Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements

by Walidah Imarisha

  she gathered these troubled spoils with her net, clamping her mouth down against the lie “I told you so,” cause who had she told? and even now, as more kinds of police and coast guard showed up, what was there to say?

  something impossible was happening.

  she felt bad for these hipsters. she knew some of their kind from her favorite bars in the city and had never had a bad experience with any of them. she had taken boatloads of them on her river tours over the years. it wasn’t their fault there were so many of them. hipsters and entrepreneurs were complicated locusts. they ate up everything in sight, but they meant well.

  they should have shut down the island then, but these island bodies were only a small percentage of the bodies of summer, most of them stabbed, shot, strangled, stomped, starved. authorities half-heartedly posted ambiguous warning flyers around the island as swimmers, couples strolling on the river walk paths, and riverside picnickers went missing without explanation.

  no one else seemed to notice that the bodies the river was taking that summer were not the bodies of detroiters. perhaps because it was a diverse body of people, all ages, all races. all folks who had come more recently, drawn by the promise of empty land and easy business, the opportunity available among the ruins of other peoples’ lives.

  she wasn’t much on politics, but she hated the shifts in the city, the way it was fading as it filled with people who didn’t know how to see it. she knew what was coming, what always came with pioneers: strip malls and sameness. she’d seen it nuff times.

  so even though the river was getting dangerous, she didn’t take it personally.

  she hated strip malls too.

  then something happened that got folks’ attention.

  • • •

  the mayor’s house was a mansion with a massive yard and covered dock on the river, overlooking the midwestern jungle of belle isle, and farther on, the shore of gentle canada.

  this was the third consecutive white mayor of the great black city, this one born in grand rapids, raised in new york, and appointed by the governor. he’d entered office with economic promises on his lips, as usual, but so far he had just closed a few schools and added a third incinerator tower to expand detroit’s growing industry as leading trash processor of north america.

  the mayor had to entertain at home a few times a year, and his wife’s job was to orchestrate elegance using the mansion as the backdrop. people came, oohed and aahed, and then left the big empty place to the couple. based on the light patterns she observed through the windows on her evening boat rides, she suspected the two spent most of their time out of the public eye happily withdrawn to opposite wings.

  she brought the boat past the yard and covered dock every time she was out circling the island looking for sunset. as the summer had gone on, island disappearances had put the spook in her completely, and she circled farther and farther from the island’s shores, closer and closer to the city.

  which meant that on the evening of the mayor’s august cocktail party, she was close to his yard. close enough to see it happen.

  dozens of people coated the yard with false laughter, posing for cameras they each assumed were pointed in their direction. members of the press were there, marking themselves with cameras and tablets and smartphones, with the air of journalists covering something relevant. the mayor was aiming for dapper, a rose in his lapel.

  as she drifted through the water, leaving no wake, the waves started to swell erratically. in just a few moments, the water began thrashing wildly, bucking her. it deluged the front of her little boat as she tried to find an angle to cut through. looking around, she saw no clear source of disruption, just a single line of waves moving out from the island behind her, clear as a moonbeam on a midnight sea.

  she doubled the boat around until she was out of the waves, marveling at how the water could be smooth just twenty feet east. she looked back and saw that the waves continued to rise and roll, smacking against the wall that lined the mayor’s yard.

  the guests, oblivious to the phenomenon, shouted stories at each other and heimlich-maneuvered belly laughter over the sound of an elevator jazz ensemble.

  again she felt the urge to warn them, and again she couldn’t think of what to say. could anyone else even see the clean line of rising waves? maybe all this time alone on the boat was warping her mind.

  as she turned to move along with her boat, feeling the quiet edge of sanity, the elevator music stopped, and she heard the thumping of a microphone being tested. there he was, slick, flushed, wide and smiling. he stood on a little platform with his back to the river, his guests and their champagne flutes all turned toward him. the media elbowed each other half-heartedly, trying to manifest an interesting shot.

  that’s when it happened.

  first thing was a shudder, just a bit bigger than the quake of summer 2010 which had shut down work on both sides of the river. and then one solitary and massive wave, a sickly bright green whip up out of the blue river, headed toward the mayor’s back.

  words were coming out her mouth, incredulous screams twisted with a certain glee: the island’s coming! the river is going to eat all you carpetbaggers right up!

  when she heard what she was saying she slapped her hand over her mouth, ashamed, but no one even looked in her direction. and if they had they would have seen naught but a black water woman, alone in a boat.

  the wave was over the yard before the guests noticed it, looking up with grins frozen on their faces. it looked like a trick, an illusion. the mayor laughed at their faces before realizing with an animated double take that there was something behind him.

  as she watched, the wave crashed over the fence, the covered dock, the mayor, the guests, and the press, hitting the house with its full force. with a start, a gasp of awe, she saw that the wave was no wider than the house.

  nothing else was even wet.

  the wave receded as fast as it had come. guests sprawled in all manner of positions, river water dripping down their supine bodies, some tossed through windows of the house, a few in the pear tree down the yard.

  frantically, as humans do after an incident, they started checking themselves and telling the story of what had just happened. press people lamented over their soaked equipment, guests straightened their business casual attire into wet order, and security detail blew their cover as they desperately looked for the mayor.

  she felt the buoys on the side of her boat gently bump up against the river wall and realized that her jaw had dropped and her hands fallen from the wheel. the water now was utterly calm in every direction.

  still shocked, she gunned the engine gently back toward the mansion.

  the mayor was nowhere to be seen. nor was his wife. and others were missing. she could see the smallness of the remaining guests. all along the fence was party detritus, similar to that left by the swallowed hipsters. heeled shoes, pieces of dresses and slacks. on the surface of the water near the mansion, phones and cameras floated.

  on the podium, the rose from the mayor’s lapel lay, looking as if it had just bloomed.

  • • •

  the city tried to contain the story, but too many journalists had been knocked about in the wave, felt the strange all-powerful nature of it, saw the post-tsunami yard full of only people like themselves, from detroit.

  plus the mayor was gone.

  the crazy, impossible story made it to the public, and the public panicked.

  she watched the island harbor empty out, the island officially closed with cement blockades across the only bridge linking it to the city. the newly sworn-in mayor was a local who had been involved in local gardening work, one of the only people willing to step up into the role. he said this was an opportunity, wrapped in a crisis, to take the city back.

  she felt the population of the city diminish as investors and pioneers packed up, looking for fertile new ground.

  and she noticed who stayed, and it was the same people who had always been there. a
little unsure of the future maybe, but too deeply rooted to move anywhere quickly. for the first time in a long time, she knew what to say.

  it never did touch us y’know. maybe, maybe it’s a funny way to do it, but maybe it’s a good thing we got our city back?

  and folks listened, shaking their heads as they tried to understand, while their mouths agreed: it ain’t how I’d have done it, but the thing is done.

  she still went out in her boat, looking over the edges near the island, searching inside the river, which was her most constant companion, for some clue, some explanation. and every now and then, squinting against the sun’s reflection, she’d see through the blue, something swallowed, caught, held down so the city could survive. something that never died.

  something alive.

  Evidence

  Alexis Pauline Gumbs

  By reading past this point you agree that you are accountable to the council. You affirm our collective agreement that in the time of accountability, the time past law and order, the story is the storehouse of justice. You remember that justice is no longer punishment. You affirm that the time of crime was an era of refused understanding and stunted evolution. We believe now in the experience of brilliance on the scale of the intergalactic tribe.

  Today the evidence we need is legacy. May the public record show and celebrate that Alandrix consciously exists in an ancestral context. May this living textual copy of her digital compilation and all its future amendments be a resource for Alandrix, her mentors, her loved ones and partners, her descendents, and her detractors to use in the ongoing process of supporting her just intentions.

  We are grateful that you are reading this. Thank you for remembering.

  With love and what our ancestors called “faith,”

  the intergenerational council of possible elders

  Exhibit A

  Excerpt from Drix’s Lecture Capsule: “The Black Feminist Time Travel of Self in the Twenty-First Century BSB [Before Silence Broke] Era”

  “Therefore self should be understood as a vessel open to time and fueled by presence, where presence is as multiple as it is singular. This is what black feminist scientists called ‘integrity,’ a standard for affirming the resonance of presence across time, where action was equal to vision embodied through variables. Our ancestors reflect this reality in the self-inscribing letter process evidenced in algorithmic email retrievals from a twenty-first-century palimpsest called google. It is unclear, however, whether the authors of emails wrote them in order to remember or in order to not have to remember. Can you hear me?”

  Exhibit B

  Be Is for Brilliant

  Letter from Alandrix, age twelve, sent via skytablet during dream upload, third cycle of the facing moon, receipt unknown:

  Ancestor Alexis,

  I’ve heard about you. I’ve even read some of your writing. Everyone says I have an old soul, and I’m really interested in what it was like back when you lived. It seems like people were afraid a lot. Maybe every day? It’s hard to imagine, but it seems that way from the writing. I have to remember that no one knew that things would get better, and that even people who were working to make it happen had to live with oppression every day. I read your writing and the writing of your other comrades from that time and I feel grateful. It seems like maybe you knew about us. It feels like you loved us already. Thank you for being brave.

  I’m twelve and last year I did a project for our community about your time, the time of silence-breaking. I made a poster and everything and an interactive dance. A friend of mine did one on the second abbreviated ice age instigated by oil on fire, but I thought writing about the time of silence-breaking would be harder. The ice continents were in your imaginations, the limits of your memory melted, you spoke about the hard things and you could see your own voices. It must feel almost like a force of nature when you live. I’m 12 and you would have thought of me as part of your family, even though now we do family differently; we have chosen family now, so maybe we would just be comrades if you lived here in this generation. Who knows? But I think that if you met me, you would feel like we have some things in common. I’m a poet and I use interactive dance so maybe you would choose me as family. I know I would choose you. You could have been at my wow kapow ritual that happened recently. In our community, 12 is an important accountability age. We named this ritual for how it feels in our bodies around now. Wow kapow. I think you used to call it the pituitary gland.

  We are here five generations after you and a lot has happened. A lot of the things that used to exist when you were 12 and even when you were 28 don’t exist anymore. People broke a lot of things other than silence during your lifetime. And people learned how to grow new things and in new ways. Now we are very good at growing. I’m growing a lot right now and everyone is supportive of growing time, which includes daydreams, deep breaths, and quiet walks. No one is impatient while anyone else is growing. It seems like people are growing all the time in different ways. It was great to learn about you and a time when whole communities decided to grow past silence. It is hard to read about the fact that sexual abuse, what we would now call the deepest violation of someone else’s growing, used to happen all the time. It is hard to imagine what it felt like for people to walk around with all that hurt from harming and being harmed. But I can tell from the writing that people were afraid so much. History was so close. But the amazing thing is how people spoke and wrote and danced anyway. Imagine being afraid to speak.

  Anyway. I wanted to say thank you. Now in the 5th generation since the time of the silence breaking we are called hope holders and healers. There are still people doing a lot of healing, but it seems like generation after generation people got less and less afraid. People took those writings and started to recite them and then another generation hummed their melodies and then another generation clicked their rhythms and then another generation just walked them with their feet and now we just breathe it, what you were saying before about how love is the most powerful thing. About how everything and everyone is sacred.

  I read a really old story where the character believed that time travel was dangerous because if you change one thing in the past the whole future changes and then you might never get born. I am still here writing this though so I think it’s okay to tell you that everything works out. That it’s okay. And it’s not easy all the time, not even here, because so much has been broken, besides silence, but it is possible, it does feel possible. My friends and I feel possible all the time. So when you get afraid to speak, remember that you all were part of us all learning how to just do it. And most . . . take it for granted. Except poets like me. I remember you. I feel it. Wow. Kapow.

  love,

  alandrix

  Exhibit C

  Notes from Drix (age twenty-five), dissertation research notebooks on the time that silence broke:

  found as a zoomed-in image of a stained subway cave:

  a.k.a.

  the writing on the wall

  “Wait for the time when blood is all we have left to write with,” they said, first in a blog post, then in circulated emails, then on scraps of cloth, then scrawled on the remaining walls, then in dirt when they could find it at the end. “Wait for the time … when a woman must eat her own sorcery to bleed the ink of her existence. Let her write it and leave it. Let her call it future.”

  So I waited. And when I couldn’t wait any more I waited twenty-eight more days. If you can read this, I am evidence. We had been wrong all along. Blood is not money. Money is not food. The anonymous prophets were right. We cannot afford our own blood.

  As I write this, the air is thick with our failure. And I am alone.

  Remember us and heal.

  Note: Archaeologists say that this engraving came slightly earlier than the other markings all over the planet in small mostly unrecorded places spelled: love love love love love love love love.

  Note: According to quantum archaeologists with bone echo data there was more than
one person who thought she was the last person on earth. It seems to me that this one had the right timing cycle and materials to write on the wall.

  Note: Clearly many aboveground people didn’t know about the underground people at this point. This cave writer may have had an inkling because she moved toward a cave that had an entrance to the underground system of root communication embedded deeply.

  Note: The historians of the underground people in the transitional time refer to the time the silence broke as their vindication for going underground, but may it not have been that their retreat also caused the silence to break the people who were left?

  Note: Unless we find another record, this is our only witness account of the time that the silence broke, but recent historiographic interventions have begun to refer to something they call the “long broke open” which includes the oceanlogging of the digital infrastructure, the shrinking of populatable land and many other factors that they would argue have a causal relationship to the silence breaking.

  Questions: What if I can never find evidence of what the people did to break the silence? Am I looking to the past in vain? Am I depending on evidence to confirm what my soul has evidence enough for?

  Exhibit D

  Found on Drix’s wall at sixteen, rare paper artifact of a printed poem duplicate by Alexis Pauline Gumbs circa twenty-first-century BSB:

  in my dream

  my ancestors are written on the walls

  lipstick leavings

  gold pen graffiti

  strips of magazine paper

  wheatpasted faces

  these must be the ventricles

  wind blows through

  shifting and caressing

  the slapstick lovings

  the glitter leftovers

  the mimeographed urgency

  the necessary flyness

  i must be standing

  inside my own heart

  tagged with the evidence

  of life living itself

  i must be walking