Trouble the Saints
Page 34
“The lady is white,” Tamara said, haltingly. Even now, the words stuck in her throat.
The nurse who had first seen her pursed her lips. “Dr. Nolan,” she said in a stage whisper, “I grew up in Virginia, and I know a nigger when I see one. She might be half-caste, but she’s a nigger all right.”
Phyllis started laughing. She laughed so hard that she started leaking again, and this time it wasn’t rosy, it was red.
“She needs a doctor,” Walter said.
The doctor hesitated. It was a hanging moment, the inhale before the clapper hits the bell, a second whose memory would return to her in dreams for the rest of her life—and what is that space, if not where the hands have always lived? When one group tries to grind out the existence of another, to enslave them for generations, to pretend to give them freedom while forging a dozen new kinds of chains, to kill their children and cite the inevitable meanness of their condition as justification, and not a most deliberate result—when the scales of justice have been so grossly weighted in the favor of those who have almost everything and who eye with deadly jealousy that meager portion which eludes them, where else might one fight back but in the spaces, the inhales, the numbers?
The doctor shook his head. “Go. We don’t want any trouble with you people, but we’ll call the police if we have to.”
Walter’s arms twitched, as though he would put down Phyllis to reach for his gun.
“Leave it, Walter,” Pea said. She sounded so tired. In all the time they had known one another, Tammy had never heard her so tired.
All that power they’d collected between them, all that cowing strength. Saint’s hands, an oracle’s deck, a mobster’s gun. Useless, useless. This was power. Jack of diamonds, running milky hands through thinning hair, going home to dinner that evening, drinking a scotch to relax, and never once thinking: I killed a woman today.
* * *
Much later, when it was over, she sat alone in the kitchen after the baby had cried herself to sleep, and she read Dev’s letter.
Pea—
There’s so much I can’t tell you that I think they’d prefer I not tell you anything. I’m safe, and healthy. The danger isn’t as much as it could be, though they try their best. I suspect you’re in much more.
I know you think you have failed the hands. But their demands always exceed what we’re capable of giving. Forgive them. Forgive yourself.
You are like a goddess with Durga inside you, a creature inscrutable, with four holy hands that reach into our future and our past. I dream of her, growing and moving in that fluid which is to her a universe. Pressing against its limits the way the best of us do, entirely unaware of how she hurts you.
I dream of our house by the river. Of a stubborn, wild little girl with her hair bound in thick dark plaits that have caught bits of grass and dandelion fluff. There is mud on her hands and knees. She hunts fossils and tells stories over bones. She will live half in the present and half in an unformed future, she will see her own death and face it as she faces the muddy current of the March river. She will know too much about us and out of love protect us from it.
This is battle: Men speechless with terror, expelling their consciousness in grunts and prayers and last cigarettes. They cloud the air but don’t linger like the gun smoke, which comes later. It is the moment before the breath that could be your last, when you shit your pants and keep running across the line. Or drop where you stand, felled by terror a second before the bullet. It is screams and blood and death, of course, but it is mostly the sharp cold of the last moment you will ever feel the cold. Fighting in spite of it.
When men go into that thinking that they don’t deserve to live, then they die. I deserve to live. You deserve to live, Pea. You deserve that more than anyone, no matter what you’ve done. What they call a labor is a battle, maybe the purest kind.
Tamara has her cards, and yes, they are a kind of power, but they aren’t the only one. They predict the future, but they don’t decide it. Whatever they have told you, don’t bow to it. If there is such a thing as destiny, it can be changed. It can be fought.
Fight, Pea. If we die, let it be screaming, not with a bullet to the back of the head because we hid behind the line. Fight, Pea. I love our daughter more than I should, more than any logic can explain, and she doesn’t yet exist apart from you, and I am telling you to fight her, our sweet Durga, if in entering this world she tries to take you from it—
And if she does, or if one of those bullets finds its mark on me, please believe, Phyllis—we are connected by more than this love or this lifetime. When we return to the wheel of life, you and I, we will find one another again and again, seven lifetimes and seven lifetimes more, until the colonized and the enslaved and the abused will rise up with the holy strength of the gods behind them and, together, we will make it right.
Your
Dev
Tamara lifted a knife, one of the rusted ones from the garden. Why not? She’d been wondering since she stumbled from Poughkeepsie’s colored hospital with bloodstains on her dress. (A dry laugh in one of Pea’s last moments of lucidity: “You made a bargain with them, maybe I can too.”) Tamara tossed Dev’s letter in the air. Then she speared it to the wall in one uncanny throw.
Tamara left it there and walked outside. She sat on the porch steps that led to the garden. The evening breeze slid down the bare skin of her arms like velvet, holding a lingering warmth from the cheerful spring day, already passing. The sweet pea vines were starting to put out flowers, and the watermelon as well. The earth beneath them was freshly mulched, a comfortable red-brown, mixed with ashes.
She lost sight of it momentarily, her thoughts caught up in a familiar eddy, a ritual rehearsal of events that could not make the ending come out right.
They had made it to Poughkeepsie by noon. Pea had lost so much blood. She sometimes knew Tamara, and sometimes mistook her for Gloria, or her mother.
“There’s a reason, you know,” she had gasped at one point near the end, “a reason they gave us the hands. They want us to fight, Mommy! I’m not going to stay up here, just taking it!”
“That you never did, sugar,” Tammy had whispered.
She turned away from that memory and fought to find a better one. For the rest of her life, this would be her charge: to remember how they had been, for the sake of that dreaming child upstairs. Tamara looked at the garden, limned in blue and orange like a kiln fire, and recalled the last night she had spent with Phyllis.
They had slept outside, slept under the stars like Tamara had as a child, and held one another’s hands, and talked, and tended their silences. In the morning Phyllis had got down on her knees and pulled her rusted knives out of the earth. Then she tossed them to the side with the weeds.
Tamara knelt beside her in the dirt.
Up the hill from the river, they could still hear it murmuring, laughing, speaking in the rushed conversation of the dead, who can’t be understood.
Now, Tamara looked down at the garden and was unsurprised to see her: Phyllis sprawled among the watermelon vines like an ellipsis, her great belly shining in another day’s sunlight. Tamara could see her so clearly, she could count the freckles on her shoulders. Her scars. Her stretch marks. Her yellow hands dipped brown in clean earth.
“What are you?” Tammy asked.
Pea looked straight at her. “A light.”
Phyllis went into labor that night. She found no gentleness there. She fought like an angel, like a saint, like a Harlem girl with policy slips in her garter and luck in her hands. She’d make something of herself one day. She knew it.
What good was a dream, they always said, if you didn’t play the numbers?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A novel is always a community effort, for all that only one name appears on the spine. Over the last seven years, I have received help, support, and encouragement from countless friends, colleagues, and institutions that pulled me along and held me up during this journey to complete t
his novel of my heart.
I am endlessly grateful for my friends who read multiple drafts, helped me talk through knotty philosophical problems, and just let me vent when nothing seemed to come together. Thank you April Anderson for loud-ass conversations about historical philosophy and the legacy of trauma in our community; Amanda Hollander for hours-long venting sessions and charmingly pedantic attention to detail; Tamar Bihari for reading the first and last drafts and all the emotional support in between; Sonali Dev for her expert eye regarding Dev’s perspective; Delia Sherman for an early read and an incisive analysis of the tricky third part; Justine Larbalestier for wading through the earliest draft and encouraging me to the end; and my decade-plus all-star writer’s group, Altered Fluid, in particular Sam Miller, Eugene Myers, David Mercurio Rivera, Kris Dikeman, Rick Bowes, N. K. Jemisin, Matthew Kressel, K. Tempest Bradford, Kai Ashante Wilson, Lilah Wild, Devin Poore, Paul Berger, Kiini Ibura Salaam, and Rajan Khanna. I remember the first time I went to a convention with you guys after I joined the group; I felt as though I’d won the lottery.
Although I began this thoroughly New York triptych in New York City, I wrote most of it in Mexico. It was my life-changing experiences here that inspired me to go back to the original story and expand it precisely as I had dreamed of and dismissed before. I’ve spent six years here writing and rewriting this book. I’m indebted to cafés whose names I’ve forgotten in San Cristóbal and Veracruz; Mexico City’s inimitable anarchist bookshop/café and counterculture social hub, Marabunta; Café Negro, with its picture window right along Coyoacán’s main drag, where I would people-watch as I wrestled with my own characters for hours on end.
What came out of those intense years in cafés was a novel that approached my vision but still fell critically short. I kept trying—having my brilliant agent, Jill Grinberg, in my corner gave me the confidence to take the risk. She and her colleagues helped nurture that initial draft into something genuinely good. Even so, it wasn’t until we were able to connect with Miriam Weinberg and Tor that Trouble the Saints truly came into its own. Miriam is that unicorn of an editor who will actually take the time to make a book do what it needs to do—the kind that had martini lunches with their acclaimed-but-temperamental writers in the ’40s, except with more editing and less drinking.
I thank my sister, Lauren, as always, for her company and kindness in untangling the tricky knots of our lives. Thank you for keeping me grounded. I’m indebted to my parents and extended family for their stories. Y muchas gracias, querido Isma, por acompañar una historia que solo podías apreciar por medio de traducción y conversaciones intensas de noches de mezcal.
Why do certain characters stay in your head while others wither? There is certainly some complex psychology at play, but I am fortunate to have all of you in my life; you allowed Phyllis and her friends to flourish and me to tell their story while I’ve been figuring out my own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALAYA DAWN JOHNSON has been recognized for her short fiction and YA novels, winning the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Novelette for “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,” which also appears in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (2015), guest edited by Joe Hill. Her debut YA novel, The Summer Prince, was long-listed for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Her follow-up YA novel, Love Is the Drug, won the Andre Norton Award in 2015. A native of Washington, D.C., Johnson is currently based in Mexico City, where she received a master’s degree in Mesoamerican studies and now plays in a band. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Saints Came In
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
The View from the River
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
They Walked in the Light
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
TROUBLE THE SAINTS
Copyright © 2020 by Alaya Dawn Johnson
All rights reserved.
Edited by Miriam Weinberg
Cover art by Charlie Davis
Cover design by Jamie Stafford-Hill
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
120 Broadway
New York, NY 10271
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-17534-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-17533-5 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250175335
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First Edition: 2020