The Freedom Race, page 13
Steaders claimed that flying coops had been their invention, but Ji-ji knew they lied. The first coop had been conceived of by seed-laborers at a progressive planting in the 600s, less than a generation after the conclusion of the Civil War Sequel. Risky even then for seeds to speak openly about civil rights, so those early seeds had to be creative. The two coastal SuperStates, reeling from a Sequel that wiped out a third of the population, and battling major disasters on multiple fronts, decided to believe the steaders’ claim that the Territories would usher in a New Era of Civility. According to Swinburne Augustus, Supreme Commander of the Territorial Militia and the first Lord-Father of Lord-Fathers, it was a steader’s duty to “obliterate the unrestrained thinking that brought God’s wrath upon the world.” During his famous Reversal Address to the Territorial Representatives, Augustus pledged to “usher in a glorious system of patronage.” This necessary reversal, he promised, would revive the way of life established by our Founding Fathers.
Ji-ji had seen a photo of Swinburne Augustus in the history text she had strapped to the underside of her bed. She’d read Maeve Exra’s book so many times the pages were falling out. In Armistice’s Rotunda, gray-haired Augustus stood under portraits of Washington, Jefferson, and other father-men, a copy of the Bible in one raised hand, a copy of The One True Text in the other. An antique rifle lay on the podium. (Exra pointed to the odd fusion of elements in the steaders’ One True Text, saying it was as if Margaret Mitchell, Augustus’ favorite author, had wed St. Paul and The One True Text was their offspring.) Ji-ji knew Exra’s description by heart: “To thunderous applause, Swinburne Augustus, bearded and steely-eyed, swore fealty to the Found Cause, to the Fathers and Daughters of the Sacred South, and to America’s Blessed Rural Edens.”
The importation of labor from other parts of the world wasn’t sinister at first—just a logical response to the global labor shortage. Early waves of imported laborers signed bona fide contracts and worked for a wage. When their time was up, the laborers had the right to go wherever they wanted. Many opted to remain in homesteads in the Territories. With each successive wave of workers, however, Territorial laws calcified. Soon there were Liberty Laborers—mostly fairskins—recognized under the Constitution, and Indentures—mostly so-called duskies—who weren’t. Importing laborers from Central and South America had concluded, for the most part, after pickers met with a unified resistance on the southern border. Attempts to recruit laborers from Asia had failed abysmally. As a result, toward the end of Augustus’ tenure, the focus switched entirely to the place steaders called the Dark Continent.
The idea of a flying coop should never have survived an atmosphere as poisonous as that. But not all the early steaders were segregationists; many were just secessionists sick of taxation and centralized government and terrified of a future that looked like it was only going to get worse. The unionists were in as much disarray as the secessionists. As Exra put it, “The SuperStates, struggling for survival themselves, didn’t have the time or the means to excise the cancer in the belly of the country.” Ji-ji had repeated Exra’s phrase over and over the first time she’d read it because it rang true. A cancer in the belly—which meant she and everyone she loved lived inside a tumor.
As the disunited states struggled to emerge as three separate-but-equal power centers, Augustus’ successors pounded the final nails into the coffin in the form of the Necessary Reversal Acts—legislation that reclassified imports from the Cradle as botanicals. The reclassification wasn’t confined to race, a point the Territorial Council emphasized whenever the system was challenged. It also reclassified others. Sexual deviants, occultists (especially witches), historians, librarians, Free thinkers—any of these and more could be reclassified as botanicals and obliged to surrender their rights as individuals. Scientists and clergymen who refused to sign a fealty pledge to the steaders’ One True Text could also be reclassified as botanicals in the Territories, even if they were the fairest of fairskins—though the overwhelming majority of seeds were on the duskier arcs of the Wheel. How could such a system be based on race, steaders asked, if race was only one criterion for classification?
As she paused in the dark just inside the door of the coop, Ji-ji was thrust back into the recent past. She remembered Juan, a certified “Deviant,” who’d been caught with Amadee in one of Williams’ barns. Amadee should be here now, flying with his twin brother. Amadee tractor-pulled, Juan pyred—a female punishment Father-Man Williams insisted upon. The cancer had spread until there were hundreds of plantings throughout the Territories, a dozen homesteads on each.…
She breathed in the musty air, ignoring the staleness of it. Coach Billy had told Tiro, who’d told Ji-ji, that the first flying coop had been built as a response to the Necessary Reversal—the seeds’ way of memorializing their own history. They believed, Coach B said, that if they didn’t write their own story in canvas, metal, and wood, it would be lost. The seeds constructed the coop (or flying birdcage, as it was called back then) out of scraps they’d salvaged, working at night and in secret—though how they managed to do this, Ji-ji couldn’t imagine, unless the early steaders were blind and deaf. The seeds devised the rules and named the equipment after figures they admired.
Legend had it (and so did Coach B) that a tornado leveled the first flying birdcage two years after it was built, but not before a few enterprising steaders discovered it and recognized its potential as a revenue-generating source of entertainment. The flying birdcage withstood the test of time, morphing into bigger and grander things but always—in Coach B’s opinion, at least—adhering to its role as a memorial to not-to-be-forgotten stories.
Uncle Dreg used to tell Ji-ji that the coop was equally symbolic to seeds and steaders. To seeds it was a reminder that flight was possible; to steaders it emphasized the inescapable supremacy of the cage. When a symbol has two faces, Uncle Dreg said, it is potent and dangerous—liable to shift on you if you don’t keep your eye on it. What mattered to Ji-ji was that the planting flying coop was the one place where her dreams were more powerful than her yearning.
Under the tent, the giant, domed flying cage took up the entire middle section of the coop. Like a circus ring, the sawdust-lined ground ring in the center was where Planting Coopmaster Mack-Jack Ferguson stood, calling out play-by-play commentary as the flyer-battlers fought overhead. In spite of what Mack-Jack would have you believe, the magic didn’t happen at ground level where he stood; it happened when you saw caged birds fly.
As your eye traveled upward it encountered spiral staircases, trapezes, staging rings and platforms, sycamore copters, a rickety hamster wheel, Jacob’s Ladders, Harriet’s Stairs, Douglass Pipes, the Marshall Maze, X Boxes, Parks Perches, Colvin Coils, Lincoln Logs, Plessy Pulleys, King-spins, hope-ropes, zip lines, and trampolines—all of them culminating in the Jimmy Crow’s Nest, a woven basket modeled after the legendary lookout baskets on sailing ships. Located inside the dome at the pinnacle of the coop, the nest was roomy enough to hold four flyers. According to Uncle Dreg, the nest was a tribute to the Middle Passengers imported centuries before.
Ji-ji looked up. Tiro was perched on the edge of the Jimmy Crow. She waved excitedly, grinning from ear to ear and raising herself on her tiptoes as if she could reach him if she tried hard enough.
Tiro saw her, but the nod he returned was hesitant and he didn’t smile. Ji-ji tried not to let it deflate her. He had to concentrate. If he didn’t, he could plunge to his death.
The flying cage sat in the center of the coop and took up most of its volume. Encircling the cage were rows of bleachers where, two months before, hundreds of spectators—steaders in the fairskin sections and seeds in the dusky sections—had watched Tiro and the other fly-boys vie for the championship.
Ji-ji looked around cautiously, then walked to the main door of the metal flying cage. Her hands were shaking—god, she was nervous! If they caught her here, the day before Ratification, she’d be screwed. But she had to see him.… Her trembling fingers fumbled with the latch. The sound of metal against metal echoed through the coop as Ji-ji stepped inside. She closed the gate and sat down on one of the benches near the ground ring’s low wall.
To prevent herself from obsessing about all the news she was desperate to share with Tiro, and to calm her fear that Brine’s guards could enter at any time, Ji-ji tried to dwell inside the moment and take it all in. It would probably be the last time she would ever see Planting 437’s flying coop. The thought made her happy and sad at the same time. Her eyes fell on the safety net directly in front of her. Raised twelve feet off the ground, it spanned the diameter of the ground ring but offered no protection should a flyer fall from somewhere other than the safe zone in the center of the coop. Fly-boys were supposed to wear safety harnesses, but these slowed them down, which explained why Tiro was notoriously irresponsible about wearing his. It also explained why Billy and his assistant Pheebs spent their nights strengthening the harnesses to ensure the old mechanical pulley system was functioning correctly.
Coach Billy stood beside the net, yelling instructions at his fly-boys. Four seeds flew in the coop this morning: Tiro, Marcus, Orlie, and Georgie-Porge, Billy’s strongest flyer-battlers.
Like Tiro and Marcus, Orlie and Georgie-Porge partnered up during battles, though their aversion to each other resulted in constant bickering. Georgie-Porge had been known to drop Orlie into the net “by accident” instead of catching him on the high trapeze; Orlie had been known to grease Georgie-Porge’s favorite staging platform. As usual, Ji-ji couldn’t help but notice how odd Orlie and Georgie-Porge looked together.
Whereas Tiro and Marcus could easily have been mistaken for brothers, Georgie-Porge and Orlie couldn’t have looked more different. In spite of the fattening-up process juvis underwent in readiness for the Propitious Gleaning, Orlie Mallorymule remained as skinny as a rake and almost as pale as his begetter, Father-Man Harold Mallory of Homestead 9. In fact, Orlie was so light-skinned he could pass for a True Hybrid or even a fairskin. Georgie-Porge Snellingseed, on the other hand, a Commonseed, was one of the darkest juvis on the planting, and one of the biggest too. Tom Snelling, the fairskin Liberty Laborer who begat Georgie, had mated with a Tribalseed import. His seed’s ebony skin hadn’t alarmed him, or made him suspect infidelity on the part of Issa, his mate. In fact, Snelling took enormous pride in his offspring—the only offspring from a union that had endured for more than twenty-five years, and one so full of obvious affection on the part of both Tom and Issa it would have resulted in a charge of Unnatural Affiliation had Snelling been a father-man. Fortunately for the couple, Inquisitor Tryton had better things to do than trouble himself with the love life of a lowly laborer.
Boasting about Georgie-Porge’s prodigious strength and appetite delighted Tom Snelling (fined on several occasions for holding Issa’s hand in public). Tiro had overheard Snelling confess to Zaini he was saving up to make a Patronage Claim for Issa. Planned to take her to live up in the Eastern SuperState near Buffalo. Figured it would take him a while to do it, so his fingers were crossed that Georgie-Porge would be on Tiro’s petition list and reach the city before they did. (Ji-ji figured it would take Snelling a while too, given how regularly he gambled away his salary.) Like everyone else, Tom knew that Georgie didn’t have anywhere near Orlie’s quickness, but what his offspring lacked in agility he made up for in strength. Built more like a sumo wrestler than a flyer, Tom Snelling’s pride and joy could bench-press all three of the other fly-boys at once.
When disputes broke out among the four, Marcus invariably sided with Georgie-Porge, but Tiro had taken Orlie under his wing and often spoke up for him. Ji-ji puzzled over Tiro’s friendship with Orlie, a notorious whiner and a sulker. Marcus—the only seed on the planting who had more access to books and learning than Ji-ji—claimed Tiro didn’t have to be fake-happy around Orlie. That was the glue, Marcus said, which made their unlikely friendship stick. “T. can grieve nonstop in the company of that pathetic crybaby. Doesn’t need to get his shit together so there’s no pressure.” Marcus was right about most things. Could be he was right about that too.
Veteran coach Billy Brineseed stood in the center of the ground ring where Mack-Jack stood during battles in his multicolored coopmaster’s outfit and jaunty top hat. Unlike the flamboyant coopmaster, Coach B wore dung-colored overalls. Even in the dim light, his bald head gleamed. He tramped over to Ji-ji and eased himself down on the bench beside her. He didn’t greet her; small talk wasn’t his forte. They sat in silence for a while.
In his mid-seventies, Billy was still as lean as a racehorse and as strong as an ox. Though he had a full head of gray hair, each year he shaved it off before the Big Race and oiled his head to keep it slick, claiming baldness made him slippery as an eel and harder for juvis to catch hold of. Though Billy no longer battled on the high platforms or upper ring of the coop, he routinely bested juvis in hand-to-hand combat.
Ji-ji almost gasped when Coach B dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes, withdrew one, then rummaged in his pocket for a box of matches. He struck a match. Ji-ji got a whiff of sulfur as it flared. In the flying coop, smoking was banned. Time and again, Coach B had ordered his fly-boys not to light up, warning them that the tent and the wooden pillars erected to help support the coop’s corroding framework would go up like kindling.
Much of what Ji-Ji had learned about the veteran coach she’d gotten first from her mam and, later, from Tiro. Billy Brineseed’s mother had been an import from the Cradle. His father was a Freeman, an African-American Indigenous with Proof of Ancestry documentation, which should have allowed his descendants to live with Indigenous rights and privileges in perpetuity. However, after his parents died from cholera just before Billy became a juvi at thirteen, he became a Ward of the Planting. Not long afterward, the planting “lost” his father’s A-I documents. Being on one of the duskiest arcs of the Color Wheel meant he was vulnerable to reclassification not simply as a botanical Commonseed but as a Serverseed, an outcast. Billy’s exceptional talent in the coop, along with his uncanny ability as an arborist, saved him. Eventually, he was traded to the 437th and assigned to care for Sylvie and other trees on the planting, and serve as flying coach.
There was another story about Billy too—one fewer seeds knew. Decades ago, Billy had appealed to have his A-I status reinstated. After years of tireless petitioning, he was reinstated to Indigenous by Saul Nickelback, Planting 437’s eighth cropmaster. Billy had left the planting to live Free in the City of Dreams. But there was a problem: he was in love with a female seed back on the planting. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to petition for his beloved’s Freedom, Billy couldn’t stand it anymore. He returned to the planting to be with her. Cropmaster Nickelback was so offended by Billy’s ingratitude he refused to allow him to pass through the perimeter gate. Undaunted, Billy had tunneled under the fry-fence, prompting Uncle Dreg to claim he was the only seed in history who had tunneled into rather than out of a planting.
Nickelback, impressed by Billy’s determination, had permitted him to remain as long as he surrendered his claim to A-I status. Billy did so. Tragically, only two years later, Billy’s beloved died.
“So,” Coach Billy said, inhaling deeply and blowing out enough smoke to fill a slop bucket, “what do you think?”
Ji-ji had no idea what he was referring to. She did what she always did when growns asked a question she didn’t have a clue about—repeated it. “What do I think?”
The tactic irritated the veteran coach. “You some kind of parrot, Lottermule?” Fortunately, before Ji-ji was obliged to respond again, Coach B explained himself: “Your fly-boy’s acting like a moron. Careening round the cage then perching himself up there in that Jiminy Nest like he’s got all the time in the world. We been on a restricted schedule. Still got four or five moves to refine. The Jefferson Coop in Monticello and the fancy new Dream Coop in the city are high tech. They got equipment in those coops like you never seen. Makes this place look like the scrap heap it is. Even the Salem Coop puts this one to shame. He’s forgotten he’s got to compete in all three and run the sprints too. You better knock some sense into him cos I’ve had it up to here.” Coach B indicated a place near the top of his forehead to demonstrate his level of frustration.
“Bet you didn’t know I smoked, did you?” Ji-ji shook her head. “April’s a crappy time of year. I’m sick of watching juvis get fattened up for the auction. Only lucky one is Marcus. Wouldn’t be surprised if Emmeline adopted him one day if he don’t expire first from weed overdosing.”
The coach blew a smoke ring. It held its shape for a few seconds in the nippy morning air before it faded into the gloom of the coop. Ji-ji decided that now, while Billy was getting solace from his death stick, would be as good a time as any to ask for advice about her back.
Billy Brineseed listened in silence, nodding a few times as he pulled on his cigarette. Dawn was breaking; daylight had started to filter in through the dome flaps at the top of the cage. To open them, Pheebs had to shimmy up the main hope-rope hung from the center of the dome, clamber onto a Parks Perch, and with the help of a hooked staff and fearlessness, roll back the unwieldy canvas flaps. No one could shimmy up a hope-rope faster than Pheebs, whose diminutive size (she was only four foot six) and extraordinary agility had earned her a permanent spot as Billy’s assistant. Even some of the steaders referred to her by her proper name rather than Cloth-34b. Billy spoke of Pheebs with a reverence he reserved for only four others: Dregulahmo, his best friend; Silapu, whom he called a Toteppi princess; Zaini, especially after Amadee’s death; and Amadee.
After Williams murdered Amadee, the old coach had been inconsolable for a while. There were rumors that he’d begun drinking again and that Pheebs had ferreted out his store of booze and poured the contents of every bottle into the flood drain. Tiro said Billy blamed himself, said he should have warned Amadee never to act on his impulses. It was common knowledge that Amadee wasn’t “regular,” as Billy put it, adding, “But if he was a Deviant, I’m King Tut. He wanted to love Free, that’s all.” Ever since Amadee’s death, Billy was always reminding Tiro to look out for Zaini and his little brothers. “Zaini kept on living,” Billy told him. “That’s courage. An’ that’s why you don’t do nothing dumb with some stupid butchery knife. That’s why you fly your heart out up there. Not just for Amadee but for Zaini too. Cos she’s the one held your tore-up brother in her arms and kissed his mashed-up remains. An’ she’s the one who birthed an’ buried him, an’ she’s the one left behind. An’ that’s the goddam painfullest place of all. Sure, I know what you’re thinking cos I’m thinking it too—Marcus can never be Amadee. Don’t be fooled. When he’s not high as a kite Marcus is one hell of a flyer. Same build as you an’ Amadee, same recklessness. So be grateful he’s willing to step up an’ serve as your practice partner. From now on, you fly like you mean it. For Zaini. For Amadee. For all of us. Fly like you’re heading home.”
