8. When the gel “seems ready,” pound with pestle made from swine bones (a swine not kill’d for the purpose, but death of natural causes), until powd’ry.
9. Inhale by the nose.
As should be clear, this recipe is frankly Inimitable. Even the otherwise turncoat Lion-Man seems genuinely unable to re-create the formula without his mates. He mutters something about collective knowledge and Context.
* * *
—
We’ll leave London behind, Bess told Jack. The two of them with the recipe in hand and Jack presum’d dead. We’ll live with what’s left of the Fen-Tigers—if there are any—and fight the surveyors and make a thieftopia in what remains. They would share the elixir-secrets. They would make a new Version together, the rogues and the doxies. They would experiment together.
Fen-fronds and deer urine? We’ll sort it out. We’ll fight the surveyors and the Exhaustion and the iron-cold fen winters. Strengthen the straggling freebooters, or find new ones. We will fight in the fens while the ghost ships collect by the hundreds—please God in the thousands—in the Waves of the oceans to the south.
Bess dreamt aloud to him about the ghost ships, streaming through the glassy electric-blue water, the way her father had told her—blue like indigo pinched from the throats of Tamil snails off Bet Dawrka where many British ships lay sunken in the tidal Floods, florets of coral, Starfish, and night-blooming seaweeds housed in their wooden hulls.
We will fight in the fens while the ghost ships clog the Thames, spearing their brave bows through the Hearts of the slave ships, the trading vessels and the Royal Navy gunners.
Until the imperial ships splinter in a thousand Clouds on Britain’s imperial shores, Jack added.
But—he said—if we die there? If there are no Fen-Tigers left? If the Surveyors shoot us dead?
Then we will Haunt the Fen, Bess said. Something between an exhortation and a prayer they would perish, and they would wait. History would find them—all the underwater dead, all the Family of Love, the Inmates, and all those who had died in the fens—the centuries-long dead, too; the ones who died when the Norman invaders came steaming over the moorland from the north. Robbers, Rebels, Lovers. Wait. Wait under waters, she said. History will find us. History will avenge us all.
It was as good a plan as any.
* * *
—
The horsecart was ready. Aurie had fed and water’d the beasts. Bess had given him explicit directions. Begg’d him to come join them. Bring Tommy, she said. Bring anyone. Bring them all. Franny and Laurent. All the bats—not the Abbess!—but the rest of them. And if you find Okoh, if he turns up living free in London, tell him where we are.
He disappeared in a flying Cloud, said Aurie. He could be anywhere.
As he sat on the hay bale, the idea of never returning to London spun Jack with Vertigo. Never again to see his roofs, his walls of Clamber and Trespass; never the briny scent of wet coaldust, the low clouds beetling down into the alleys, or the choke-damp Vapors that miasmed as the innkeepers hung the lantern lights at night. Never the clouds of scavenger sparrows kicking up filth in the cobblestones. The coves and the doxies laughing in the pubs.
But all the way out to the fens, Bess drove the horses, and he rest’d his aching head in her lap, and as the cart rocked him—the Afternoon sky leaking pale to the south over the gray stretch of the fenwaters, the penumbral tree-shadows mirrored in the Shoals—he knew something even deeper than his own Cityness, and it was this.
When a daughter of the fens—of the Oppressed and the incarcerated, of the eel and the fish, of the freedom-fighters and the Scottish Inmates and the Family of Love, of the indentured who freed themselves from their masters, and of the Righteous of this earth and the next—when this daughter of the fens who has taken your Body and luxuriated you in her arms, stands before you in a horse barn and says: There is no utopia of the Damned save the one we will make ourselves, and we will make it—
That is to say.
When a woman regards you with her inevitable Expression—the one that says: I’m waiting for you in the future; catch up, catch up—you will liberate yourself from every pre-existing bond, body, and name you ever had.
And go with her.*2, *3
*1 “It emerges in fragments,” said Foucault of the archive. History does not progress, but rather piles and strews—a chaos of heterogeneous shards. This is something close to what Derrida meant when he said that the archive does not preserve so much as occupy the site of the destruction of a memory. An impossible, ghostly archaeology—unexcavatable and haunting.
*2 “And go with her”—Reader, that’s my contribution. I could not resist making one small alteration to the manuscript—a kind of counsel, really.
*3 The body has two histories. So says the manuscript. It is why I have had to steal it back from the publisher. To steal it for us.
There is the history that binds us all. The terrible history that began when the police first swarmed the streets of the cities and the settlers streamed down the decks of their ships, casting shadows on the world to turn themselves white. Casting the wickedest net. There is no trans body, no body at all—no memoir, no confessions, no singular story of “you” or anyone—outside this broad and awful legacy. So when they ask for our story—when they want to sell it—we don’t let them forget.
Slavery, surveillers, settlers and their shadows.
But the second history of the body?
The second history is love’s inscription.
Some inscriptions we wear like dreams—fragments of a life untethered from this world, messages from a future reflected to us like light off broken shards. A woman undresses in this dream-light, embraces you, and your body rises with hers to become unmarked.
Some inscriptions are utterances, battles. Someone fought the police long ago. This, too—this street fight—is a kind of love….Someone said, “[O]ne Molotov cocktail was thrown and we were ramming the door of the Stonewall bar with an uprooted parking meter. So they were ready to come out shooting that night. Finally the Tactical Police Force showed up after 45 minutes. A lot of people forget that for 45 minutes we had them trapped in there” (“I’m Glad I Was in the Stonewall Riot,” Sylvia Rivera, interviewed by Leslie Feinberg, Workers World, July 2, 1998).
I’m not saying this battle was fought for you. History is not that linear. And yet, because of it, and many others like it, now you inhabit your own skin.
In the name of my ex who taught me the second history of my body and the first history of the world, I took the manuscript.
In the name of every woman whose touch tethered me to the future—of every woman who visited me in the dungeon of myself—I stole back for us what is rightfully ours.
In the name of those who came before, who fought the police; those whose names we know, and those whose names we can never know.
In the name of those who come after, who will never know our names—
The night I left, the wind poured down from the hills, bitter and constant.
The nightclouds whizzed over Route 17, silvered purple in the pitch-black sky. I drove past rows of wrecked factories. Some were now breweries and lofts. Most were concrete and brick chunks, shavings, mounds of dust—the detritus of industry collapsed in ruins, hatching toxic nerves and blood vessels that reached down into the dirt at the side of the highway.
I passed the neon-lit box stores with fighter jets screaming overhead. I passed Irish burger joints, yogurt shops, “humane” abattoirs and haberdashers.
I passed what were once Mahican villages, scrubland and forest. The sites of the burning of the longhouses. They say that under the rye fields lay charred scars in vast patches; they say that the charcoal ashes aerated the soil, nourishing a brighter, greener rye leaf. As time passed, the settlers tried to erase the traces of the longhouses. But the flame
moths that preferred the greener stalks gathered in perfect cream-colored clouds, their furry wings iterating an unforgotten trauma endlessly against the wind. When they rested at night—their wings wrapped tightly around their bodies—the moths swayed on the chaff like so many broken twigs waving in the dark.
I passed the flame moths swaying, lit up in my headlights’ glare.
I drove a long time, and I drove very far.
Morning was coming, the sun a bare gray ring behind clouds.
The moorland rose on broad green shoulders specked with dry pink flowers, snipe pitching and wheeling—grape-black birds, dark against the sky like bats.
A forest of tall pines and hemlock thickened and then thinned.
I drove until I reached water, silked dark under gray clouds. Green water crawling with weeds and phosphorescent-forewinged dragonflies. Tiny waves bathed the shoreline. Silver-flanked minnows flicked close then flicked away. Hawthorn bushes pushed through the soil in full flower. Oysters burped air bubbles at the fen shore. The soil was boggy, brackish, unowned and alive. At the horizon, a library—soaring walls of chitin, spiderweb and glass—flashed red in the setting sun.
Are you wondering how to get here?
Dear Reader, if you are you—the one I edited this for, the one I stole this for—and if you cry a certain kind of tears—the ones I told you about, remember?—you will find your way to us.
You will not need a map.
for Victory Matsui
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
If readers have made it this far, they know that Jack Sheppard was an English folk hero and jailbreaker whose history formed the basis of many eighteenth-century pseudo-memoirs, biographies, and ephemera, in addition to John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and, later, Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. In my own speculative approach to this popular folktale, I have sought to oppose the ahistoricist tendency of much fiction to imagine early modern London as a uniformly white city. Confessions of the Fox is a fiction crafted in fidelity to the London we know was true—a diasporic London shaped through centuries of Black and South Asian communities and labor—but of course this fiction is itself necessarily partial and fallible. To the extent that I have achieved anything of what I set out to do, it has been an honor to speak with, read, and learn from the work of scholars, activists, and writers who have labored with such dedication to restore to history occluded or suppressed truths, and who have represented and imagined forms of resistance to dominant narratives. In the Resources section that follows, I have listed some of the representative texts with which I am immensely grateful to have been able to engage. Of course, any flaws or failures of the manuscript are my own.
This is a novel that draws heavily on histories of mass incarceration, racialization, colonialism, the cruelties of capitalism, the militarization of the police, and the inextricability of embodied life and struggle from that history. In writing it, I was inspired by and turned many times to the works, histories, and stories of people who have endured incarceration. Angela Davis’s body of work was an indispensable reference point throughout. Assata Shakur’s Assata was a touchstone for me, as was Leonard Peltier’s Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance. Just as this book was being completed, Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike won demands, and Chelsea Manning and Oscar López Rivera got free. It has been a great privilege to learn from these writers, stories, and lives. For me, lived struggle gives meaning to works of art, not the other way around. Just so, this book would fundamentally have no meaning outside of these struggles, the broader fight for prison abolition, and the long-sought, never surrendered horizon of liberation.
* * *
—
As for more specific acknowledgments, I have to begin with Chris, Victory, and One World.
When I learned that my agent would be pitching my novel to Chris Jackson’s One World imprint, I was thrilled. I knew that Chris would be relaunching the imprint with an emphasis on work by writers of color as well as other writers whose work “explores our politics, culture, and interior lives, without the filter of the dominant culture.” In awe of the vision of the imprint, I did not dream that Chris would be interested in taking me on, and yet—in a turn of events that still amazes me—he was.
After my first meeting with Chris and my editor, Victory Matsui, it was exhilaratingly clear that One World was committed to the idea that novels did not need to sacrifice a radical political worldview in order to be (hopefully) entertaining and absorbing. I felt very strongly then that there was no other imprint I could be as proud, honored, and excited to be a part of as this one. So my first debt is to the team that made this happen: To my wonderful agent, Susan Golomb, for taking me on, for revising the entire manuscript three times in one insane month with me—while she had pneumonia—and for knowing to connect me with One World. To the phenomenal Chris Jackson for recognizing something worthwhile in the manuscript, for sharing his editorial acumen, and for welcoming me into the deeply meaningful community he is building at the imprint. And to Victory Matsui—prodigy and genius—who worked as hard as I did for almost an entire year, tearing apart and reconstellating this book with me. I believe that Victory went as deep into the book as it is possible for an editor to go. The gift of that shared labor of writing, conceptualization, and editing is profound to me, and it is why I have dedicated this book to Victory.
This book has incurred many additional debts.
The activist communities who have shared time, labor, and space with me. My political education is truly the foundation of all work that comes after.
The librarians at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA and at UMass-Amherst (especially Jim Kelly) for their help with primary-text research for this novel, which began while on an Ahmanson-Getty fellowship at UCLA in 2009–2010.
The Lannan Foundation; Adult Contemporary (Katie Brewer Ball and Svetlana Kitto)/Shandaken Project/Dia:Beacon; the P L A T F O R M lecture series (Patrick Gaughan and Jon Ruseski); and the Dartmouth College critical theory reading group (Alysia Garrison, Christian P. Haines, Max Hantel, Devin Singh, and Patricia Stuelke) for inviting me to speak, to read parts of this novel, and to think together about it.
Junot Díaz and Adam McGee at the Boston Review, John Hennessy at The Common, Andrea Lawlor at Fence, Melissa Febos and Hunger Mountain, all the comrades at Salvage, and John David Rhodes at World Picture Journal for editing and publishing work related to this project.
A special thanks to Beth Pearson and the production team at Random House, for their incredible work with a manuscript that incorporated the irregularities of eighteenth-century prose stylizations.
Co-authors, comrades, interlocutors, and mentors who offered support or read/discussed this and related projects with me: Brenna Bhandar, Tithi Bhattacharya, Sarah Blackwood, Nicholas Boggs, Tisa Bryant (who pointed me toward Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco at a crucial moment, and whose conversation about writing and literature in general has been a profound gift), Zahid Chaudhary, Ted Chiang, George Ciccariello-Maher and the Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics collective, the 2016 Clarionites, Ashley Cohen, Pete Coviello, Christina Crosby, Ned Delacour, Andy Duncan, Jen Gilmore, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Jack Halberstam, Maria Davhana Headley, Sami Hermez, Markus Hoffmann, Ruth Jennison, Cassandra Khaw, Anja Kirschner, Ellen Kushner, Rachel Kushner, Victor LaValle, Kelly Link, Sarah Mesle, China Miéville (who read and advised on the manuscript or portions thereof a staggering three times), Sabina Murray, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson (for generous guidance and support in the world of nonacademic publishing), Jasbir Puar, Cornelia Reiner, Trea Russworm, the amazing Bethany “the fixer” Schneider, Dani Shapiro, Matthew Sharpe, Delia Sherman, David Shulman, Dean Spade, Edward Steck, Stephanie Steiker (whose brilliant engagement with the form and theory of this book and much else is dear to me), Jordan Stein, Shelley Streeby, Michael Taeckens, Kate Thomas, Alberto Toscano, Amy Villarejo, Rosie Warren, and Chi-mi
ng Yang.
My wonderful sister, Amanda Hall, and the Hall family—Kevin, Rainer, Leo, and Stevie. The Horowitz-Barkan-Ogles: Susie, Ross, Vanessa, and Joel. The Guters: Marvin, Bobbie, Avi, Lisa, Lev, Katie, and Arlo. My late father, Stephen Rosenberg, read early versions of portions of the manuscript; his support and enthusiasm were very meaningful to me. Of my late mother, Barbara Rosenberg, I can only imagine that she would have been thrilled this was being published and mortified by every word.
A number of friends, in addition to offering indispensable counsel and collaboration, saw me through the finishing of this book at a difficult time, and shared in practice the kind of care, dependability, and trusted community we often dream of in the abstract. I’m especially grateful to my dear Kadji Amin, Steve Dillon, Allison Page (a rock!), Pooja Rangan, beloved Britt Rusert, Svati Shah, and the daily company of Bernadine Mellis, Hart Mellis-Lawlor, and my oldest and dearest buddy, Andrea Lawlor.
RESOURCES
In researching this book, I have sought guidance from many friends as well as an indispensable range of work on topics such as prison abolition, anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggle, mutinies, trans self-determination, workplace sabotage, and resistance of all kinds. I have been very lucky to be able to draw on incredible scholarship in decolonial and postcolonial studies, critical race studies, Marxism, and queer and trans theory. I include some of the works that have been especially foundational to my research here—though by no means is this an exhaustive list—in the hopes that readers will find these to be useful avenues for further thought.
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