everything that had gone before; it was a synthesis.
◉ ◉ ◉
“Wind Will Roam”
Historical Re-enactment: Akona Mvovo as Will E. Womack:
My aunt cleaned house for some folks over in West Hollywood, and they used to give her records to take home to me. I took it all in. Everything influenced me. The west coast rappers, but also Motown and pop and rock and these great old-timey fiddle records. I wanted to play fiddle so bad when I heard this song, but where was I going to get one? Wasn’t in the cards.
The song I sampled for Wind Will Roam - this fiddle record “Wind Will Rove” - it changed me. There’s something about the way the first part lifts that moves me every time. I’ve heard there’s a version with lyrics out there somewhere, but I liked the instrumental, so I could make up my own words over it. I wrote the first version when I was ten years old. I thought “rove” sounded like a dog, so I called it “Wind Will Roam,” about a dog named Wind. I was a literal kid.
Second version when I was fifteen, I don’t really remember that one too well. I was rapping and recording online by then, so there’s probably a version out there somewhere. Don’t show it to me if you find it. I was trying to be badass then. I’d just as soon pretend it never existed.
I came back to Wind Will Rove again and again. I think I was twenty-five when I recorded this one, and my son had just been born, and I wanted to give him something really special. I still liked “Wind Will Roam” better than “Wind Will Rove,” ’cause I could rhyme it with “home” and “poem” and all that.
◉ ◉ ◉
(sings)
The wind will roam
And so will I
I’ve got miles to go before I die
But I’ll come back
I always do
Just like the wind
I’ll come to you.
We might go weeks without no rain
And every night the sun will go away again
Some winds blow warm some winds blow low
You and me’ve got miles and miles to go
◉ ◉ ◉
I wanted to take something I loved and turn it into something else entirely. Transform it.
◉ ◉ ◉
The next OldTime started out in G. My grandmother had never much cared for the key of G; since her death we’d played way more G sessions than we ever had when she chose the songs. “Dixie Blossoms,” then “Down the River.” “Squirrel Hunters.” “Jaybird Died of the Whooping Cough.” “The Long Way Home.” “Ladies on the Steamboat.”
Harriet called a break in the third hour, and said when we came back we were going to do some D tunes, starting with “Midnight on the Water.” I knew the sequence she was setting up: “Midnight on the Water,” then “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” then “Wind Will Rove.” I was pretty sure she did it for me; I think she was glad to have me back in the second row and punctual.
Most stood up and stretched, or put their instruments down to go get a snack. A few fiddlers, myself included, took the opportunity to cross-tune to DDAD. These songs could all be played in standard tuning, but the low D drone added something ineffable.
When everybody had settled back into their seats, Harriet counted us into the delicate waltz time of “Midnight on the Water.” Then “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” dark and lively. And then, as I’d hoped, “Wind Will Rove.”
No matter how many times you play a song, it isn’t the same song twice. I was still thinking about Nelson’s graffiti, and how the past had never felt like a lie to me at all. It was a progression. “Wind Will Rove” said we are born anew every time a bow touches fiddle strings in an OldTime session on a starship in this particular way. It is not the ship nor the session nor the bow nor the fiddle that births us. Nor the hands. It’s the combination of all of those things, in a particular way they haven’t been combined before. We are an alteration on an old, old tune. We are body and body, wood and flesh. We are bow and fiddle and hands and memory and starship and OldTime.
“Wind Will Rove” spoke to me, and my eyes closed to
feel the wind the way my grandmother did, out on a cliff above the ocean. We cycled through the A part, the B part three times, four times, five. And because I’d closed my eyes, because I was in the song and not in the room, I didn’t catch Harriet’s signal for the last go-round. Everyone ended together except me. Even worse, I’d deviated. Between the bars of my unexpected solo, when my own playing stood exposed against the silence, I realized I’d diverged from the tune. It was still “Wind Will Rove,” or close to it, but I’d elided the third bar into the fourth, a swooping, soaring accident.
Harriet gave me a look I interpreted as a cross between exasperation and reprobation. I’d used a similar one on my students before, but it’d been a long time since I’d been on the receiving end.
“Sorry,” I said, mostly sorry the sensation had gone, that I’d lost the wind.
I slipped out the door early, while everyone was still playing. I didn’t want to talk to Harriet. Back home, I tried to recreate my mistake. I heard it in my head, but I never quite made it happen again, and after half an hour I put away my fiddle.
◉ ◉ ◉
I’d rather have avoided Harriet the next morning, but cancelling our standing date would have made things worse. I woke up early again. Debated showering to give her a different reason to be annoyed with me, then decided against it when I realized she’d stack the two grievances rather than replace one with the other.
We met in her quarters this time, up three decks from my own, slightly smaller, every surface covered with archival boxes and stacks of handwritten sheet music.
“So what happened last night?” she asked without preamble.
I held up my hands in supplication. “I didn’t see you call the stop. I’m sorry. And after you told me I belonged in the closer circles and everything. It won’t happen again.”
“But you didn’t even play it right. That’s one of your tunes. You’ve been playing that song for fifty years! People were talking afterward. Expect some teasing next week. Nothing else happened worth gossiping about, so they’re likely to remember unless somebody else does something silly.”
I didn’t have a good response. Missing the stop had been silly, sure, but what I had done to the tune didn’t feel wrong, exactly. A different wind, as my grandmother would have said.
“Any word on what wrong in the database the other day?” I asked to change the subject.
She furrowed her brow. “None. Tech said it’s an access issue, not the DB itself. It’s happening to isolated pieces. You can still access them if you enter names directly instead of going through the directories or your saved preferences, but it’s a pain. They can’t locate the source. I have to tell you, I’m more than a little concerned. I mean, the material is obviously still there, since I can get to some of it roundabout, but it really hampers research. And it gets me thinking we may want to consider adding another redundancy layer in the Memory Project.”
She went on at length on the issue, and I let her go. I preferred her talking on any subject other than me.
When she started to flag, I interrupted. “Harriet, what does ‘Oklahoma Rooster’ mean to you?”
“I don’t have much history for that one. Came from an Oklahoma fiddler named Dick Hutchinson, but I don’t know if he wrote—”
“—I don’t mean the history. What does it make you feel?”
“I’m not sure what you mean. It’s a nice, simple fiddle tune.”
“But you’ve actually seen a farm in real life. Does it sound like a rooster?”
She shrugged. “I’ve never really given it much thought. It’s a nice tune. Not worthy of a spot in the Memory Project, but a nice tune. Why do you ask?”
It would sound stupid to say I thought myself on a farm when I played that song; I wouldn’t tell her where Wind Will Rove took me either. “Just curious.”
◉ ◉ ◉
“Harriet’s grandson is going to drive me crazy,” I told Natalie. I had spent the afternoon with Teyla and Jonah, as I did every Friday, but this time Jonah had dragged us to the low gravity room. They had bounced, and I had watched and laughed along with their unrestrained joy, but I had a shooting pain in my neck from the way my head had followed the arcs of their flight.
Afterward, I’d logged into my class chat to find Nelson had again stirred the others into rebellion. The whole class, except for two I’d describe as timid and one as diligent, had elected not to do the new assignment due Tuesday. They had all followed his lead with a statement “We reject history. The future is in our hands.”
“At least they all turned it in early,” Nat joked. “But seriously, why are you letting him bother you?”
She stooped to pick up some of the toys scattered across the floor. The kids drew on the table screen with their fingers. Jonah was making a Tyrannosaurus, all body and tail and teeth and feathers. Teyla was still too young for her art to look representational, but she always used space in interesting ways. I leaned in to watch both of them.
“You laugh,” I said. “Maybe by the time they’re his age now, Nelson will have taken over the entire system. Only the most future-relevant courses. Reject the past. Don’t reflect on the human condition. No history, no literature, no dinosaurs.”
Jonah frowned. “No dinosaurs?”
“Grandma Rosie’s joking, Jonah.”
Jonah accepted that. His curly head bent down over the table again.
I continued. “It was one thing when he was a one boy revolution. What am I supposed to do now that his virus is spreading to his whole class?”
Nat considered for a moment. “I’d work on developing an antidote, then hide it in a faster, stronger virus and inject it into the class. But, um, that’s my professional opinion.”
“What’s the antidote in your analogy? Or the faster, stronger virus?”
Nat smiled, spread her hands. “It wasn’t an analogy, sorry. I only know from viruses and toddlers. Sometimes both at once. Now are you going to play for these kids before I try to get them to sleep? They really like the one about the sleepy bumblebee.”
She picked Teyla up from her chair, turned it around, and sat down with Teyla in her lap. Jonah kept drawing.
I picked up my fiddle. “What’s a bumblebee, Jonah?”
He answered without looking up. “A dinosaur.”
I sighed and started to play.
◉ ◉ ◉
Natalie’s answer got me thinking. I checked in with Nelson’s literature teacher, who confirmed he was doing the same thing in her class as well.
How wrong was he? They learned countries and borders, abstract names, lines drawn and redrawn. The books taught in lit classes captured the human condition, but rendered it through situations utterly foreign to us. To us. To me as much as him.
I had always liked the challenge. Reading about the way things had been in the past made our middle-years condition more acceptable to me. Made beginnings more concrete. Everyone in history lived in middle-years too; no matter when they lived, there was a before and an after, even if a given group or individual might not be around for the latter. I enjoyed tracing back through the changes, seeing what crumbled and what remained.
I enjoyed. Did I pass on my enjoyment? Maybe I’d been thinking too much about why I liked to study history, and not considering why my students found it tedious. It was my job to find a way to make it relevant to them. If they weren’t excited, I had failed them.
When I got home from dinner that night, when I picked up my fiddle to play “Wind Will Rove,” it was the new, elided version, the one which had escaped me previously. Now I couldn’t find the original phrasing again, even with fifty years’ muscle memory behind it.
I went to the database to listen to how it actually went, and was relieved when the song came up without trouble. The last variation in the new DB was filed under “Wind Will Rove” but would more accurately have been
listed as “Wind Will Roam,” and even that one recreated somebody’s memory of an interview predating our ship. If this particular song’s history hadn’t contained all those interviews in which the song’s interpreters sang snippets, if Harriet or my grandmother or someone hadn’t watched it enough times to memorize it, or hadn’t thought it important, we wouldn’t have any clue how it went. Those little historic recreations weren’t even the songs themselves, but they got their own piece of history, their own stories. Why did they matter? They mattered because somebody had cared about them enough to create them.
◉ ◉ ◉
I walked into my classroom on Monday, fiddle case over my shoulder, to the nervous giggles of students who knew they had done something brazen and now waited to find out what came of it. Nelson, not giggling, met my gaze with his own, steady and defiant.
“Last week, somebody asked me a question, using the very odd delivery mechanism of my classroom walls.” I touched my desk and swiped the graffitied walls blank.
“Today I’m going to tell you that you don’t have a choice. You’re in this class to learn our broken, damaged history, everything that’s left of it. And then to pass it on, probably breaking it even further. And maybe it’ll keep twisting until every bit of fact is wrung out of it, but what’s left will still be some truth about who we are or who we were. The part most worth remembering.”
I put my fiddle case on the desk. Took my time tuning down to DDAD, listening to the whispered undercurrent.
When I liked the tuning, I lifted my bow. “This is a song called ‘Wind Will Rove.’ I want you to hear what living history means to me.”
I played them all. All the known variations, all the ones that weren’t lost to time. I rested the fiddle and sang Howie McCabe’s faulty snippet of Windy Grove from the recreation of his historical interview and Will E. Womack’s Wind Will Roam. I recited the history in between: Windy Grove and Wendigo and When I Go. Lifted the fiddle to my chin again and closed my eyes. Wind Will Rove: three times through in its traditional form, three times through with my own alterations.
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