by Terry Bisson
Yasmin’s husband, Leon, had been killed in space five years before, on the return from the first Mars flyby. In Africa this summer, as part of the antiquities team for the Olduvai extension of the Great Rift Expressway, it had seemed especially ironic to Yasmin that she was relocating the graveyards of people who had tied their children’s braids a hundred thousand years before; she was repairing the pots they buried their loved ones with, while the father of her child, the comrade of her days, the lover of her nights, hadn’t even left her with a body to bury. The accident, a welding line break, had happened during an EVA, in deep space, in slow motion: the whole world listening across a hundred sixty million miles while Leon, spinning irretrievably away from the ship, assessed the damage for his comrades, outlined the fix (he was Chief Engineer), and said farewell. Farewell. Harriet was eight. Leon was so far away that he had already been dead for 14.5 minutes when he said goodbye to her and Yasmin.
It had broken the child’s heart, but broken hearts children get over with. It had left Yasmin alone, and afraid of the night sky. She couldn’t stand to look at the stars. Where was Leon in all that cold splendor? She hated the shroud-like Milky Way, or in Africa, the Southern Cross; she hated the million brilliant stars looking like candles in a graveyard endlessly deep. Of course, she knew it was morbid. For five years she had never told anyone, not even Harriet, why she stayed inside at night: with Leon gone there was no one to tell. Until last summer. And she had told Ntoli not because they were lovers (she had had lovers) but because he was old enough, in his spirit, to understand. He had that formal southern African fashion of answering a touch with a story, a story with a touch. In the traditional fishing villages east of the Cape, he said, when a man was lost at sea his belongings were buried so that the Earth would not forget him.
His own father was buried so.
Harriet scanned the vid down farther; she could tell by the way her mother sat holding her shoulders that she could hear. She clicked through the menu. Land reclamation in Europe was going well. In Timor they were farming the sea. The Lion was in sub-Deimos orbit, where the crew was programming the great ramwings, preparing to descend. Click, click. “Like the cellular memory of a limb that has been lost to evolution,” the vid explained, “the pseudo-wings align and guide the ship in an imitation of flight appropriate for the rarified air of the red planet.”
Harriet was still young enough, at thirteen, to understand remembering something she’d never had. Her father had once told her that gliding was easier the younger you were, because almost everybody remembers how to fly from their baby dreams. As they grow up they forget. Even after he became a space engineer, he loved gliding.
Harriet was going to start flying this year whether her mother liked it or not. The collective would back her up.
She punched off the vid, and went to the door and looked out onto the terrace. Her mother was asleep with the letters on her lap. Even though she had gotten along fine for the summer, even though she was almost thirteen, which was almost fifteen, which was almost sixteen, Harriet was glad to have her mother back. Even a cranky mother who was afraid of the sky. Harriet covered her with a blanket and took the letters inside to read. She reached down to take her shoes off, then remembered that she couldn’t. But she could: they flexed to help her. She stepped back into them and they put themselves back on. That was neat.
But if they were going to get pretty, she wished they would get on with it.
Yasmin was dreaming of Leon again. It was the same dream she’d had twice since coming back from Africa. Leon had been a gliding instructor in college, but he had never asked her to go up, understanding that she hated flying (which was why she’d taken the car from Nova Africa, after grinding her teeth for four hours on the triplesonic from Dar). But in the dream he didn’t understand anymore. He was like a stranger. He reached for her and she pulled away. He didn’t look right. He was wearing the space suit he wore in the stupid holo at his mother’s house, the one he was wearing right now, 14.5 minutes ago. Up there. I can’t go with you, Yasmin said. He got smaller when she said it.
I can’t go with you.
He got smaller when she said it.
She woke up in a cold sweat. No wonder: the clouds were gone, and the million stars were glaring down at her over the mountain. Trembling, she gathered up her blanket and went inside. It wasn’t true that the dead wanted you to be happy; they resented being dead alone. Harriet was asleep on the couch. The letters were at her feet, arranged in chronological order. One shoe had dropped off, and when Yasmin slipped it onto her daughter’s foot, the shoe helped out. They would be great for babies. Babies wouldn’t care how they looked.
She laid down with her little fire. She decided to tell Harriet that she was pregnant tomorrow, then tell Pearl the next day, when they were back in Staunton on the way home to Nova Africa. Watching the Mars landing while Pearl wept. Yasmin wasn’t looking forward to any of it.
It seemed I had a horse. Deihl wanted Sees Her gentled, so he didn’t mind me riding him night or day. That night I went to see Cricket out at Green Gables, the plantation two miles out of town where Mama had lived before she’d been bought by old Deihl. Like most town folk, I had mixed feelings about field slaves. They seemed ignorant, passive, backward; yet I was drawn to them inexplicably as if toward a dream I had forgotten and was trying to remember. There were almost thirty Africans at Green Gables, and they usually knew the truth of things, since the plantations were on the “peavine” that didn’t pass through town. Like a fool, I was as excited by the horse as by the raid, but Cricket soon set me straight. “Once we get freedom,” he said, “then we’ll have all the horses we want.” It began to dawn on me, that the fighting in Harper’s Ferry had some purpose besides making the white folks angry and providing me with a little excitement.
“I saw them this morning,” I said. “Honest. They were walking into town, all with guns, and one of them. . .”
“Hush,” Cricket said, rapping the top of my head with his big knuckles. “Learn to keep your big mouth hushed up.” I almost cried, he hit so hard. Cricket was three years older than I, and when you’re twelve that seems like a century. Cricket was my cousin; he was my mentor, my secret idol, the big brother I’d never (I then thought) had. All the black folks were talking about the raid anyway, so I didn’t see why I couldn’t. There was a granny woman at Green Gables, and she said that God would send a sign of deliverance, a fire on the mountain. Sure enough, as soon as it got darker we saw it, blazing like a star that had come down and landed right on top of the ridge. All the talking stopped. All you could hear was wood and leather hinges creaking and children being hushed as everybody came out of the cabins and stood there watching, watching, watching.
“Fire on the mountain,” the granny woman said. “They up there sharpening they swords.” Then she said that word again: freedom. It had a shivery ring to me, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. I was afraid of granny women anyway. I told Cricket, and he told me to hush up again, then put his arm around my shoulder as if to apologize, and we stood there watching. I was nervous; I was afraid the white folks would see us and know what we were thinking. I looked behind me to the big house, but the curtains were all drawn. The granny woman must have seen me look around, or maybe others had done the same. “They trembling just like in the Bible,” she said. “Trembling just like in the Bible.” The fire blazed on, and finally I went home.
July 25, 1859
Miss Laura Sue Hunter
Miss Colby’s School
Richmond
Dearest Lee Little Laura Sue:
While I agree with you, that Marriage is a betrayal of both Love and Freedom, I don’t agree about Latin. It may seem a dead language now, but Latin is the language of learned discourse everywhere, not just in Medicine, and as our Age of Science advances toward its Noon it will be read and written more, rather than less. Believe me, there are those who would remove it from a young lady’s curriculum. Do not make their work easier.
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I’m glad you liked the poems I sent. I’m not surprised that your teacher prefers Milton to Lord Byron. You must hardly expect one whose job it is to keep you in a condition below that of Man, and above that of the Slave, to commend to you those whose calling it is to show you the very Stars. I say this to encourage, not discourage, your studies; for while Miss Colby’s is not Harvard, it will afford you some knowledge, and while our father has many old-fashioned ideas, he is at least enlightened enough to educate his daughter, and that much can’t be said of many of his generation.
I can appreciate the Excitement there, but no, I do not regard Brown as a Great Satan, nor do I think it is the end of the world. Do you not think it only Just, that the Slave, who has such willing oppressors, should also find willing friends? I’m afraid, however, that Brown will pay dearly for his boldness and, yes, humanity when the army brings him down. I share these Sentiments, of course, with none in the family but you.
Your loving brother,
Thomas
Grave robbing! Brown and Tubman left behind no wounded, but four dead, who were ignorantly and drunkenly abused and mutilated, then buried in a common grave in the mud of the sycamore flats near the Shenandoah. A week later the graves were robbed. The story whispered around was that some among the black folk had given them a proper heroes’ burial. Well, that was not to be tolerated; the local authorities finally had something they could get their teeth (such as they were) into, and on the testimony of an ignorant “house nigger” called Jameson Jameson, arrested Granny Lizbeth at Green Gables and carried her into Charles Town caparisoned in chains. They tried to make her walk, but she wouldn’t, so they brought her in a wagon escorted by six militiamen in matching outfits on horses with matching Hall’s pattern muskets. It was quite a show for a 120-year-old woman. Mama all but tied me to the stove, but since Deihl needed me in the stable and was too busy to keep track of me, what with all the journalists and railroad men in town, I managed to get to the courthouse twice on the day she was tried. I watched them bring her in, and I watched the crowd outside the courthouse when it was all over. White folks had come from miles around, and one of them called out the proceedings from the courthouse door to all those who couldn’t fit into Charles Town’s tiny courtroom. You have to understand that these Virginians had never seen an African in a courtroom before; it was as unusual to them as trying a horse, and the fact that it was happening at all was an indication of the utter strangeness of things since Brown’s raid. Well, Jameson Jameson was brought in but now said he didn’t remember anything. The crowd in the courtroom booed. The prosecutor slapped Jameson, the judge admonished the prosecutor, and Jameson cried, and the crowd in the square laughed and ate fried chicken. As for Granny Lizbeth, they had three lawyers against her and only one for, but still she lost (as that old joke goes). After a one-hour trial she was found guilty of defacing a Christian grave (Christian, since two of the four dead were White men: I have always fancied that one of them was the boy I saw on the road) and sentenced to a public whipping, the first in this part of Virginia in almost twenty years, although in the more elegant Tidewater such traditions die more slowly. Well, Granny Lizbeth, who was approaching 120 (she claimed, and we believed such things in those days) and had even less in life to fear than the rest of us Africans (though mostly we did not know it yet), bared up her yellow teeth (the cryer said) and threatened to call up the “very fires from Hell” if any “man, jack, or devil” so much as laid a hand on her. The judge, looking over his shoulder, suspended her sentence “on account of her advanced age and decrepit condition” and sent her home in the same wagon, without the chains. She rode out with her chin in the air like a conquering hero, and no wonder. A few of the white folks in the crowd booed and hollered, but most were dead silent: like the judge, they were looking over their shoulders; like me, they were afraid of granny women. Such was the state of mind among the whites the first week after the raid. Scared but angry. Angry but scared. Governor Wise of Virginia said the question of the outlaws up on the mountain was a federal matter, since it had been a federal arsenal that had been raided. President Buchanan said it was a state matter, since the raiders had never left Virginia. Wise said they had come from Maryland. Governor “Know-Nothing” Hicks of Maryland said they had committed no crimes in Maryland that he knew of. Buchanan pointed out that the sabotaged railroad bridge terminated in Maryland. Hicks said Buchanan (who was sixty-seven) was too old to know with any certainty one end of a bridge from the other. Etc. It felt like summer with a storm in the air waiting to cut loose. I kept looking over my shoulder, too, like the judge, but I was looking for something else, though I didn’t know yet what it was. I helped Deihl with the horses twice a day and helped Mama with her kitchen, both of which chores had fairly doubled. The Harper’s Ferry railroad bridge was still not fixed, and in the meantime eastbound as well as northbound trains were being routed through Martinsburg and Hagerstown, so Charles Town was getting all the traffic Harper’s Ferry used to get, plus its own. Not the Charleston you know, great-grandson, the great Nova Africa seaport, but Charles Town, a dusty little Virginia county seat where the idiocy of rural life reigned unchallenged. The town was filled with government men, railroad men, newspaper men, plus the usual slave brokers, cattle buyers, and timber appraisers: most of them with horses, the rest needing them, and many of them, at least the lower elements, turning up at Mama’s for cornbread and beans. The gentlemen and upper-grade government men ate at the Planters or at the Shenandoah in Harper’s Ferry. John Brown had been good for business. Meanwhile the fire on the mountain burned and the black folks said nothing: little to the white folks and even less among ourselves. Later that week an ignorant “house nigger” named Jameson Jameson was found with his throat cut. The next week came Iron Bridge.
The Blue Ridge at Harper’s Ferry is low but steep, tangled with laurel and stones, and split as if by a bread knife at the gap where the Shenandoah and the Potomac join together and slice through for the seaboard. After breakfast Grissom took Yasmin and Harriet for a tour. The museum’s inertial car was big enough, but Yasmin could tell Grissom wanted to drive the university’s, so she suggested it. It took them only twenty minutes to cover the steep streets of Harper’s Ferry. There wasn’t much to see. Floods and time had done what war had failed to accomplish, and except for the guests at the Shenandoah Inn, nobody lived below the Bolivar Heights—the bluff that edged the plain to the west. There were only the stumps and shells of brick buildings from the brief boom years before the War. The treasure of the town was not in its dank stone buildings but, as John Brown had so correctly noted, its strategic situation: cradled between two forked mountain rivers where they plunge through the gap in a mountain that was straight, smooth, and almost unbroken to the south, looking to Brown and Tubman like a spear pointing at the heart of the slave South.
There was nothing in Harper’s Ferry to indicate its place in history, except the museum. Most of the John Brown memorials, Grissom told Yasmin and Harriet, were fifty miles up the Valley near Roanoke, his captured city, where he fought most of his battles, died, and, it was said, was buried on one of the peaks.
But no one knew exactly which one. “One of the interesting things about your great-grandfather’s paper is the light he sheds on that subject.” Grissom took a holo of his two visitors standing in front of the old engine house, where Brown had locked up his hostages, and they headed east for Charles Town.
The three of them sat in the wide front seat, Harriet in the middle. She seemed in a better mood, Yasmin noticed. Perhaps it was the shoes: they were no more colorful and the soles were still thick, but they had stretched a little up her ankles in a graceful curve.
Grissom stepped on the gas pedal, easing the big machine up to one hundred, enjoying the smooth rumble of the hydrogen-fired internal-combustion eight. The inertials, which ran on electric flywheel motors, made only a hum that barely changed in pitch or volume; with a top speed of ninety-five, they were steady, cheap, and s
afe. But unexciting. This magnificent antique roared like a corn picker when it was opened up.
“It’s wonderful,” Grissom said. “Do you drive it all the time?”
Yasmin laughed and shook her head. “The university keeps it for special occasions. I only got it because the motor pool manager’s father was a friend of my great-grandfather’s, and he convinced the school that it would be appropriate for the trip.”
“And because she’s afraid to fly,” Harriet chimed in.
“I will fly. I just don’t like to. I flew back from Africa.”
“Gritting your teeth all the way,” Harriet said.
“Still.”
“I think driving is boring,” Harriet said. “You can’t see anything but bugs and sticks.”
“Well, it’s not boring to me,” Grissom said, easing on up to 120. “I drove one of these in Chicago when I was a kid. I worked one summer for a millionaire out in Evanston. Speaking of the past, did you read the letters?”
“Most of them,” Yasmin said. She remembered going to sleep with them on her lap. As always, when she remembered her recurring dream, her heart leaped up in her breast, as if someone had come for it: then it fell back, disappointed. “What a sad story,” she said.