“Deal’s done, Miss Emmaline,” said the White Lady, looking amused. “Too late.”
Emmaline turned to Pauline, shaking, horrified. Pauline, though, lifted her chin. “I saw it, Momma,” she said. “One life for three. Trouble coming whether we want it or not, but if I go, you and the boys will get through it.”
In a wordless fury, Emmaline flung herself at the White Lady. She did this without using her body, and the White Lady met her without hers, taking her up and out and through and into dreaming. Thing was, dreaming wasn’t a thing mortal folks did so well when they were awake, so Emmaline tumbled, helpless, lashing out ineffectually. And in the perverse way of her kind—who loved to lie, but liked it best of all when truth became their weapon – the White Lady showed Emmaline the future that Pauline had bought. She saw: Markets full of melons and greens and peaches, all artificially fresh and reeking of chemicals in the dead of winter. Long elevated strips of road carving up Negro towns and neighborhoods all over the country. Gray, looming schools isolating bright black minds and breaking their spirits and funneling them into jails. Police, everywhere, killing and killing and killing. This? Emmaline fought nausea and despair, lest she strengthen her enemy— but it was nearly impossible not to feel something. Oh, Lord, her baby had given up her freedom for this?
And yet. All at once Emmaline was not alone in her tumbling. Pauline, new and raw and woman-strong, pushed at Emmaline, helping her straighten up. Then Pauline pointed, snatching more truth from the White Lady’s dream than even she wanted shown; the White Lady hissed into their minds like ice on a griddle. Pauline ignored this and said, “Look, Momma!”
And then Em saw the rest.
Marching black people, attacked by dogs. But still marching. Children— Sample!—struck by the blasts of fire hoses, the torrent peeling off clothes and tearing skin. Still marching. Joined by dozens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands.
Still. Marching.
Before these marches, prayers and church-plate dinners. Emmaline, sprinkling a little fire into the chicken and dumplings to warm the marchers against the cold hose water to come. Young women refusing to be ordered out of their bus seats to go sit in the back. Emmaline braiding a donkey’s stubbornness into their hair. Children holding their heads high through crowds of shouting, jeering white teenagers and adults. Emmaline trimming a few figs from the sycamore to make jam, sweetening the children’s mouths with the taste of heritage and survival.
And so much more. Brown faces in space! Emmaline could only stare at the stars, and savor the impossible possibility. Brown men on the Supreme Court! Then she saw the white house that Pauline had mentioned. The White House, nestled amid statues and obelisks and the mirror pools of Washington, D.C., a place of power in itself. She saw a man standing on its steps, brown as fig jam. And then a woman, black as molasses, her gaze hard and high and proud. And then another woman, and another brown man, and so many more, their frequency increasing with the spinning of the sun.
Still marching. Never stopping, ’til freedom was won.
Pauline’s single sacrifice could set all of it in motion. But— “No!” Emmaline fought her way back toward wakefulness. “I can’t—it can’t be me who stays!” She didn’t believe! She had taught her children to bow their heads, not lift them up high. “I’m not what they need!”
You gon’ be all they get, sugar, said the White Lady into the dream, in a laughing whisper.
No. No, she damn well would not be.
The dream still spun around her. Emmaline set her jaw and plunged her hand into it, grabbing wildly this time, and pulling back... the jar of sycamore jam.
“Sin’s sin,” she snapped. The top of the jar was tight, but she wrestled it off and plucked out a dripping, soft sycamore fig to brandish against the churning dark. “A deal’s a deal. But one kind of prey the same as another to you lot, ain’t it? You like children’s beauty, but a woman’s don’t hurt you none. You like innocence, but you’ll take foolishness. So here mine: I can’t believe the world will ever change.
“I can’t hope. It ain’t in me. Spent too long making it easier for people to live downtrodden. I know how to survive, but I ain’t got the fight for change in me—not like my baby does. So take me, and leave her.”
“No!” Pauline shouted, but Emmaline had enough control to drown her out with the sound of chanting, marching crowds.
The shape of the White Lady had blurred into the dream, but she was a sharp-toothed presence amid the swirl. Take you both, child and fool, all mine.
Emmaline grinned. “Greed’s a sin.” The dream cracked a little beneath good Christian truth, allowing Em to summon the whiff of burned sage. The White Lady flinched hard enough to slow the whirlwind of the dream, for the smell carried with it lamentations for stolen lands, stolen children, and the stolen lives of Em’s Creek forbears. Emmaline set that in place opposite the jar of figs. “Your bargain was one for three, not two for two.”
Images of marchers warped and twisted around them, the White House dissolving into the foxy face of the White Lady. “True enough,” she said, conjuring up her fan again. “Still, I’d rather the child if you don’t mind. Or even if you do.”
Here Emmaline faltered. She had not dreamt of rosemary. Frantically she rifled through images, tossing away the fish she’d dreamt of before each of her children, shoving aside the green tomatoes and the collards of the market. Lord! Had she never once dreamt of baking chicken?
She had not. But then, through the tittering laughter of the White Lady and her cronies, Emmaline smelled a dream of pot-roasted guinea-rooster, with orange peel... and rosemary. That had been the first time Emmaline accorded her daughter the respect of a fellow woman—oh, and Pauline had been savoring that feeling, all this time! There was a bit of innocence attached to it, too, lost after Emmaline’s explanation about white men’s oranges; the perfect sweetening to lure in a hungry fey. And indeed, the White Lady paused, lifting her face a little and half-closing her eyes in pleasure at the toothsome aroma. But then she stiffened as she caught the rosemary’s perfume.
“Rosemary, sage, and fig,” said Pauline, in a tone of satisfaction. “Now let my Momma—”
“Take me,” Emmaline said. Commanded, now, because she could. She had bound the White Lady by both the ancient rules of the Old Country and the newer rules of flesh and blood. The deal had been made, one innocent life for three lives protected and prosperous, but Emmaline had control over which life the White Men got to keep, at least.
“Momma!” Pauline, her beautiful powerful Pauline, abruptly resolved out of the dream’s swirl and turned to her. “Momma, you can’t.”
“Hush.” Emmaline went to her, held her close, kissed her cornrowed head. “I done told you a million times that the world doesn’t change—but I was wrong, and I’m sorry for that. You got a big fight ahead of you, but you can win it. And you’re better suited for that fight than I’ll ever be.” She hugged the girl tight. “Be strong, baby. Tell your brothers the same. I know y’all are anyway.”
Pauline clutched at her. “But Momma, I, you can’t, I didn’t want—”
The White Lady closed the dream around Emmaline, and whisked her away.
IN THE MORNING, Pauline woke up on the ground of the Fairgrounds wet with dew and weeping. Her brothers, who had come up to the Fairgrounds to find her, came quietly to her side to hold her tight.
COUSIN RENEE TOOK the children in, of course, for blood was blood. She sent them one by one to Alabama State for their learning, so they were there when the Freedom Rides began. Naturally all three joined up. Through the dark times that followed, the foretold dogs and hoses and beatings—and the unforseen lynchings and assassinations and bombings—there were white folk aplenty doing evil... but no White Folk. The fey did not go again where they had been bested once, and in any case, their time was waning. The dirt of Alabama was red for many reasons, not the least of which that it was full of iron ore. Took a lot of power to overcome that much iron... and
the times were changing such that not even black children could be stolen with impunity any more.
The White Folk kept their promise, at least: Jim got his arm bitten by a dog during a protest, but it did not tear his throat out. Hard-headed Sample dated a white woman and only had to flee town; the men who meant to chain him up behind their truck and drag him to death did not catch him. Pauline got married, dreamt of fish, and made her own daughters to carry on the family legacy. After a few more years, she ran for city council and won, and nobody strung her up. Then she ran for mayor, and won that too. All the while she turned a tidy profit from her sideline barbecue business. The greens had a little extra warmth in them that made everyone feel better towards each other, so she called them Freedom Greens, mostly as a joke.
But one year the black man Pauline had dreamt of in the White House passed through town, and he decided to come all the way to Pratt City to have some of Pauline’s Famous Freedom Greens. Folks went wild. Somebody paid her to write a book about her life. Somebody optioned the film rights. Companies called and asked to franchise her recipe—but Pauline said no, instead hiring a small staff of Pratt City dwellers and leasing a commercial kitchen to fill all the thousands of orders for greens herself.
In every can, mind, there was a sprinkle of rosemary, sage, and a tiny dab of sycamore fig. Just to cut the bitterness a bit.
AND LATE ONE cold winter’s night, Pauline dreamt again of the White Folk. She saw how lean and poorly they were looking these days, deprived of their easy prey, and as the hate of the world dwindled and left them hungry. But as she fought the urge to smile at their misfortune—for ill-wishing would only make them stronger—she caught a glimpse of a painfully familiar black face among their foxy whiteness, strong and proud and shining in its own way. A face that was smiling, and satisfied, and full of motherly pride.
So the world changed. And so Pauline woke up and went to hold her oldest granddaughter close, whispering to her of secrets and savory things and dreams yet to come—and of Great Grammy Em, never to be forgotten, who would one day also be free.
RED AS BLOOD AND WHITE AS BONE
Theodora Goss
THEODORA GOSS (www.theodoragoss.com) was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting; Interfictions, a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; and Voices from Fairyland, a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems. Her most recent book is The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-sided Love Story. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards. Her debut novel, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, will be published in 2017.
IAM AN orphan. I was born among these mountains, to a woodcutter and his wife. My mother died in childbirth, and my infant sister died with her. My father felt that he could not keep me, so he sent me to the sisters of St. Margarete, who had a convent farther down the mountain on which we lived, the Karhegy. I was raised by the sisters on brown bread, water, and prayer.
This is a good way to start a fairy tale, is it not?
When I was twelve years old, I was sent to the household of Baron Orso Kalman, whose son was later executed for treason, to train as a servant. I started in the kitchen, scrubbing the pots and pans with a brush, scrubbing the floor on my hands and knees with an even bigger brush. Greta, the German cook, was bad-tempered, as was the first kitchen maid, Agneta. She had come from Karberg, the big city at the bottom of the Karhegy—at least it seemed big, to such a country bumpkin as I was then. I was the second kitchen maid and slept in a small room that was probably a pantry, with a small window high up, on a mattress filled with straw. I bathed twice a week, after Agneta in her bathwater, which had already grown cold. In addition to the plain food we received as servants, I was given the leftovers from the baron’s table after Greta and Agneta had picked over them. That is how I first tasted chocolate cake, and sausages, and beer. And I was given two dresses of my very own. Does this not seem like much? It was more than I had received at the convent. I thought I was a lucky girl!
I had been taught to read by the nuns, and my favorite thing to read was a book of fairy tales. Of course the nuns had not given me such a thing. A young man who had once stayed in the convent’s guesthouse had given it to me, as a gift. I was ten years old, then. One of my duties was herding the goats. The nuns were famous for a goat’s milk cheese, and so many of our chores had to do with the goats, their care and feeding. Several times, I met this man up in the mountain pastures. (I say man, but he must have been quite young still, just out of university. To me he seemed dreadfully old.) I was with the goats, he was striding on long legs, with a walking stick in his hand and a straw hat on his head. He always stopped and talked to me, very politely, as he might talk to a young lady of quality.
One day, he said, “You remind me of a princess in disguise, Klara, here among your goats.” When I told him that I did not know what he meant, he looked at me in astonishment. “Have you never read any fairy tales?” Of course not. I had read only the Bible and my primer. Before he left the convent, he gave me a book of fairy tales, small but beautifully illustrated. “This is small enough to hide under your mattress,” he said. “Do not let the nuns see it, or they will take it from you, thinking it will corrupt you. But it will not. Fairy tales are another kind of Bible, for those who know how to read them.”
Years later, I saw his name again in a bookstore window and realized he had become a poet, a famous one. But by then he was dead. He had died in the war, like so many of our young men.
I followed his instructions, hiding the book under my mattress and taking it out only when there was no one to see me. That was difficult at the convent, where I slept in a room with three other girls. It was easier in the baron’s house, where I slept alone in a room no one else wanted, not even to store turnips. And the book did indeed become a Bible to me, a surer guide than that other Bible written by God himself, as the nuns had taught. For I knew nothing of Israelites or the building of pyramids or the parting of seas. But I knew about girls who scrubbed floors and grew sooty sleeping near the hearth, and fish who gave you wishes (although I had never been given one), and was not Greta, our cook, an ogress? I’m sure she was. I regarded fairy tales as infallible guides to life, so I did not complain at the hard work I was given, because perhaps someday I would meet an old woman in the forest, and she would tell me that I was a princess in disguise. Perhaps.
The day on which she came was a cold, dark day. It had been raining for a week. Water poured down from the sky, as though to drown us all, and it simply did not stop. I was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes. Greta and Agneta were meeting with the housekeeper, Frau Hoffman, about a ball that was to take place in three days’ time. It would celebrate the engagement of the baron’s son, Vadek, to the daughter of a famous general, who had fought for the Austro-Hungarian emperor in the last war. Prince Radomir himself was staying at the castle. He had been hunting with Vadek Kalman in the forest that covered the Karhegy until what Greta called this unholy rain began. They had been at school together, Agneta told me. I found it hard to believe that a prince would go to school, for they never did in my tales. What need had a prince for schooling, when his purpose in life was to rescue fair maidens from the dragons that guarded them, and fight ogres, and ride on carpets that flew through the air like aeroplanes? I had never in my life seen either a flying carpet or an aeroplane: to me, they were equally mythical modes of transportation.
I had caught a glimpse of the general’s daughter when she first arrived the day before, with her father and lady’s maid. She was golden-haired, and looked like
a porcelain doll under her hat, which Agneta later told me was from Paris. The lady’s maid had told Frau Hoffman, who had told Greta, and the news had filtered down even to me. But I thought a Paris hat looked much like any other hat, and I had no interest in a general’s daughter. She did not have glass slippers, and I was quite certain she could not spin straw into gold. So what good was she?
I was sitting, as I have said, in the kitchen beside the great stone hearth, peeling potatoes by a fire I was supposed to keep burning so it could later be used for roasting meat. The kitchen was dark, because of the storm outside. I could hear the steady beating of rain on the windows, the crackling of wood in the fire. Suddenly, I heard a thump, thump, thump against the door that led out to the kitchen garden. What could it be? For a moment, my mind conjured images out of my book: a witch with a poisoned apple, or Death himself. But then I realized it must be Josef, the under-gardener. He often knocked on that door when he brought peas or asparagus from the garden and made cow-eyes at Agneta.
“A moment,” I cried, putting aside the potatoes I had been peeling, leaving the knife in a potato near the top of the basket so I could find it again easily. Then I went to the door.
When I pulled it open, something that had been leaning against it fell inside. At first I could not tell what it was, but it moaned and turned, and I saw that it was a woman in a long black cloak. She lay crumpled on the kitchen floor. Beneath her cloak she was naked: her white legs gleamed in the firelight. Fallen on the ground beside her was a bundle, and I thought: Beggar woman. She must be sick from hunger.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven Page 50
