How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

by N. K. Jemisin

  “Children should be seen and not heard,” said the White Lady, gesturing gracefully with her fan. “But ladies with that blood like wine, sweet and high and so fine, get some choices in the matter ’til it’s taken from them. What say you, Miss Pauline?”

  Pauline, to her credit, glanced at Emmaline again. Her belligerence had faded by now, and her small face was properly anxious and afraid. Then, though, her jaw firmed, and she faced the White Lady squarely. “You said trouble was comin’.”

  “Oh, indeed.” The White Lady let her gaze drip left and right, syruping all over the boys. “So much trouble! Folks getting uppity from here to the Carolinas. De-seg-gregation! Non-discrim-ination! And don’t you know them bullnecks will be hitting back fast, beating y’all back into your place.” She stopped her gaze on hotheaded Sample; Sample set his jaw. “Hitting back hard, I tell you, on boys who think to be called men.”

  Pauline caught her breath. Then, though, thank the Lord, she bit her bottom lip. “I want to speak to my mother.”

  There was a moment’s long, pent pause. Then the White Lady flipped her fan back up into a blurring wave, dropping into a mocking curtsy. The servant child moved jerkily back behind her, taking hold of the parasol again. “Seeking counsel is wise, and within the rules besides,” the White Lady admitted. “Not too much counsel, though, little miss. Some deals don’t last long.”

  With that, she flounced off with the child in tow—though Emmaline noted that she skirted wide around the sycamore fig before passing behind a pine tree and vanishing.

  The instant Emmaline could speak and move, she did, hurrying over to Pauline and slapping the tar out of the girl before she could speak. “Didn’t I tell you about folks like that?” she demanded, pointing with a shaking hand after the White Lady. “Didn’t I tell you they’ll put a pretty orange in your hand and snatch it back with the hand attached?”

  It had been happening more and more lately that Pauline defied her—but then, this was only proper, was it not? A girl coming into her womanhood, and her adult power, should speak her mind sometimes. “I know, Momma,” Pauline said, without a trace of apology. Her voice was so calm and strong and even that Emmaline blinked. “But I had dreams.”

  “Well, you should’ve told me! And you should’ve told me about the blood coming, I know how to make you safe for at least a bit of time, and—”

  “You can’t make me safe, Momma.” Pauline said it so sharp, her gaze so hard, that Emmaline could only flinch back. “That’s why you told me what to be scared of, ain’t it? So I could make myself safe. And I know, ’cause you taught me, that it’s a woman’s job to fight for hers.”

  “That’s a man’s job,” Jim said, scowling—though he, too, should’ve been quiet, cowed by the slap. Sample nodded fiercely. Emmaline groaned and put a hand in the air for strength; all of her children had forgotten how to mind, all at once.

  “Decent folks’ job, then,” Pauline said back, with a little heat. “But Momma, I saw it in the dream. People marching! Big ol’ redneck bulls, standing up like men, holding dogs and billy clubs. Blood everywhere.” Emmaline’s skin went all a-prickle with remembered fear. Yet there was no fear in Pauline’s face as she went on, her voice rising in excitement. “At the end of it, though, Momma, at the end … I saw white children and black children sitting by each other in school. It was yellow and brown and red children there, too! Black people at the front of a bus! Momma …” Pauline bit her lip, then leaned forward to whisper, though there was no one to hear but family. “I saw a black man in a big white house.”

  There were always black men in the big white houses of downtown Birmingham. Who else was going to tend their gardens or wash their cars? And yet … there was a fervor in Pauline’s gaze that warned Emmaline there was something more to her daughter’s dreams.

  Didn’t matter, though. The world didn’t change. And somebody had to protect her fool children from themselves.

  Seething with pent-up anger and fear, Emmaline herded the children inside. She made them go to bed early, with no supper for smarting off, because they had to learn—Pauline especially. Wasn’t no prosperity worth a girlchild’s soul and what little innocence life allowed her. Wasn’t no safety for black boys beyond what humility bought them, little as that was.

  And while they slept, Emmaline burned sage, and she prayed to every ancestor of three continents who might listen, and then she set herself up in a chair before the door with her grandmother’s old musket across her knees. She would stay up day and night, if she had to, for her children’s sake.

  After a few hours had passed in slow and taut silence, and the candles burned low, and the weight of drowsiness pressed on the back of her head like a blanket, Emmaline got up to keep herself awake. She peeked in the boys’ room: They were snoring, curled up, though Jim had a half-eaten peach still in his hand, sneaked out from some hiding place or another against just such an occasion of their mother’s wrath.

  Pauline’s room, though, was cold from the open window wafting sharp bitter wind over the girl’s empty bed.

  There would be only one place the girl could have gone: the Fairgrounds, in the shadow of Red Mountain.

  Emmaline ran to Renee’s house, since Renee had the only working phone on the street. There she called Frank, who came over bringing his mule. The mule ran like it knew what was at stake, so fast and hard that Emmaline’s bottom was raw long before she reached the place.

  The Fairgrounds were only Fairgrounds once a year. The rest of the time it was just a fallow field, occasionally used for harness racing. Long ago, though, it had been the breaking ground of a plantation—the place where new slaves, freshly force-marched up from the port of Mobile, got branded and stripped of name and spirit before being sent into the fields. As Emmaline halted the mule and slid off its back, she felt all that old blood there in the ground, mixed with old tears and the red dirt beneath her feet. White Folk fed on that sort of magic. This would be a place of power for them.

  As Em reached the top of the hill, she saw that Pauline stood beneath a pine that was being strangled by a carpet of kudzu. Before her stood the White Lady—shining even more now, her skin catching the moon’s gleam in the way of her people, ears gone to points and mouth too wide and full of sharp fangs. They both turned as Emmaline thumped up, out of breath, her legs shaking from holding so tight to the mule’s sides. Still, she moved to stand between them, in front of Pauline and facing the White Lady. “I ain’t gon’ let you!”

  “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 Folk 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 anymore.

  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 toward 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.

  And late one cold winter’s night, Pauline dreamt again of the White Folk. She saw how lean and poorly they were looking these day
s, 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.

  L’Alchimista

  The assistants had ruined the caponata soup. Screaming and flinging hot pappardelle after them, Franca stopped on the inn’s sidewalk to pant for air as their backs faded into the snow-flecked night.

  “Problematic, signora,” said a voice to her left. “Now who will help you in the kitchen?”

  Franca turned, lifting her ladle to confront a specter. Or so the man seemed, hidden as he was within a voluminous winter coat and wide-brimmed hat. In the light from the sodium lamps, she could make out the etching of a face within the hat’s shadow. Thin graceful lines of nose and chin and lips, the lattermost curved in a smile. The smile did not help her mood.

  “More problematic than they’re worth,” Franca said, putting her free hand on one ample hip, “and so will you be if you’re here a-begging. Or if you’re a flasher, go find the widow Annabella down the street; I hear she’s not picky.”

  The smile widened. “Not begging, signora, except perhaps for some warmth and a good meal. I heard both could be found here.”

  “Heard where?” Franca narrowed her eyes, suspicious. None of the travel websites would list any inn where she worked.