The Lesson

by Cadwell Turnbull

  She opened her phone and went through her list of contacts. When she reached her brother’s number, she pressed call.

  “What’s up, sis?”

  “I need a ride to Gela’s grave tonight. Can you come get me?”

  For a moment, there was quiet at the other end of the line. “Grams know about this?”

  “Does she need to?”

  Another silence. “All right, what time?”

  “In an hour,” she said.

  “An hour?” He sighed. “Okay. See you in a bit. And be ready.”

  Lee put down the phone and immediately walked over to where her grandmother slept. She reached down into the bag next to the couch and pulled out her hat.

  • • •

  Derrick arrived within an hour. As she walked up to the car, she saw Mera sitting in the front seat. Mera turned and smiled. To Lee, it was like watching a statue come to life.

  “Hey, Lianna,” Mera said. “How are you?”

  “I’m good. You?”

  “I’m all right.”

  The reply surprised Lee. It was such a human thing to say, and it didn’t seem to fit with her understanding of the Ynaa. To be honest, any reply would have surprised her. “That’s cool,” Lee said finally, not knowing what else to say, and got in the car.

  “Strap in,” Derrick said.

  “Whatever, monkey brains,” Lee said, folding her arms. She looked out the window at what she now knew to be Alice’s Jeep, parked in the same spot.

  Derrick chupsed his teeth and put the car in reverse. “You welcome.”

  Lee had met the Ynaa ambassador only twice, both times when Lee caught the bus up to the Legislature to wait for Derrick to get off work. As she entered the office, Mera would smile and say hello before getting back to whatever she did at her desk.

  Lee would watch her.

  When Mera moved, she seemed perfectly human. Not like the others. She could have blended in wherever she went. She was quiet, but that wasn’t a big deal. Lee was quiet, too.

  When Mera wasn’t moving, however, it would get weird. She’d get really still—so still, you couldn’t even tell whether she was breathing.

  Derrick had once let slip that he thought Mera was there before the ships came. How had she managed to fool anyone back then, sitting still like that?

  Lee had asked once, after working up a sufficient degree of courage, “Did you used to do that when you were pretending to be human? Be still like that?”

  Derrick had looked up from his work disapprovingly. “Lee!” he whispered.

  Mera woke from her hibernation, and for a moment there was a flicker of surprise. “Yes.” And after a moment’s pause, “When I had to play dead.”

  “Oh,” Lee said.

  People had their theories about Derrick and Mera. Lee heard it from every direction. And worse, people were starting to ask her about it. “They work together,” Lee told people. “That’s all.” But she had a brain. She knew that wasn’t the whole story.

  “You don’t expect us to believe that,” said two of her younger cousins after church one day.

  “That’s their business, not mine,” Lee said, walking away.

  “Derrick’s behavior,” Lee’s grandmother had told her that same afternoon, “is an abomination. Unnatural!” Apparently, it was the talk of the congregation. There was always some shit the old heads at church were going on about.

  Lee had heard that word a lot growing up: “unnatural.” For many things. It hung oppressively over her. What was unnatural about loving someone? She never got a good answer on that. And as far as she knew, there weren’t any scriptures condemning interplanetary love affairs.

  “You mind us waiting for Lee?” Derrick asked as he sped up the little hill in front of Grams’ house.

  “No,” Mera answered. “Of course not.”

  Lee wished she could see Mera’s face. She tried looking in the side mirror but could see only her shoulder.

  “How you holding up, Lee?” Derrick asked.

  “What you mean?” Lee asked back, playing with the bill of her Yankees cap.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t ask this morning. Didn’t know it was a year already.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lee said. “Thanks for picking me up.”

  Lee glanced up to see Derrick looking at her through the rearview mirror. He was trying to read her face. She smiled and waved at him. He turned his attention back to the road.

  “Grams see you when you leave the house?”

  “Nah.”

  “She gon’ lose her mind when she wake up and you’n home.”

  “Grams gon’ be just fine.”

  “Hmm,” Derrick said, nodding his head and pushing out his lips. “Okay. If you say so.”

  Lee rolled her eyes. “You worried what she gon’ do when she finds out it was you who took me out the house?”

  Derrick didn’t say anything. He gripped the steering wheel tighter and flicked on the low beams. It was starting to get dark. Lee could look out the window and see the bats already in the darkening sky, swooping and swerving for their meal of mosquitoes and moths. She rolled down the window and felt the cool breeze hit her face. The wind blew into her ears, and it sounded like someone blowing into a microphone. Houses passed by on one side of the road, some still wearing blue tarps from Hurricane Irma. It had been years, and some people still had not fully recovered.

  The car jerked to the right as Derrick swerved to miss a pothole at the last second. The road was filled with them. St. Thomas: pothole capital of the world. Even an alien invasion couldn’t make her people get their act together.

  Lee swore as Derrick swerved around another hole.

  “The only time anybody drive in a straight line is when they’re drunk,” Derrick said.

  “And when they beating up their girlfriend,” Lee said quietly.

  No one said anything for a long while. Lee waited for someone to speak into the mike, but there was only the wind against her ears, like the sound of distant rolling thunder.

  • • •

  “Hey,” Derrick called as Lee was getting out of the car. “You need me to come with you?”

  Lee looked at Mera, sitting motionless in the front seat. “Nah, I cool.”

  “Okay, well, we gon’ be right here. Take your time.”

  Lee could see a small crowd already gathered by Angela’s grave, and another, much larger one closer to the graveyard entrance. As she walked, she read names and dates off the graves. Oliver Thomas. Died 1960. Michael Todman. August 2015. Rachel Aberdeen. 1945.

  Lee wondered how they made room for all the dead. The island had roughly fifty thousand people and only two decent-size graveyards. And centuries of dead folk. Soon, she imagined, they would have to stack people like dominoes. They had already done just that for family members. Some sites had three graves of concrete stacked one on top of the other. Lee wondered who would get the spot on top of Angela.

  As she approached Angela’s grave, she read the tombstone. Angela Mary Gifford. May 28, 2023. The words Beloved Daughter were etched in an attractive cursive into the gray marble tombstone. Below it, the carved outline of Angela’s face. Two bouquets of flowers were right next to the tombstone, a framed picture of Lee and Angela smiling, cheek to cheek, beside the flowers. Five people were gathered at the grave. Milton, Dian, Jessica, Angela’s mother, and a man next to her who must have been another family relative.

  Lee smiled at Angela’s mother. She only nodded and returned a brief smile, and then, as if Angela’s tombstone were televising important moments of Angela’s short life, her mother stared back down at the grave.

  “Who’s that with your brother over there?” Jessica asked.

  Lee looked over in the direction of the car, as if she didn’t know what Jessica was talking about. “Mera.”
>
  “Oh, snap,” Dian said. He opened his mouth to say something else.

  “If you like your teeth, you should keep it behind your lips,” Lee warned.

  “Yeah, yeah. Nice hat.”

  Lee didn’t respond. Angela had apologized when she gave Lee the hat. It was a gift, and a symbol of turning over a new leaf. “I know I been distant lately,” Angela had said. “I won’t be anymore.” She had died the following week. And all Lee had was this gift, the precursor to a stolen promise.

  From her location, Lee could make out some of the people over at the other graveside. She knew immediately that the larger group was there for Anthony’s one-year anniversary. They were a day early. No doubt, there would be another, larger remembrance ceremony tomorrow. Someone sang an old church hymn Lee didn’t recognize. But she did recognize the woman shaking in the arms of two men. Anthony’s mother.

  “You remember when Gela slapped that pahnah for lifting up her skirt?” Milton asked. “I swear, the whole of Building A heard that fetch.”

  “That slap was heard around the world, mehson,” Dian said.

  “Yeah, dehman.” Milton’s eyes had a faraway look. If Dian was hopelessly in love with Lee, Milton had it for Angela to the power of ten. “She was something else.”

  Lee looked up and saw that Angela’s mother was watching her, the same old familiarity in her eyes. “Come here, daughter,” she said finally. Lee went, and Ms. Gifford put her arms around her and began to cry.

  A long moment of silence followed as Lee tried to find words to say that might ease her surrogate mother’s pain. “I love you, Gela,” Lee said loud enough to carry to Ms. Gifford’s ears. “We miss you.” Silently to herself, Lee said, “I love you more than you know.”

  A raspy rendition of “Amazing Grace” started up from the other crowd and carried on the wind.

  Ms. Gifford held Lee tighter and trembled. Lee thought there was a message in that embrace that she could receive, so she found herself holding on tighter as well. It felt as natural as gravity.

  Several minutes passed in that peaceful embrace.

  A calm before a storm. Lee really shouldn’t have been surprised when it ended.

  When the singing from the other group cut off, replaced with the yelling of a dozen voices, Jessica was the first to turn. Her eyes widened. The chill of anticipation swept through Lee. Looking over Ms. Gifford’s shoulder to the other crowd, she needed only a moment to put it together.

  “Shit.”

  What the Universe Understands

  This would be the second time Mera got herself killed. It was July 1792. Cane season.

  Back when it was still the Danish Virgin Islands, Mera stood out on the sweltering fields of La Grande Princesse Plantation of St. Croix, cutting sugarcane with the other slaves.

  She looked out over the plantation as she worked. The hot air above the ground created a mirage effect, a world underwater, the ground and sky swirling together. Tamarinds hung from the trees, roasting in their shells.

  The sun-weathered slaves swung their sickles in rhythm. Swash, swish, swash. They sang along to the susurrant pulse, singing of places and lives past.

  A baby cried. The child’s mother worked across from Mera. The mother paused from her work to tend to the little boy resting near her on a piece of dried calfskin.

  “Come here!” yelled the white bomba watching over their group. He motioned the woman over to him, curving his index finger like a coiling snake.

  The mother went, staring up at him on his brown donkey.

  “Why you keep messing with that baby?”

  The mother was from an Akan tribe and only spoke Twi—a ship girl newly branded and seasoned. She stared up at him, frightened, saying nothing.

  “Well?” he said, getting louder.

  More nothing.

  He sighed. “Turn around, then.”

  The other slaves in Mera’s group continued their chanting song, their sickles moving in rhythm. But they kept their eyes on the bomba and the woman.

  Whap! The whip hit her on the forearm. She turned immediately with a whimper, her back now facing the bomba. Whap! Whap! Whap! She fell to her knees wailing, her voice echoing over the vast fields of cane.

  “Be quiet and get back to work!”

  The woman understood “work.” She got up, still moaning, and returned to her sickle. The sunbaked baby, as if inspired, joined his mother with a new bout of crying.

  Perhaps it was the gnawing rage that threatened to consume Mera. She had watched too many similar beatings, seen too many broken bodies pulled from their beds before dawn by the steady bleat of the conch shell to spend their days, from sunrise to sunset, with their backs bent into the endless stalks of cane. Or perhaps it was the memory of Siba.

  Mera dropped her sickle.

  “Hey!” the bomba yelled.

  She walked over to that bomba on his donkey.

  “What you up to, girl?”

  She kicked the donkey so hard in the ribs that it toppled over like a wooden chair caught in a strong wind, trapping the pot-bellied man beneath.

  The bomba screamed out, but she shut him up quick. She stomped on his neck hard, crushing all the inner workings. He gurgled and spat blood; his eyes rolled back in his head. A gentle breeze filled the silence. Only the trees talked.

  Then Mera walked off the field, past the astonished slaves and back to the slave village. She found her hut, with its wattle-and-daub walls and thatch roof, and stooped to get through the low doorway, disappearing into the dark, dirt-floored room within.

  A little after noon, while some of the slaves were still on break, Mr. Schimmelmann came with ten angry white men and called Mera out of her little shanty.

  “Get out here!” Mr. Schimmelmann yelled.

  She came out fast enough, and they shackled her and carried her out to a big locust tree near the plantation’s main road.

  Mr. Schimmelmann’s wife, the mistress of the plantation, was pregnant. He was not about to let any woman inspire an uprising, especially since his almost four hundred slaves outnumbered the whites twenty to one.

  He ordered another slave driver—since the dead one had forfeited the pleasure—to give the woman two hundred lashes of the whip. This one was black. He kept looking back at Mr. Schimmelmann until the plantation owner angrily ordered him to whip her right away. The bomba quickly returned to Mera. She stood completely calm, as uninterested in the events as if she had no involvement in them at all. The bomba cracked the whip twenty times against her dark, naked back, each stroke more furious than the one before. But her skin did not break.

  “Obeah!” said the bomba with the whip, panting like a winded dog.

  “Witch!” another yelled, backing away a few steps.

  A few men approached Mera at once. They stripped off the rest of her clothes and strung her up from the locust tree, wrapping the woven rope tight around her slender neck. Mera could feel the fibers as the rope tightened, a boa squeezing.

  Several white men pulled her body up to a decent height and then tied the rope around the tree trunk.

  Mera hung there with her feet swinging, her toes pointed and trying to touch the ground below. She watched the men as they continued to whip and curse her for her wickedness.

  “Devil!” said Mr. Schimmelmann as he spat out dry bristles of sugarcane. Red-faced, he bit into the cane stalk again and chewed, subduing his nerves, beads of sweat collecting on his upper lip.

  The plantation was in an uproar. Other slaves came to see the obeah woman who would not die. Two Yoruba tribeswomen conversed in excited whispers. The white men hooted and hollered. Schimmelmann’s wife and daughters stayed inside their majestic plantation house, staring out from behind white-­curtained windows.

  Mera continued to watch the whole thing as if she weren’t a part of it. At one point, she lifted h
er hands over her head and pulled herself up just enough to laugh at them. Eventually, she got bored and let her head hang off to the side. She closed her eyes and was very still. She didn’t even bother to move as they continued to whip her.

  Hours after sunset, when everyone had gone off to bed, she opened her eyes again. No one had dared pull her down. She lifted her hands over her head again and tore the rope. She landed on her feet and started walking down the dirt path to the sea, feeling the salt wind against her naked body.

  She would have to repeat this process again. In a decade or two, she would go to another island and impersonate a slave fresh off the newest ship in from the West African coast.

  • • •

  When Mera came in to work the morning before she would accompany Derrick to the graveyard, he was not there.

  She didn’t think anything of it at first. But then an hour passed. She called him on his cell, but he didn’t answer. She left him a voicemail.

  Mera knew he was avoiding her. It was obvious why.

  To pass the time, she busied herself answering calls and emails. The emails were easier to do. She gave carefully worded answers to people’s concerns. Many were about the recent unrest. Protests were a regular occurrence now, coming up on the anniversary of a young boy who had been killed. Many of the people emailing the office wanted to be assured that the Ynaa would not react aggressively to the situation.

  Mera lingered on one email in particular, from a mother of three boys. The woman begged Mera to speak on the behalf of humans, ask the Ynaa not to respond to the unrest by murdering any more young men.

  My boys are good, she wrote. They deserve a full life. All our boys do.

  There was a message between the lines of her message: the acknowledgment that most of the killings by the Ynaa had been of men and boys, and the deeper acknowledgment that those killed had been the more aggressive of the locals, engaging in outright altercations with the Ynaa.

  As Mera sat puzzling over a reply, she spoke through her mind to her reefs. They sang back in the language of information.

  We’re close, they were saying through a million points of data. Very close.