“Green Siskin, is that you?” Sparrow’s vision blurred. Her throat was tight and she could speak no more.
The siskin hopped in her hand and chirped.
* * *
The Twisted Ladle was doing good business on this night. It was right after the harvest, when people’s purses were full and limbs sore.
The little inn didn’t have the kind of delicacies that the teahouses in the big cities served, but the laborers and laundresses and petty farmers and farming wives who filled its benches didn’t care. Rice wine and sorghum mead flowed freely, and fried tripe came by the plateful. People said what was on their minds, instead of what they thought they ought to say, as was the wont with learned scholars and clever merchants.
But they were all quiet now, listening to the young tanci woman. She strummed her pipa:
I sing of great Yangzhou, the city of white salt,
Of wealth and fame, a thousand refined teahouses.
But one night they came, iron hooves to assault,
So starts the tale of a girl of the blue houses.
The singer-storyteller wasn’t pretty, not exactly. Her face was too thin, with a delicate nose and quick eyes that reminded one of a bird. Her long, dark hair was cropped short, as though to remind her listeners that she was selling music and story, instead of something else that some men might have desired. She wore no makeup or jewelry, save for a jade ring on her right hand.
On her shoulder sat a green siskin, a lovely bird apparently trained to chirp and harmonize with the playing of the pipa.
“…then the invading army surrounded Yangzhou, like a stormy sea pounding against a rock…”
She clapped two bamboo sticks together to simulate the sound of horses’ hooves. She dragged a rusty nail across an old gong to simulate the sound of armor grinding against armor.
Of course the young woman didn’t call the invaders in her story “Manchus.” It had been more than a decade since the Manchu conquest of China. The new dynasty claimed the Mandate of Heaven, and clever scholars came up with cloying tributes to the wisdom and strength of the Manchu sages.
Like all true stories, her story was set a long, long time ago.
“ ‘What does a lowly woman, a concubine, know of virtue?’ asked the captain.”
The little siskin fluttered from table to table, picking at melon seeds, and everyone marveled at its beauty.
In the same manner, as the young woman told the story, she hopped between voices and expressions. The audience was mesmerized.
“Green Siskin strode up to the soldiers and said, ‘What treasure do you need?’ ”
They clenched their fists as they pictured the bodies in the streets. They cheered and laughed as Green Siskin tricked the invading commander. They spat and slapped the table in anger as the ignorant merchant condemned Green Siskin.
Hundreds of thousands died in six dark days.
A despised woman saved thirty-one.
Ever cunning, she sought no fame nor praise.
Defying fate, she did what could be done.
As far as most in the crowd were concerned, the Yangzhou Massacre never happened. Official histories were always composed by sealing away ghosts.
But the truth always lived on in song and story.
Masters and mistresses, this I know to be true:
There is no Heavenly ledger, no all-fair Judge.
Yet general, prostitute, merchant, or child,
The fate of this world each one of you can budge.
And the little siskin took off from the young woman’s shoulder and circled around the room, chirping and singing, lifted up by the warm air, by the loud cheer that exploded from the crowd: free, free, free.
Art by Nilah Magruder
Jooni
by Kemba Banton
* * *
1843
Jamaica
Jooni woke to darkness and a hammering like hard rain; the little hut shuddered violently, then quickly rattled to a stop. She bolted upright and listened. There was now only her own haggard breath and the chickens fussing in the back of the yard. Pictures from her dream gathered as she glanced wide-eyed around the hut. She felt for the machete beside her banana-leaf mat. All was still. Maybe it was the dream… maybe.
She lay back down on her mat, her heart beating like horses’ hooves battering the earth, and watched the first light of dawn creep through the clumsy window.
Eyes closed now, pictures from her dream descended. Yaa – Jooni’s mama – with scars and blood and empty eyes and buzzing flies around her wounds. The only way she ever came, to haunt her.
Was every morning going to always be like this one? Waking in a sweat after seeing Mama like that, or thinking she was still back there, before 1838 – before Jamaica gave its slaves their full freedom. Sticky, hot slaving fields. The sky a treacherous ceiling. All the buzzing and buzzing in her head. And Mama – Jooni’s everything – gone. Really gone.
It was all settling into her chest now. She could feel it – her whole day was going to be colored by this dream. She could feel how it was knotting up her insides, making her mouth crimple. She held her belly. No vomiting today. Let me be still today. But as she said it, she felt it a false hope. The whole world was broken and falling to pieces. She’d never known another truth. Her mama had once said wherever hope was robbed, you turned your hand and fashioned it into existence. But Mama had been wrong about many things. Jooni clenched her teeth and tried to breathe deep. Then clicketyclackety-clicketyclackety, there it was again, and the hut rattled. The chickens squawked and clucked. Something was falling on the rooftop. Jooni jumped up with her machete, grabbed the hem of her gown, and flashed to her door. In the soft glow of the morning, milky stones lay scattered on the steps and across the ground. The same milky crystals that had fallen some days ago and which had melted and disappeared in the heat. A man in the village had said he’d heard of it, had said the words ice and hail. Hard water falling from the clouds. Jooni raised her chin and searched the sky suspiciously. The yard was silent.
Calabash gourds were neatly lined atop the short stone wall that surrounded the yard. Dead leaves were strewn across the ground. A rubbish heap lay at the back, full of banana skins, fat earth grubs, and mango seeds. Under an otaheite apple tree, laden with the pink-red fruit, small statues molded out of dark earth clay stood surrounded by a banquet of food and water and other bits of offerings. There was a barrel of rainwater and pans. All was quiet.
Jooni set her mouth in a mean line and sighed. She waited, checking her irritation. Some days ago, the breadfruit tree had come loose from the ground and leaned to one side, as if it were getting ready to fall. Stones from the low wall had mysteriously slipped out of place and thudded to the ground. And then there was the day the skin on her arms turned to charred flesh, the next moment gone. Just so. It had happened so quickly she wasn’t sure she’d seen right. When it happened again the following day, fright bit her. She’d spent the afternoon sitting in a tub of herbs and rainwater, scrubbing and whimpering.
At first, Jooni thought it was a duppy spirit playing tricks on her, but she didn’t think so anymore. This felt strange. Different. What in heaven’s name could be happening? Jooni stood there in the doorway, counting her breaths. The shadowy hut behind her groaned.
This hut – her refuge – it made many noises, but had been built strong by the freed man that built it shortly after Jamaica had fully emancipated all its slaves five years ago: 1838. She always had to say the year to herself, as if these things – numbers – which Jooni had started learning to read, were magic, as if not saying them would render the freedom absent, hurl her back into that wretched time. As if that time could come into this one – and capture her. 1838. No – Massa Williams wouldn’t catch her.
She’d found the hut about a year ago, abandoned there on the side of the hill above the village, See Them Come, called so because it was founded by ex-slaves who after Emancipation had seized the uninhabited land, and continu
ed to come and come and come. The numbers had swollen to the hundreds.
Jooni had stumbled on the hut desperate and cross, needing to find a quiet place. She was eighteen, nineteen, or maybe twenty years old – she didn’t know what year she was born, not that it mattered. She had found the hut and could feel its barren solitude in the planked walls and echoes. She felt the man and knew he was never coming back for it. Probably left the island with the waves of people that had taken off for Panama to work, or someplace else, shifting and shifting – like ghosts – needing to forget. Jooni had made the hut her home. Hers. Where nobody’s eyes dug into her. Accusing. Judging. Like Tenan, who never failed to remind Jooni how much she owed. For keeping by her after Yaa had died, for minding her, for putting up with her. For risking her own livelihood, running from the plantation with her, like some runaway, hiding even though Emancipation had come already. Lord knows what Massa Williams would have done to Jooni for what she done. They hid, working on other estates before finally coming to See Them Come, when the threat of an enraged former Massa had shrunken and confined itself to the nerve and muscle of the body.
Now patches of the brightening sky shone through the trees and made lace patterns of leaves. Jooni continued to count the moments, still waiting. Beyond the yard wall, one could see the sides of the hills. Below all of this, down the path, there was the village, which would be waking at this same hour. Further down, the snake-like path descended, opened out, and led abruptly to where there was glittering sand, a road going to town, almond trees, and the broad, broad sea. Men were already there now, pushing their boats into the water, hunting fish and crab, and anything else in the salty depths that could be eaten or sold. Jooni briefly recalled the sensation of that water flooding all the membranes in her face, her eyes, her nose, filling her throat – the time she had dunked herself in, thinking she would drown. And the sea had foamed and spat and heaved her back onto the shore. A distant memory the taste of salt. Grainy. Jooni leaned slightly and spat into the dirt outside the hut; she pulled the back of her hand across her lips.
A light breeze picked up some dried leaves and blew them across where the ice lay, still shining like small pieces of moon, starting to melt. Jooni did something like a sniffle, and still holding her machete, now glinting in the new morning light, she pulled back into the shadows of the hut and slammed the door.
* * *
Jooni’s memories sometimes seemed to have a breath of their own – they were so alive. She could remember so vividly working alongside her mama and the other women on the plantation. Yaa’s presence had been so formidable as she’d swung her cutlass with power and tireless rhythm, slicing through the cane stalks and making them tremble and drop to the ground. Jooni could see her clear clear – her handkerchiefed head, the sweat breaking loose over her skin, her cowrie shell necklace dangling from her neck like the one Jooni also wore.
Jooni had seen how the men and women looked up to the obeah woman, Yaa, feared her even. Depended on her to ease strife, stave off chaos, offer tiny fragments of hope. Yaa stuffed wounds with plant poultices, made concoctions of man piaba bush and devil’s horsewhip. She made fetishes and talismans for small troubles, blessed new babies and guarded their huts from unseen evils, stood over the dying – and afterwards, placated their spirits. She stood ready to brave monsters sealed in myths, and the ones that walked in human form. It was Yaa who taught Jooni the power of incantation, had grabbed her cheeks and gazed into the child’s eyes. She’d said, Look at me, Jooni. Here. Say after me. And Jooni followed: I am not no slave. Never was. Never have been. Never will be. I am no slave to man, nor woman, nor beast. No slave to no mind, no thought, no feeling. I am like iron passing through fire. The sky, the plants, the sea. I am life and nothing will break me. So I think, so I speak – I am. And Jooni would stare into Mama’s eyes, deep as ocean, and say those words like a spell.
Yes. Mama was magic. And those who knew also knew to be silent about it, would never tell Massa more than he needed to know.
To young Jooni, Yaa might have been a god, indestructible. Sometimes on the plantation death seemed more certain than life, but she did not think Mama could die. Could vaporize in a cloud of smoke.
But she had.
* * *
Inside the hut, the floor creaked and grunted with Jooni’s rocking. She hugged her folded legs. And rocked. Back, forward, swing, back, forward, swing. Creak, groan. Knock knock. There. A sound she didn’t make.
Jooni stopped. Reached with her ears. Searched with her senses. Hm. Nothing.
The hut had its own ways.
A rooster crowed from the backyard, a loud err-ah-err-ah-errrrrr that echoed into the morning. The rising sun began stealing through the window and touched Jooni’s long face and deep cocoa skin and glistened off the fat dark beauty mole above her lip. It creeped across the floor and glided over a basket, two wicker chairs, and a small table.
Then Damba appeared. Jooni didn’t move, she only watched him.
Sitting on one of the chairs in his oversized pants and torn shirt, swinging his small legs.
He didn’t have his head.
A giggle escaped from a corner behind Jooni, childish and bouncy. Then Damba’s headless body dissolved. Jooni managed a crooked smile at the empty wicker chair.
Damba – the only spirit she hadn’t the will to turn away. She held him once and he’d felt like any other little boy, alive and in flesh, in two pieces, his body curled up in her lap, his head cradled in her arm – his face wet from crying. Feeling him suddenly so real, she had held him with everything inside her, not minding the blood.
Holding Damba had been healing. Jooni had never done that before with no other duppy. They mostly came silently demanding – sad, angry, lost – always asking, begging, needing. Leaving a cavern of hollowness behind each time.
Like a woman duppy that came one time with a tin mask trapped on her head, and who came for days appearing here, there, everywhere, while Jooni had tried not to look – busied herself with yard work, trying, trying hard not to feel, to not understand the inundation of voices in her head, speaking like a swarm of bees, to not heed the tightening pain in her chest, until Jooni one day threw down her pot and screamed, her beauty mole trembling, telling the duppy to go the bumbo to hell.
And it went away.
And left Jooni with a vacuum that made her bawl. And the memory of those eyes behind that tin mask – like mirrors; in them Jooni had seen a fracturing that nothing could fill, a fracturing crack-whipped into the mind. It hurt – oh god, it hurt. That duppy had come needing and Jooni had sent her away. Yaa would never have done that.
Ah sorry… Jooni had pleaded. Ah sorry… you hear me? But the duppy never came back no matter how Jooni had begged the air, cried into the ground, whispered into the grooves in her hut walls, please please – and when all that had failed, screamed again and kicked over the frail furniture, screaming for them all to leave her alone. There was no way to fix this broken, brittle world.
And now who’s-it-what’s-it was getting renk.
Throwing down icy stones on her.
Jooni got up. She was tired. Tired of the battling. Tired of sad stories and dogging memories. Tired of the stress, the strife. These damned, rotten ghosts with their sufferations, as if she didn’t have enough of her own. Her own mother’s spirit never even came back to her. Never, not even once. Ever. Why? Because she was gone. Really, really gone. Gone, gone.
She felt the urge to run to her statues – her beautiful statues she’d formed carefully from the dark earth clay and into shapes of people, for those too-sad sufferation times she couldn’t hold or rock away. She wanted to run to them, feed them, bring them drink, and pretty flowers. Make more statues fashioned from clay.
But there was work, always work to do. The chickens needed care, the yard needed raking. With thoughts and memories flying wildly through her mind, Jooni quickly changed her clothes and decided to face the day.
* * *
Out
side, the sun was already high. The ice had left small dark spots, now fading. She pretended not to notice, ignored the flip-flopping in her belly. Her off-white cotton dress, smeared with dirt stains, gathered at her waist and fell down in skirts to her shins, lightly brushing against her legs as she moved. The cool air breathed on her arms and kissed her scalp where her hair parted into bulbous plaits that curled stiffly under her jaw and down the nape of her neck.
The green things were humming now – a gently trilling, slightly buzzing synergy. Like the way the cane fields used to buzz when Jooni used to help Mama and the other women in the field gang. The whispering stalks sometimes spoke of effort, and tiny struggles, of the uncurling of leaves and the hunger for sun, great growth and quiet changes. Other times they whispered frenzy – of heavy, driving work, of blood spill and loss of innocence. In those times, the cane fields were unbearable to be in.
Jooni took the rake and walked round to the back; the chickens scattered out of her way and then trailed her footsteps. The big cock perched on the wall followed her with his head. She pulled the blankets of dead leaves across the ground, leaving shallow canals in the earth, and worked them into one pile; she would set it afire later. Now she would head down to sea to sell her mangoes. She scattered feed for the chicken, watching them nervously as they scrambled, cluck-cluck-clucking and pecking each other for space. The rooster flew off the wall to join the fussing, a blur of wings.
Jooni walked over to the water barrel to wash the dust and mess off her hands, and sprinkle her face. And that’s when she saw it, in the pool of water like a mirror – holding the light of the sky and shadow shapes of hanging otaheite leaves – she swore she saw another face – her own face, yes, but with blistering scars and pock marks and with eyes so fiery. A face that glowered. Glowered at her? Jooni pulled back sharply, reaching up to her face fast, fast, running her fingers up her jaws, over her forehead, down her cheekbones and nose. Nothing. Skin smooth as garden egg.
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Page 33
