Africa Risen, page 24
He won’t die. He won’t die easily. He smirks. She circles him. Surrounding them, the women swing and pirouette around these steel blades, slicing their thighs, as his rapper swag maneuvers them. More blood, more money, girl gotta respect. He opens his mouth again, but Sewela quickly grabs his tongue, yanks his voice from his larynx with scraping nails and on this composed film score, Sewela rides his song, paces his low tessitura. Desperate and hobbling about, Motsumi whips out his phallic gun. The pistons of her breast glare at him, and her voice, a siren, screams shayamaGETDOWN. The women quickly fall and she lets the bullets rip through Motsumi’s body. His body, life-wan, falls to the floor, a loose fabric of skin and bones. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat, the women chant, rising free from their concrete graves, recognizing this falling action from the song “Skin’s Prison.”
In the bleak dark of mind, Sewela rubs the texture of kwaito onto his last reggae heartbeats. She hacks at the limbs of generational trauma, gnaws it with her teeth, drinks the blood by the gallon, spews culture with her tongue. Deskins herself of law, lore, loin. She sits on the throne of his hide and bone without label, gender, premise. Peeling time, she’s going forward and backward simultaneously whilst he groans, and the film slackens, a stasis. She strikes him again, unspools time from the recording reel, throwing him into the prison of his actions.
I am monster, unlawful, new territory, new kingdom, a disruption. A monster here, god elsewhere …
She wears his taxidermized masculinity as a crown, chugs his death to the outro of her visual album, sits on the throne made from his bones and the leather of his skin—this powerful shot graces the front cover of magazines. She’s a powerhouse auteur of glitz, glam, gore for her studio album collection Peeling Time, seventeen songs long, featuring top hits “My Religion,” “Another One,” “P***y Love,” “Whores & Nuns” et al. Gold microphones surround Sewela, interviewers inquiring on the concepts behind her visual album as it plays on all screens:
[Post-Chorus: Sewela]
♪♫“My Religion” (DJ Topo Club remix)♪♫
The corpse of Motsumi’s voice hangs from the murdered legacy tree exhumed from the placenta of his evil. He is a proper man. The burning tree blazes in the dark. Thirty women watch, getting loose on the dance floor to the Klaxon of his voice flickering, spitting ash, burning, dying …
THE SUGAR MILL
by Tobias S. Buckell
I can feel the sale I desperately need slipping away when the sugar hits the tea and the whiteness dissolves away. Before the ghost of sweetness gets whisked away by the trade winds that struggle their way up the hill in erratic blasts, the thin woman looks down at my carefully prepared tray to wrinkle her precise nose, a nose tipped with a messy thumb’s width of frosted sunscreen.
The sugar is a miracle. Empires grew on sugar, fortunes rose, entire peoples kidnapped, shackled, and whipped across an entire ocean to an entirely different continent to make it, and she says, “I do my best to avoid sugar. It’s unnatural. My friend Monica runs a juicing business: everything you need comes out of the fruit. All the sweetness you need.”
I drink simple instant coffee. Hot water, some scoops, and go. But whenever I come out with a silver tray of teas and pour the hot water, they all but swoon.
There’s a little plastic honey bear in the kitchen. I should have poured some into a small bowl and found a tiny little spoon.
I read an article once about how great real estate agents bake cookies in a house before they show it. Get that chocolate-chip cookie smell filling the house, and you get everyone thinking of home. “Find your own favorite childhood memory smell and fill the prospective home with it!”
Fry up some plantain and fill the grounds up with that? I didn’t think it would translate for these prospective buyers. I was born here, ate like here, had a parent who grew up here, and one from abroad. I could shift into either parent’s accent, and I looked white. So, people from the US mainland feel more comfortable with me as a real estate agent, though few would ever admit it.
The woman is Katelyn. The man is John. He doesn’t want to talk too much about what he does, but it has something to do with derivatives. She runs “a studio.” “I can just see starting up morning yoga down on the beach. Sunrise. The photos online will sell it.”
They were impressed by the mountain goats and asked if there were tame ones that they could use for goat yoga.
“I can look into that for you,” I tell them.
The wind whips at the tablecloth under the silver tray. I set up some lawn chairs on the grass because there wasn’t much to see in the small cabin behind the tamarind tree. A kitchen, a common room, a bedroom nook. It was a caretaker’s cabin, roughed up by many a hurricane, clinging to the top of this hill with weathered, gray concrete block and not a lick of paint to it.
I can’t sell these two a concrete-block cabin. Katelyn of “the studio” wouldn’t be caught dead in it. They’re staying in an open-air eco-lodge with even fewer amenities than the cabin, a glorified tent on the beach.
But the land has a view of five nearby beaches that curl out onto the turquoise ocean. From our tea position, they can look down the hill. They can listen to the distant sound of Ms. Hennigan’s rooster carrying on, the taxis blasting music as they move people around, and life on the island doing its thing.
Never mind the cabin, I needed them to see potential.
Because it had been three months since my last sale. I was out of savings. I was out of credit. Even Evan down at Happy Dogs wouldn’t front me a drink at the bar anymore.
Any more of this, and I would be looking at a job delivering blended drinks to sun-blistered people sitting on the sand looking at the windsurfers and being oh-so-polite and smiling in hopes of a shitty tip.
“My friend Jason, from Australia, when he came to the US he said the bread here had so much sugar in it, he thought it was cake! Cake!”
I don’t want to talk about bread, so I point at one of the boulders near the edge of the far point of the hill. “From that rock there, pirates would look out at the channel between the islands. They could see their prey approaching and would rush down the hill to row out and prepare to catch them.”
The pirate shit always works. They rush over to examine the rock.
“Right over there in Baston Bay,” I continue, “old man Baston heard a knock on his door, one day in 1873. Two raggedy old men at the door said they had been given a map by their grandfather to treasure right in Baston Bay. They promised to share it if he let them dig on his land. He refused, shut the door. And you know, a week later, old man Baston’s walking his land, and he comes across a huge hole at the top of the beach. Inside is a single doubloon at the very bottom.”
Katelyn and John are impressed.
It’s the Caribbean. Steady winds, heat, beaches, and rum. They’re here for their paradisiacal experience. The one they’ve felt they’ve deserved their whole life, so deep in their bones. And I’m trying to sell it to them as hard as I can because … I need that commission. So much of the island’s been snapped up, carved up, developed, sold to outsiders. Most of the real estate agents on the island are from overseas now, so those parcels are just passed around by entities abroad, billionaires parking their wealth in the land and passing them around like trading cards. “My mega-marina is a rarer find than your gaudy hotel.”
I need a first month’s deposit and several months’ buffer to get myself out of the tiny concrete-block cabin I’ve been squatting in anyway. I’m not supposed to be living on the property I’m selling, but the old owners want nothing to do with the old mill.
I need the money to move out because I’m tired of all the old ghosts wandering around the property.
* * *
When I get home I toss a heavy potato-and-chicken roti on the plywood table and unwrap the foil keeping it warm. I blow on my fingers, and then stop to toss several mangos into the corner of the dark room.
Sandy-gold and sunset-orange skin wobble across the cheap tile.
An offering, just as my mom taught.
“Please,” I mutter. “Please leave me be.”
“Hey child,” one of the shadows in the corner of the concrete house says, voice scratchy like the dry brown leaves out in the bush.
I pick at the shiny bits of aluminum foil and stare at the heat rippling off the roti skin. Green flecks of ground-up peas and spices from inside the dhalpuri skin glisten in the light of the bulb over my head. Under the skin the wedged edges of potato push out, like a child’s hand from within a mother’s belly.
“Child.”
Two shots of cheap Cruzan rum. A Heineken, the bottle as green as the fresh palm frond hat that shifts in the dark. The kind that tourists love to buy on the beach, take home and hang on the wall until it’s brown and brittle.
“Child.”
“Damn it!” I slap the table. “I respectfully asked for you to leave.”
“We respectfully cannot,” they murmur.
“Why must you always be vexing me like this?”
Several pairs of glowing eyes regard me. “Vexing?”
Queen Atarah stands up from a tiny three-legged stool, her shaved head gleaming in the bulb light as she wobbles forward, the crutch in her right hand tap, tap, tapping against the floor. With disgust for me clear on her pinched face, she spits. “This isn’t vexing. We asked you. We called you from through the veil, and then listen to you whine about it.”
“Five figures,” I snap wearily. “Five.”
I hold up a hand, fingers spread out. Wiggle them.
“Co-mission…” Queen Atarah says. “We hear this over and over again. But what profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?”
“That’s the sort of shit broke-ass people have to believe,” I say. “Or what hope do they have?”
“What have you done to earn all that anger, son?” Queen Atarah asks me. She gestures down at the stump of her leg. “When you can see us all before you?”
She eases herself down to sit across from me. Her tiny coral-flecked eyes glint. The others step out to her sides. Two shirtless men, scarred torsos, one missing his right arm, the other both his hands.
I lower my head.
The breath I let out is long and rich with rum and roti.
“Your veins, our blood.” Queen Atarah taps the table.
I lay my sandy hands next to her deep brown. “But so little, Queen.”
Queen Atarah laughed. “Knew a boy like you. Sister dark, brother pale, twins. Parents both brown as good earth. And they took him up into the main house. Favored him. Got him apprenticed and all of that. But they hung him just the same when that white woman up by Smith Bay said he touched her. When the knives come out they know who you are. Just as we know who you are. Can’t run from it.”
“I don’t run from it,” I said.
“And how your accent sounds when talking to buyers?”
I open my mouth, and then shake my head. “Five figures. So I can start my life. So I can be somebody.”
“But you put on an accent for anybody, not just them. Hide your island self away for the sale.”
“Guilty.” I roll up the foil into a ball and shoot it right over Queen Atarah’s head in an arc. It hits the trash can. Perfect shot.
“No one in this room blames you. Survival we understand.”
“So leave me be, leave the land be.”
Queen Atarah shook her head. “We can’t. We’re bound.”
The first time I’d met her, she grabbed the ragged stump of a man’s nearby hand and shook it. Food for the mill, she’d told me. The price we paid to squeeze the water and sugar from the cane. So many limbs eaten by the infernal machinery of profit and power.
All that blood, soaked into the dirt around the mill. It kept them here.
“The land seized us, then,” Queen Atarah would say.
“Five figures, great-great-great-grandmama. Five figures. This land will be sold to do something else and everything that stood here will be forgotten so that we can all take the money and move on.”
“Give us the address where the white man and woman are staying so we can haunt them,” Queen Atarah says. “Respectfully.”
* * *
For Katelyn and John, the next step isn’t just buying the land. No, nothing that simple. There’s some kind of construction loan scheme going on, so today they’re back with a bigger camera and an iPad.
“Visioning,” John says.
There’s someone from the bank and a surveyor coming by later as well.
John is using an app on his iPad to look at potential builds. “Buddy of mine did some mocks.”
Over his shoulder I can see virtual architecture, colonial windows and shutters attaching to the mill.
“This would be the master bedroom,” John says, looking over the iPad and back to reality. “Just right there.”
I retire back to lean against a young mango tree in the shade as they meander about the property, looking at their computer-generated visions.
“The dining room table is right by the gears of the mill,” Shadrak whispers into my ear. Shadrak is another haunter, but with baggy linen trousers and a tool belt slung over one shoulder like an old Western gunslinger. Less intense than Queen Atarah.
“The gears,” everyone in the shadows whisper.
“I know,” I reply. “I know. I know.”
“But you’re not saying anything.”
“What do you want me to say that would make any difference?” I snap at the shadows cast by the searing sun. “They know what they’re building on.”
Once they build on this, I can imagine someone asking them where they lived. “Up by the old mill!” They’d say that proudly, wouldn’t they.
“Do you know what will haunt you more than us if you let them do this?”
“What?” I ask sourly.
“That you just let it happen.”
Katelyn takes a selfie, flashing a peace sign and gaping into the fish lens of her phone. She’s standing in front of the mill’s entrance. The dark maw to where the machine used to live. The machine that ate all the ghosts’ limbs.
I can’t see all of them. Queen Atarah has told me there are hundreds here, their bodies ill at ease, separated from being whole.
“Sometimes,” she whispered once to me. “Sometimes they just ground it all up with the cane. Can’t stop the process. Just pulp and mash to be dried with the rest of the plant squeezed for its sweetness. Then our blood was boiled with the juice, boiled until sweet crystals for their tongues in other countries.”
Exported to those smacking lips, to be poured out of fine china, or ladled with silvered spoons into delicacies.
John shouts, and Katelyn yips. She picks her phone off the neatly cut, thick grass and runs inside.
“What?”
He leans against the bleached, gray wood of the doorjamb. “Thought I saw something,” he said. “Just a mouse, I think.”
“Or an iguana,” I shout.
“It was Shuffling Peter,” Queen Atarah corrects.
“Please, for me, move on,” I beg. “Isn’t there a light to go find?”
When this commission hits I’ll have to be careful not to mention where I would be staying after this. I didn’t need the mournful past clanking around an apartment.
Katelyn and John hop around to the back of the mill, looking for iguanas to feed with red hibiscus flowers.
“We’re going to head back to the hotel,” John says brightly after their small adventure ends fruitlessly. There are no iguanas up here; I won’t tell them that though. They love iguanas, they haven’t had to clean up after iguana shit everywhere, the hotel they’re in does that quietly in the background so they can feed their mini-Godzillas. “We have a rum tasting scheduled, and some more consulting to do.”
And then they leave, weaving around the wrong side of the road in their rental Jeep, hitting every pothole in the road with such jarring slaps I wince from up the road.
“Remember when they first reached out to you?” Queen Atarah asks.
In the middle of the hurricane. An email, right before the cell tower got ripped up by the winds and flung clear out over into Donaldson’s backyard. Big news up in the US covered the destruction live. Property damage. Winds so powerful they compared the energy to nuclear bombs.
And after the bombing, real estate speculators came in to pick over the remains.
“We’ve always dreamed of moving to the Caribbean,” John’s email said. “And we’re hearing about a lot of land coming up for sale.”
Before I’d replied to the email, days later when we picked ourselves up, cut trees and pulled them off roads, pushed roofs off to the side, I promised I’d put a portion of the commission toward post-hurricane recovery.
* * *
Ms. Hennigan came by to help cast out the ghosts three weeks back, when I’d been working hard to clear out dead brush from the hurricane and try to make the mill as presentable as possible.
All the time the shadows spoke to me with the rustle of wind through skeletal, bleached branches stripped of their pre-hurricane green. I had stopped to stare at a single playing card, embedded deep in a tree’s bark. Five of clubs.
An old man, sucking on a long piece of sugar cane, grinned toothlessly at me. “When mama mistress opened the door at night, and she hung the purple-windowed lantern, we’d line up in front of the house.”
