Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History

by Tananarive Due

  “You devil!” I slap the padded shoulder of his thick coat and he turns, startled, facing me. His face is his face, but both younger and older somehow, a mature youth resting in his eyes.

  He looks me over, smiles that big smile.

  “Well that’s not much of an introduction.” His voice is deeper than I remember, smooth like warm coffee has softened his vocal chords.

  “Introduction? It’s me, Charlotte, fool.” My hand travels to my hair, newly coiffed and pinned to my head at the sides, it’s a different look for me. A new hairstyle can’t possibly be preventing him from recognizing me, can it?

  “I’m not sure I understand,” he says. “But it’s very, very nice to meet you, Charlotte. I’m Samuel. It’s not everyday a beautiful woman walks up to you and slaps you silly.”

  “But…” I start.

  “Here, do you have somewhere pressing to be right now? Let me buy you a coffee.” He folds his paper and places it under his left arm, leads me to a small storefront shop in a building at least ten stories high.

  My head is shaking. I rub my temple, stare and try to make sense of this Booker that isn’t Booker.

  “So, you are not Booker… but you look just like him,” I say, a question and a statement in one.

  He pauses, head tilts to the side, eyes narrow with confusion like I am playing a joke on him.

  “I… am not.” He shifts on his stool as two coffees are placed in front of us on the long counter. “Did you say Booker?”

  “Yes. Booker. From North Carolina.” I look at him expectantly. He meets my gaze and confusion is still there in his eyes.

  “Hm. My grandfather’s name was Booker. He was a slave in North Carolina. My mother says I look just like him, but I never met him. He died in a fire when he was nineteen, right after she was born.

  “My goodness.” My heart beats so fast I can hardly hear him speak, one hand covers my mouth.

  “Yeah. His name is a sort of legend in those parts. They say people took to calling him the Magical Negro, used to sneak into the big houses and kill the masters without a sound. No one knew how he did it. My father says he saved a lot of Negro lives along the way. I’m proud to look like him. But this is… strange, don’t you think?”

  And suddenly it makes sense. I’m terrified and relieved and panicked and… happy. I cannot stop the tears that well as understanding filters in, floods my senses.

  I reach out, touch this stranger’s face, make sure he is real. “I’m sorry.” I say, smiling through clouded eyes. “But… I think that we were supposed to meet, somehow.”

  His face pushes up and away, makes room for that wide grin. Booker smiles at me. His eyes wide, glistening like they used to under that big oak tree.

  “I am inclined to agree, Miss Charlotte, I think I do agree.”

  Art by Eric Orchard

  A Wedding in Hungry Days

  by Nicolette Barischoff

  * * *

  1900

  Rural village outside Shandong province, China

  “Your daughter wants a husband,” Mother says one day, after they have found another dead chicken. “I know it.”

  “How can you know it?” Father asks her, smiling small. Father always has small smiles for Mother, even while he stares at the bottom of a bowl of hard rice with no chicken or fish or egg in it. “How can anyone presume to know what she wants? The minds of all children are unknowable.”

  Mother’s eyes become narrow and black. She thinks he is making fun of her. Or else this is just how her eyes go when Father smiles, now. “She brings me dreams… terrible, urgent dreams that I can never quite remember when I wake. Dreams where everything we have becomes a black ruin, and all our family living and dead wanders like lost ghosts…”

  Father’s smile spreads dolefully. “I do not think you need our daughter to bring your dreams of ill omen these days,” he says, and pats her hand in the way that tells her he will not talk of this anymore.

  But Mother will not have her hand patted today. “She brings sickness, Husband! To my stomach, to my head. The only pains greater are my hunger pains.”

  Father relinquishes what is left in his rice bowl. He eats less and less as the days pass. “It is this house. The wind-and-water of this house has always been bad. We should have gone from here long ago.”

  “Wind-and-water does not kill our chickens!”

  “No,” Father agrees, “the drought kills our chickens. And makes our neighbors to sell their houses off piece by piece, and makes our neighbors’ children to fill their bellies with dry grass and tree bark like in the years of the Great Famine…”

  “You see? She even visits misfortune upon our neighbors!”

  Father laughs, which makes Mother’s eyes turn to slits. Mother understands his laughs as little as she understands his smiles. “You have always been soft with her, and blind,” declares Mother, “always turning your head when she made mischief, praising the vain thing straight to her face. It’s as though you thought she was a son–”

  “I never mistook her for our son,” says Father, now without a trace of laughter. “I know where our son is as well as you.”

  He is so grave that Mother is silent a moment before she chooses her next words. “Then you know that a daughter cannot stay,” she says. “A daughter belongs in her husband’s house, with her husband’s mother. Where they will not starve to feed her.”

  Father’s gaze lowers. He did not know until now that Mother watches every scrap placed at my tablet with narrow black eyes. He makes no immediate reply, and this or something else makes Mother suddenly go hard in the face. “It must be time,” she says with pinched determination. “She must be old enough. I have seen it done for daughters much younger. I have seen it.”

  “All places are not Taiwan,” Father reminds her, in a voice far away. “Who would take our poor unlucky daughter to wife in this place, in these bad days? Who would keep her? There is almost no one left here, living or dead.”

  They think I will not hear them, where I am. My tablet is small, and made of a cheap, warped wood. It faces a wall, behind a door, where no guests will see. And so they think I will not hear, facing the wrong way. But the tablet is not where I truly live. Not truly. In the place where I truly live, I hear almost everything that is said, whether I want to or not. Words leave living mouths so carelessly, and we come across them all sooner or later, here in the City of the Ghosts, floating on and on forever into space.

  * * *

  For one day out of the year, on the fifteenth day of the month they call Ghost Month, we are allowed out. This is the day of our Festival, the day the world opens for us. No matter who we are now in the City, even if we are now the wildest and hungriest of Hungry Ghosts, we are permitted on this day to go among the living, and see the sights, and hear the sounds, and smell the smells of who we were.

  If I concentrate, if I send enough intention to my arm and hand, I can even touch things.

  And so, on the day of my eighth Festival, just days after I have heard Mother and Father plotting my marriage through the little warped-wood window of my tablet, I am walking in the village where I once lived and died, touching everything I can find to touch: cobbles and straw, and birds’ feathers and hot coals, and warm dung. The heads of some small boys who turn from pissing their names on a wall to see who has touched them, and find that there is no one there. I will collect it all. I will not lose one single thing.

  I walk better now that I am dead. I am not so small, and toddling and bowlegged. And now that I am dead, I am free to walk where I will. I am free to smell the dust of the road, the damp of the water, the woodsmoke of a thousand different ovens, without anyone saying to me, “Little Ling, where do you go in the road all by yourself? You will be run down by a horse and cart!” or “Little Ling, the bottom of a river is nowhere you want to go! Stay there, where the bank is dry!” or even “Little Ling, don’t you see this flame burns blue and hot? Stand back, stand back!” For this one day, it is
like I have been allowed to grow up, and to learn what there is to learn about the world.

  You cannot learn very much about the world when you have only been alive in it for four years. And no one ever did say to me, “Little Ling, you must be very careful of a fever! A fever may come hot and cold at night, and take you faster than horses and carts, or rivers, or blue flames.” And so now I have to do my walking and growing up and learning while I can, while the sun shines on this day.

  This one, small day. In the month which has been called ours. Oh, the living are so generous, so extravagant to believe we might be allowed to stay with them so long. But in this even the Ancestors must obey.

  When the sun goes down, I will go, as we all must go who are not Hungry or forgotten, to the place of my family home, and I will sit in the chair father has kept empty for me even though I am not an Ancestor, a chair he once cut down to my small size. I will breathe the steams of all that Mother has cooked, the rice and fruits and warm buns she might have made in the days before my brother went away. I will listen to the clatter of old, familiar plates and old, familiar talk, the grumbling and begging of an old familiar dog, if the dog still lives. And I will be able to watch Mother’s eyes and Father’s small smiles, and know that I was alive here once.

  After that, it will be back to the City, where I am alone in the gray streets, in a strange, gray, crooked house I have built myself, waiting for the next scrap to come through my window. I can bear going back, though. I can bear almost anything, as long as there is a place to return to when the world opens again.

  But if I am married, if the place I must return to is just another strange house…

  To end my walking every year in a house with its own dusts, its own dim light, its own unfriendly smells, its living faces who would feel no more walking through me than they would passing through a current of cold air… it would only ever be like wandering.

  I won’t be married, I decide now, as I pass through the scattered rice and withered peaches that someone has already left in the road for any passing Hungry Ghosts. I can’t be married. Married to whom? Who would marry me? I’m dead. I have been dead twice as long as I have been alive. I have never even been engaged. I am a thin, funny ugly girl even now. I do not know how to be a good wife. I do not even know how to be a good ghost. No other ghosts come to visit me. No one comes to drink tea in my gray little house. I am nothing. I am nobody. It is all I can do to hold my walls up, and to keep the Hungry from my door.

  No, I won’t be married. Tonight as Father sleeps, I will talk to him. I will scream and tear my hair and beg him to let me stay behind the door facing the wall. And maybe today, on this day of ghosts, he will hear me. Until now, I have only ever come into my father’s dreams mute, unable to make even the smallest sound that might keep him from forgetting me in the morning. And I have never been able to come into Mother’s dreams at all, whatever she might say about her dreams of omen. But I am young for a ghost. I have time to learn how to make them hear me. And when I do, Mother will not dare to argue, even if she does find a some far-flung strangers willing to clear a place on their family altar for a dead farmer’s daughter.

  Cheered by this thought, I turn my face to the sun, breathing the warm air in, breathing it out. It has been a long time since I breathed.

  It is a quiet Festival day. There are no street operas, no parades for us ghosts to watch. Most of our neighbors have now gone away into the cities as my brother did eight years ago, leaving the shells of houses and farms, long ago stripped of roof tiles and fence-posts and anything else of any value at all. But monks still light small altars for us (how hard they chant to retrieve us all from Hell! I wonder what they should say if they saw where we really lived) and there are still enough households to send up comforting clouds of incense and food smoke, and the smoke of burnt paper.

  Perhaps some of the paper offerings are for me, and I will go back to my gray house to find solid, bright festoons of flowers, or a chair or two to sit in. Perhaps by and by, I will be able to fill my house with shining lamps, and rugs, and ornaments, and then the great old Ancestors in their paper mansions will deign to drink my tea, and not pass me by with such stony faces. Probably not, but I find it is a nice daydream.

  As the sun climbs, I stop and sit in a tuft of dry grass by a little inlet of seawater that still trickles in from the great ocean. There are some ghosts drifting up and down over the water, aimless, yet somehow preoccupied. Perhaps they drowned here. Or perhaps they are just Hungry, quenching their ghost-thirst where they can (most fresh water has either dried up or turned foul).

  I keep my eyes on the water. If they are Hungry, I do not want to look at them. I meet enough of them in the gray streets, growling low in their throats as they think of tearing me apart for my food.

  The inlet is the last place where my brother held me, covering my fevered head with droplets of salt water while he made crosses in the air and said Christian prayers from a book he had found. I wish l remembered what his hands had been like. But I remember only how black Mother’s eyes became after that, how hard her voice. She hissed and raged. She called him names I did not understand. She spat words I had never heard before, with hatred I never knew she had. And then my brother was gone, and shortly after, so was I.

  Of course, now he is gone away from her, trapped in Peking with angry, hungry men who would do more than spit on him and his Christian book – who will tear him apart – and she cannot say he is dead to her without thinking how close he is to becoming a ghost. And there is no one to carry her worry and anger but my father. My father and I. I come here on this day to make sure my brother is not one of us. To make sure I do not meet him. I have never found him yet, in the City or anywhere else. And when I have learned to speak in Mother’s dreams, I will quell all her black worry. I will say to her, “Your son is not here. He is alive, and I am alone.”

  I lose track of time, sitting there on the bank, not finding my brother’s ghost, and the sun is gone before I know where it goes. The inlet begins to fill with the lit paper boats and lanterns that are meant to guide ghosts here and back again. It is the paper that makes me realize. All at once, I understand just how my mother intends to find me a husband.

  There is no time… there is no time. I only pray – if ghosts can pray – that I am not too late.

  * * *

  The Fisherman’s Boy once had an older brother and a name, and now he has neither. This is just how it happens, the Boy decided. When you have a brother, when you are one of two sons hauling in the fishing nets, your father must call you each something, so that you know when you are being called, or praised or punished.

  But his brother, Tao, came to him one night, standing very tall, and told him that a brotherhood of great men had come to take Tao away with them to the city. These were powerful men, he said, part of a secret Society that would bring back righteousness and strength to this land. The Boy asked his brother where righteousness and strength had gone. “Are you stupid?” Tao asked him. “Do you not see that there is moral degradation and Christians and Imperialists and yang guizi everywhere, bringing this drought down upon us?”

  The Boy looked around him, but saw none of these.

  “These brothers are of the highest discipline,” said his brother with shining eyes. “They keep the strictest schedule of prayers, and cleanse themselves with the most secret of rituals. They are invulnerable to all the foulest weapons of the foreigners and the Imperialists–”

  “What about the yang guizi?” asked the Boy.

  “Yes, yes, them as well! And when I am one of the Society, I will be invulnerable as they. Our father may be angry to find me gone in the morning, but he will know what I have done when I and my true brothers sweep this land, unable to be cut down.”

  Tao spoke half the truth. Their father was angry in the morning, but he would never see his son sweep the land. Only a body, three weeks later, and a letter with no name that said the body was Tao’s. And a neat little hole wh
ere the bowels of the body had come out. The Boy used to wonder whose magic had failed, whether the Imperialists had found a weapon strong enough to kill even Tao and take the long life from his name, or whether his brother had become a shape-changer and left something else that was not him at all to die in his place.

  By and by, though, it did not matter. Gone is gone, and now the Boy is the Fisherman’s only son. He must haul in the nets and mend them. He must gut the fish, and clean the fish, and make the fish into soup. The Fisherman does not need a name for him when the nets break or come up empty, or when the knife slips in his hand, or when the soup boils and burns. The Fisherman only ever says “You,” and so that is what he is called. “Come, you! Idiot child, what makes you so stupid?”

  And the Boy answers always to himself, “I do not know what makes me stupid. I do not know what makes me anything that I am, except that perhaps I think too much about paper.”

  Tao used to say that his little brother had a head full of paper, that he dreamed about paper instead of wealth or feasts or women. And Tao was right, the Boy decided. There is always paper, even when there is nothing else. Hanging like lanterns and flying like kites, and whipping around in dusty streets. Red paper, and yellow paper, and blue and green paper. Paper can be made into anything, can make whole worlds of anything, if you are patient and you collect enough: meadows of flowers, flocks of birds, fleets of ships, an entire province full of houses.