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

by Walidah Imarisha

  • • •

  How do you tell your ring-mother you’re pregnant? Especially when her son’s been dead five years. Especially when his name happens to be on the damn vid every day. Especially when you’re not married again. And don’t want to be. And she’s a Jubilation Baptist. And.

  Yasmin would worry about it later, on the way back south to Nova Africa, after Harper’s Ferry.

  After telling Harriet.

  They sat up not very late, the three of them, and talked of very little. Pearl was so uncurious about Africa that Yasmin wondered if she suspected something had happened there. Harriet went on and on about school. She had come to spend the usual month in Virginia with her granny; she had ended up starting school when her mother had been delayed two extra months in Dar es Salaam.

  Yasmin’s fingers were hungry to braid her daughter’s hair, but Harriet had cut it almost too short, in the Merican style. So instead, she gave her her present. Excitedly, Harriet unwrapped the box and opened it. An icy little silver fog came out. Inside the box, nestled in sky blue moss, was a pair of slippers, as soft and formless as tiny gray clouds, but with thick cream-colored soles.

  Pearl oohed and aahed, but Harriet looked puzzled.

  “They’re called living shoes,” Yasmin said, “They’re like the basket, only they change color and everything, and they never wear out. It’s a new thing. They’ll fit perfectly after a few days.”

  “Like yours?”

  “No, these are just regular shoes.” Yasmin held up one foot, clothed in a golden brown African high-top of soft leather that shimmered like oil on water. “Yours are special, honey. The living shoes are something new, just developed; you can’t even buy them yet. The Olduvai team helped get this pair from Kili especially for you. To apologize for keeping me over.”

  Harriet thought this over. So are they from you or them? she wondered. She picked up one slipper; it was warm and cold at the same time and felt creepy. They looked like house slippers.

  Why couldn’t her mother have brought her beautiful shoes, like her own?

  “The only thing is, they’re like earrings,” Yasmin said, kneeling down to slip the shoe on her daughter’s foot. “Once you put them on, you have to leave them on for a week.”

  “A week?”

  After Harriet went to bed, Yasmin sat up, brooding. “Don’t be discouraged,” Pearl said. “The child has missed you. Plus, even though she doesn’t say it, all this Mars business troubles her too. Be patient with her.

  “Now come over here, child, and let me fix your hair.”

  • • •

  Harriet got up early so that she could walk to school with her friends one last time. It felt funny to want and not want something at the same time. She wanted to get home to Nova Africa, but she would miss her friends here in the U.S. She waited with the girls on the street in front of the school, hoping the bell would ring, hoping it wouldn’t. The new shoes looked like house slippers with thick soles.

  “Harriet, did you hurt your foot?” Betty Ann asked.

  “My mother brought me these from Africa,” Harriet said. “They’re living shoes, so I can’t take them off for a week. They’re like earrings.”

  “They look nice,” Lila said, trying to be nice.

  “They don’t look like earrings to me,” Elizabeth said.

  “They gave my granny shoes like that in the hospital,” said Betty Ann. “And then she died.”

  “Oh, wow,” the girls all said. Harriet’s mother pulled up to the curb in her long university car, too early. The girls were used to the little inertial hummers, and the university’s Egyptian sedan was twenty feet long. Its great hydrogen engine rumbled impressively. Harriet didn’t tell them they were driving it because her mother was afraid to fly.

  Yasmin watched from the car while the girls traded hugs and whispers and promises to write and shell rings—all but Harriet and one other, white girls; all in the current (apparently worldwide) teenage uniform of madras and rows of earrings in the Indian fashion. No boys yet. If Yasmin remembered correctly, they lurked in the background at this age, in clumps, indistinguishable like trees.

  The precious living shoes she had brought her daughter looked shapeless and drab next to the cheap, bright, folded-over high-tops the Merican girls were wearing. Yasmin watched as Harriet tried to hide her feet. Well, what did they know about shoes out here in the boondocks?

  “What’s this?” Harried said, opening the car door and eyeing the doctor’s bag on the front seat.

  “This is your great-great-grandfather,” Yasmin said. “Let’s put him in the back seat. He won’t mind. He’s only twelve, anyway.”

  It was good to hear the child laugh. On the way down to the valley, Yasmin suggested to Harriet that after dropping off her great-great-grandfather’s papers at the museum in Harper’s Ferry, maybe they should spend the night. “It’ll give us some time to hang out together before we head back to Charleston and work and school. I can tell you all about Africa.”

  Harriet liked the idea. She reached back and opened the bag. It had a funny pill smell.

  “I knew great-granddaddy fought with Brown,” she said. “I didn’t know there were any secrets.”

  “Brown and Tubman,” Yasmin corrected. Why was it always just Brown? “And it was great-great. And he didn’t actually fight with them. And I didn’t say secret papers. The story is the same one you’ve heard all your life in bits and pieces. He just wanted the original to be in the museum. This is the actual paper that he wrote fifty years ago, in 1909. It’s like a little piece of himself he wanted buried there.”

  “Creepy.” Harriet closed the bag.

  “Oh, Harriet! Anyway, I couldn’t take it on the Fourth, since the dig wasn’t finished yet, and—what with one thing and another, I was held up in Dar. . . .”

  There it was. Yasmin smiled secretly, feeling the little fire in her belly. At this stage it came and went at its own pleasure, but when it came it was very nice. “So we’re going now,” she finished. “You and I.”

  “There was a big celebration on the Fourth,” Harriet said. “I watched it on vid.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me about Africa?” Yasmin said, searching for a way to begin to tell her the good news. How do you tell your daughter you’re pregnant? Especially when her father’s never been buried? Especially when. . . .

  “Why didn’t you ask me?” Harriet said.

  “Ask you what?”

  “Ask me to go. I could have taken the papers to Harper’s Ferry. Then they would have been there for the Fourth.”

  Yasmin was embarrassed. It had never occurred to her.

  “I’m his relative too. I was here the whole time.”

  The Martin Delaney motored past, but Yasmin didn’t race it this time. The high whine of the differential plasma motors sounded complaining, not joyful. She searched her belly, but the little fire was gone.

  • • •

  The airship looked like an ice cream sandwich, with the ice-blue superconductor honeycomb, trailing mist, sandwiched between the dark cargo hull below and the excursion decks above. While Harriet watched, the honeycomb blinked rapidly: the ship was making a course correction, and it existed and didn’t almost simultaneously for a few seconds. Then all was steady again. Weighing slightly less than nothing, and with slightly more than infinite mass, it sailed northward as unperturbed as a planet in its orbit.

  Harriet waved two fingers enviously as the ship glided way. From up there the world was beautiful. There was nothing to see from the ground but catfish ponds and wheat fields and country towns, one after another, as interesting as fence posts.

  She punched on the radio, double-clicking on the news, then double-clicking again on Mars. Until her mother gave her that look.

  “It’s not that I’m not interested, honey,” Yasmin said. “We’ll be back at your grandmother’s to watch the landing. I don’t want her watching it alone. I just don’t want to exactly hear the play-by-play until then, yo
u understand?

  “Sure.”

  • • •

  Two hours later, they were in Charles Town. Yasmin turned east at the courthouse toward Harper’s Ferry. The road ran straight between well-kept farms, some still private. The wheat was still waiting for the international combine teams, working their way north from Nova Africa; but a few local hydrogen-powered corn pickers were out, their unmuffled internal-combustion engines rattling and snorting. Yasmin saw a green-gabled house at least a hundred years old and started to point it out to Harriet, thinking it was the very one in the story in the doctor’s bag in the backseat, Green Gables. But no, hadn’t that one burned? Besides, Harriet was asleep.

  The shoes did look plain. There was something you were supposed to do with living shoes, to train them, but Yasmin couldn’t remember what it was. She sighed. Her reunion with her daughter was not off to a very good start. Oh well, things could only get better. Ahead, the Blue Ridge, blue only from the east, was red and gold. Neatly tucked under it at the gap was Harper’s Ferry, where the Independence War began.

  • • •

  By noon I had unloaded the fence posts while Deihl dickered and spat in Low German with the owner, and we started back with the new horse tied to the wagon; he was indeed a skittery character. His name was Caesar, which I spelled in my mind, “Sees Her,” for I had not yet formed that acquaintance with the classics which was to enrich my later years, and will I hope yours as well, great-grandson. The owner, a breakaway Amish, said he had bought the horse lamed from two Tidewater gentlemen passing through; it made a Southern horse nervous, he joked, to live so close to the Mason-Dixon line, which ran, he said, at the very bottom of the field in which we stood. He pointed out the fence row. Sees Her munched hay out of the wagon bed as we headed back south, and Deihl unwrapped the sausage biscuits Mama had sent with us. Deihl was stingy with words, but he shared a pull of cider from the jug he kept under the seat; he was no respecter of youth in the matter of drink, but who was in those days? I lay out in the back of the wagon with my head under the seat out of the sun and went to sleep. Deihl went to sleep driving, and unless I miss my guess Kate went to sleep pulling, which mules can do. I was dreaming of soldiers, perhaps influenced by the little band I’d seen before dawn; or perhaps my second wife was right when she said I had the second sight; or perhaps the Amish was right and Sees Her smelled abolition; certainly he was to live the rest of his life surrounded by the smell: the horse woke me up whickering nervously. I sat up and heard popping that I thought at first was Fourth of July firecrackers. We were on the Maryland side of the Potomac, near Sandy Hook. The railroad bridge to the west was burning, or at least smoking mightily. A train was stopped on the Virginia side, leaking steam, and men with rifles were swarming all over it. Every once in a while one of them let off a shot toward the sky. A soldier watching from the riverbank rode into town with us. Deihl didn’t waste words asking what had happened because he knew we’d be told with no prompting. The town had been attacked by an army of a hundred abolitionists, the soldier said. He’d been sent with a detachment from Charles Town to guard the railroad bridge, but too late. The mayor, who was pretty universally liked, was dead, and so was a free black man named Hayward, who worked for the railroad. The soldier though it was a great irony that a free “nigger” had been shot, since the attackers were “abs.” The papers were to make much of this also; but since almost half the population of the Ferry was n’African, and almost half of that free, or what passed for free in those days, I don’t know how it could have been otherwise. George Washington’s grandson and a score of other Virginians had been killed, the soldier said. He had a chaw the size of a goiter and spat into the wagon straw, and I kept expecting Deihl to straighten him out, but he didn’t. Coming past the end of the railroad bridge, we saw that the tracks had been spiked and two of the bridge pilings knocked over by a blast. The railroad workers were standing around looking either puzzled or disgusted, and one of them joined us for a ride across the wagon bridge into town. He’d been drinking freely. He spat into the hay too, and still Deihl said nothing. I remember watching him spit uncorrected and thinking: what’s this world coming to? Sees Her was tossing his head and whickering, but Kate was steady. In the town the hotel and several other buildings were still smoldering. There was a wild, scary smoke smell: the smell all of us in Virginia were to come in the next few years to recognize as the smell of war. There was no fighting, but armed men were all over the streets looking fierce, bored, and uneasy at the same time. I felt my black face shining provocatively and would have not hidden it but damped its blackness down if I could. The railroad men and the soldier both said “Kansas Brown” was behind the raid, as if the name had deep significance. White folks made much of Brown, though I had never heard his name nor had any of the slaves until that day, when he became more famous among us than Moses at one stroke, and not as “Kansas” or “Osawatomie” Brown but as Shenandoah Brown. The railroad man told how the hotel had been torched and in the confusion Brown and his men had retreated across the Shenandoah into the Loudon Heights, which is what we called the Blue Ridge there. They had fast-firing breech-loading Sharps rifles. Once in the laurel thickets, who would follow them? “Not the Virginny milisshy,” the soldier said, laughing. “They’re at the tavern a-soaking their wounds in gov’mint whiskey.” I will attempt no more dialect. The railroad man seemed to take the soldier’s words for an insult and sulked and spat, wordless from there on. The soldier’s cut was not altogether true, anyway, I found out later: four of the “Virginias” had been killed in the fighting before falling back, all upon one another. I felt a deep, harmonious excitement stealing over me, though I did not at the time truly understand the events or what they meant. Who did, Merican or n’African?

  7 Slightly edited excerpt from Fire on the Mountain (Oakland: PM Press, 2009).

  Homing Instinct

  Dani McClain

  “Greedy” is the word that comes to mind. As the announcement’s meaning sunk in, I got greedy for the 70-degree days in the middle of February and the way sunlight bounces off the leaves of jade green succulents no matter what time of year. How the air—even in the middle of downtown Oakland—smells like flowers (yes, and weed and sometimes urine). The options always presenting themselves: look toward the hills and see yellows and browns and the promise of a place where the wind blows a little less; or look toward the bay and see it glistening like a sheet of light, dotted with sails and bits of sky.

  I got greedy for things that likely wouldn’t be around much longer anyway.

  As I listened to Breslow speak, my mind wandered to the parties at the New Parish and, before that, Oasis, places where old Stevie Wonder jams and Chaka Khan remixes brought back memories of childhood. The Malcolm X Jazz Festival in East Oakland and the Ashby flea market, the same people always turning up at all the same places.

  When EO 3735 came down, I got nostalgic for the things around me. It should have made the decision easy, but it didn’t. Paloma, on the other hand, knew immediately.

  “I’m staying here,” she told me just moments after the press conference at which the executive order was announced. Because the situation was so dire, the president had said, everyone would have ninety days to reposition themselves. That was the word she had used: reposition.

  “They couldn’t even put it to a vote?” I said to Paloma, realizing that this would be the only conversation that mattered for the foreseeable future.

  “Why? So the people who still believe all that snow proves the climate isn’t changing can get on TV? If it had gone through Congress, we’d have to listen to their ignorant rants get equal time with the scientists and the people who won’t let their fear override what’s in plain sight.”

  We’d watched the speech together and talked it over from every angle we could think of once the president had answered her final question and walked offstage and away from the press corps.

  “I’m glad Breslow just went ahead and said, ‘Here’
s what’s up: figure out where you want to be and get there. And quit all this jumping on planes, trains, and automobiles all the time like your presence is so desperately needed at this meeting and that conference and this family reunion and that weekend getaway.’”

  Paloma was from Chicago but she knew her home was Oakland. It didn’t feel so cut and dry to me.

  • • •

  I walked home thinking that if the Breslow administration were smart, it would hire Paloma to do a series of PSAs. For the print ads, it could just be her face, serious and resolute, eyes staring straight ahead. The caption in bold, block text would read, “COMMIT.” For the online and broadcast versions, it could be her voice saying something like, “When you move”—and the phrase would hang in the air while you watched quick takes from footage of the latest disasters: a shot from the Outer Banks of North Carolina when they still existed, the wind whipping giant waves into the cottages and splintering their stilts to shreds—“you prove”—and now the stampede on the Venetian Causeway during the Miami Beach exodus—“that you don’t get it.” The now iconic images of people swimming in the streets of New Orleans would fill the screen as Paloma said, her voice heavy with disappointment and judgment, “You still don’t get it.”