A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  If I miss them, I cannot imagine how Darla feels, so I let her rescue Adaeze from my grip. I sneak into the kitchen to make sure our afternoon task is out of sight. At four, Adaeze is too young to keep secrets, and I shake away a nightmare scenario in which she inadvertently betrays us. Marcus and I agree that pulling her out of preschool now will raise too many flags. We trusted in the goodness of people too long.

  I cut up some fruit as Darla and Adaeze make their way to the kitchen, my daughter doing all of the talking and Darla letting her. I used to worry about having children, because I didn’t think I’d have anything to say to them, but it turns out you don’t have to say much of anything. I wish silly worries like that still mattered.

  “Adaeze,” I say in warning when she tries to reach for an apple slice, “kwo aka gị.”

  She pouts but goes to the sink, stepping on the short stool that helps her reach. I’ve been doing little things like this the last few months, making her as self-sufficient as I can while preserving her innocence.

  “Kwo aka gị ofuma,” I add when she barely wets the tip of her fingers.

  Darla releases a pointed sigh. She didn’t mind when I taught Nyah and Jaden Igbo words, but if I took a phone call from my mother while we sorted and cleaned shells, I could feel a certain tightness coming off her in waves. Worse yet was the time I briefly switched to Igbo in front of her when talking to a visiting cousin, and Darla hadn’t believed me that it was a gesture of habit, that we weren’t talking about—or trying to exclude—her. That was before the whole “bougie bitch” thing and it wasn’t even a cousin I liked, so I made my deepest apologies and everything had seemed good.

  “Imelu ofuma. Kuwalu onwe gị aka.”

  Now I am, in fact, just being a bitch, as I would have congratulated Adaeze in English had we been alone. And from Darla’s agree-to-disagree hmm, she knows it too. Our Adaeze-induced truces are getting shorter and shorter.

  Darla lingers until five o’clock, when Russell will be home. It’s dangerous in these times for a black woman to make a noticeable routine of being alone. She smooches goodbyes on Adaeze and again my animosity lifts, but we depart with tight little smiles. I divide my attention between my daughter and my phone and can only fully relax when I get Darla’s text: I’m home. Russell is here. Text me when Marcus gets in.

  And I do.

  * * *

  —

  When the State Custody Law was first proposed, most people assumed it was a satirical “modest proposal” of sorts. How else to read the proposition that designated all black citizens within U.S. borders as wards of the state regardless of age or financial status? The outline of the fake law had been so detailed as to be laughable, drawing on the 2020 census data and statistics on black unemployment, truancy, and homelessness, at record highs after the Civil Rights Act was overturned mid-2019, releasing Americans from basic decency. The proposal stated that until these issues were resolved, the government should step in. Wasn’t that what you people wanted, the president tweeted later, to have the government do everything for you?

  That’s when we figured out the revolting proposal was real, and the resulting outrage was swift and vicious, with almost universal condemnation. Almost. A Times op-ed began the turning of the tide. Cloaked in concern, the columnist made his argument for this necessary, temporary step: If it doesn’t work, what’s the harm, everything can go back to normal. And now it was a referendum on a ballot, a rotten fruit in the marketplace of ideas.

  I was one of the skeptics and I still am. My rage is tempered by the knowledge that though the law is being voted on, there’s no way this actually passes.

  “That’s what they said about the Civil Rights Act being overturned. And the gun-ownership laws.”

  Marcus is caressing my stomach in sleepy circles. It’s a debate we’ve had enough times that it’s lost any heat. My nose is in his armpit and it’s a blend of gaminess and the failing deodorant that allowed it. It is so familiar a scent in a world that has turned so unfamiliar, so quickly, that I start to cry.

  “Hey, hey. None of that.”

  For a while it’s just my sobs and the friction of his hands, now soothing my back. It seems like all we do in this bed is take turns crying.

  “What about Nathaniel?” Marcus poses.

  A game we play often, coming up with names for our hypothetical son. It means we believe in a future we can bring another child into. It also means: Enough with the crying, else I break too.

  “Only if you promise to never call him Nate.”

  “That’s half the fun of the name. Yours?”

  I try to lighten the mood.

  “Okechukwukereokeonyekozuru.”

  Marcus laughs loud, then quieter, not to wake Adaeze.

  “I promise to never call him Nate,” he says, and we are both laughing now and it feels so good to not be crying that I want to cry.

  I wish my mother could see us, to understand that there’s no one else I can survive this life with. To understand why I chose him over a country. She still calls, but the tariffs make each conversation a prohibitively expensive one. She’d been living in Dallas with my youngest brother when dual citizenship was outlawed and everyone was forced to choose which nation to pledge their full allegiance to. It was 2021, a year before the State Custody Law proposal, but after the Civil Rights Act was overturned, and things were getting dire enough that a good number of Nigerians picked their green passport, even with all the news trickling through the media embargo about what was happening in Lagos. My mother had been among them and urged all of her children to follow suit. All my siblings did but me.

  “Chinedu, biko. Please.” And her voice was so deep with tears and terror, I wanted to hang up the phone.

  Within three months, the president declared that all those who’d chosen foreign passports proved how unpatriotic and uncommitted to America they were and would—all three million of them—be deported.

  “Come with us,” my mother had pleaded. “Leave that man, and bring your child. Let them not kill my daughter.”

  It was hard to take her histrionics at face value, but I felt real fear hearing leave that man from my mother, a woman who doesn’t believe in divorce, like divorce was a conspiracy theory of which she remained skeptical. Her advice to me before my wedding was to submit to Marcus in all things. When I chose to stay, she cried so hard I put the phone down, unable to bear the sound in my ear.

  * * *

  —

  “Mommy, this.” Adaeze points to the blue box of macaroni, startling me from my phone. The pasta aisle is supposed to be a no-go zone since I’d weaned Adaeze from said macaroni, and by the look in my angel’s eye she (1) remembered how delicious it was and (2) would throw herself into a reckless tantrum if denied. I slip a box into the cart. Adaeze resumes singing into a carrot she’s appropriated as a microphone. Disaster averted.

  The article I return to predicts that the referendum is projected at a 50/50 split. It needs a 55/45 majority to pass. “Encouraging,” the writer said of this, that even in these climes, it would likely fail. I text Marcus: See, it’s going to fail.

  I spot the youngish-looking white man just before I run into him with the cart, and I give an exaggerated “Phew! That was close!” and smile my safe-black-person smile and excuse myself to pass. Then excuse myself again when he doesn’t hear me and it takes a third time—with Adaeze chiming in—before I realize it’s on purpose. My body tingles with restraint as I contemplate shoving his cart aside. But the scene it would cause. The chance he would claim assault and be believed. It used to be a rumor one would hear, something you heard about a friend of a friend of a friend, until it happened to someone I knew, arrested when a white mom at the daycare escalated a silly fight between two kids to a police matter. I swallow the insult like many before, another stone churning in my stomach, and ease out of the aisle the way I came.
Adaeze is still saying, “Excuse me!” in that singsongy way of hers, and I fight a sudden wave of debilitating rage. I want to hurl every can at his smug head. I want to take everything that makes him feel safe and burn it to ash.

  My phone dings and it’s Marcus responding to the article: Likely isn’t good enough.

  * * *

  —

  When I pull up to the house, Darla’s car is already in the driveway. She’ll be in the laundry, scooping casings from the barrel we’d snuck in when members of the Black Resistance (I still think we should rebrand this) pretended to deliver furniture. Our friendly white neighbors, Kathryn and Doug, had offered to help, and they were nice enough that they probably would have kept it quiet, but nowadays you could never be sure. Marcus didn’t like them, felt like they talked to us the way a kid ate vegetables, something they did because they felt they had to. I take a cranky Adaeze into the house, and she brightens at the prospect of Darla but doesn’t come fully awake until I set her in front of cartoons in the living room.

  I turn on the smaller unit in the kitchen, one Marcus and I had argued over but that I’m now grateful for.

  “Turn that off. Please,” Darla says as she emerges from the laundry. She holds a bowl of shells under her nose and sniffs deeply. “I like the smell,” she says to the raised brow I give her, and if it was a year ago, when things were still okay between us, I’d have said something like, Okay, weirdo, and it would just have been something I said, not the start of another fight. Because she actually said please, I turn off the news.

  “Not off off, just to something else. I don’t know how you and Marcus can stand watching and reading all that shit. It’ll eat your soul from the inside. Someone will call if there’s something we need to know.”

  “I want to keep an eye on things, just in case.”

  “Hmm,” Darla says, darla-ly.

  I turn the TV back on, scanning the guide until I find something safe. It takes a line or two from the opening credits of the sitcom before Darla and I begin to whisper the words under our breath, then get louder—“I got in one little fight and my mom got scared and said, ‘You’re moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air!’ ”—until we finish at the top of our lungs, cackling when Adaeze rushes in, confused but happy we’re happy. She rushes back to her cartoons when we don’t prove quite as interesting.

  “Where did he end up moving to, Morocco? Or was it Monaco?”

  Either way, he—and all monied celebrities—were lucky, and able to afford the exorbitant twenty-thousand-dollar fine charged for non-essential international travel before even that was banned altogether. We run through what we know of the black celebrities who hadn’t left the country, either by choice to stand and fight or because they never thought it would get this bad or because their money was funny. And for a moment it’s like old times and we are the sisters we never had.

  Of a certain TV housewife, Darla says, “Please, she’s only famous in America—you’d have to drag her onto a plane screaming and kicking off the fake Loubs.”

  And I’m cracking up, until I remember that with many of the deported three million, they’d done just that, hauling women by their hair, handcuffing children to plane seats and the like. Darla sees on my face when I stop finding it funny, and she probably stops finding it funny too when she remembers, but we’re too stubborn to give each other an inch and I sit there with an insufferable martyr silence while she forces dry, obnoxious chuckles.

  “My, y’all are having fun in here.”

  I bumble in a panic, while Darla calmly lays a kitchen towel over our work before Kathryn can get a good look. “I tried the front, but you mustn’t have heard me,” she says through the screen, then turns toward Darla. “Hi, I’m Kathryn.”

  She comes fully through the door and holds out her hand to Darla, who just looks at it. Kathryn’s smile tightens at the edges and she spins toward me.

  “It just got so loud for a second there and my folks are over and, well, you know how they are.” She rolls her eyes theatrically. “Daddy wanted to call the cops, but I said that wasn’t necessary.”

  “Of course it isn’t,” I say. “We’ll be sure to keep it down. This is—”

  “Nobody,” Darla interrupts. Kathryn keeps her eyes on me.

  “Great, I’ll let you know when they leave. Later, then.” She turns to say goodbye to Darla, then thinks better of it. We listen to her fading steps.

  “Don’t go around saying my name to people I don’t want to know my name. And why does that white woman feel comfortable just walking into your house?”

  Stones churn in my stomach.

  “Kathryn is okay.”

  “Tell me this. If she’s ‘okay,’ then why’d you panic when she showed up?”

  “She’s not like that.”

  “Hmm.”

  And it’s the last goddamn hmm I can take.

  “What the fuck is your problem, Darla? What did I ever do to you?” I circle the kitchen closing windows, because I plan to get loud.

  Darla scoops up the bowl of shells and I hear the metallic cascade as they rejoin their friends in the barrel.

  When she’s back in my face, she whisper-shouts, “My kids are halfway across the country.”

  And I whisper-shout in return, “Okay, but I didn’t take them away from you. So why the fuck are you mad at me?” And I want to take it back right away because it’s cruel, but it’s also true and so I stand my ground.

  “I sent them away to save them. And you, you could have left with her”—she points to the living room—“at any time. You could have escaped all this.”

  “But I didn’t!”

  “Are you kidding me? How do you not get it?”

  My stubborn silence.

  Darla continues.

  “Where is your mother? Right now, where is she? Your grandmother, where is she?”

  I think of Nana in her little village house, her precious chickens pacing the yard like sentries. No electricity, no running water, so she pays a boy to fill a large drum every week, which she rations, pouring boiling water back into the drum to keep the tepid supply free of worms. I had loved the place as a child and hated it as a teenager, feeling deep embarrassment at the poor African cliché of it all. At another time, it would have pained me to imagine my mother, who delighted in collecting pretty perfume bottles she never sprayed, reduced to living that life, but now—with the prospect of enslavement hanging over our collective heads—I picture my grandmother’s contented stance as she watches her precious chickens peck at the ground and I think how happy she must be to have her daughter and grandchildren under her roof. But I won’t give an inch.

  “I didn’t do this; you don’t have to be angry at me.”

  “I’m not angry at you—” At my incredulous look: “Okay, I’m a little angry at you. Okay, a lot. You could have left.”

  “I chose to stay.” The words coated in a layer of sacrifice, the smug surety that I made the right choice in the name of lov—

  “You had a choice!” This Darla yells at full volume, and some of my martyrdom crumbles under the weight of it. “I’m not saying it’s your fault; I’m just saying you had a choice and you don’t know what it’s like to not have one. It’s not fair, that’s all.”

  My phone beeps and I grab at it to save me. It’s a text in code. We each avoid the other’s teary eyes.

  “We’re on.”

  * * *

  —

  The ride is a quiet one with an exhausted Adaeze passed out in the backseat. We turn off our phones even before we leave the house, too untrusting to simply turn off the location services. Darla calls out the decoded directions from her notepad and doesn’t say much else. She navigates us through increasingly remote roads until we’re on a dirt path. She settles a handgun—loaded with the inevitable product of our many hostile after
noons—onto her lap. We wait.

  He is late, but he is alone, which hadn’t been the case with the last one. He is also the right age, his fourteen-year-old baby face just starting to harden in the wake of puberty. He seems to know the drill, no phone or electronics on, but he passes Darla money, which she refuses, then tries to give it to me. He must not yet know how it works and I wonder, but cannot ask, how long ago his parents had been disappeared. I could imagine him as a son of pastors, high enough in the church hierarchy to be designated an “influential black individual” and detained for questioning. The Justice Department is looking for him now, hoping to leverage him to will his family’s compliance.

  I see the way Darla stares at him and I know she sees her son, Jaden, in his face. It’s always like that with the boys. I see a nice kid, but if I let myself, there is Nathaniel. Okechukwukereokeonyekozuru. Nate. There is my son waiting for us to fix the world.

  When the boy spots Adaeze sprawled like a sultan in her sleep, he grins, and I like him all the more for it. He grins at me, at Darla, and we can’t help returning his delight, and we are a minivan full of grinning fools driving to the next checkpoint.

  LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH was born in the United Kingdom and grew up in Nigeria and wherever else her father was stationed for work. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and has received the African Commonwealth Short Story Prize and an O. Henry Prize. She was selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35, and her debut collection, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, won the 2017 Kirkus Prize and the 2017 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in Minneapolis and is working on a novel about you.