After that it was peaceable in the kingdom: sweet, smooth, with me in silks and jewels my kids worked two jobs to buy. Sympathy from Gerard’s colleagues, “He made your life a living hell.”
But where’s the joy in ruling when your most abject subject is in jail? I retired to my chamber in a cloud of thought.
When I came out my remaining subjects were all grown up. June, working as a supermarket checker, Gerry at State U. She blamed me for not being around to fix her SATs. He barked, “Get out of the manger, Mom. I’m in love.”
They made their lives, I think. They think I did.
While I was sleeping, my grown daughter Junie—my little Junie—picked up my staff and—ZOT, I am here.
See your mother come in the door in the green quilted coat that means she’s here for another extended stay, see her smile that lovably tentative, tender smile and wonder why when we do love her, we do LOVE her, these encounters are always so hard. Psychic space. A mother who is also a mother-in-law takes up so much psychic space!
Nuclear families are built on privacy. If a nucleus can shatter, our mother’s has fragmented, leaving her lost in the stars. We form our own. We are the new family here.
Is it her fault these encounters are so difficult? Ours?
She keeps coming back. We think every time: This time we’ll make it different, and discover that in spite of all our best efforts, it never is. Mothers, daughters. What are these patterns that determine our mutual future? When and how were they set? Is this loving estrangement really her fault? Mine? In spite of our best efforts she and I bring all the old freight to these meetings. What she said to us when we were little, what we failed to say to her.
And spoil ourselves wondering about the old patterns that it’s too late to change. Why it was always so hard.
Is it in our stars that it is this way, or is it in our genetic encoding? Do our daughters see their own futures coming in the door with the same loving, fearful eyes?
I whisper these questions to the woman in the cell next to mine but she is sick now, too sick to really answer.
When she speaks, it is to the eternal chain of mothers and daughters, leading from forever into eternity. I lay my ear flat against the chink in the wall, holding my breath so I can hear.
All we can do is love them, she says.
The prisoners speak.
MARILYN: You think I asked for this? Dingy cell with flaking stone walls and no comfort at night but the message that come in on toxic pipes? Lead pipes bring water and carry waste out of our cells—lead, when we had all the old paint stripped from our houses just to keep our babies safe. Morse code. H-E-L-L-).
I gave my children everything. Vitamins to keep them strong and lessons to make them accomplished and flash cards to get them smart, and if I brooded over their progress, who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t be enchanted by the genetic miracle: raw material to perfect. Pliable small people, look a lot like me. Speak the same language, members of the same club. We are them, yes? No.
My fault, for failing to understand the truth.
Mothers, do not be deluded. They may be cute when they’re little, follow you anywhere, do anything to please you, laugh at your jokes. You work hard to shape them, to do the right thing, but be aware. No. Be warned.
They are nothing like you.
Your children’s adult lives devolve into a litany of reproaches, a dizzying transport of blame.
“You used to make me wear terrible clothes. That green T-shirt. Those hideous pink shoes.”
“You asked too many questions. Always getting in my face.”
Or is it: “You never listened to me.”
“You made me eat mixed-up food.”
We used to talk about it when we lived in the world, we daughters who were mothers of small children of our own. We talked about our mothers. We talked about it a lot. We conspired. —Not going to get like that, we vowed. We colluded with our own daughters. —Promise to tell us if we start getting like that. And they vowed, —We will, we will.
On her mother’s seventieth birthday CSB accidentally washed the cake.
Contemplating her mother, EBM said: —There ought to be an island somewhere, surrounded by sharks.
Before our eyes, the Chateau D’If sprang into existence. We looked at it and marveled.
Remember, she was still in the world with us; the Chateau D’If was designed with her in mind, not us.
As long as she lived, we could maintain our position.
Now she is gone.
Now we are in the front ranks. And the Chateau D’if? Admit it. It was only ever a matter of time.
The prisoners speak.
ANNE: They’re yours, but only for a minute.
They grow up.
You get old. Maybe the worst crime is not the atrocities you committed in the kitchen—the pudding disaster. The casserole nobody would eat.
It’s not the wardrobe errors: “The other moms all wear jeans.”
Nor is it the social gaffe: “Why did you have to tell them that, Mom?”
I think the unforgivable sin is getting old.
Sooner or later you are the outsider, begging your daughters to suffer your presence in her house. Slip in gratefully and try to be unobtrusive. Hope to earn your keep by doing little things around the place. Pat the sofa pillows and put them just so. Scour the sink and while you’re at it throw out that dead plant. Do little favors and try not to make too much noise coming into a room.
“Mother, did you move my notebook? I can’t find anything!”
“Nobody asked you to straighten my dresser drawers, Mom.”
Don’t reason with them. Don’t argue. “But they’re a mess!” And if she and her husband are having a fight, go sit at the top of the cellar stairs.
You become aware that they stop talking when you come into a room. One afternoon you find them waiting for you. “We’ve loved having you with us, Mother, but it’s time to make some plans.”
They tried to erase me, but I have left traces. Signs so the world will know what happened here. A hairpin in her stocking drawer. A gift painting she will be afraid to take down. When they took me I put long claw marks in one of their walnut doors.
On Shark Island there is no time off for good behavior. There are only lifers here.
The woman in the cell next to mine has died. In the night I hear feeble tapping on the pipes and I move the cot and put my mouth close to the crevice in the wall. I murmur, What is it? Are you all right in there? The sound of her harsh breathing tells me she will never be all right. She dies with her mouth pressed to the opening in the wall. Only I hear her last lament.
—All I did was love them too much.
AT THE TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN MOTHER
In the Chateau D’If the management declares a day of mourning. Matched pairs of trustys lower the coffin into the fresh place prepared for it while the mothers grieve. We never knew her name but it is clear to the women marshaled here that in her own way, she stands for all of us. She is the past, present and future generations of mothers exiled here.
The unknown mother died without betraying her origins; she died without recanting; I did the best I could! She died without regrets and without repenting. She died in a state of invincible ignorance, innocent of the nature of her unknown sin.
The prisoners lament.
Oh.
Oh how.
Oh how much we love her.
Oh how hard we try to keep from going where she has gone
and oh, how we conspire with our own sweet daughters.
How delicately we tread the line!
Your daughter asks. “Is it being a mother that makes you crazy?”
You have spent your life proving that you have always been the same person. Therefore you dissemble. “If I’m crazy, I was born this way.”
When you are in a less vulnerable mode you usually say, “You’ll be a mother some day. Then you’ll see.”
The prisoners speak.
SUSANNAH
: One tough babe, I am, and she could reduce me to a jelly. Not going to be like that, never going to be like that.
Tales brought back by sailors: my daughter has a daughter of her own. In the gift packet allowed prisoners on high holidays, my daughter includes snapshots of her son and her new baby girl. They are beautiful together—my daughter and this small, new woman, her daughter, who bears my name. I look at the children’s faces and I see hers. Tears come too fast to swallow. We look alike.
Shark Island is for lifers. So is motherhood.
The prisoners speak.
MELANIE: This place is rough. The stones are cold and I don’t like it here. On my cot at night I try to figure out what I did that was so terrible, numbering my crimes.
Okay, I nagged them about their homework, for one. I bought them clothes they hated, which they told me later, and in spades. I made too much mixed-up food. Mushrooms. Onions. Yeugh! I gave them until the big hand reached the six to clean their plates or else.
I always said, “Why don’t you go outside and play?”
I loved them, God I loved them, I still do.
I’ve been saving stuff. Sharp things. One of these nights, I’m going to gouge out the cement from around the bars and pull them loose and I am getting out of here. The going will be slow; I’ll climb down the outside wall with bleeding toes and shredded fingertips. When I reach a point where I can swing out and avoid the rocks, I’ll jump.
And if I can elude the sharks …
SARAH: Not me. I know a better way out. A friend who never had children is waiting just beyond the barrier reef. She has a skiff. If I make it, I’m going to find the people who put me here. I’m going to grab my children by the shoulders and look into their eyes …
REBA: And I, I am going to feign death. When the guard comes in to hold the mirror to my mouth I’ll overpower her …
ANNE: And put on her uniform?
MARILYN: Or get work in the laundry room and hide myself in the bottom of a laundry cart!
Sunrise and moonrise race past in quick succession, a brilliant parade of time passing outside our cell windows. I look up and see new stars. I see novas burst and expire.
The future is written in their faces—the pictures my daughter sends on birthdays and holidays. Her daughter grows.
How quickly these things happen. How long our sentence here. How little time we had outside! Past and future, birthdays, Christmases, times of joy—we were only ever here.
The prisoners speak:
VAL: Since we’re all, er. Getting down here, I might as well tell you, some of us have been working on a tunnel. At the signal tonight we’re going out.
The devil’s advocate, I say to her, You may make it because right now you are a trusty, but the rest of us can’t. At night we’re locked down us in the cells.
VAL: No problem. While the screws were sleeping Peggy stole the keys. She kept them long enough to get impressions; she’s made duplicates. My cell. Sarah’s. Reba’s. Yours. Are you with me?
MELANIE/MARILYN: You bet.
ANNE: Count me in … I think.
REBA: Would you believe I’m standing guard tonight?
VAL: Then you can help us!
REBA: I can’t help you, but I promise to look the other way.
VAL: Okay, then. Everybody. Are you with us?
God knows I am tempted, but my blood is drumming with the recurring story. There is something I know without knowing how I know.
My heart stutters and my belly trembles. I can’t.
VAL: Amazing free offer and you can’t?
Someone I care about is coming. I know it. How can I explain this without explaining it? The grief and the terror. The sense of the inevitable that gives me such hope? I am polite, but evasive. —I can’t afford to leave here now.
REBA: What do you mean, you can’t afford to leave? You can’t afford to stay!
I tell them, Message I got. Tapped in on the pipes.
MARILYN: What do you mean, message you got?
New—prisoner—in—the—holding—pen.
I tell them because I am afraid not to tell them.
Unless I mark this with words it may disappear. —I heard it tapped out on the pipes. It’s the new prisoner.
She was allowed one phone call. Instead she took the silver dollar the children provide the internees for that single phone call, and gave it to the guard, who brought the news to me.
VALERIE: —Twelve hours and we’re free women! What’s one new prisoner more or less?
ANNE: Twelve hours and we’re out of here. What’s the matter with you anyway?
MARILYN: Free women! What’s the matter with you?
The mothers of shark island are offering me freedom that I can’t afford to grasp. I explain as best I can: She’s waiting down there, alone and scared because she’s new. They’re moving her upstairs tomorrow night. A few favors and I may be able to get her into the Unknown Mother’s cell.
My heart overflows. —We can whisper at night.
REBA: All that for somebody you never met?
I do not exactly lie but I am evasive. —I only said she was a new prisoner. New in a place she vowed never to come. But even with the best of intentions—you know. I tell them, I never said we’d never met.
I do not add: She looks like me.
A thief cuts the heart out of his mother to sell to the caliph, who has offered him a fortune for it. He throws her body aside and puts his treasure into a box. Eager to collect the money, the thief runs too fast. He trips on a rock and falls flat. The box slips from his hands and flies open. His mother’s heart rolls out. As he sits up the thief hears it crying, Are you hurt, my son?
Tonight the mothers of Shark Island make their break. At least they’ll try. They may even make it if the island is less secure than we think. If the escaping mothers survive the jump into the deep, treacherous channel …
And if they can outswim the voracious sharks …
Even if they do make it, nothing much will change.
Motherhood isn’t a job description, it’s a life sentence.
Let the others dodge the sweeping searchlights and the spray of machine gun fire. Let them struggle through the icy waves and drag themselves up on the shore and let them fan out in the nation like a legion of avengers, intent on …
Intent on …
She’s coming. They know it. She’s at the door. Soon she’ll ring the bell. Arrested by something they don’t know yet, our children quicken.
—Lover, did you hear something?
—No, I didn’t hear anything.
She goes to the door anyway/he shrugs on his bathrobe and goes to the door. Try not to let their voices sink. —Oh, it’s you.
See her come in the front door in the green quilted coat that means she’s here for another extended visit; see her smile that tentative, tender, heart-breakingly lovely smile and wonder why when we do love her, we do LOVE her, these encounters are always so hard.
Listen, my darlings, my colleagues, mes sembables, past and future:
These visits are hard, but they’re all we have of each other, me and you. And as for the future?
The future was only ever us.
Therefore I let the other escapees go, in hopes of a happy outcome, but as for me? I will spin out my story here.
Listen, there’s a new prisoner in the holding chamber, and I have sent down word that there’s an empty cell on the other side of mine and yes I can already hear her speak:
“Mom, for the time being can you pretend like you, like, don’t know me?”
“Oh love my daughter, my past and my future.”
Anything for you.
NNEDI OKORAFOR
The Palm Tree Bandit
Nnedi Okorafor is a novelist of African-based science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism for both children and adults. Born in the United States to two Nigerian immigrant parents, Nnedi is known for weaving her African culture into creative evocative settings and memorable characters. Oko
rafor’s short stories have been published in anthologies and magazines, including Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, Strange Horizons, and Writers of the Future Volume XVIII. A collection of her stories, titled Kabu Kabu, was published by Prime Books in 2013. Her novel Who Fears Death, won the World Fantasy Award and was a Tiptree Honor book. She is a professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Buffalo. “The Palm Tree Bandit” perfectly encapsulates what it means to subvert often patriarchal myths and folktales. It was first published in Strange Horizons in 2000.
Shhh, shhh, concentrate on my voice, not the comb in your hair, okay? Goodness, your hair is so thick, though, child. Now I know you like to hear about your great-grandmother Yaya, and if you stop moving around, I’ll tell you. I knew her myself, you know. Yes, I was very young, of course, about seven or eight. She was a crazy woman, bursting with life. I always wanted to be like her so badly. She had puff puff hair like a huge cotton ball and she’d comb it out till it was like a big black halo. And it was so thick that even in the wind it wouldn’t move.
Most women back then wore their hair plaited or in thread wraps. You know what those are, right? Wrap bunches of hair in thread and they all stick out like a pincushion. They still wear them like that today, in all these intricate styles. You’ll get to see when you visit Nigeria this Christmas. Hmm, I see you’ve stopped squirming. Good, now listen and listen close. Yaya sometimes wore a cloak and she’d move quieter than smoke.
In Nigeria, in Iboland, the people there lived off yam, and in good times they drank palm tree wine. Women were not allowed to climb palm trees for any reason—not to cut down leaves or to tap the sweet milky wine. You see, palm wine carried power to the first person to touch and drink it. Supposedly women would evaporate into thin air because they weren’t capable of withstanding such power. Women were weak creatures and they should not be exposed to such harm. Shh, stop fidgeting. I’m not braiding your hair that tight. I thought you liked to hear a good story. Well then, behave.
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