by Kwame Mbalia
I put the box down on the floor. The images on its sides, including the one of Anansi and Nyame confronting the Maafa, were barely visible. As Netta’s eyes stayed on the Story Box, I closed my eyes and concentrated on the Maafa’s tale.
The Maafa is pain, John Henry had said. It came here with the first of us. The sadness to our joy.
Drums pounded in my ears and my fingertips tingled. I opened my eyes in time to see the Story Box glowing, and projecting images on the bulkhead. An inky black leviathan leaped forward along the planks, only to be met by a group of familiar beings: a giant man with a shining hammer, two soaring shadows with blazing wings, a man with golden eyes, and a spider clinging to a line of sparkling silk. They all clashed with the formless beast, eventually casting it back into the darkness below.
The Story Box flared white-hot in the dark before it faded to a dull glow, and a sigh seemed to settle throughout the hull of the ancient ship.
After several seconds, Netta lifted her glowing eyes to me. “You would tell this story?”
I raised my chin. “I would tell the tale of how all the gods of MidPass and Alke united to defeat a powerful foe. Yes, I would tell that story.”
The open secret of the Maafa had been bothering me throughout my time here, and it had taken something High John said to make me understand. You shouldn’t try to hide from your pain. You shouldn’t run from it, cover it up, pretend it never happened. That’s what John Henry and Nyame and all the other gods had tried to do with the Maafa. That’s what I’d tried to do with Eddie. Uncle C thought he’d hurt me by taking all my good memories of my best friend, but he’d only helped me face my feelings.
As Anansesem, it was my job to carry the stories of the land to its people. All the stories. If we ignored the past, how would we learn from it?
I waited for the Maafa’s decision.
The Story Box’s light dimmed, and the passageway seemed to widen a bit. The trapdoor in the deck disappeared, and the bulkhead planks straightened. Netta, still possessed by the Maafa, raised both arms.
“We return to our rest, and you will tell our tale?”
“And,” I added, “I’ll even get rid of that haint for you. A two-for-one. Because I’m that kind of guy.”
Netta nodded, and she stepped to the side. Two planks in the bulkhead shifted apart like they were made of rubber, and the girl disappeared into the darkness.
Something rustled in the upper deck, and Brer Fox’s voice sounded above me. “I don’t know how or why, or what you said, but it agreed. You have to be careful, though, my boy. Provided you hold up your end of the bargain, as soon as you rid the ship of the haint, the Maafa will return to the bottom of the sea. And if it just so happens you can’t escape in time, both you and the Story Box will ride down to the deep along with it.”
His voice broke off and I nodded grimly. “I understand.”
“I know you do, my boy, I know you do. Forgive an old fox his worry. Take heart—you can do this.” His voice began to fade away, and I stopped myself from dashing to the wall to beg him to stay and help me. A last chuckle floated in the air. “Seems like hope lives after all.”
“Wait!” I shouted. “Are you—all of you—coming back?”
Silence.
Then, “I reckon some will. But I like how my story ended, my boy. And I’m tired…so, so tired. Figure I might just rest for a bit.”
“Fox,” I called. “FOX!”
And then there was nothing but me and the empty passageway, a nondescript door waiting at the end. Something rolled down my cheek, but I didn’t bother with it. Whether it was the sea’s salt water or my own, it wouldn’t help with what came next. I hefted the Story Box back onto my shoulders and started walking before fear talked me out of it.
I had made a bargain with the Maafa.
Now it was time to deal with Uncle C.
“WELL, COME ON IN, TRISTAN, don’t be shy. You letting out all the heat.”
It took a few heartbeats—several pulse-pounding heartbeats—before my eyes adjusted to the gloom. The passageway had been dim, but this room was two shadows short of midnight black.
The layout mirrored my visions. There, in the corner, the barrels stacked up to the deck. The rectangular burlap bags, their faded black letters illegible in the dark. And mounds, I mean mounds, of the white—
“Cotton,” I said, astonished.
“Smart boy. Smart, smart boy. That’s why I like you, wanna help you.”
I didn’t see the haint at first. Cotton was strewn across the floor, piled up in the corners, and bursting out of several stained, split-open bundles. But there, in the highest mound in the far corner, lay the figure of what used to be a man.
Uncle C.
Uncle Cotton.
From what I could see, he was stylish. He wore a pair of fine, polished patent leather dress shoes, silk dress socks, creased trousers, and had a pocket-watch chain dangling from the pocket. But that’s all I could see. The top half of him lay beneath a white heap of soggy cotton. The only thing showing above his waist was the left side of his face—ashy, pale, and blistered around the lips. His eye, blue as the bay outside, blinked open, and the corner of his mouth crinkled into a smile.
“Lookie here, lookie here. Look what the cat dragged in. I’d get up, but…well, I’m a bit under the weather.” He laughed, a raspy chuckle that irritated my ears like forks scraping against plates. “Well, come in, come in, don’t be shy. We gots a lot to talk about, don’t we?”
I studied him.
This was the architect of nearly everything bad that had happened in MidPass and Alke. The one who had stirred up the bone ships, the iron monsters, the hullbeasts, the brand flies. The evil behind the abductions of people and animals and the pillaging of their homes. Because of him, Ayanna was suffering, maybe even…
He watched me study him, but when I squeezed the straps on my shoulders, his eyes latched on to my backpack, and a suspicious look crossed his face. “What you got there?”
For a second my heart thudded in my chest like the war drums in the Ridge. I hid it, though, and shuffled closer. Just a bit.
“I brought you what you wanted. Now give me my memories.”
“I told you to bring me the Story Box, not some raggedy knapsack! Where is it?” Uncle Cotton demanded.
“Right here,” I said, patting my backpack. “Where’s my journal? Where are my memories?” My voice felt thick and speaking was difficult. My chest wouldn’t stop heaving, and my palms were sweating.
He eyed me, then chuckled. “Straight to the point. Okay. I like that. No shucking and jiving around the issue. Well, my boy—”
“I’m…not…your…boy,” I said, breathing hard after every word.
His eyebrow rose. “Okay, then, okay. No need for rudeness. I thought you were better than that. You are better than that, I know it. You and me, we’re the same. Determined. Focused. Driven. I understand what you’re going through, believe me. Having something stripped away. Ripped from you. The loneliness. The emptiness.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “Give. Me. My. Journal.”
“Okay. Okay. Everything you need is right there.”
I opened my eyes to see that he had shifted slightly, so his face pointed toward the corner off to my right. I spied a door, its bottom half covered in thick roots and thorny vines, and my spirits sank. “How am I supposed to get in there?”
I’ve never seen a half-face look more apologetic. “Tristan, Tristan. I told you, you gots to trust me. What you’re missing is in that room, beyond that there tangle, and I can get you to it. I told you I could help, and I will, believe me. But I can’t do nothing like this.” His eye looked down at his buried torso before fixing me with a pleading gaze. “You’ve got to help me if you want me to do the same. I told you. Free me, and I can free everybody.”
“Free you…” I repeated.
Uncle Cotton grimaced, a cruel twist of the face. “My own fault, really. This world is built on the power of s
tory, boy. Seems my story is intertwined with this here floating death palace. Cotton and the Maafa.”
“Greed and enslavement,” I whispered.
Cotton shifted, a movement I realized was a shrug. “Nature of the beast. Funny, right? You freed me, only for me to end up tangled in something even stronger.”
His pale eye flicked to the Story Box. I took a step back.
“But with that…Ohhh yeah, with that, I could rewrite my own story. You went from chump to champ. Imagine what I could become. The legends. The history! It’s the only way,” he said. Something rustled in the mountain of cotton, and a withered hand, with nails black and sharp, rose feebly out of the white fluff. “Give it to me. Let me help you.”
I hesitated.
“Let me help you,” he whispered again, and the insistent demand wormed its way into my brain.
I slipped off the backpack and held it in my right hand. “And you’ll give me my memories, and the journal? Right away?”
A snarl rippled across his half-face before it faded and a smile appeared. “Sure, Tristan, sure thing, just as soon as you free me, I’ll get it to you. You’ll have what you want. All your stories—every single one. Heck, here’s a few reminders to get you started, just so you know I’m on the level.”
He took a deep breath, then blew gently on the cotton in front of him. Little strands of white, barely visible in the dark, floated toward me like a cloud. I backed up, but the threads consumed me. I froze in fear, feeling a tingling sensation that started in the center of my spine and moved upward, increasing in strength as it went, until my forehead buzzed.
Eddie’s smiling face popped into my mind. Both of us, sitting at the table, going over our English project. Eddie at the corner store. Eddie holding the heavy bag for dear life as I threw hooks and crosses and jabs and straights. The memories swept over me and I felt months of stress leak out of my shoulders.
“Now then…” The buried haint’s lone eyebrow was arched again, and it brought me back to the present like a splash of ice-cold water to the face. Anansi’s adinkra burned hot against my wrist, and I fiddled with it and the Amagqirha’s bead.
“A deal’s a deal, Tristan.”
I nodded, swallowed, then took a step forward and dropped the backpack into his straining hand. He fumbled with it, then snagged a strap and clutched it tight. He inhaled, then exhaled, and the skin on his face seemed to ripple.
“Help me,” he demanded. “Help me out of here.”
This was it. Once he was free, everything would hang by a thread. I prayed I’d thought this plan through enough as I inched closer. I scooped handfuls of soggy cotton away from him, like wet sand at the beach. The waterlogged fibers weighed a ton, and they clung to my fingers as I tried to hurl piles away. Slowly, a body began to emerge from the mess.
A head with stringy gray hair slicked back tight to his skull.
Teeth bright white—so white they seemed fake, except for the single gold tooth in the back.
And he was rail thin.
He wore a matching suit jacket, and beneath it, a collared shirt starched stiff.
Uncle Cotton hugged the Story Box tight. Before my eyes his face lost its wrinkles, smoothing out to look like that of a much younger man, and the cotton…All the cotton in the room began to tremble. Slowly at first, but soon each dingy white ball bounced and hopped as if in an earthquake. They rolled on the floor and tumbled down from the piles in the corners, hightailing it to where Uncle Cotton lay with his eyes closed, a heavy sigh escaping his lips. They bounced down his collar, rolled into his sleeves and pant legs, even into his socks.
Soon all the cotton in the room was gone. It filled his clothes like straw in a scarecrow.
All that was left were the thorny roots digging into the bottom of the door to the next compartment.
I had to get him to remove those, too, or this plan was doomed.
“Help me up.”
His voice, stronger and more confident, grabbed my attention, and I stretched out an arm. His hands felt like leathery claws as they slipped around my wrist like handcuffs. But he was light—so light it surprised me. Cotton spilled out of his jacket sleeves and pant cuffs before it was drawn back inside like a yo-yo on a string. He patted down his hair and kept the right side of his face turned away from me, though his left eye rolled toward me and winked.
“Ahhh. You don’t know how good it feeeeeels, being free from that there prison. Trapped like a hog before dinnertime, I swear. And this—” He held up the Story Box by its two straps and stopped speaking as the magical treasure slowly morphed back into the shape of a chest. He giggled, and the giggle turned into a chuckle, which grew into a hearty laugh that sounded wet and loose.
“Ha-haaaaa, lookie here. Boy, I feel that power, let me tell you. I can feel it right as rain. Hoo-whee! We gonna have us a party!”
He fumbled at the lid, trying to release the catch. It held fast, and his smile slowly faded as he tried again and again to open the Story Box. He grunted, swore, dropped it to the floor and pulled with both hands. He looked up and I flinched—the right side of his face, up to and surrounding his right eye socket, was a mass of viney wood stems and shredded cotton. His eye socket blazed and he snarled.
“Why won’t this thing open?”
I licked my lips. “Because only I can open it.”
“Well, then do it, boy! Ain’t got time for your games!”
The door behind him was still covered in roots. I took a deep breath, then shook my head. “No.”
“No?” He barked the word so violently, my hands were up and my fists clenched before I realized it. His teeth were bared and his clawlike fingernails suddenly became longer and sharper, like talons. They grew and grew, twisting and turning toward me, and too late I realized they were slender branches, thin itchy switches with barbed hooks. They snaked around my wrist and up my arm, digging into my skin, and Uncle Cotton leaned in close.
“No?” he repeated.
“Not”—I squeezed the words through my teeth—“before you give me my journal. Like you said.”
He looked ready to spit. Maybe worse. The branches tightened around my wrist, as proof of what they could do, and then they loosened enough so I could talk without wincing. Red marks crisscrossed my left arm.
Uncle Cotton swallowed whatever curse dangled on his tongue, and suddenly the smooth, polished smile was back. “Okay, then, okay. Sure, you’re right. Gotta help. But I gotta make sure you’re on the level. I need to know I can trust you, Tristan. I’m gonna have to rely on you when we get outside. We came to this world together, and if we go out there as a team and you let them know I’m here to help, to be a savior…shoot, ain’t no stopping us. I’ll be a hero. That’s what they’re looking for, right? A hero to come trotting along and rescue them from themselves? Well, here I am.”
He preened, even as the rumbles of the Maafa smashing against the Golden Crescent shook the room. His blue eye narrowed, a calculating look entering it, and the cotton branches began to squeeze me again as he grew even more excited.
“They might give me the keys to the city. I mean, look at you—they gave you all sorts of godly charms and you just a boy with a few stories. Anansi’s chosen one. Ha!” He scoffed. “Wait until a real tale-teller, a word-spinner, a true weaver, comes along. They’ll forget all about that spider and his little brood.”
He froze as a thought struck him.
“They might even make me king.”
His cotton-encrusted eye socket fixed on me, and terror gripped me so fiercely I couldn’t breathe.
“Yeah. King Cotton. That’s got a real ring to it, don’t it, boy?”
A peal of thunder rumbled in the distance. Drums and shouts echoed in my ears.
My mouth moved, once, twice, three times, before something resembling a word crawled out of it. “Y-yeah.”
“Aw, don’t worry, King Cotton will take care of his friends. You could be my ward, my heir apparent. Play your cards right, and you coul
d have your own little palace here. Pick any one you want—they’re all empty.”
He cackled and slapped his knee.
“My…memories…” I gasped out past the pulsing pain in my arm.
“Right, right. Getting ahead of myself. Well, go ahead, Tristan, get your little friend’s stories and let’s shut this raiding party down. You and I got some planning to do.”
His right eye turned bright white as he puffed out his narrow chest, sucked in a mouthful of air, and blew a stream of cottonseed-filled air at the door. The vines creeping around the compartment shriveled and peeled away, like flowers wilting under the baking sun. Soon nothing remained but little piles of dirt scattered on the creaking wooden deck. The pain in my arm faded as the branches untwisted and retreated back into his fingernails.
Uncle Cotton beamed. “Happy?”
Memories rushed back into my mind like a floodgate had been opened. Cotton watched, then pointed to the newly opened door. Inside the cell-like compartment, a brown book lay against the wall.
Eddie’s journal.
An ominous rumble rattled the deck as I crossed the few feet to pick up the little book. Its leather cover was warped and the pages were water-stained, but you know what? I didn’t care. It was Eddie’s, it was mine, and I had it once more.
The deck shuddered again, and Uncle Cotton looked around with a frown. “Now what’s got this hunk of junk all up in arms?”
A small smile crossed my face. The Maafa was keeping its promise. I’d gotten Uncle Cotton’s tendrils out of the hull, and now the ship was preparing to return to the bottom of the sea, where it belonged.
A seam appeared in the deck between two planks, and water started bubbling through. I backed away. Time was running out. I turned to head through the passageway, only to find Uncle Cotton standing in front me, the Story Box extended, a weird gleam in his blue eye.
“You ain’t thinking about skipping out on me, is you? Tristan? Naw, you wouldn’t do that. You a man of honor! Like me…I held up my end of the bargain. You got your little book. Now it’s time for you to open the Story Box.”
