The Bloody Chamber:

Investigating and Adapting as a Feminist and Jamaican Fairytale

by

Olivia James

Presented to the Faculty

of

Wheaton College

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for

Graduation with Departmental Honors

in Creative Writing and Literature

Norton, Massachusetts

May 16, 2021

2

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank the late Professor Beverly Lyon Clark, who acted as my advisor on the first half of this thesis and was one of my biggest supporters throughout my time at Wheaton. Without Bev, this thesis would have been impossible. I’m absolutely honored and grateful that I was able to work with Bev as often as I did and I am so incredibly glad that I had her endless guidance, enthusiasm, and kindness in writing this thesis. Bev helped shape this thesis from the very beginning, and

I want to thank her for being such a great advisor, teacher, and person. Thank you, Bev!

I’d like to thank Professor Deyonne Bryant for being not only an incredibly helpful and understanding advisor but also a continued supporter of my writing goals.

This has undoubtedly been a difficult semester, and year, but her encouragement and help has been completely indispensable in creating this thesis.

I would also like to thank all the professors I have taken classes with during my time at Wheaton and who have taught me and broadened my world view for four years.

Specifically, I want to thank the members of my thesis committee: Professor Dolita

Cathcart who has been a consistent source of inspiration and encouragement in my love of fiction, fantasy, and diversity in literature, and Professor Jim Byrne who has always inspired me to write better and think deeper in ways that have undoubtedly made me a better student, scholar, and writer.

Lastly, I would like to thank my entire family for being supportive through it all. I want to thank my mum for giving me a love of stories and always encouraging my dreams. I want to thank my dad for his constant support and always letting me take inspiration from his life. I want to thank my sister Nic for helping me take a step back 3 from my work and worries. And lastly, I want to thank my sister Marissa for always being my #1 fan, constantly inspiring me and just being there for me no matter what.

Thank you to everyone who has been there for me throughout this whole tumultuous process. I couldn’t have created this thesis without all of your love and support.

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Table of Contents

Preface 5

The Bloody Chamber:

Contemporary Bluebeard Adaptations Addressing Feminism and Race 6

Mr. Campbell, a Novella by Olivia James 64

5

Preface

A blue beard. A curious bride. A cursed key. A forbidden, bloody chamber. The

Bluebeard tale—particularly the French “Bluebeard” by —is represented by its brutal imagery as well as its corruption of tale ideals. An unsuspecting young woman marries a mysterious, wealthy man with a blue beard and finds out too late that he is not only violent but has a habit of murdering his wives. Though she is warned not to peer into his secret chamber, the wife gives into her curiosity and discovers the remains of the wives that came before her. Terrified of joining them, the wife begs her husband not kill her too, but can only convince him to give her enough time to say her final prayers. But the wife—unbeknownst to her husband—is clever. She cries out to her sister for help, begging for her brothers to come in and save her. Her brutal husband, however, is still determined to kill her, and just as he prepares to strike her down, the wife’s brothers arrive on horseback and kill Bluebeard to save their sister. Now a widow, the curiously clever wife of Bluebeard inherits his wealth and creates for herself and her siblings a happily ever after that nearly erases her husband’s memory.

Of course, despite the wife’s courage and cleverness, Perrault’s original tale is not represented as a feminist tale of any sort—in fact, Perrault condemns the wife’s curiosity over Bluebeard’s violence—but the tale indirectly creates a complex examination of power struggles and structures in marriage that is often extended, in contemporary retellings, to explore the place of all minorities in society. This thesis investigates the way

Bluebeard can be used by modern authors to uncover feminist potential—both purposeful and accidental—in fairy tales as well as reveal the experiences of minority individuals.

6

The Bloody Chamber:

Contemporary Bluebeard Adaptations Addressing Feminism and Race

“Open anything you want. Go anywhere you wish. But I absolutely forbid you to enter that little room, and if you so much as open it a crack, there will be no limit to my anger.” She promised to follow the orders he had just given exactly. -- Charles Perrault, from The Classic Fairy Tales (189)

“…an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing” -- Linda Hutcheon, from A Theory of Adaptation (9)

Introduction

From postmodern retellings to romantic young adult novels, fairy tales have long been and continue to be a popular source of inspiration and storytelling. In part, fairy tales are popular in the realm of adaptation because of their familiarity and popular thematic elements. As Linda Hutcheon explains, “Themes are perhaps the easiest story elements to see as adaptable across media and even genres or framing contexts” (10). The familiar themes of fairy tales—or folk tales, depending on preference—from rags to riches, overcoming challenges, enchantment with the fantastic, and falling in love and living happily ever after are themes that are easily malleable across genre and time. It is those themes that can be translated and used to modernize or otherwise diversify older tales and use those stories to explore modern aspects of society. “The contexts of creation and reception,” Hutcheon continues, are “material, public, and economic as much as they are cultural, personal, and aesthetic” (28). Consequently, in the modern, globalized 7 world, major alterations in an adaptation “can change radically how the transposed story is interpreted, ideologically and literally” (Hutcheon 28). The cultural context responsible for originally spawning the oral traditions that would evolve into fairy tales led to different interpretations than those in the context of modern society, and as such, alterations to the tales are vital in the adaptations remaining relevant in modern contexts.

Additionally, these adaptations can restore the diversity that has been lost in the original transcription. 1

Fairy tales that are familiar in popular culture are, in essence, simplified and homogenized versions of their predecessors. In the writing of Charles Perrault and the

Grimm Brothers, diversity, violence, and female autonomy have been considerably thinned to make room for stories that pleased the middle-class—and patriarchal— households which became their main audience (Teverson 212). In particular, empowered heroines have been eliminated in a sweep that has generated endless feminist scorn for lacking female representation in fairy tales beyond beautiful, helpless women in need of a male savior (MacDonald 18). The collected tales of traditional writers like

Perrault, then, are mere simulacra of the original oral tales that are far more diverse and less focused on didactic plots intended to mold middle-class children than they are on enthralling storytelling. Furthermore, even in our modern culture, the fairy tales that continue to have general popularity are those censored by what Bacchilega and Rieder

1 That is not to say, of course, that the European tales we have come to accept as standard—Perrault, Grimm, etc.—were particularly inclusive of all ethnicities or racial identities, but to say that the original tales with a variety of characters and especially a variety of gender roles offer the opportunity for malleability and cultural meshing in a way that the purposefully Eurocentric and often patriarchal standard retellings simply do not. 8 refer to as the “Perrault-Grimms-Disney triad” (24). The iterations of these tales as told by Perrault, the Grimms, and later Walt Disney have become the canon in western popular culture and are, Christy Williams argues, “so pervasive that they dominate the possibilities for fairy tales in Western popular culture and do not allow other stories to take root” (“Wicked” 257). Retellings, in consequence, are a way of revitalizing these censored tales and shining a light not only on the diversity that has been lost but also on the way these familiar stories can be used to illuminate modern experiences and cultural diversity.

Furthermore, modern adaptors, in their efforts to empower, diversify, and critique, have begun to uncover the non-canonical, the so-called “forgotten” tales (Teverson 209).

As Ruth MacDonald and Andrew Teverson explain in their separate work, the homogenization of fairy tales and the acceptance of the written tales of Bacchilega and

Rieder’s triad as the standard has led to a forgetting of tales that stray from the canon.

Tales that feature particularly strong women or particularly unsavory stories that may challenge the romanticized standard have been lost by our popular culture. In consequence, many forms of diversity that were present in oral tradition have been, essentially, written out of the fairy tale genre. However, although these tales have been largely forgotten because of their lack of adherence to historical social codes, many of these stories are, in fact, finding a new life in the form of retellings which are far more willing to explore morality and diversity than tales intended to civilize or otherwise shape children (Teverson 209-214). 9

Among the most popular forgotten tales, one that has been adapted time and time again in spite of flying under the dominant popular culture radar is Bluebeard.2 A curious wife, a brutal husband, a closet of clotted blood and dismembered bodies, and an enchanted key permanently stained—Bluebeard, like many other fairy tales or folk stories that have not been popularized, strays from the romantic standards of tales like or . Yes, there is a technical happily-ever-after once the evil husband is killed and the wife inherits all of his wealth and remarries happily, but the journey is far bloodier than those belonging to the dominant canon. Although Bluebeard as a figure and legend has had quite a past of popularity—operas, plays, , poetry, connections to real life criminals—its familiarity has not continued into the twenty-first century (Hermansson 20-43). Furthermore, Bluebeard’s negligible presence in modern popular culture is complicated because its most common iterations are written by Perrault

(“Bluebeard”) and the (“The Robber Bridegroom”),3 that is, even the familiarity of the names Perrault and Grimm have not secured Bluebeard a place in modern consciousness. In spite of being penned by two of the triad and receiving a fair share of adaptive work, Bluebeard has not been associated with the modern fairy tale canon in mass culture and has, instead, been lost to obscurity in popular culture.

One potential cause of its obscurity is the fact that Bluebeard has not been retold in a mass, modern format by a source like Disney. That is, the tale has yet to be properly

2 I will be referring to the tale in general—including all iterations and larger themes or manifestations of Bluebeard plots and ideas—without quotation marks while specific Bluebeard stories, for example, Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” will be put in quotations. 3 Additionally, it is worth noting the popularity of Joseph Jacobs’ English version titled “Mr. Fox.” Though Jacobs is not so famous as Perrault, his version of Bluebeard is one of the most popular in terms of adaptation and retellings. 10 romanticized or censored for modern standards of child-friendly stories and has thus not been catapulted to twenty-first-century fame—which is perhaps, both a positive and a negative. Bluebeard still exists in its brutal original form without the Disney influence; yet, without that influence, it is also largely erased from popular consciousness. Its roots in violence and, in many iterations, its focus on a clever, empowered female protagonist have not yet been rewritten for a general modern audience. Instead, Bluebeard has retained its brutality in a way that is staunchly not Disney fairy tale style and thus not seen as suited for modern children. As Casie E. Hermansson explains, the “omission of the story as a nursery story lessened our familiarity with the fairy tale” (40). Even the fairy tale authorities Perrault and the Grimms have been unable to elevate Bluebeard to canonical popularity, particularly because even their retellings have not been able to sufficiently glorify the tale. There is a happy ending—the wife is said to marry “a very worthy man” (Perrault 192) who erases all memory of her husband Bluebeard—but the violence and death leading to that point are more extreme than those of popular, modern stories. Bluebeard, then, straddles the line between forgotten tales written by or empowering women and the more classic, and often labelled problematic, tales common in popular culture. It is worth noting, however, that Perrault, in his effort to censor

Bluebeard and make it suitable for his audience, attempts to erase the figure of an empowered heroine. As Maria Tatar explains, the “classic, canonical versions” have a notable absence of capable heroines while in those further from the Perrault-canon “we discover heroines who are…courageous” (186). Perrault’s version, attempting to align 11 more neatly with other popular tales, lessens the wife’s courage, but even in doing so, is unable to present Bluebeard as a fairy tale to be idealized in current popular culture.4

As characters, Bluebeard and his wife stray from popular fairy tale figures and have not thus far been neutralized or idealized enough to belong in a Disney-defined canon. Bluebeard as the wealthy husband who sweeps the female protagonist off her feet should be Prince Charming, but instead, he enacts unspeakable violence on his many wives, not only casting his current wife from the desirable role of soul mate to an interchangeable woman, but also revealing the potential dangers of marriage that undermine the notion of happily-ever-after. Likewise, the wife herself is unlike other female protagonists. Rather than being docile and amorous, she is curious and disgusted by her husband—initially for his hideousness and later for his violence. By undermining fairy tale expectations, the characters and the plot of Bluebeard have been unable to be confined by canonical expectations and, as a result, have faded from popular vision.

However, even without being part of the popular stories and movies suitable for mass consumption, there are still many literary retellings and interpretations of Bluebeard across different literary mediums and genres. Aside from the more famous adaptations

4 Furthermore, it is worth noting that Bluebeard appears to be an outlier not only in the popular fairy tale canon, but also within Perrault’s canon as well. Many of Perrault’s fairy tales are romantic and idealized—like Cinderella or Donkey Skin—but Bluebeard centers around brutality and the corruption of a fantasy marriage. Like all fairy tales, Bluebeard does not have a specific origin point, but Perrault’s version is commonly thought to be influenced by oral tradition and other stories, which could potentially be the reason for how unlike the rest of Perrault’s catalog it is. There is no way to trace the exact origins of the Bluebeard tale, only clues in that Bluebeard figures appear in folk and fairy tales from around the world, but regardless of how it came to Perrault, it stands out from the rest of his work and, likely consequently, does not have the same status in modern popular culture as his other stories.

12 like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, ’s “The Bloody Chamber,” and Margaret

Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s Egg,” more recent literary retellings continue to expand upon the

Bluebeard foundation. For example, there is T. Kingfisher’s young adult fantasy novel

The Seventh Bride, which follows young heroine Rhea as she discovers her Bluebeard- like wizard husband has been collecting wives not to kill but to dismember in a variety of ways and sell their body parts or abilities to the highest bidder. Similarly, there is Emily

Carroll’s graphic novel and fairy tale collection Through the Woods, which retells

Bluebeard in a more traditional form in the story “A Lady’s Hands Are Cold,” in which a new bride left alone in her husband’s house finds the dismembered remains of the first wife after hearing her sing a haunting song to her each night, ultimately bringing the first wife back to life before fleeing the house out of fear. Additionally, Carroll’s book includes “Our Neighbor’s House,” which, while not as explicitly inspired by

Bluebeard as “A Lady’s Hands Are Cold,”5 is clearly reminiscent of another Bluebeard iteration: Mr. Fox. Along with the more classic Bluebeard retellings, these newer adaptations offer modernized takes on the original tale. From the focus on female empowerment and female friendship in Kingfisher’s novel to the emphasis on a bleak rather than happily-ever-after ending in “Our Neighbor’s House,” modern literary reinterpretations of Bluebeard comment on current societal expectations and concerns by making use of the evolutionary nature of fairy tales and their adaptability to reflect each society retelling them. As Cristina Bacchilega describes in Postmodern Fairy Tales:

5 In addition to following much of Perrault’s popular narrative standard, it is worth noting that “A Lady’s Hands Are Cold” also makes use of a primarily red and blue color palette which immediately and visually invokes both the traditional violence of Bluebeard as well as the image of the titular character’s signature blue beard. 13

Gender and Narrative Strategies, fairy tales “are ideologically variable desire machines”

(7) which reflect and, to a certain degree, enforce societal norms. It makes sense, then, that modern literary retellings of Bluebeard, regardless of their narrative setting, are used to explore issues that are salient in our current society. The above authors engage in what

Teverson claims to be a revitalization of “lost, forgotten, repressed fairy tales that have been excluded from the canon because they do not conform with its ideological biases”

(218). Literary retellings of Bluebeard, across genres, are able to reclaim this forsaken fairy tale and use the familiar frame story and its thematic elements to tell stories grounded in modern values and social concerns.

Among these modern literary retellings, the novels Mr. Fox and The Wrath & the

Dawn—by Helen Oyeyemi and Renée Ahdieh, respectively—demonstrate most clearly the malleability of Bluebeard and the way it can be reshaped to highlight modern social values and issues. Both novels use the cornerstone of the Bluebeard formula to delve into modern societal concerns, namely highlighting the issue of gender roles and equality in classic fairy tales and shedding light on the experiences of people, specifically women, of color.

Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox imagines a postmodern retelling of Bluebeard in which renowned writer Mr. Fox, who has a bad habit of killing off his female protagonists, squares off with his imaginary muse Mary Foxe, who is determined to stop his killing spree. Contained within the frame story are short narratives that focus on characters in different settings and of different identities, many of which delve into the construction of identity, using the Bluebeard base to shed light on modern notions of gender and the experiences of people of African descent. Similarly, though advertised primarily as an 14 adventurous retelling of the folk tale collection6 Thousand and One Nights, Ahdieh’s The

Wrath & the Dawn has clear parallels to and influences from the Bluebeard tale—from

Shahrzad’s husband Khalid’s murderous behavior to the explicit inclusion of another

Bluebeard retelling as one of Shahrzad’s tales—suggesting that the young adult novel is in fact a retelling of both stories. Like Mr. Fox, Ahdieh’s novel demonstrates the way a familiar tale like Bluebeard can be used to explore non-European cultures, but, while

Oyeyemi’s many stories within Mr. Fox demonstrate the malleability of Bluebeard to explore a myriad of cultures and identity, The Wrath & the Dawn is concretely set in a fantasy Middle East. Both Ahdieh’s and Oyeyemi’s novels serve as case studies for the way a classic fairy tale like Bluebeard can be reimagined—with, for example, non-

European cultural influences and an ethnically diverse cast of characters—and used to illuminate minority experiences as well as the experience of gender with a modern perspective.

Gender Complexities and Feminism

As with many fairy tales, one of the main critiques levied at Bluebeard—or at least the Perrault standard—is the lack of female empowerment or equality, specifically considering Perrault states the story is concerned with the “evils of female curiosity” rather than a condemnation of Bluebeard’s violence (Tatar 185). Yes, the wife7 defeats

6 Although the tales contained in Thousand and One Nights are not consistently labelled as fairy tale or folk tale, their roots “from Persian, Indian, and Arabian oral traditions” (Leeming and Sader 454) creates an immediate association with our general definition and understanding of folk tales. 7 It is significant that in many versions, the wife has no name and is referred to solely as wife—an issue with individualism that certainly causes concern and aggravation among feminist scholars. 15

Bluebeard, often with the aid of her siblings, but otherwise she is passive for much of the story. The single most active thing the wife does in Perrault’s canonical story is peer into the forbidden chamber, for which she is immediately punished not only by her homicidal husband but also by the narrator, who condemns her curiosity. This condemnation of the wife is embodied by the first moral of the story, which has garnered much resistance among modern readers for its explicit blaming of the wife as well as its prioritization of sexist didacticism—warning women not to be curious like Bluebeard’s wife—over any criticism of Bluebeard’s violence. 8 Perrault writes:

Curiosity, in spite of its many charms,

Can bring with it serious regrets;

You can see a thousand examples of it every day.

Women succumb, but it’s a fleeting pleasure;

As soon as you satisfy it, it ceases to be.

And it always proves very, very costly. (Perrault 192)

As Jack Zipes explains in The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre, one of the most distinctive features of Bluebeard is its roots in “a misogynist strain of storytelling” which, in its narrative about power and who has it, ultimately explores “why power should always be in the hands of men” (60). Certainly, the Perrault standard abides by these patriarchal constraints of his day, but in many other iterations of the tale there is more power and sympathy to be had for the wife and—given the complex and power-based gender politics of the Perrault tale—immense possibility for shifting the

8 There is a second moral which offers a soft condemnation of Bluebeard for being a terrible husband, but even so it is not so explicit as Perrault’s accusation of the wife. 16 wife’s role to one of more autonomy and power. For modern feminist writers, it is the story’s potential for female empowerment and ability, as well as the oppressive rhetoric of the Perrault standard, which is ripe for modernization.

At its core, the Bluebeard tale is concerned with gender and power even more than it is with curiosity or violence. As Stephen Benson suggests, Bluebeard “revolves around gender relations” (254), a claim that seeks to explain the fascination of the so- called “Carter generation” and their successors with recontextualizing and retelling

Bluebeard. The centrality of gender in Bluebeard makes it a fairly popular choice among feminist writers, who use the foundation of an overtly patriarchal tale to explore modern gender values. Although the typically canonical Bluebeard enforces traditional and patriarchal social values, the complex and dualistic nature of the relationship between

Bluebeard and his wife brings into question the role of and relationship between genders, particularly when read by modern audiences. In Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and

Narrative Strategies, Cristina Bacchilega echoes the beliefs of many fairy tale and theorists in claiming that fairy tales are a reflection of the socio-cultural values of their creators and audience. A “tale of magic,” Bacchilega claims, “cannot be simply liberatory because within its specific community, it would also…rely on and reinforce social norms” (Postmodern 7). In the case of Bluebeard, enforcing social customs means reinforcing the patriarchal values of Perrault’s social environment—for example, the condemnation of female curiosity with a lesser concern for male violence—and, in the case of modern adaptations, using those traditional values to comment on and explore modern power struggles specifically in terms of gender politics. 17

Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox is one such retelling that, using the base of Bluebeard and its assertions about gender and gender politics, interrogates modern ideas of feminism and how those ideas can be expressed in the familiar form of a fairy tale. Of the three main characters in the frame story of the novel—St. John (Mr.) Fox, Mary Foxe, and

Daphne—it is the muse Mary whom Oyeyemi uses to explore the feminist potential in

Bluebeard. As the muse of Mr. Fox, Mary’s existence itself is a constant question throughout the book. That is, there is no confirmation—until the very end of the novel where Mary leaves both Mr. Fox and Daphne to see the world for herself—of Mary’s autonomous personhood. Immediately, Mary’s innate reliance on Mr. Fox for character evokes the position of Bluebeard’s wife, who has no name and thus no identity without her husband. However, Oyeyemi complicates this characterization by making it clear that

Mary is not Bluebeard’s wife. Rather, the role of the wife is played by Daphne. While

Daphne is a clear reflection of the Perrault standard patriarchal values—in the opening pages of the novel, Mr. Fox describes his wife as obedient and pleasurable by claiming,

“She doesn’t complain about anything I do; she is physically unable to” because “I fixed her early” (1)—she still manages to have a life and identity separate from Mr. Fox. With a complex history that is explored later in the novel, Daphne is portrayed as a complete, autonomous woman who, while controlled and influenced by her husband and his desires, still exists in his absence. Mary, on the other hand, is initially dependent on Mr. Fox much like the wife of the traditional Bluebeard and it is only through her intentionally confrontational behavior that she begins to develop individually.

Frustrated with her creator Mr. Fox’s tendency to kill off his female characters in particularly gruesome ways, Mary ropes him into a game of storytelling in order to 18 challenge Mr. Fox’s propensity for violence. Though Mary is not Mr. Fox’s wife, she takes on part of the traditional Bluebeard wife’s role by having access to Mr. Fox’s

“forbidden chamber,” that is, his habit of killing and dismembering his female characters.

In contrast to the traditional wife, however, Mary is not punished for having this knowledge but instead gains an element of allure which keeps Mr. Fox fascinated with her no matter what turmoil she puts him through—though Mary insists he loves her only for her looks, Mr. Fox is adamant he is “crazy about [her]” (Oyeyemi 3). Mary’s immediate familiarity with Mr. Fox’s “forbidden chamber” reflects what Bacchilega explains to be an initiation into society and womanhood through uncovering Bluebeard’s secrets. Mary—already fully knowledgeable of Mr. Fox’s secrets and thus without the curiosity typical of a Bluebeard wife—is not punished for being aware of Mr. Fox’s murders; rather she begins, as Bacchilega outlines in regard to the symbolic importance of the forbidden chamber, a “process of initiation which requires entering the forbidden chamber” (Postmodern 107). Rather than Bacchilega’s proposed sexual initiation,

Mary’s initiation is into personhood and, more specifically, womanhood. As Mr. Fox’s muse, her autonomy is initially debatable, and it is only through the power she gains by having access to Mr. Fox’s forbidden chamber that she is able to gain independence.

Because she has access to the chamber, she begins the challenge between her and Mr.

Fox, a challenge which ultimately leads to her liberation as she gets to know Daphne, is brought outside of Mr. Fox’s office, and eventually is able to leave the Foxes and go off on her own. The chamber, then, in Oyeyemi’s feminist, postmodern hands becomes a tool for Mary’s female empowerment rather than her oppression or punishment. Oyeyemi, through Mary, reshapes what Christy Williams refers to as the “gendered narrative 19 patterns” (“Wicked” 257) while simultaneously reclaiming the identity and power of a woman who is portrayed negatively in the original tale (“Wicked” 265). Mr. Fox’s chamber is available to Mary from the very beginning, and it is this access which allows

Mary to challenge the violent power struggle between genders and gain a level of autonomy that was denied not only to her as a muse but also to Daphne as an oppressed wife and to every other wife of a Bluebeard figure.

However, Oyeyemi’s feminist adaptation is not focused solely on developing and empowering the female characters. Rather, Mr. Fox is a strong example of using

Bluebeard to explore feminism and gender because Oyeyemi focuses on male characters as well. While many of the brief narratives written by Mary and Mr. Fox have both male and female characters, it is “The Training at Madame De Silentio’s” which explores male gender roles and expectations most thoroughly and which subverts Bluebeard standards most effectively. “The Training at Madame De Silentio’s” recounts the experiences of

Charles Wolfe and Charlie Wulf during their time at Madame De Silentio’s Academy, a school which trains “delinquent ruffians between the ages of sixteen and eighteen” to become “world-class husbands by the time they are twenty-one” (Oyeyemi 120). In other words, teenagers Charles and Charlie are sent by their families to Madame De Silentio’s

Academy in order to be molded into perfect husbands in a school reminiscent of finishing schools intended to reshape young women into ideal, obedient wives. While women and, specifically, wives throughout Mr. Fox are valued for beauty and obedience, in this particular story it is the husbands who are reduced merely to the ways they can please their wives. In a sense, the students at Madame De Silentio’s Academy take the place of 20

Bluebeard’s bride and all the limitations that come along with it, most notably, the consequences of curiosity.

While out on the lake that lies in the academy’s grounds, Charlie falls into the water and Charles dives in to save him. Then, as they swim to the shore, both boys are startled to discover a “man trapped at the bottom of the lake, wrapped round and round with a great rusty padlocked chain” (Oyeyemi 127). After finding the trapped man, both

Charles and Charlie—in much the same way that Bluebeard’s wife attempts to mask her discovery of the forbidden room and the stain on the enchanted key—try to initially hide their discovery and obsession with it by recording “Nothing today” (127) in their daily journals. However, the boys cannot stop questioning why the man, Reynardine, is at the bottom of the lake, what he might look like, and what Madame De Silentio has to do with his imprisonment until eventually they steal keys to the padlock from Madame De

Silentio’s office and set Reynardine free. It is only after his liberation that they discover

Reynardine is a “woman-killer” (131). Charles and Charlie wind up punishing themselves with guilt in ways that Madame De Silentio cannot, and are eventually sold off to be ideal husbands to wives who, unsatisfied with their purchased husbands, cover them in masks that render them identity-less. In this story, the graphic crimes of the Bluebeard-like

Reynardine are almost entirely ignored in favor of condemning the boys who are unable to resist their curiosity in much the same way that Perrault’s original morals forgo commenting on the heinousness of Bluebeard’s murders in favor of criticizing the wife’s curiosity. “The Training at Madame De Silentio’s,” then, plays on the standard set by other Bluebeard tales to, as Karen Mozingo explains in relation to Pina Bausch’s 21

Bluebeard adaptation, let “the theme of curiosity…overshadow the theme of Bluebeard’s crimes” (101).

As a tale often thought to encourage limiting female curiosity, Bluebeard plays into the patriarchal values of Perrault’s society (Mozingo 95-103). However, by flipping female curiosity to male curiosity, Oyeyemi highlights the consequences of patriarchal control not just for women but for men as well. Oyeyemi, Justine Jordan writes in her

Guardian review, “locates in the Bluebeard story not only female loss of identity but male emotional imprisonment” (2). The ironic tone of the story highlights the folly of

Perrault’s canonical moral that punishes curiosity and suggests, by condemning male curiosity, the traditional socio-historical views which undermine feminism limit not only women but men as well. Oyeyemi reveals the complex gender politics embedded in the

Bluebeard tale and, by switching the power dynamic in Madame De Silentio’s Academy, shifts the contention between genders to what Bacchilega—referring to Atwood’s famous adaptation—describes as “a nuanced understanding of patriarchal sexual politics as a social construction that oppresses both women and men” (Postmodern 116). Among the many contained tales in Mr. Fox, the inclusion of “The Training at Madame De

Silentio’s” helps to critically explore the consequences of patriarchal oppression and control by highlighting the way both men and women are negatively affected by the anti- feminist standards of canonical fairy tales.

In parallel, Ahdieh deepens her feminist adaptation of Bluebeard by including male focalizing characters in addition to female ones throughout The Wrath & the Dawn.

Advertised as a retelling of Thousand and One Nights—also referred to as The Arabian

Nights—Ahdieh’s novel explores the bold Shahrzad, who, after her best friend Shiva is 22 beheaded by the Caliph Khalid, volunteers to be his next wife and vows to break his killing streak and exact revenge for the loss of her dear friend. On the surface, it is clear that this novel is in fact a fantasy adaptation of Thousand and One Nights complete with a modernized version of the notoriously clever Scheherazade and a young Khalid in the role of King Shahryar, who marries a virgin each night and kills them the following morning after having been betrayed by his first wife. However, many of the novel’s thematic elements similarly suggest that Ahdieh’s novel is influenced by Bluebeard in addition to Thousand and One Nights. While there are many potential origins for the story that would eventually become Bluebeard, the parallels between the murderers King

Shahryar and Bluebeard make a strong case for a connection between the two and a potential source of inspiration for the Bluebeard tale (Zipes, Irresistible 60). Aside from the connection between Bluebeard and “the most notorious of all humankind”

(Zipes, Irresistible 60)—that is, King Shahryar—there is the use of the “Forbidden

Chamber” iconography. The motif of a forbidden door being opened, Sherrill E. Grace suggests, is a striking echo of many elements and stories in Thousand and One Nights, particularly the story “Prince Agib,” in which Agib is blinded and exiled because he opens a forbidden door (Grace 248). More specific to Ahdieh’s retelling, however, are the themes of curiosity and the role of gender.9 Shahrzad continues to display curiosity about

Khalid’s “Forbidden Chamber,” in this case the closet in his bedroom, and spends much of the novel trying to uncover his other secrets in order to understand him better.

9 It is also worth noting that one of the stories Ahdieh’s Shahrzad tells to Khalid is “Mehrdad the Bluebeard” (Ahdieh 220-230), an obviously overt Bluebeard tale featuring a more autonomous female protagonist named Tala, who is much more active in her marriage to the Bluebeard figure than the wives following the Perrault standard. 23

Additionally, at the center of the novel is the complex power struggle between Khalid and Shahrzad, who are both equals and enemies, a relationship which reflects the doubling of Bluebeard and his wife. That is, as Bacchilega proposes, the Bluebeard figure and his wife operate as doubles, toeing the line between their dichotomous goals and behaviors and their sub-textual similarities like duplicity and even power—though

Bluebeard’s is physical while the wife’s is not (Postmodern 111-138). Therefore, although it is marketed as a retelling of Thousand and One Nights, The Wrath & The

Dawn is arguably inspired by both Thousand and One Nights as well as Bluebeard and uses those familiar foundations to explore gender roles and feminism in much the same way as Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox.

Like Oyeyemi’s, Ahdieh’s exploration of gender roles and relations is deepened by the inclusion of male focalizing characters. Throughout the third-person narration,

Shahrzad’s father and Tariq, Shahrzad’s initial romantic interest and childhood friend, as well as Khalid all have chapters for which they are the focalizing character. Ahdieh’s attempt to infuse modern, feminist values into an adaptation of two traditional—and, on the surface level, sexist—stories is most successful through the chapters focusing on

Khalid. As the Bluebeard figure, he is easy to characterize as monstrous, after all he does behead a new wife every dawn with seemingly no explanation, but the inclusion of his perspective helps to humanize and explain his motivation so that even if readers cannot fully support or empathize with him, they can understand some of his drive to behave as he does.10 Ahdieh’s novel is still centered on Shahrzad, but the inclusion of perspectives

10 Of course, his motivations and secrets are not fully fleshed out in The Wrath & the Dawn but are drawn out into the sequel novel—The Rose & the Dagger—which is not so closely following the narrative frame of either Thousand and One Nights or Bluebeard. 24 from the men in the story delves more deeply into the power dynamic between men and women both in fairy tales and our society in general. This inclusive, feminist take on

Bluebeard bridges the gaps of gender politics in the canon by adding nuance where in the original there is only male domination and female cunning to try to challenge the status quo.

Additionally, these perspectives, like those in Oyeyemi’s “The Training at

Madame De Silentio’s,” reflect how the pressures of a patriarchal fairy tale society impact the male characters. Khalid must, as a teenager, grapple with protecting his kingdom from a curse or sparing the lives of innocent young women who are sacrificed on behalf of them all. Tariq must be strong and objective at all times, even when his beloved Shahrzad is at risk, and is condemned by older men in his society when he shows any impulsivity or emotion about trying to rescue her. Ahdieh modernizes fairy tale gender constructs by pairing her development of women with a consideration of the social pressures defining manhood—a consideration which does not take precedence over the development of female characters but, when paired with Ahdieh’s exploration of womanhood, creates a more thorough and modern exploration of gender. The inclusion of the fears of men and consideration for the way patriarchy can harm their identity as well,

Bacchilega explains, “may seem luxuries in the general context of gender politics…but they are productive, and not trivial luxuries” (Postmodern 116). By using male characters

The fact that his true reasoning and in essence his true secrets are not uncovered in this novel is perhaps another signifier of this book being closely tied to Bluebeard because, as Jack Zipes explains in Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre, Bluebeard’s wife “really never learns his secret—why he killed his previous wives and who he really is” (155). Instead, just like Ahdieh’s Shahrzad, Bluebeard’s wife knows only of his crimes while his rationale is left undiscovered. 25 as focalizers and gaining insight on their plights and how society’s gender expectations influence their behavior, Ahdieh reveals the complex gender constructs both in our society and in the fairy tales we still enjoy, adding complexity to Bluebeard’s generally simplified gender relations and offering a glimpse of the pressure the patriarchy puts not only on women but on men as well.

Still, the novel is, at its base, an adaptation of Bluebeard and Thousand and One

Nights intent on empowering its heroine. Shahrzad is, from the very beginning of the novel, different from all the other women who have fallen prey to Khalid’s brutality and, really, different from any other woman around her. Bold enough to willingly marry a murderous Caliph, Shahrzad is introduced immediately as a force to be reckoned with and a young woman so capable that her friends and family, in spite of their worries, have no real doubt she will be the one to break Khalid’s killing spree. Notably, Shahrzad is a spectacular archer, having been trained by Tariq and her surroundings to aim without looking and almost never miss a shot. In essence, Shahrzad is exceptional in all things and, in consequence, elevated above any other women in the novel. Shahrzad, in

Ahdieh’s quest to make an empowering heroine in fairy tales that actively threaten and suppress their female protagonists, becomes a representation of a superficial, individual empowerment. That is, Shahrzad is a figure of vigilante feminism. As Laura Mattoon

D’Amore explains, the theory of vigilante feminism indicates “a version of feminism that itself performs as an outlaw, outside the boundaries of feminist praxis that is rooted in peace and the eradication of systems of power and dominance” (390). In other words, a vigilante feminist figure behaves in ways that create individual empowerment but, in doing so, undermines the efforts of other feminists or feminist theorists to dismantle the 26 systematic structures that create gender inequality and oppression. For example,

Shahrzad’s exceptionalism. Not only is she beautiful, brave, and lethal with a bow and arrow, but she is also the only woman in the novel to be all of these things. Although

Shahrzad herself is an image of empowerment that could serve as inspiration for young readers, the pattern she represents is ultimately more harmful than it is inspiring. By being singled out as the one and only woman of her kind, Shahrzad’s character supports oppressive social structures (Williams, “The Shoe Still Fits” 101-105). As an embodiment of “girl power,” she “reinforces patriarchal authority by emphasizing individual achievements” and therefore doing very little to challenge the structures that set “standard feminine behavior” (“The Shoe Still Fits” 101) in the first place.

Shahrzad’s vigilante feminism is particularly glaring because of the fact that she exists in an adaptation of Bluebeard and Thousand and One Nights, both of which, at their roots, have heroines with far more autonomy and action than those found in other fairy tales. Rather than expanding on what makes the original Scheherazade so bold and cunning, or exploring why Bluebeard’s wife for all of her docility still breaks her vow to her husband and peers into the forbidden room, Ahdieh’s adaptation is content to rely on flat notions of girl power that make Shahrzad a force to be reckoned with in the confines of the novel but a character with little to say in feminist conversation. Shahrzad, rather than challenging the patriarchal standards of Bluebeard as say Oyeyemi’s Mary Foxe does, accepts these social structures and simply separates herself from other women to assert her toughness and ability. For much of the novel, The Wrath & the Dawn, then, fails to “challenge systemic sexism” and thus fails “to make social criticisms that mark 27 many feminist fairy tales as potentially transformative” (“The Shoe Still Fits” 109). 11 It is not that Ahdieh is not telling a feminist tale, rather that she is taking two stories in which the protagonists have been a symbol for challenging society’s gender standards and does not use them to their full potential. Bluebeard’s wife, for all of her consequences, is still a fairy tale protagonist worth noting—even in Perrault’s version—if not for her clever plans to save herself then simply for her willingness to overcome timidity in favor of curiosity. Similarly, Scheherazade is cunning enough to stop the king’s murderous rampage and protect herself as well as all of the other women in her society. Ahdieh’s Shahrzad, too, has all of these qualities. She is clever and bold and willing to risk herself for the benefit of other women; it is simply that for much of the novel she is unable to overcome the limitations of vigilante feminism in order to make true transformation or commentary on systemic standards and patterns both of fairy tales and our society.

In fact, it is not until Shahrzad’s discovery of and entry into Khalid’s forbidden chamber toward the end of the novel that she is truly initiated into society and can overcome her exceptionalism in favor of true empowerment and concern for society. As it is for Mary Foxe, the symbol of the forbidden chamber is the transformation not into sexuality as in other retellings, but into womanhood. Bacchilega summarizes the icon of the forbidden chamber, suggesting it is a test which forces the heroine to be clever and results in her initiation into, for example, sexuality or community (Postmodern 110). The

11 Ultimately, Shahrzad is able to stop Khalid’s slaughter of young women, which is a step toward altering the social structures that devalue the women in Ahdieh’s novel; however, she does so accidentally—she only creates change because she wants revenge for a single woman and because she falls in love with Khalid—rather than consciously deciding to challenge the patriarchal social structures in place. 28 chamber, then, can be “the husband’s bloody chamber, a room where the heroine is asked to consume human flesh, or Hell itself” (Postmodern 110). The chamber in Ahdieh’s novel is much subtler: a cabinet in Shahrzad’s husband’s room containing letters written to the wives he has had killed. Specifically, letters of apology to the families of the deceased young women, recounting their individual excellences and his personal guilt over their deaths. When Shahrzad finds the letters, she finds that “Each was dated. Each acknowledged Khalid’s sole responsibility. None offered any justification for the death.

No excuse” (320). Rather than an immediate initiation or a secret forcing Shahrzad to save herself or trick the Bluebeard figure, these letters serve as a sort of catharsis; they humanize Khalid and help Shahrzad find an outlet to mourn her beloved Shiva and deal with her feelings for Khalid. In the letters, she is forced to reckon with the truth of Khalid and his actions that she has been ignoring in favor of her mounting feelings. In doing so, she is initiated into society by dropping the walls of her individual exceptionalism and facing the fact that every woman who has lost her life to Khalid is individual and worthy.

In essence, the letters and the forbidden chamber reveal that Khalid is not only a threat to her or her friend—whom she also elevates to exceptionality—but to all women. As a result, the society that has made Khalid so powerful is also a risk to women. Khalid’s cabinet ties Shahrzad more closely to her society and humankind at large, a society “to which the Bluebeard figure does not belong” (Postmodern 110). Her understanding and overcoming of individual successes undoes the problematic commentary created by her early vigilante feminist characterization, which “does nothing to critique social structures, but…suggests that feminism is only about women, not about gender and society” (“The

Shoe Still Fits” 115). The forbidden chamber figure in The Wrath & the Dawn initiates 29

Shahrzad into the community by undoing her exceptionalism, and serves to critique the oppressive social structures that are initially encouraged by Shahrzad’s superiority.

As Williams explains, the “future of postmodern feminist fairy tales lies in stories that can rewrite the genre without totally unmaking it” (“Wicked” 269). That is, the success of feminist fairy tales depends on the ability of authors to modernize and create empowerment in these familiar stories while retaining the elements of the fairy tale genre that has made it beloved. Ahdieh and Oyeyemi both modernize the fairy tales they draw from, creating empowered and autonomous female characters and infusing their work with current social concerns, while simultaneously keeping the genre elements of the fairy tale. In other words, successful feminist fairy tale retellings must blend the social values and issues of the society in which they exist with fairy tale elements—for example romance, fantasy, and magic—that have made and continue to make fairy tales such a popular genre. In spite of how different Oyeyemi’s and Ahdieh’s novels are, both embody this spirit of retellings that, despite their intentions to analyze and modernize gender politics within Bluebeard—and Thousand and One Nights—maintain the spirit of the tale. Each Bluebeard figure is still a killer, each wife figure is still forced to overcome his violence to join society, and both stories still focus on power and its complex ties with violence and gender. Rather than undermining the features of Bluebeard which have made it popular in history, both Oyeyemi and Ahdieh build upon the fairy tale and infuse modern social concerns and culture into it in order to make the stories more complex and compelling to a modern audience.

Both authors, then, create what Linda Hutcheon calls “palimpsestuous” adaptations. In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon explains Michael Alexander’s 30 theory of palimpsestuous retellings, saying that “an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary” (9). These adaptations are inspired by Bluebeard, but they are not less than the original versions; rather they add to the canonical standard and revitalize a story that, with its limited socio-cultural aspects, would not retain popularity with modern audiences. Where the Perrault Bluebeard is rife with moral instructions and rigid gender expectations, Oyeyemi’s and Ahdieh’s adaptations explore concern for all gender constructs, infusing modern values like feminism into a tale that seeks to divide and make men and women inherently unequal. In essence, these feminist retellings are intent on revealing what has been hinted at but lost in fairy tales that set gender expectations but do not explore them or their consequences.

Oyeyemi and Ahdieh continue a tradition of adapting Bluebeard and using it to complicate cultural expectations of gender and identity.

Outside of the fact that both Ahdieh’s and Oyeyemi’s novels are Bluebeard retellings, it is worth noting the differences in these adaptations that are often guided by the genres of each book. For example, as a postmodern work of fiction, Mr. Fox is more experimental in form than a traditional narrative structure and is comprised of short narratives all contained within a frame led by Mr. Fox and Mary—not unlike the structure of Thousand and One Nights. Oyeyemi uses the experimental tendencies of the postmodern genre to reflect the fairy tale tradition of concision. As Carney says, “most stories in the vast fairy-tale canon are relatively short” (223), and Oyeyemi’s novel is no different. Each short narrative, despite being tied in some way to Bluebeard, offers its own narrative which enables Oyeyemi to explore with greater depth different facets of modern social concerns, ultimately bridging the gaps of diversity in popular and 31 homogenous fairy tales by including stories that explore social constructions, for example, gender. Ahdieh, writing a young adult fantasy novel, does not have the same scope as Oyeyemi’s postmodern novel and, in a centralized narrative with only a few brief tales that Shahrzad recites to Khalid, focuses on empowering her characters and visibly blending culture through Bluebeard and Thousand and One Nights.

In part, the fact that The Wrath & the Dawn is intended for a younger audience plays into the historical perspective that fairy tales are for children—in spite of the fact that many scholars, such as Linda J. Lee, believe “fairy tales have never been intended only for young audiences” and rather “target an adult audience and address adult concerns” (56). The “relationship between a fairy tale world and a realist one,”

Bacchilega and Rieder argue, will always have “something to do with relationships between children and adults” (33). The label of “young adult” immediately evokes ideas of fairy tales made suitable for children and thus rid of the violence and trauma that make stories like Bluebeard popular for adaptation. The young adult classification evokes historic understandings of childhood moral training, which begins with an impressionable child for whom stories like censored fairy tales are a shaping force (Ahmed, “Willful”

236). Alternatively, some, like Elisabeth Rose Gruner, argue that fairy tales can regain their depth by being transposed into the “sometimes gritty world” of literature for the young, which can often “[restore] their more troubling aspects” (17), particularly with the absence, in many cases, of a happily-ever-after ending. Furthermore, Ahdieh shatters any assumption of censorship or moral training with the inclusion of sex.

Although not graphically eroticized, The Wrath & the Dawn exposes the role of sex and sexuality in Shahrzad and Khalid’s relationship, which opens “new areas of 32 discussion that intersect with current concerns about fairy tales” (Jorgensen, “Innocent

Initiations” 28). Ahdieh expands her examination of female empowerment by including brief mentions of sex through which Shahrzad retains and sometimes gains some level of control and power in her marriage,12 thus countering the standard of fairy tales belonging to women but disempowering them by “denying them any real agency” (Jorgensen,

“Innocent Initiations” 35) in terms of sexuality. Although it is not a significant factor in the novel, Ahdieh’s brief attention to sex highlights not only the expanding horizons of the fairy tale genre but also another facet of feminism that can be discussed through an adaptation meant for the young but not censored to be morally didactic. Ahdieh eliminates what Zipes calls the “radical morality” of popular “fairy tales and fantasy works that have been mass-mediated for young readers” (Breaking 206). By granting respect to the intended young readers through not censoring Bluebeard or the social issues she explores, Ahdieh reinforces Zipes’ claim that literature for the young is folk literature. That is, young adult literature—like children’s literature or any other work geared toward younger audiences—is “literature for all the folk, read by young and old”

(Breaking 209) and exceedingly important for the socialization of the young and, arguably, the resocialization of older readers who have not been previously exposed to modern social realities.

12 On her wedding night, Shahrzad initiates sex with Khalid both to avoid his interrogation of why she volunteered to marry him (Ahdieh 25) as well as to create a level of intimacy between them in order to start her plan of enthralling him with stories and figuring out a way to defeat him (29). For Shahrzad, sex is a way to gain control in her interactions with Khalid and shift their power dynamic, which is initially so unbalanced because of his royal status and because of his physical prowess, which she admits outmatches her own (29). 33

Oyeyemi and Ahdieh are working in the frame of different literary genres despite their similar sources of inspiration in Bluebeard, and as such use genre-specific expectations to explore relevant social issues and to diversify a fairly familiar tale.

Overall, the different literary genres of Ahdieh and Oyeyemi reflect the diversity of the fairy tale genre and, more specifically, of Bluebeard, and their flexibility to be translated into any genre with concern for any and all modern social concerns. In addition to concerns of feminism and constructions of gender, both Ahdieh’s and Oyeyemi’s novels demonstrate the ability of fairy tale adaptations to explore modern concerns of diversity, particularly by highlighting the experiences of people Asian and African descent respectively.

Diversity and Minority Experiences

While fairy tales are easily understood as vehicles for reimagining gender roles, it is still difficult to understand the role of race and racism in shaping the classic iterations of these tales and the role diversity must play in retellings. Young children, Dorothy L.

Hurley explains, when asked to reimagine classic fairy tales, showed emerging abilities to think critically about gender issues yet still had an “inability to understand internalized racism” (222). However, while modern adaptations are increasingly bending fairy tales into feminist stories, adaptations of tales like Bluebeard are also used to bridge cultural gaps and expose minority, racial experiences. While most western fairy tales do not overtly attend to race, the “implicitly political nature” (Lau, “Imperial Marvels” 141) of the fairy tale genre suggests that not only has race played an influential role in the development of these tales but that it continues to be a source of adaptation inspiration 34 for modern authors. In “Imperial Marvels: Race and the Colonial Imagination in the Fairy

Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy,” Kimberly J. Lau claims “race has been critical to the development of the fairy tale as a literary genre despite its nearly complete invisibility”

(143). However, in spite of the fact that “early modern and modern ideas about race played a fundamental role in the development of the European fairy tale” (Lau, “Imperial

Marvels” 169), there is a notable lack of attention paid to race in the scholarship of fairy tales. Donald Haase notes this irony when commenting on Stefan Neuhaus’ Märchen, which “asserts the global ubiquity of the fairy tale” but simultaneously “ignores most of the world and a wide variety of fairy-tale forms” (“Decolonizing” 29). The influences of racial ideology and relations, as well as the notions of colonization that permeated much of Europe during the recording of fairy tales, are still present in tales today but are not often studied in fairy tale scholarship. With a notable lack of “non-western” fairy tales being spread—the result perhaps of inadequate translation, which is “an essential step in giving…ears to readers of English” (Haring, “Formalism to Ideology” 157)—the additional lack of attention given to racial minorities in western societies is far more impactful. Although scholarship has yet to pay proper attention to the experience and representation of minorities in the fairy tale genre, that absence is no longer so prominent in the realm of adaptations. White, Eurocentric retellings are still most common, but attempts to bridge cultures and expose minority experience are becoming more easily accessible. Notably, Oyeyemi’s and Ahdieh’s novels contribute to the increasing diversity in familiar western tales.

Just as Shahrzad’s characterization within the frame of Bluebeard and Thousand and One Nights shines a light on the transformation of feminism from vigilante to active 35 in challenging systemic standards, she also reveals some of the plights of Middle Eastern and Asian women and, furthermore, the importance of diversity in fairy tale retellings intended for the young. When explaining her personal impetus to write a fantasy story with Middle Eastern and Asian female protagonists, Ahdieh says: “When I was growing up, I needed to believe it was possible for a girl like me to slay a dragon or have a significant place in a world dominated by men. Only other young women with whom we can identify can show us that” (qtd. in Ho 3). As an Asian woman, specifically of Korean descent, Ahdieh, like other adaptation writers, seeks to diversify the fairy tale canon to include young readers who are a part of western audiences even if they do not identify as white. Given The Wrath & the Dawn is a young adult novel, it carries with it some of the responsibilities and expectations that we, as a society, place on children’s literature.

Namely, the burden of being at least somewhat of a positive influence on its hypothetically young or impressionable audience. “Children,” Melissa Heckler and Carol

Birch argue in “Building Bridges with Stories,” must “develop pride in their own cultural identity” in order to be capable of dealing “responsibly and sensitively with the similarities and differences of others”; furthermore, stories like fairy tales “are a natural means to this end” (8). Like Ahdieh, Heckler and Birch suggest that the successful and inclusive development of young readers is contingent on seeing themselves and their cultures represented in stories and, likewise, seeing stories representing other cultures and thus creating a level of understanding. Because, as Judith Heide Gilliland summarizes, having young readers exposed to different cultures even simply on the pages of a book can “remove some of the barriers that cause misunderstandings and worse” (106). As a

Middle Eastern female character surrounded by other Middle Eastern characters, 36

Shahrzad works to both provide an inspiring representation for Asian and Middle Eastern readers as well as readers from diverse backgrounds, including mainstream readers.

While not given a specific, real-world racial identity, Shahrzad can be understood to be Middle Eastern because of the novel’s primary inspiration source, Thousand and

One Nights, as well as claims that Ahdieh drew additional inspiration from her husband’s

Persian identity (Ho 2). Shahrzad’s ethnicity makes her a representation of Joel Taxel’s definition of multiculturalism, which he describes as representing “individuals and groups considered outside of the sociopolitical and cultural mainstream of American society” (155). Her cultural background is worth noting not merely because of the potentially positive influence that she could have on young readers, but also because she is part of an adaptation inspired partly by Bluebeard. Considering the Perrault standard,

Bluebeard is a European story filled with characters of white European descent. In consequence, the fact that Shahrzad leads Ahdieh’s adaptation is significant because it is not only adding diverse stories to the western fairy tale canon, but is also diversifying the tales that already exist in order to make them more relevant and compelling in modern society. Though not set in our real world, the inclusion of Middle Eastern culture— clothing, food, language—makes it clear that The Wrath & the Dawn highlights both the experiences of Middle Eastern people and simultaneously challenges western perceptions of Middle Eastern culture as manifested even in fairy tales. Khalid is a Caliph, not a king.

Tariq wears a rida’, not a scarf. Shahrzad is beautiful and brown, not white as snow. The culture is not whitewashed and neither are the characters. Instead, the story offers a glimpse of the life of Shahrzad as a Middle Eastern woman who is seen as beautiful 37 against the western standard of paleness and who is shaped by the language, food, and customs of a Middle Eastern-inspired culture.

However, with the focus of Middle Eastern culture written by an author who is not of Middle Eastern descent, the question of Orientalism is raised. 13 Theorized by

Edward W. Said, orientalism suggests that western representations of Asian culture in literature and other forms of art and culture are simulacra of true Asian culture and represent western ideals and desires more than they do eastern reality (Orientalism). The question of orientalism in The Wrath & the Dawn is complicated primarily by the fact that the novel is classified as fantasy and, furthermore, is a fairy tale adaptation. In consequence, much of the culture is altered. The men are all trained in combat with various blades, the women are endlessly beautiful, and the desert is emphasized almost to excess. However, the novel is also focused on magic, spell books, and a Bluebeard figure whose murdering of his wives has little to do with culture and much to do with the inspiration of Bluebeard and Thousand and One Nights as well as the curse Khalid faces.

In other words, it is difficult to classify clearly whether or not Ahdieh’s novel is orientalist because many of its cultural subversions are purposeful decisions to adhere to the magic of a fairy tale. It is not that the novel responds “more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object” (Said 22), but that Ahdieh is intentionally basing the narrative on Bluebeard (and Thousand and One Nights) and, in consequence, imposes

Middle Eastern culture on European culture. This is not to say that Ahdieh does not

13 The issue of orientalism is additionally complicated by the fact that Ahdieh, while not Middle Eastern, is of Asian descent, specifically Korean. Of course, the fact that she is examining another culture as an outsider still creates the possibility for an orientalist perspective, but debatably less so than someone completely removed from Asian cultures. 38 romanticize the culture she writes about but to suggest that what romanticization she does engage in is guided not by a desire to adhere to western expectations but to retain the fantasy and magic that define its sources of inspiration. There is certainly a struggle between the western constructs of Bluebeard and the Middle Eastern culture of Ahdieh’s novel, but overall The Wrath & the Dawn manages to strike a successful balance between the glamorized culture of a folk tale and the westernization of orientalism.

Still, Shahrzad and The Wrath & the Dawn as a whole are particularly influential not only because of the diversity that Ahdieh puts on display for all audiences, but also because of the clear ties to Bluebeard which suggest that not only does minority culture make for interesting stories, but also that in the fairy tale genre diverse cultures create stories that are equally as magical and enthralling as those of their European predecessors. Modern audiences crave multiculturalism—a craving seen clearly through the rising popularity of groups like We Need Diverse Books and movements like

#OwnVoices, which prioritize creating exposure for culturally diverse stories and authors—and so it is the job of adaptations to meet that demand and offer glimpses of a world many readers would otherwise never experience.14

Although not a young adult writer, Oyeyemi similarly puts a significant emphasis on diversifying Bluebeard and using the fairy tale touchstone as a vehicle for exposing the experiences and culture of Black characters. Like Oyeyemi’s later novel Boy, Snow,

Bird, which infuses the traditionally European Snow White tale with African folktale

14 The Wrath & the Dawn, in fact, is so popular that it has not only spawned a sequel but its own adaptation as a WEBTOON adapted by Stephen Lamm and illustrated by SilvesterVitale, which has a 9.56 rating out of 10 and 943,600 followers as of May 2021 (from webtoons.com). 39 influences, Mr. Fox similarly “unsettles the European fairy tale’s largely unrecognized hegemony” (Lau, “Snow White” 389). In other words, Oyeyemi’s diversification of traditionally European tales shakes the white racial dominance of fairy tales and challenges social expectations of fantasy whiteness. In particular, Mr. Fox focuses on the experiences of Black women, adding another layer of diversity to the genre by beginning to explore the complications of intersectionality.15

In “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against

Women of Color,” Kimberlé Crenshaw outlines the necessity of examining race and feminism through the lens of intersectionality and the harm—namely the further marginalization and the ignoring of violence directed at Black women primarily—that can come if said intersectionality is not considered. More so than any other “designated minority group” in the United States, Black women—though Crenshaw does acknowledge the plight of other racialized groups as well—are most frequently socially marginalized (Crenshaw 1250). In both the effort to dismantle systemic racism and oppressive gender rules, Black women have been largely overlooked. To bring focus to any violence on the part of Black men is to feed into racist rhetoric, and mainstream feminism, led often by white women, forfeits racial concerns for ideas of an overgeneralized notion of gender equality (Crenshaw 1246-1265). The result, generally speaking, is a failure to accurately represent the unique experiences and plight of Black

15 This is not to suggest that Ahdieh’s focus on Asian women does not touch on intersectionality but that Oyeyemi’s attention is more explicit because the Black women in Mr. Fox exist in societies where they are a minority whereas Shahrzad exists in a society where she is part of the cultural majority. In consequence, Oyeyemi’s characters offer more relevant explorations of intersectionality in a multiethnic society than Ahdieh’s do. 40 women both in scholarship and popular culture. Oyeyemi, however, does delve into intersectionality in several different sections of Mr. Fox. The range in stories allows

Oyeyemi to wrestle more thoroughly with notions of essentialism that often plague Black women16 and that Crenshaw argues is strengthened by a lack of understanding of intersectionality (1298). Most notably, the narratives “Hide, Seek” and “Like This” explore the experiences of Black women and provide commentary on the burden of the expectations and misunderstandings of society they must grapple with. With these shorter narratives all recounting different Bluebeard adaptations, these parts of the novel use a familiar fairy tale form and narrative to highlight the experiences of and modern perspectives on Black women.

Fairy tale adaptations can, often, be used as an “interpretive device” to explore and understand childhood trauma and experience, such as experiences of children surrounded by war (Haase, “Children, War”). While the neglect of acknowledgment or understanding given to women and girls of color is not the same as being surrounded by war, the emotional burden of being misunderstood or consistently ignored by society despite needing support (Crenshaw 1269-1298) certainly leaves its mark. It is that emotional trauma that Oyeyemi explores with such subtle depth. As Donald Haase explains, the setting of the fairy tale world creates a place to explore emotional trauma and reaction without the burden of a world filled with the same traumas, referring to the practice of reconstructing the past through fantasy as “a fairy-tale quest in search of home on a new plane” (“Children, War” 368). The magical setting and structure of Bluebeard,

16 See also bell hooks’ “Postmodern Blackness,” which thoroughly investigates the theories and flaws of essentialism. 41 then, helps to create a world for Oyeyemi to fill with the past experiences of Black women in a setting that does not have all the same constraints and complications of our world that induced the trauma in the first place. In other words, Bluebeard is far enough removed from reality that the past can be reconstructed helpfully to examine what happened and why, rather than being caught up in the real world’s rules and the trauma it will inevitably inflict. One of Oyeyemi’s stories in which this use of fairy tale to reflect and expose Black, female experience is particularly prominent is “Hide, Seek.”

Toward the end of Mr. Fox, at which point the line between Mr. Fox’s real life and who exactly is telling which story is hopelessly blurred, “Hide, Seek” appears, telling the story of a boy born in Asyût who is given up for adoption to a female art collector who “needed a seeker” (211) like the boy, and a docile girl born in Osogbo whose “heart was too heavy” because “it was open” (218). The boy grows up to be “at once condescending and eager” (215), and joins his adoptive mother—who is referred to simply as “the woman”—in her quest to collect “art that was body pieces” (216) and construct from the individual pieces a woman. The girl, on the other hand, decides to

“hide her heart somewhere until she was big enough to keep hold of its weight” (220), and leaves it behind a stone at a shrine, becoming lighter in its absence and developing a close relationship to the dead, who speak to her from time to time. It is only during the boy’s search for a heart to complete the “gathered woman” that their stories intertwine as he waits for the owner of what he thinks to be the perfect heart to arrive, ultimately leaving the shrine after five days without the girl showing up. Aside from the opening harkening clearly back to the fairy tale storytelling tradition—opening with the phrase

“Once, in Asyût,” which mimics the familiar “once upon a time”—“Hide, Seek” has 42 echoes not only of Bluebeard but of fairy tales in general. From both the boy and the girl being in some way unique—the girl with her open heart and docility, the boy with his seeking abilities—to the clear allusions to Bluebeard—the disembodied female body, the girl’s heart being removed—this story makes use of traditionally European fairy tale structure and theme but complicates it by diversifying the cast of characters.

Additionally, with the echoes of African storytelling, specifically references to Egyptian gods that make up the sky and land (Oyeyemi 212-213) and the focus on Yoruba ancestors, Oyeyemi interweaves African culture with the European culture of Bluebeard.

By doing so, she, as Lau explains, foregrounds “the African origins of the storytelling form that puts pressure on the European fairy-tale tradition” (“Snow White” 382). “Hide,

Seek” sets the stage for a social commentary on the experiences of a Black woman in society that also manages to highlight the importance of intersectionality through the ironic comparison of the girl’s experience to that of white protagonists in different iterations of Bluebeard.

In tales like Bluebeard, one particularly common theme is violence and, more specifically, bodily mutilation, particularly of women. The significance of dismemberment, particularly how it pertains to women and empowerment, is a popular point of contention in fairy tale studies, particularly when it comes to the question of whether or not self-mutilation can truly be seen as empowering. With Carter’s The

Bloody Chamber rose an array of feminist voices debating Carter’s representation of female sexuality and violence and worrying that her attempt at feminist retellings actually play into patriarchal boundaries and fantasies (Makinen 4). However, while some feminist readers see the female protagonists of Carter’s stories—and others like them—as 43

“inevitably enacting the roles of victims of male violence” (Makinen 12), others agree with the notion of reclaiming violence being empowering. As Merja Makinen explains,

Carter set a precedent for telling stories of “women troubled by and even powered by their own violence” (3) which, in turn, allows these fairy tale retellings and those that succeed them to give autonomy and empowerment to their female protagonists even if they continue to operate within the frame of familiar fairy tale stories. In essence, the reclaiming of fairy tale violence, particularly in the form of self-harm, is considered by some feminist thinkers as a way for female characters to liberate themselves from traditional, patriarchal fairy tale boundaries and reclaim a variety of experiences and facets of identity. Furthermore, there is a rising awareness that for some female adolescents—like Oyeyemi’s character girl from “Hide, Seek”—self-mutilation and specifically cutting is a way to regain agency (Cowdy, “Resistant Rituals). As Cheryl

Cowdy explains, in spite of some perspectives reducing self-harm to grotesqueness, it in fact represents a way for adolescents, and especially female adolescents, to cope with and respond to society. In fairy tales, self-mutilation is commonly viewed as “ritualistic acts of self-sacrifice” (Cowdy 46), but in contemporary work, self-mutilation “is often a response to traumatic experiences stemming from the dysfunction and disease of…socio- cultural spaces” (Cowdy 57). Thus, despite some feminist objection to the function of self-mutilation as empowerment, the idea of female characters reclaiming their agency through claiming once-male violence is gaining popularity.

However, there is still a lot of debate surrounding the effectiveness of violence as empowerment in fairy tale retellings. As Jo Carney summarizes, Maria Tatar believes maiming is a signal of helplessness and a loss of power for female characters whereas 44

Lisa Propst claims this violence can actually defy powerlessness and lead to empowerment (“Intertextual Ingestion” 228). Carney herself argues that dismemberment, particularly in fairy tale adaptations like those of and Aimee Bender, can sometimes be used as “a catalyst for self-affirmation and empowerment” or signals of

“profound experiences of grief, worry, and alienation,” especially when that violence is extended to both male and female characters (“Intertextual Ingestion” 229). While

Oyeyemi doles out a fair share of violence and suffering to the men in the novel, “Hide,

Seek” and most of the other stories focus instead on violence toward women. And in a story focusing on a Black woman, dismemberment serves as a significant symbol for the plight of Black women in modern western society.

Violence inflicted by the self—for example suicide both literal and figurative—is commonly referenced by Black theorists as a method of regaining agency or control in the face of a violent or otherwise oppressive society (Ryan, “Revolutionary Suicide”).

Discussing Toni Morrison’s work, Katy Ryan delves into the origins of the phrase

“revolutionary suicide” as a way to respond to rather than succumb to a racist society.

Instead of simply representing “victimization, powerlessness, hopelessness,” Ryan explains that suicide can also “indict a brutal, dehumanizing culture that makes life unbearable” (391). The idea of revolutionary or protest suicide, then, puts an emphasis on the “transformative aspect” and “prevents ‘suicide’ from slipping into submission to a hostile, governing culture” (Ryan 391). That is, this notion of revolutionary suicide refers to a decision to end suffering and regain some sense of autonomy rather than submitting to the forces that seek to oppress or harm the individual. As Toni Morrison’s Beloved demonstrates, the paradoxical suicidal thought substantiates that the “self has to be killed 45 to survive” (Ryan 395), an idea that arises in the reclaiming of violence by female characters like Oyeyemi’s. As a Black girl, the girl in “Hide, Seek” engages in a figurative form of revolutionary suicide by carving out her heart and thus killing her compassionate self not to submit to society but to establish her own autonomy and survive how she can in response to the world she must endure.

The girl, as she is called throughout “Hide, Seek,” willfully dismembers herself by cutting out and hiding her heart. In a subversion of the Bluebeard thematic element of men enacting violence on women,17 the girl inflicts violence on herself in order to stop any future violence—like her father hitting her until she bleeds—that is brought about by her difference and docility. In the vein of Carney and Propst’s suggestions of fairy tale violence being a catalyst for empowerment, the girl’s complete bodily control in removing her heart signifies a level of female autonomy that is notably absent in the original Bluebeard tale. Additionally, the removal of her heart allows the girl to function more successfully in a society that had shunned her for her docile otherness beforehand.

In other words, her decision to inflict self-mutilation allows the girl to be more empowered as an autonomous woman who can navigate society and who, without the burden of her too-heavy heart, is able to move out of her parents’ house, where she first experienced violence at the hands of her father, and live on her own, completely

17 It is also worth noting that the boy spends the entirety of the story attempting to reconstruct a woman out of dismembered bits rather than inflicting violence as a traditional Bluebeard figure does. The boy’s role subverts violence and gender expectations by relating him more closely to one of the more popular iterations of a Bluebeard wife, who reconstructs her murdered sisters and brings them back to life, thus adopting the female role of the fairy tale despite representing a male character. 46 independently. However, more than being feminist, the girl’s bodily mutilation offers a glimpse of the social views pushed onto Black women and girls.

In an essay for the Journal of Negro Education entitled “#BlackWomenMatter:

Neo-Capital Punishment Ideology in the Wake of State Violence,” Ashley L. Smith analyzes the pressures of western society that are pushed onto Black women and girls that manifest most often in violence and a loss of girlhood. Smith traces the roots of violence by discussing the unequivocally harsh punishment doled out by schools, police, and society as a whole to Black girls, concluding, “Black girlhood cannot possibly be free”

(269). The girl in this story, born passive and obedient almost to excess, is punished for behaving exactly like the traditionally white wife of Bluebeard—and for that matter other fairy tale heroines like Beauty or Snow White. That is, while being docile and lovely is praised in white women and girls in fairy tales, this Black girl is punished for behaving in exactly the same way. In essence, the girl is denied the opportunity to experience her girlhood and is instead forced to give up the heart that makes her gentle in order to survive. The traumatic incident of removing her heart and relinquishing it to the care of ancestors in the shrine essentially reshapes the girl’s entire identity. As Barbara Tannert-

Smith suggests, a traumatic event destroys “the victim’s existing framework of reality,” which leads ultimately to “a sense of shattered subjectivity and the gradual reorganizing of the self in relation to a new emergent reality” (398). The girl inflicts self-trauma to reshape herself and survive in a society that rejected and took advantage of her earlier gentleness. The fact that she inflicts this violence on herself rather than an outside force doing so is also reflective of the failing of feminist rhetoric to take intersectionality into account. 47

While the white wives of Bluebeard can be oblivious to violence and experience it only as a fluke that is rectified by Bluebeard’s eventual murder, this Black girl must be completely conscious of the violence targeted at her and, only by claiming that violence herself, is she able to become strong enough to survive. In other words, with feminism failing to take the additional vulnerability of race into consideration, the Black girl does not receive the same feminist protection as other wives of Bluebeard and must instead accept and claim the violence that is multiplied by the combination of her womanhood and Blackness. “The failure of feminism to interrogate race,” Crenshaw argues, results in feminist resistance strategies that “reinforce the subordination of people of color” (1252).

While other fairy tale heroines are the victim of violence, trauma, and dismemberment from which adaptation authors must help them recover, Oyeyemi highlights the fact that such feminism fails to take into account the differing experiences of Black women.

Gender narratives, specifically in feminist terms, “are based on the experience of white, middle-class women” (Crenshaw 1298), and it is through Oyeyemi’s blatant and jarring contradiction of these expectations formed by white experience that she shines a light on

Black experience. Bluebeard, as a traditionally European tale, features a white and often victimized wife who must overcome the violence of her husband. By challenging this standard, Oyeyemi highlights the difference in experience of white women and Black women, who face violence and oppression in completely different ways and must, as a result, behave differently.18 The girl and, more specifically, her decision to remove her

18 The difference in behavior often manifests as “attitude” from Black girls which Smith explains to be one of the main causes of unnecessary school punishment: perceived attitude from young, Black women who have had to become tough to endure the treatment they receive that is tainted simultaneously by sexism and racism (266). 48 heart to survive work in tandem with the structure of Bluebeard to expose the differences wrought by intersectionality, particularly pertaining to the violence so common in fairy tales.

In addition to revealing the threat of white western society to Black girlhood,

“Hide, Seek” exemplifies the African oral storytelling traditions of using folk tales to create inter-community connection. In other words, while the girl in the story is specifically a Yoruba girl from Osogbo, her story can extend to include and connect like people from different Black communities. Much African folklore, Lee Haring argues,

“exists as a means of boundary maintenance, reinforcing their sense of sameness and connection with one another” (“Translating” 10), which can lead to difficulties in translation as a balance of cultural difference and textual similarities must somehow be maintained. In much the same way, “Hide, Seek” represents a connection between Black girls in different modern societies whose girlhoods are threatened in similar ways. This is not to say that Oyeyemi’s African retelling of Bluebeard matches culturally with

American or British Black girls, for example, but to suggest that the incorporation of

African traditional storytelling techniques implies the story is meant to cross cultural boundaries and reveal shared experiences among girls from different places. In working with the intersectionality highlighted by the metaphoric violence of the girl dismembering herself, Oyeyemi’s infusion of African storytelling emphasizes the significance of diversifying Bluebeard and thus allowing it to be more easily shared and appreciated as significant in Black culture and communities.

Similar to “Hide, Seek,” the story “Like This,” which appears earlier in the novel, also uses Bluebeard to explore modern concerns of race and gender. After witnessing a 49 fight between Daphne and Mr. Fox, Mary begins to tell the story “Like This” with the disclaimer that Mr. Fox will “die next time” but that he should not mind because “It’s all just a lot of games” (87). Mary’s story begins with a fairy tale-like premise—“There was a Yoruba woman and there was an Englishman” (89)—and launches into a tale of a married couple who endure separation only to discover too late that they want to be together. After the woman “stamped her foot and wished her man dead,” the man dies, and is only brought back to life after she gives “up all the children she might ever have”

(90) and is rendered barren. Following his resurrection, the couple decides to part ways in

Paris, where the woman—from then on referred to as Brown—meets another woman called Blue, who informs her they have switched lives accidentally and Brown is supposed to be a writer while the Englishman is supposed to be Blue’s husband. What follows is an identity crisis as Brown steps into Blue’s life and consequently loses her memory of her previous life including the years spent with her husband. Of the many complex features of this story that both embody and subvert Bluebeard and general fairy tale traditions, one that is particularly notable is the use of color to name and identify the two women in the story. Tracing the patriarchal constraints and stereotypes of fairy tales,

Jeana Jorgensen, in her American Folklore Society essay “The Most Beautiful of All: A

Quantitative Approach to Fairy-Tale Femininity,” focuses in on the emphasis of adjectives to describe fairy tale protagonists. While women in fairy tales are also broken down into dismembered parts that facilitate their commodification,19 the role of adjectives to define female beauty and worth is not only one of the primary causes of feminist aversion but also one of the ways westernized fairy tales condemn Blackness

19 See Jorgensen, “Most Beautiful” 44. 50

(for example, “who’s the fairest of them all?”)—or, really, anything other than whiteness

(Jorgensen, “Most Beautiful” 38-50). It is notable, then, that the women in “Like This” are described by colors that, being so far from white—Brown and Blue—would be considered unappealing in traditional fairy tales.

By describing them with dark colors, Oyeyemi separates Brown and Blue from western beauty standards—a separation that is strengthened by the fact that Brown does not act with the morality that beauty often represents (Jorgensen, “Most Beautiful” 53-

56). In much the same way that the girl from “Hide, Seek” is denied the privilege of being docile because she is not a white fairy tale heroine, Brown and Blue are denied the morality associated with other fairy tale heroines because they lack the western beauty that correlates with goodness. Oyeyemi’s consciousness of this implied immorality is used as ironic humor—there is even a quote about Brown killing her husband because

“you know what a Yoruba woman can be like sometimes” (Oyeyemi 90)—which emphasizes stereotypes while simultaneously undercutting them with the rest of the story.

Furthermore, the simple naming system plays into fairy tale tropes that resign characters to the implications of their names and thus eliminate any possibility for development

(Williams, “Wicked” 263). Brown and Blue are simply that: women in brown and blue clothes who, according to fairy tale standards, should remain exactly as they are.

However, in Oyeyemi’s conscious manipulation of the adjectives and their significance,

Brown is able to overcome the bounds of her name and ultimately restore herself to who she was before Blue’s—and society’s—interference.

More impactful, however, than the claiming of racist and sexist adjectives, is

Oyeyemi’s commentary on female interchangeability, or rather, a lack of female identity. 51

The wife of Bluebeard, without a name and without an identity outside of her marriage, is a prime example of the lacking development of fairy tale women. Bluebeard as a tale, in fact, serves as a case study of the fantasy interchangeability of women as Bluebeard the man marries wife after wife without care, killing them all and moving onto the next young woman as if they are entirely the same. The patriarchal ethics guiding the traditional Bluebeard story facilitate the erasure of female identity and are what Oyeyemi challenges in this story in order to construct not only a female identity but, importantly, a female identity that is particularly Black. Addressing the role of sexism in erasing the individuality of women, Bacchilega explains that “within a patriarchal framework, biology turns into a formula for women’s commodification and interchangeability”

(Postmodern 117). Bluebeard’s wives, bound by the patriarchal values of Perrault’s world, have no identity or individuality; they are merely Bluebeard’s wives. In parallel,

Brown and Blue, other than being differentiated by the color of their clothing at their first meeting, have no distinct identity to the outside world. They switch lives without so much as an objection from anyone other than Brown and the husband, who have vague memories of each other despite their separation. The world, then, deems both women entirely identity-less. They can be switched indiscriminately and, in fact, Blue suggests there are countless other situations just like theirs—“there are many cases like ours, and they’re only just being sorted out” (93). However, Oyeyemi contradicts this notion by allowing Brown and the husband to retain some semblance of their memories and search for each other to restore their love and, by reclaiming the life she wants, Brown’s unique identity. 52

In her quest to regain her life and her husband, Brown ends up willingly dying alongside him, giving in to Reynardine, who—as Jordan explains in her book review— adopts the role of Yoruba ancestors. 20 Brown uses her ethnicity and culture to overcome the interchangeability imposed on her by her gender and western society, therefore taking on the failures of intersectionality to acknowledge that gender and race are not an either/or proposition (Crenshaw 1242) by using her cultural and racial identity to define herself individually. Contradicting Bacchilega’s suggestion that for the wife in a

Bluebeard tale to be safe, Bluebeard himself must die because the representation of

Bluebeard and his wife as extreme opposites “sustains the story thematically”

(Postmodern 112), both the husband and wife die in “Like This.” At once, the deaths cement the story as a Bluebeard adaptation with the infusion of familiar violence and the initiation of Reynardine—who does the killing—into the Bluebeard role while also asserting, much like “Hide, Seek,” that Black women can have control of their own fate.

Yes, Brown’s fate is, on the surface, bleak, but its main redemption—and its ties to the idea of a happily-ever-after—lies in the fact that she is able to gain control over her life by ending it and, simultaneously, is able to reunite with her love even if it is in a shrine.

Additionally, the fact that she is a Yoruba woman implies a life-after-death belief, such as with the ancestors in “Hide, Seek,” which heightens the ending’s potential as being happily-ever-after. Oyeyemi, thus, manipulates the white European standards of

Bluebeard, and fairy tales in general, to empower Black female characters by giving them

20 There is no distinction made by Oyeyemi to suggest that the Reynardine in “Like This” is different from the Reynardine in “The Training at Madame De Silentio’s”; in fact, the parallel between Reynardine’s role in Brown and her husband’s deaths and his status as a murderer in “The Training at Madame De Silentio’s” suggest that in all likelihood they are one and the same. 53 autonomy and by denying the fairy tale tendency to erase individual identity, independence, and diversity.

Both Ahdieh and Oyeyemi’s novels tackle the opportunity of adaptation to diversify a genre by using the canonically white European Bluebeard as a way not only to explore feminism but to explore different cultures, racial identities, and the difficulties that come with them all. In part, Bluebeard is so ripe for adaptation and revision because of its possibility for complicated gender politics,21 which reflect continued concerns that

“patriarchy demands women’s subservience” and thus make Bluebeard and its remakes an embodiment of “a culture’s conflicts and possibilities for resolutions” (Zipes,

Irresistible 61). In essence, Bluebeard, and other fairy tales, are ripe for retelling because they reflect and refract not only the society from which they originated but also our modern society. The inextricable connection between fairy tales and their societies suggests that modern retellings concerned with modern social norms are also suitable for diversity because they belong to a society far more culturally diverse than the European societies inspiring the canonical iterations. As a genre, fairy tales are often related “to social, political, cultural, educational, and other human concerns in…the real world”

(Haase, “Decolonizing” 18). Furthermore, as Haring explains, no society exists without

“the mixing of linguistic, cultural, and ethnic elements” (“Translating” 19), suggesting that all fairy tales, whether or not they explicitly suggest such a thing, are the result of

21 Thinking specifically of Bluebeard’s annihilation of females contrasted by a wife that in many iterations manages to outmaneuver him, the power struggle between genders in Bluebeard is arguably more openly complex than the gender politics in other tales. Bluebeard itself is not inherently empowering, yet the relationship between genders is not only complicated, but also given more obvious attention than gender is given in many other fairy tales. 54 cultural “métissage.” Fairy tales like Bluebeard, in spite of their European appearance, are being retold with different cultural influences not merely because modern audiences desire such diversity but also because such folk stories have “much to say about cultural mixing” (Haring, “Who” 149). That is, the stories we know today are the result not only of European minds and cultures but derive from “a variety of tiny tales thousands of years ago that were widespread throughout the world” (Zipes, “Meaning” 221). It is not simply that these modern adaptations are infusing diversity into these classic stories but that they are highlighting the already established potential for diversity in these tales that exists by virtue of the malleability and cultural cross-contamination of oral tradition.

Furthermore, fairy tales reflect the desires formed by socio-cultural ideologies and histories (Bacchilega, Postmodern 146), which, in our modern environment, results in fairy tales concerned with feminism and race. Although the canonical Bluebeard is

European, the history of the genre and the widespread appearance of Bluebeard-like figures—for example, King Shahryar—suggests that the tale has far more diverse roots.

In consequence, the adaptation work of Ahdieh and Oyeyemi serves not only as a modernized glimpse at gender and race relations and identity but also of the forgotten and diverse origins of familiar European tales.

Conclusions

“To reconstruct the fairy world in the image of modernity may be possible, but success at this point in human history seems illusive,” Ruth MacDonald wrote in 1982, weighing the pros and cons of feminist attempts to reimagine and retell classic fairy tales with more empowering heroines (MacDonald 20). In the twenty-first century, however, 55 success is no longer illusive. Helen Oyeyemi’s and Renée Ahdieh’s adaptations of

Bluebeard and the exploration of feminism and minority experience contained in both of their respective novels, as well as the fact that both Mr. Fox and The Wrath & the Dawn manage to retain the fairy tale style of Bluebeard and the genre as a whole, suggest that modernizing and empowering fairy tales is no longer a possibility but a reality.

Adaptations like Oyeyemi’s and Ahdieh’s relate to audiences through the violence and gender struggle of Bluebeard to highlight modern social plights and shortcomings—such as continuing concerns with patriarchal demands, or the lack of attention given to intersectionality and the consequent marginalization of women and others from cultural and ethnic groups. Bruno Bettelheim argues that for readers of all ages, “only a story conforming to the principles underlying our thought processes carries conviction for us”; even if we have, objectively, learned by adulthood to “accept that there is more than one frame of reference for comprehending the world,” it is still difficult to “truly think in any but our own” (45). In part, traditional fairy tales are so popular because they do adhere to mass western thought processes, but the acknowledgment and inclusion of diversity in modern adaptations in many ways challenges this adherence. Yes, many readers are concerned with feminism and equality, but Oyeyemi and Ahdieh restructure their narratives to follow the thought processes of different cultures—for example, a Yoruba perspective—which potentially threaten the easy relation western audiences have with the original tales. The success of these retellings, then, suggests that as a culture we, perhaps, are ready to begin accepting and thinking in the way of world views unlike our personal ones. 56

By acknowledging the hidden diversity working behind tales like Bluebeard and further complicating the Perrault standard by undermining his attempts at morality and female suppression, both authors manage to transform a historic European fairy tale into novels that are relevant and useful in the modern day for exposing the often lost or ignored experiences of minorities, be they gendered or racialized, or both. By weaving enthralling tales that reflect the possibilities for diversity and empowerment in the fairy tale genre, Oyeyemi and Ahdieh bring a new element of inclusion to the genre of fairy tale retellings that invite readers of all ages and identities. Taking hold of a forgotten tale like Bluebeard, both authors reshape it to infuse diversity and an emphasis on the equality of all identities—be they linked to race, culture, or gender—into a traditionally stiff and exclusionary tale. And by inviting others to experience and understand the plight of minorities, Oyeyemi and Ahdieh invite fellow writers to reshape forgotten or popular tales and readers to demand more riveting examples of multiculturalism. And hopefully, both novels and authors will be able to set a precedent to recover fairy tale diversity and forgotten tales that can remind us of the interconnectedness of storytellers from around the world.

57

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64

Mr. Campbell

65

Part I: Winston

The Blackrose plantation and Great House sat on an immense plot of land not too far from the square where Samuel Sharpe would eventually be hanged, though its owner

Winston Campbell didn’t know about that until he visited a bustling Montego Bay much later. It was, for all the official reasons, home, though as Winston rode up on his horse- drawn carriage he couldn’t help feeling a sense of detachment from it.

His trip back from Kingston had taken longer than he’d expected, and at the moment he would’ve preferred to ride up to a slightly more welcoming home than the

Great House awaiting him. His fault, he supposed, that the wide halls of Blackrose were more often empty than full, but he couldn’t help the vague pang he felt for Bonny Hill, the plantation he’d grown up on with family, some semblance of friends, and Yendi—the girl he loved. How sick was that, he wondered, that he missed his childhood of slavery at the sight of his own property.

The carriage lurched, the wide wooden wheels clunking over rocks lodged in the road, and put a sharp end to Winston’s musing. He forced himself to return his attention to the reins in his hands and the horses at the end of them before he became distracted enough to split a wheel or scare one of the horses.

Slowing to a stop, Winston rose from the carriage bench and hopped down into the gravel, his arrival met by a young man he’d hired a few weeks back to work on the 66 plantation and tend to the horses. Distantly, as he handed the man he remembered was called Henry the reins, he wondered how long he would last before leaving Blackrose.

They all did eventually, Winston’s employees. They came to him for help and safety, and when he granted it to them they disappeared like the echo of voices in a storm, leaving nothing behind of their time spent on his land.

Winston paused, watching Henry nod and smile at him politely before retreating for the stables with the horses, then cast his attention on the daunting form of Blackrose that rose before him, three stories into the sky.

Objectively, it was a beautiful Great House with pale yellow plaster stretching over the highest two floors and a first floor of weathered stone. Surrounded by towering palms and mango trees, the path and the grand staircase leading to the front doors looked like he imagined a fantasy would. Well like a fantasy did; Yendi’s fantasy.

She’d wanted rows and rows of gardens. She’d wanted mango trees lush with heavy, orange-red fruits. Her words had been in his thoughts with every decision he’d made in Blackrose. Down to the very color of the plaster coating the walls, the paintings he’d hung in his bedroom, in his study. But Yendi wasn’t here, wouldn’t ever be here, so he shook off all thought of her gruffly and stalked for the staircase.

Winston walked across the width of the porch and to the double doors shut firmly against the heavy heat. He pulled open the door and stepped inside the dim hallway, the most enclosed part of the house with no direct exit to the outdoors save the front door he’d already shut firmly behind himself.

He started down the dark wood hallway, the sound of his steps the only noise in the otherwise still house. The walls were a green color as several of the other rooms were, 67 and would’ve been far brighter if he bothered to pull back any curtains or bothered to keep enough servants employed to do it for him. But as it was, the green was duller than it should have been, just as the house was far quieter than a house this size should have been.

As he continued walking through the house, heading for the very back of

Blackrose where his study stood, he passed the great dining room with faint pink walls and a long wooden table polished to perfection and generally underused. A sitting room off to the left with plush couches that showed very little wear. The entrance to the kitchen that was far too big for the needs of one man was closed, though he knew beyond the shut doors was a stone-floored room that opened directly to a patio with endless doors and windows seeking to bring the gardens and the sun into the house.

But he paid the house little mind as he continued his meander to his study. At the very end of the first floor of the house sat his office, the very last room before Blackrose spilled open into the vast gardens. If time permitted, he’d wander the gardens before the sun set, to breathe in the soil and the fresh air, but first, work.

As usual, the Great House was quiet, with most of the servants spending time outside and in their quarters, fully appreciative of what a careless overseer Winston was, and he wondered faintly where his one connection to the outside world, Tami, was.

His most recent apprentice, his assistant, whatever she wanted to be called. He was teaching her the art of Obeah, the connection with the ancestors, the protection she could dole out. She’d been with him for near on four months now, eagerly taking in every bit of knowledge and skill he possessed. 68

There had been students before her, five or six of them, all of whom had readily left him upon learning the true nature of his work or disappearing once he’d helped them.

Annie Palmer in particular came to mind. The White Witch of Rosehall who had learned under him and gone off several months later after being changed by him, beginning a new life similar to his own. He didn’t resent her—much—but her departure had made him wary of taking on Tami as a student a few months ago. But she was insistent and passionate and undeniably connected with their ancestors and the world around them, so he’d accepted her, not quite convinced she’d be any different, desperate enough for a partner he’d wound up deciding to chance it.

Tami should’ve been here somewhere, they’d agreed she’d be here to help him with some of his work when he returned, but he saw no sign of her on his way to his study. Tami liked to be outside, he knew, so it didn’t surprise him much to think she’d be out roaming the gardens or even the fields, and he figured he’d have to ring the bell in his study to let her know he was back once he was settled in.

He extended a hand, twisting the shining gold doorknob of his study door, and paused at the sound of a thud coming from inside. Tami, he assumed, it could be no one else.

Pushing open the door, Winston stepped into his office and paused in the doorway, letting the door swing shut behind him.

His favorite room in all of Blackrose, the study was where he spent the majority of his time. It was a sizeable room, half indoors, half outdoors, though at the moment all of the doors leading outside were shut firmly. The walls were yellow, bright against the deep brown of the floor, and dotted with a few paintings. Paintings from different places, 69 different times, done by nameless street artists. He never could really be a fan of renowned artists, and could never find it in himself to spend money on their work.

Instead, the paintings he’d collected through all of his travels were personal, one- of-a-kind pieces that he hung with care and rearranged when he was particularly stressed and no amount of work or distraction in the gardens could ease the knots in his neck. It was a ritualistic soothing thing, taking down those paintings and putting them in new spots in his study, and at the moment, his thoughts still filled with Yendi and the life he no longer knew, he felt the itch to take them all down.

But he resisted because there, in the center of his study, standing before one of the couches with her hands held tensely before her, stood Tami.

When he’d left for Kingston, knowing it would be a several week endeavor, he’d left her in charge of Blackrose, given her a ring of heavy keys and permission to do anything she liked in his absence. Well, almost anything. He had warned her against opening the small closet that sat along the wall of his study.

A halfhearted warning on his part, but given to her nonetheless so she could see the extent of his work, see all that he did, all that he planned to do, all that he could teach her to do. And from the way she was standing, by the way a line of tension held her shoulders high, he was sure she’d opened it.

“Hello Tami,” Winston greeted. He gave her a polite smile, unable to shake that edge of formality from his expression. He’d never been able to with her, no matter how kind she was, how lively and vibrant.

She offered him a smile in return, tighter than it usually was on her young face, and inhaled audibly. “Hello Winston.” Tami cleared her throat and straightened, lifting 70 her chin so the round planes of her face glinted in the sunlight rushing in through the glass along the wall.

Tami’s face was round, partly from youth, partly from the wide set of her cheekbones and made of perfectly smooth brown skin not quite so dark as Winston’s but almost there. Her thick, tightly coiled black hair was pulled back in a neat plait that clung to the curve of her skull and ended at the top notch of her spine. It was always perfectly done just as her dress was always impeccably washed and pressed.

Still looking at Tami and her unusually tense expression, Winston crossed the floor to the wide desk placed at the end of the room where he could observe his entire study. Just now feeling the heat of the day, he undid the buttons at the cuffs of his white shirt, then rolled the fabric up, exposing the dark of his tightly muscled forearms, shaped by years of physical work just as the wide expanse of his hands had a permanent roughness that no amount of rest could ever fully mend.

“How was Blackrose in my absence?” Winston asked, sinking down into the seat behind his desk and extending his legs, crossing one foot over the other, an absentminded effort to shake the stiffness from his long wagon ride.

“Everything was all right,” Tami said, her voice tighter, higher than he was used to. She cleared her throat and sat down on the couch before his desk, sitting stiffly on the cushions. Then she stood back up, as if the seat was burning hot and she couldn’t bear the sensation of it against her dress. “I must confess I opened the closet,” she blurted.

He nodded. “Ah.” He’d expected as much, hoped for as much. “And?”

“And I…” she swallowed, eyes darting to the firmly shut closet door before jumping back to Winston. “I’m not quite sure what I’ve seen.” 71

Winston leaned forward, his forearms on the desk, and laced his fingers together.

“It’s my work,” he said vaguely, “The work I’ll be teaching you to do.”

Tami hesitated, glancing at the door as if she couldn’t quite quench her desire to flee, then forced herself to sit once more, looking at Winston head on. He watched her suck in a breath that deepened the hollow of her throat. “What I saw in there…” she trailed off.

Winston frowned, exhaling sharply in frustration. The horror on her face was unmistakable; he’d recognized it from the moment he set foot in his study, but he’d hoped perhaps he was mistaken.

He rose from his seat, running a rough hand down the length of his face as he started a slow walk around his desk. He paused before Tami and held out a hand, forcing himself to ignore the flinch that shot through her when he approached her. “My keys,” he said, schooling his voice into a flat calm.

“Oh… oh, of course.” Tami fumbled, getting clumsily to her feet and retrieving

Winston’s ring of keys from a window sill. She stopped several paces away from him and extended her arm, holding the keys out to him, clearly attempting to avoid even the slightest chance that she would touch him.

Winston took the keys and turned from her, making his way to the closet and slipping the key into the lock, twisting swiftly and pulling the door open, letting the sunlight rush in and illuminate all he held inside. Artifacts, memories from his trips through place, through time. And beyond that, the outline of something oddly human and somehow still inhuman.

Skins. 72

That’s what he called them, the silhouettes of human bodies that hung in his closet until he had time to distill their Blackness into ink to dye his roses black. Three skins, hanging beside each other like ironed shirts in a wardrobe.

The skin color he pulled from Black servants, setting them free on their white- dominated island and keeping that memory of their past selves for himself. He commemorated them with the rose bushes, a new life for their old lives.

He cast an eye over the skins hanging before him, pausing long enough to give

Tami time to see them again, to see all he had done laid bare, then turned around to look at her. His back to the closet and its contents, Winston slid his hands into his pockets and cocked his head just slightly to the side, regarding Tami with thoughtfully narrowed eyes.

If she’d looked tense before she looked sick now, her eyes perfect circles, her brows drawn so tightly they almost touched. She shook her head, unable to stop looking at the skins, then blinked her attention sharply up at him.

“What did you do?” she demanded, her voice a whisper of a whisper, so faint he almost didn’t hear the tremor in her words.

Winston allowed the slightest of smiles to push its way across his lips. “I saved them.”

“No, no,” Tami insisted, shaking her head, her eyes still too wide. “You killed them.”

“I didn’t kill anybody,” Winston protested. And when he did he felt a part of himself deflate. Tami didn’t understand what he was trying to do and, from the looks of it, had no intention of attempting to listen to him. In the time he’d been gone and she’d been left to ruminate in what she’d discovered in that closet, he’d become her villain. 73

He rubbed his eyes with his first finger and thumb, suddenly exhausted with this entire endeavor. He should’ve guessed it would wind up being a waste of time. That closet, the gruesome beauty within it had frightened all of his tutees away. He spoke again, his words riding the wave of a sloping exhale, “I changed them.”

Tami regarded him warily, her arms folding protectively over her waist as if even now she didn’t trust him not to come after her. “What yuh mean?” Her voice was less certain than it usually was, just a flash of that Patois coming into her words.

Usually when she worked with Winston she made an effort to speak the most proper English she could, though he’d assured her more than once that Patois was just fine with him. Speaking the Queen’s English, Tami told him once when they sat in his study drinking tea, made her feel successful and established as he was. He hadn’t broken it to her that when he wasn’t thinking consciously of it he spoke Patois too, nor did he bother explaining to her that just as she had, he’d grown up on a sugar cane plantation.

Winston turned just enough to look at the skins, echoes of people who didn’t quite exist anymore. They were the perfect shape of the bodies they’d come from, ghostly suits that he pulled from the dark skin of his people.

The first time he did it, changed a Black person into a white one, he thought the skin suit he was left with was horribly grotesque. The holes for eyes, for mouths remained there, both wide in an eternal shock that would never be smoothed. The arms were slack, the legs loose. They were like incomplete sketches, charcoal drawings that were almost alive but not quite. But now he saw a beauty in them, in the color he’d glean from those remnants, that would make his roses gleam bright as the night sky. 74

He wondered if he could ever make Tami see the beauty in them. Certainly, he’d failed spectacularly to convince his previous students to feel the same way.

“Hear me now, Tami,” he began, returning his attention to the young woman before him. “What I do is take off dark skin and replace it with pale skin so people can live freely and safely.” Winston took a step toward her, letting his shoulders slump, his chin sink slightly, making every conscious effort he could to be less intimidating. “I’m an

Obeahman,” he reminded her in a gentle voice. “Remember what Obeah does.”

“Protects us,” she replied. “Helps us talk to the ancestors.”

“The ancestors have taught me to protect our people, their descendants.” Well, the ancestors and a certain young woman named Yendi had taught him, though he kept that thought to himself. “I take away the color so I can shield them from the pain and suffering.”

He watched the bob of Tami’s throat as she swallowed, downing his words and their meaning as quickly and harshly as he himself downed a drink of rum. Then he watched her suck in the left side of her lip, chewing on the inside of it with her teeth as she did when she was particularly thoughtful.

For just a moment, he felt a pang of regret that he’d made her so unsure, but it had to be done. She had to know what he was working toward, what he was working to train her for before he spent any more time on it.

Years of disappointment had made him callous. He recognized it but he couldn’t stop himself from feeling it. How long could he be expected to seek partners and face their fears and disgust without losing some patience? 75

“You’re an Obeahwoman,” he told her when another moment passed and she still had nothing to say.

“Mi know.”

“Why did you think I was training you?”

“To protect our people,” she answered. “To remember our past.” She lifted a hand, pointing to the hanging skins. “But not that.”

“How many slaves have been killed? How many of our people have been slaughtered and tortured and hurt because of their skin?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. A lot. Too many.”

“Too many,” he agreed.

“But we’re not slaves anymore,” she protested.

Winston gave a lethargic shrug of one shoulder. “No, I suppose not. Not by law, but how many white men you see who treat us as equal?”

She had no answer to that. He could see her scrambling for something, for some reason that what he was doing was utterly despicable, but it was hard to condemn him, he knew. When he’d first seen Yendi do it, first heard her utter the fact that she’d learned how to change people to save them, he’d found himself equally lost for words. But he hadn’t fled from Yendi’s side. He’d faced all the horror and all the disgust. Looking at

Tami, he doubted she’d be willing to do the same.

“It feels wrong,” she said finally.

“Why?” he challenged. He pulled his hands out of his pockets and folded his arms across his chest. “Because we should be proud of who we are?”

Tami nodded, apparently grateful for the lifeline. “Yes.” 76

“We are. I am. So are the people I change. You can be prideful and practical both.”

Tami shook her head again, the arms she held around her waist tightening. “But it’s not possible. You’d have to kill them to take off all that skin.”

Winston sighed, taking a step away from the closet and sinking down into a seat on one of the plush benches set against the wall. “You’re thinking of skinning animals,” he declared, “but it’s more like peeling an orange.” He leaned back against the cushions and nodded his head to a seat at his side, inviting Tami to claim it. When she did, perching on the very edge of the seat, he continued. “These white people have made it impossible for us to be safe in our own bodies. We can’t fight them or we get killed. We can’t work for them or we become slaves again. We can’t do anything in our own bodies on the land we were born on. That is our curse. But I’ve found a way around it, Tami.

Obeahmen, Obeahwomen, if we work hard enough and don’t fear the change or the power, we can protect our kind as no one ever has.”

“I don’t know,” Tami answered uncertainly. Her dark eyes were focused firmly on the dark floorboards, refusing to meet Winston’s burning gaze.

He felt himself recoil from her. She’d already made up her mind. He could see it in the way she sat, the way she continued to avoid all his explanations. There was nothing he could say to her to make her understand. She’d be like all his students, she’d cower from the truth and leave him. What a waste, he thought bitterly, an utter waste of her talent and his time.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have let her discover the closet on her own, but he’d wanted her to open it. To know the extent of what she was training for more clearly than he’d 77 ever be able to explain it in words. He’d wanted her to be able to confront what his other assistants hadn’t.

He was an Obeahman who took the black out of his people’s skin.

In hindsight, perhaps he should’ve told her right away, but he’d wanted her to be good at Obeah before he did it. He’d wanted her to get so hooked on the feeling of helping people that seeing the grisly extent of his protection would entice her rather than scare her off. And selfishly, he liked the way it felt, having a confidante. He hadn’t had any sort of partner since Annie, and hadn’t had a real partner since he and Yendi would listen to voices on the wind and teach each other all they knew.

Almost all of his other students had fled at the sight of those skins. And those who hadn’t balked at it, Annie and one young man named David, had wanted it for themselves. The power and the change both. And he’d changed them, made them both white, whiter than the white people that ruled over them all, and taught them how to do it themselves. David hadn’t much cared for the art of it, had taken his new whiteness in stride and disappeared to start a new life. Annie had taken to her whiteness and set about establishing her own Great House where she could change people just as Winston did.

Annie was a victory, he supposed, but not in the way he’d wanted. He’d wanted someone at his side, someone to help him, someone to help curb that endless quiet that stretched through every hall in Blackrose and filled every bit of Winston’s being until the sound of another human voice overwhelmed him.

A sudden surge of frustration coursed through him and he furrowed his brow sharply at Tami. “You didn’t run when you saw what I was doing,” he snapped. “You 78 stayed here at Blackrose and waited for me to return. Why? If you hate what I’m doing, if you don’t understand. Why stay? Why not pack your things and run?”

Why stay here and mock me? Why make me hope you’d stay?

“I…” Tami bit the inside of her lip again, making the round shape deflate into the cavern of her mouth. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I wanted to give you a chance to explain.”

Winston snorted.

“What about your workers?”

“What about them?”

“You told me they’re all new. Is this because… you do this to them?”

Winston nodded. “I changed them. At their request. I don’t force anyone. People come to me when they’re scared and desperate and don’t want to live that way anymore.”

He leaned forward, bare forearms against his knees. “And if you stay, I’ll teach you how to protect them too.”

“Why take their skin?” she asked hesitantly. “Couldn’t you send them… somewhere else?”

Winston sneered at the suggestion. “Where? Mother Africa? Just you wait, the same people who are here ruining our lives will be there soon enough. I’ve seen it.”

Tami scooted away from him, putting as much room between them as she could without standing. “What do you mean you’ve seen it?”

He frowned. He could tell her, could tell her all that he’d seen in his travels through time and place, but when he looked at her face, so young, so scared, he realized suddenly it wasn’t worth it. Nothing could convince her. Not what he’d seen in the past. 79

Not what he’d seen in the future. Nothing would ease that crinkle of horror from her forehead and convince her to stay by his side.

Pushing a sigh out of his nose, Winston pushed himself up from his seat, making his way to one of the windows and walking up and down the length of it, debating opening it to let in a breeze. Instead, he spoke, keeping his sights on the garden outside rather than looking back at Tami. “When I was starting out, like you, I thought I could protect us as we are. And when that wasn’t working, I thought… well maybe we could hold out and wait until things got better. And then a friend helped me see the truth. And when I went into the future and saw how long it took and how much we were still killed for this—” he gestured roughly at his own dark skin—“I thought it was time to give up that dream.”

His words were met with silence. Long and tense. He looked over his shoulder to see her standing beside her chair, taking a slow step back from him. He sighed and returned his attention to the land sprawling outside the window.

She was leaving. He wouldn’t stop her. He was sick of solitude, but not sick enough to chase Tami.

“Don’t you want to know what I do with the skin?” he asked aloud. Really, he was surprised she hadn’t. That had always been one of the first questions his students asked before they got ready to flee.

“What…” she cleared her throat and he heard the weight of another step on the wood floor. “What do you do with the skin?”

“I take the color out and dye my roses.” 80

The room was still for a moment, then, at the sound of her steps nearing the door, he spoke again. “I’m not going to hurt you, Tami,” he said softly. “Nor am I going to make you stay. You can leave. I won’t keep you.”

“Winston?” her voice cracked when she said his name. Fear or regret, he couldn’t tell. It had been too long since he’d tried to decipher the emotions of another person and apparently his skills at it were rather rusty.

“Mm?” he asked, sliding his hands back into his pockets and continuing to face the window.

“You won’t change your mind?”

A huff of laughter escaped him before he could smother it. “No, Tami. I won’t change my mind.”

Again, the room was filled with silence, a silence he was used to and supposed he would have to continue to expect. Then, softly, as if she said it by accident, he heard the word “goodbye” slip into the air, accompanied with the swift creak of the door being pulled open and the disappearing echo of footsteps, purposeful and hurried, down the hall and away from his study.

A heavy sigh made the cage of his ribs collapse as Winston turned from the window to regard his now empty study. He crossed the floor to push the door shut, then made his way to the closet where he retrieved one of the skins and set it out on his desk.

They’d been hanging long enough and he had enough time now to drain the color from them, distill it all into a jar of ink he’d wet his garden soil with. He retrieved a small jar that had been filled with black dye until he’d used it on a recent rosebush, and set it on 81 his desk beside the skin. Then he sank back into his desk chair, surprised at how unruffled he felt in the wake of Tami’s immediate absence as he started to work.

He began to roll up the skin, tight as he could to begin getting those uneven drips and drops of color. It was like wringing out a towel, pulling all that skin and all that history together in a tight roll and twisting and twisting until the color sprung free and fell into the awaiting ink pot.

Tami wasn’t much of a loss, he reasoned with himself. Sure, she was talented and enthusiastic and kind, but she also preferred the company of the servants passing through

Blackrose to Winston’s. He was undoubtedly at least partly at fault for that, but he ignored that fact as he continued working. He paused, the skin in his hands only partly drained and the ink jar already sporting a fair amount of liquid color at the sudden realization that he was once again entirely alone made him still.

How many times had he been left alone?

Too many. So many times that he was more familiar with the sensation of loneliness than companionship.

He needed a partner, someone who could see all the ugliness of himself, of what he’d lost, of what he’d done, of what he would keep doing no matter what guilt built in the cavern of his chest, and not cower. He wanted someone at his side, someone to face the same truths he’d been forced to face since he was born and accept the things he did.

He wanted someone who could ease that wound of isolation that had gnawed at his insides and grown with each passing year of his life. He wanted Yendi. 82

His hands faltered in their task, a drop of black color plunking onto the surface of his desk and bursting into a star like a rain drop exploding on a window. He’d done this so many times that an error surprised him, but not nearly so much as his realization did.

He swiped up the drop of color on the tip of his first finger and scraped it on the rim of the ink pot, examining the stain it left on his fingertip when he was done. Gone but not quite gone. He squeezed the skin again, a rush of colored droplets clinking into the pool of ink at the bottom of the jar. He was going to find her.

In 1760, A few months after Jamaica was shaken by Tacky’s Revolt, Winston was born on Bonny Hill Plantation to a slave named Cleona in a hut on the edge of the slave village, just about an hour and a half after Cleona’s friend Daisy gave birth to a baby of her own. That baby was Yendi, not quite two hours older than Winston and yet old enough that throughout their childhood she led them around as if she was an adult when he was still only a pickney.

Perhaps it was the fact that they shared a birthday, or perhaps it was the fact that both Winston and Yendi were born hearing ghostly voices on the wind, but whatever it was, they were inseparable. Any spare moment was spent together, telling stories, listening to the ancestors’ whispers that both of them were stunned to find everyone else didn’t hear.

He grew up knowing every line of her face, which crinkles in her brow meant she was utterly displeased—which she often was—and which tilts of her lips meant she was holding back a comment that would surely earn her a lashing from their white overlords.

Sometimes he thought he memorized her face before even that of his mother’s. 83

Always he pictured that little cluster of birthmarks on the left side of her neck.

Slightly too long to be freckles, a collection of four marks speckled the skin just below her ear. He’d never seen a mark like it on anyone else, and saw it under the curtain of his eyelids when he tried and failed to get to sleep. How long had it been since he’d last seen those marks in real life? He couldn’t tell. They’d been together on Bonny Hill in his youth, but how long ago had that been? He’d started to lose track when he’d noticed a general resistance in his body to aging.

Perhaps he was immortal, cursed to live through all time with the rawness of her absence never dulling. Because no matter what other moments from his life faded, Yendi was sharp in his mind, clear like the horizon line on a cloudless day. Bright and warm.

Solid and then gone.

When they were adolescents, Yendi confided in him that she’d discovered a new skill in Obeah. Few people knew they practiced at all; it was simply too dangerous after the gruesome butchering of Obeahmen the year they were born, so they worshipped in secret without all the adornments and displays they should have been allowed.

Winston practiced healing and protection where others dabbled in curses and poison, and that he and Yendi ever practiced together was already unsual, but not nearly so unusual as the fact that Yendi had figured out how to wield her faith into whatever depraved thing she had.

“What skill?” he asked her, eyes wide. He remembered sitting against the perimeter of his mother’s small garden, watching the geckos run through the damp soil when she plunked down in the dirt beside him, looking past the garden at something he couldn’t see. 84

She shrugged, wrapped her arms around her knees, and explained as clearly as she could that against all odds she’d saved Mary, a young woman who’d always been their figure of a big sister, who had been followed and favored by the hand of a particularly cruel overseer that left Mary limping and glassy-eyed.

Young Winston leaned forward, his face scrunched up in confusion, and stared at

Yendi’s face contorted in the scowl he knew meant she was thinking too much and too fast all at once. “How?” his voice almost squeaked, intimidated by that distant look in

Yendi’s eyes. He hadn’t been so sure of himself as a boy. Yendi had always had confidence enough for the both of them.

He watched the rise and fall of Yendi’s shoulders when she shrugged, and the way her fingers tightened around themselves, hugging her knees in closer. “I changed her.”

Yendi didn’t say much more, she didn’t have to. Instead, she grabbed his hand tight in hers and led him quietly through the slave village and into the hut where Mary lived with her mother. Mary stood in the center where the ceiling peaked and, lithe and tall as she was, she didn’t have to stoop. Well… if that really was Mary.

The woman standing in the middle of Mary’s family hut certainly looked like her.

She had the same gentle rounding of her nose, the same dent-free arc of her full lips, the same almond eyes that sloped upward on her face under eternally neat brows. But she was white. Utterly white.

Sable-skinned Mary had gone pale, her skin the creamy color of breaking waves, that light skin Winston knew turned red in the sun, splotched with sweat and blush. 85

At the sight of her, at the sound of her voice that he knew, that floated in the air soft like the rustle of palm fronds coming from a body that was inexplicably pale and foreign, Winston wanted to bolt. But Yendi held him still with a firm squeeze of his hand.

“M-Mary?” Winston inquired softly.

Mary turned to face him, a faint, mysterious smile curling the corner of her lips.

“Hi baby,” she greeted as she always did. She was only a few years older than he and

Yendi were, but she’d always treated them like children. She let her smile widen then gestured down at her herself, at the dress she always wore that was stained with dirt and sweat from field work and that looked remarkably out of place on her coconut milk skin.

“What yuh think?” she asked.

Winston glanced at Yendi, grateful for the pressure of her hand around his, forcing him to be present, forcing him to look at Mary no matter how desperately he longed to look away. “I don’t understand,” he answered finally, the words rushing out in a single, breathless exhale.

“Mary was getting hurt,” Yendi said softly at his side. “I wanted to help her.”

“She’s white!”

Yendi’s scowl deepened. “She’s safe.”

“Safe,” Mary echoed, the word light in her voice as if she couldn’t quite believe the idea of it. She shook her head gratefully at Yendi, that smile unfading on her lips.

“Because of you.”

Yendi dipped her head. “I hope so.”

“I can’t thank you enough,” Mary continued. 86

And it was then that Winston noticed what else was different about her: she was speaking perfectly properly.

As if knowing immediately what Winston was thinking, Yendi said aloud, “To blend in she has to look and sound right, eeh?” She looked at Mary conspiratorially.

“Nuff hiding, Mary.”

“Enough hiding,” Mary agreed, smiling at how perfectly proper she sounded.

Then she stepped closer to them, leaning down to render them all eyelevel. “Yendi I want you fi listen to me.” Her dark eyes darted to Winston. “You too. You’re almost grown,”

Mary said firmly, her eyes back on Yendi. “When I get settled you come to me. Both of you. You won’t last long here. The Scot will look for someone new.”

Winston felt a bolt of tension shoot down Yendi’s arm to her hand where her fingers stiffened against his own. He squeezed her hand back, as if to reassure her of the impossible: that he could protect her. That if the Scot should ever turn his hands on her,

Winston would stop it from happening.

But Yendi smiled at Mary anyway, an attempt at reassurance that the older woman, still frowning, clearly didn’t believe. “I’ll be ok,” Yendi said anyway, ignoring the doubt glinting in Mary’s eyes.

“What now?” he asked when it was clear neither Yendi nor Mary intended to speak. “How will you stay here?”

Mary fixed him with a gentle smile. One of those smiles he knew adults used when they didn’t want to let him down but had to. “I can’t. How could I?”

“Then…” he paused, eyes darting to Yendi and taking in the determined lines of her face before looking back at Mary. “You’re leaving.” 87

He couldn’t believe the words when they came from his mouth, but Mary nodded nonetheless. “I’m leaving.”

She could go anywhere, looking as she looked now, Mary told him, now that she was truly free. How could she wait any longer for some promised freedom when she was being hurt every day?

“But you’re not you, you’re… you’re different,” Winston countered.

“I’m still me,” Mary said gently. She stepped toward him and Yendi, putting her arms around them both and hugging them to her. “But now I can be safe.”

Winston didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t want to say anything else, he didn’t want to make Mary feel any worse than he suspected he already had. It couldn’t have been an easy choice, he reckoned, deciding to give up such a big part of yourself, no matter what it was for. But he couldn’t ease that unsettled twisting in his gut seeing the women he knew move in a skin that wasn’t quite hers.

The thought unsettled him, and when he returned later that night to his mother’s garden with Yendi at his side, he was still silent, brooding.

“The Scot was going to kill her,” Yendi said in answer to a question he hadn’t asked.

Winston made a vague noise in response, batting away a mosquito that buzzed near his head, nearly invisible in the dusky light.

“I can tell you’re mad,” Yendi continued on bluntly.

“No.”

“Then what?”

“I’m confused.” 88

Yendi sighed impatiently. “I told you I’d show you how to do it. Not tonight, I’m tired.”

He wanted to ask her why. Why did she do it? Why did she willingly transform

Mary into a white lady? Why didn’t she seem to have any regret about it? But he said nothing, and sat silently at her side, Yendi’s warm body pressing into his side, and traced shapes in the packed dirt as she told him all she’d learned and all she could teach him.

Now, sitting alone at his dinner table in the wake of Tami’s departure, he couldn’t help thinking of seeing a changed Mary, knowing he would have fled like Tami if Yendi had given him the choice. Still, he couldn’t hold it against Tami, not really. Mostly because in the hours since she’d been gone, she’d faded from his mind. Vaguely, he wondered if he could even picture her face now that she wasn’t before him. Whenever he tried to conjure the image of her, young and enthusiastic and positively overflowing with drive, he saw Yendi instead.

Yendi who died too young and promised him she’d be reborn, promised him they’d find each other again.

Winston sat alone at the dining table, mulling over his too-long life and the things he’d lost. Perhaps if he had a normal lifespan, if he wasn’t cursed to live on healthy and young, he wouldn’t be sitting here at this dining room table meant for a family with only one place set and occupied.

He tapped his finger thoughtfully against the cup he’d filled just a touch too high with brown rum and let his gaze wander over the empty seats gathered around his shining, oval table of deep, dark wood the same color as his deep, dark wood floors. The chairs faced him expectantly, waiting for some words of wisdom from the old, young 89 man. He could feel it. The impatience in the seams of their cushions, in their straight backs.

Winston raised his glass to the empty chairs. A salute, and drank down the too- warm liquid before any phantoms clinging to his furniture could pressure him for more than that.

His mind loosened, the gentle, persuasive fingers of his rum prying apart the locks in his head until all of his thoughts and worries and regrets poured out into him, rushing free of whatever makeshift barriers he’d put in place.

Determined to fight off those thoughts of his, he focused on a mental list of tasks he was making to be completed the next morning when the sun rose high enough and bright enough he could pretend he wasn’t bothered by the dark shadows that were the only beings to fill his halls.

But it wasn’t enough. No matter what he listed, no matter how many times he forced himself to narrow his focus to the half-eaten slab of white fish on his plate, the rice, the freshly sliced fruits and vegetables that the hands of temporary servants had prepared, he couldn’t quiet the noise in his head. He couldn’t blur those cursed memories that woke him at night. Not just the losses, the fact that he’d never really gotten over losing what he’d lost. Everything, everyone else was a pale imitation of the people he’d already lost.

He extended a hand to reach for the jug of rum sitting inconsequently before him, then hesitated. The last thing he needed was to drink more and let even more of his thoughts loose. So instead, he rose sharply from his seat, ignoring the protest of his chair legs as they scraped the floor, and strode from the dining room. 90

He needed fresh air. He needed to feel something other than the confines of

Blackrose pushing in on him.

Winston burst into the gardens a few moments later, letting out a deep sigh of relief when his feet touched the cool, damp soil of his rose garden. The warm night air swept in around him, slipping up under the hem of his untucked shirt and sweeping back out again through the half unbuttoned top, making the white fabric billow around the straight lines of his agile body.

He took a step forward, surveying the sprawl of his land as his bare feet sank into the dirt. He never could grow fully accustomed to shoes. He’d spent far too long slaving away with hardly clothes to shield his skin from the heavy sun that even now, with so many years sprawling between who he was now and who he’d been at Bonny Hill, he couldn’t convince himself to wear shoes if he wasn’t putting on a front.

Here, alone in his rose garden, he needed to touch the earth. And most importantly, he needed to feel the ancestors in every way he could. This is where his blood was. The blood he’d spilled himself in this body he knew so well, the blood his forbearers had dropped in moments they related to him with whispers pressed directly to his ears.

The soil curved up between his toes, holding fast to him, moving as if it knew what he was thinking and longed for the contact as well. Taking in a deep breath,

Winston let the smell of working soil and blooming roses settle into his nose, relishing in it.

His mother had usually smelled like soil. She spent her days in the sugar cane fields and her nights in her garden, and Yendi’s skin always had the faint scent of flowers 91 and, more specifically, roses. They were her favorite flower and the few rosebushes in the slave town were hers. Tended to immaculately and nurtured to glory. The scent of his own roses made her think of her again and the reason he’d come out here in the first place.

Purposefully, he stepped deeper into the gardens, continuing until the doorway was blurry in the dusky distance. Then he sank down to his knees, kneecaps met with the distinct chill of permanently damp dirt that would surely stain his pants. He leaned forward, palms of his hands flat against the soil, and pushed out a long steadying breath.

“I know you can hear me,” he told the earth, the flowers, the sky, the world beyond. He loosed another shaky breath. “I need your help.” His fingers dug into the soil.

“Please.”

Around him, the wind swirled, picking up just enough speed that he knew he’d been heard. It continued on, the breeze picking up and picking up until the fabric of his shirt whipped against his skin and the flowers around him whined in protest at being bent and pulled. But Winston didn’t move, stayed kneeling in that dirt, putting down roots as thick as a palm tree’s until the wind once again began to slow. And slow. Until it was stiller than it had been before, any turning in the night sky replaced by utter quiet.

Peace. That was the way he’d always thought of it, that feeling of serene quiet when the ancestors descended, when they manifested more than just faint whispers on the wind, when their bodies took on a shadowy shift that was almost human but not quite.

Winston lifted his head when the silence descended, when that unearthly stillness filled every bit of space in his garden, and sat back in the dirt to look up at the small gathering of ancestors that appeared before him. Three spirits stood before him, all three 92 of whom he’d seen before. With them, they brought a perfumy air that hung around him like humidity, blooming in the clean smells of fresh fruit and salty sea air. He’d heard whispers from other living people that arrived on gusts of cold air, but for him, with visits from the ancestors they brought with them waves of warm, still air. Perhaps they weren’t quite ghosts then, he’d decided more than once, perhaps they were something else entirely.

He offered them each a respectful dip of his head, and waited for them to sink to the level of the ground where they folded what would have been legs on a physical body, looking particularly more corporeal when they sat on the ground as he did.

“Winston,” the woman who sat in the middle offered. A shadowy smile flickered across her face, distorted ever so slightly by the impermanent mist that made up her features. Her nose was round, her cheeks even rounder, with deep black eyes that were almost constantly crinkled into crescents from the push of her smile. She’d been old when she passed, he knew, but it suited her; he couldn’t imagine her young.

“Mama Juba,” he returned. He knew her well. It was her voice he’d heard first when he was so young the memory almost didn’t etch itself fully in his mind. Her voice had appeared in his ears and warned him against running out of the sugar cane stalks and into the path leading up to the Great House where, unbeknownst to him, the overseer rode, ready and willing to discipline any slave that crossed his path and displeased him.

Winston had had a soft spot for her ever since and as a child had dreamt that she was his direct ancestor, a great, great grandmother or something.

“What you need?” the man to her left demanded. Dante who’d died young and whose spirit still betrayed the youth of his mortal body and the scowl he’d always worn. 93

For as long as Winston had heard him and seen him, he was always impatient. His full, purple lips were pulled to the side in an eternal sneer, the echo of him kissing his teeth in disapproval always following the weight of his words.

Winston cleared his throat. “I need help.”

“With what?” Now Maven, the man on Mama Juba’s right spoke, his voice deeper and softer than Dante’s, slow in the way old men with island-thick voices often were. His brows had gone silver white when he still walked on earth, and they hooded his eyes with a heavy, pleasant arc that made his irises look a shade or two darker than

Winston thought they really were. Like Mama Juba he was generally pleasant, and now a toothless smile was etched onto his face, the pale mustache quirked up at the ends with the same amusement as his lips.

Winston hesitated, dropping his stare to the dirt where he let it linger, examining the flecks and stones that made it up, watching little insects weave in and out of it. He ran through different words in his mind, trying to find the right way to make his impossible request. Then he sighed, running the clammy palms of his hands nervously over his thighs. “I need a partner,” he said finally.

“But that’s not all you want, eeh?” Mama Juba asked softly, her age worn face made up of gentle wrinkles that persisted in her spirit form. It was like looking at her reflection on a smooth pond. The colors were there, the shapes and the lines, but they were slightly muddled, slightly off, in a perpetual state of gentle shifting. Mama Juba was there and not there, but even in that watery shadow of a human form, he could see that all-knowing smile pushing into her face.

“Him want Yendi,” Maven agreed, his words lifting with a chuckle. 94

Winston swallowed, feeling a glob of anxiety squeeze down his throat when he did. He hadn’t realized how foolish it sounded until Maven had said it so clearly. He wanted Yendi back, but who didn’t want a dead loved one back? Was his loneliness really any more acute than anyone else’s?

Selfishly, he decided it was. No one else seemed doomed to an eternity of memories and no one to ever fill the hollowness mourning.

Dante scowled at him. “Yendi?” he asked sharply. Yendi had been Dante’s favorite when she lived. He’d been the voice she heard most and spoke to most. Yendi had been his protégé and Winston could never live up to her. He’d been her Mama Juba and had been there at the end, at Yendi’s side just as Winston was, watching the light drip from her eyes.

Winston sighed, lifting his hand to run it down the length of his face, the callouses there scraping the stubble of his chin. “I want Yendi back,” he said softly, directing his words more at the ground than at the misty spirits before him.

“And what do you expect us to do?” Dante demanded harshly.

“Before Yendi died,” Winston began, ignoring the way his voice weakened on the admittance that Yendi was dead. It didn’t matter how many years passed between then and now, he hated to say it, hated to think it. “Before that, she told me she’d be reborn. I want to know if she was. Or if she will be.”

The trio of ancestors before him was silent for a moment and it was a physical effort on his part to face them all. Did they think him a fool for asking?

He swallowed, watching the expressions of all three of the ancestors as they considered what he’d asked. Mama Juba’s face was set in a gentle smile, Maven’s a 95 furrow of consideration, and when he looked at Dante he was already staring at Winston with a faint scowl still contorting his expression.

“What you know of Yendi?” Maven asked Dante.

“Mi no know nothing,” Dante answered stubbornly.

Well at least nothing had changed in his relationship with Dante. He’d hardly liked Winston when Yendi was alive, thinking he was permanently a step behind her in skill and ambition. Winston had a habit of thinking he was right.

“Dante,” Mama Juba said with a gently scolding smile. She returned her warm gaze to Winston, saying simply: “Him know.”

“Mi remember when Yendi come back,” Maven said before Dante could be forced to answer, still looking skyward in contemplation.

Winston’s heart started in his chest, fluttering against the confines of his ribs.

Yendi had been right like she always was. She’d been reborn, evaded the permanence of becoming an ancestor before her time.

“Yendi’s back?” Winston asked, breathless.

“Eh…” Maven exchanged a glance with Mama Juba and tilted his head to the side. “Back somewhere. Different but back.”

“Different how?” he pressed.

“A likkle mixy mixy,” Maven said.

Mixed then. Yendi in a mixed body. That wasn’t enough to make her different. It was the blaze in her stubborn eyes he’d recognize her by. The fervor in her voice. The way she rubbed the spot under her ear with her first finger when she thought too much.

“And a different name,” Dante added. 96

Winston leaned forward, desperate for all the information they had. “What name?”

Dante gave him a twisted, smug semblance of a smile. “Mi cyan tell yuh.”

No. No.

They couldn’t dangle the possibility of Yendi before him and take it away. He’d already lost her once, he couldn’t lose her again. Winston bristled, sitting up straighter than he had been, turning his desperation to Mama Juba. “Please,” Winston murmured, beseeching as he looked into his teacher’s ancient, knowing eyes.

“Mi can say the gyal you know as Yendi is marked just as you knew her,” she said kindly, tapping a gnarled finger to the side of her neck where Winston knew Yendi’s birthmark to be.

“And she’s still here,” Maven added, motioning to the island that hummed around them. “St. James Parish.”

“Is she already born?” Winston asked.

Dante shrugged. “Mi cyan tell yuh.”

To be clear, Winston had never liked Dante. But he’d never hated him so much as he did just then, seeing that smug, ghostly smile and just knowing that he’d probably already found and talked to Yendi in whatever new form she took.

“Her soul was given another body to occupy,” Mama Juba continued. “We can’t tell you when she was reborn.”

“If yuh waan tuh fine har, luk fah har,” Maven instructed with a dismissing wave of one wide hand. 97

“Look where?” Winston demanded. He could hear that desperate edge coming into his voice, that side of passion he knew he had too much of, remembered even Yendi telling him he needed to relax. But he couldn’t help it. The promise of Yendi was dangling before him, he couldn’t let it go for the sake of propriety. He couldn’t stay still and silent just because Dante was sneering at him or because he didn’t want to pressure the ancestors.

He’d promised Yendi from the time they could speak that he’d be at her side.

He’d promised her again when she lay dying before him. He didn’t intend to break his promise to be respectful now.

“Where?” he repeated.

Dante shrugged. “You know her well, eeh? Where do you think her soul would be put?”

Winston hadn’t the faintest idea. She could be anywhere, and apparently any time.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Please, what else can you tell me? Anything.”

Mama Juba smiled gently at him once more, the doting smile of a mother, and extended a wisp of a hand to caress Winston’s cheek with the warm touch of a slow breeze. “She’s in a year you’ve already seen,” she offered.

“She’s the same age as when you knew her,” Maven contributed.

Then, grudgingly, Dante added: “When you find her she’ll be in a crowd with music.”

Winston almost opened his mouth to ask something more, to ask for more specification than that, but from the still looks all three ancestors had taken on he was rather certain they didn’t intend to say anything else on the matter. And for now it would 98 have to be enough. He knew the most important thing: Yendi was back. Somewhere, sometime, that fiery soul that had lit the world for him since the moment he was born was back on earth, ready to light it up once more.

Winston dipped his head graciously. “Thank unuh,” he said, his voice thick with emotion he didn’t want to show before them—well, before Dante anyway.

In response, he felt that familiar, comforting stroke of breeze against his cheek,

Mama Juba saying goodbye, and then the wind began to swirl again, ripping that peaceful silence at the seams and letting the living world seep back into his senses. The familiar whining buzz of insects filled his ears, the distant rumble of waves climbing over each other to reach the sand first. And when he lifted his head back up, the ancestors were gone, nothing but the roses, glimmering and black, in their stead. Again, Winston was alone, but as he shoved himself back up to his feet to return to the house, a faint smile played at his lips.

The next morning, Winston sat alone in his bedroom, looking out the window at the sunny daybreak. He’d hardly slept, and how could he, with thoughts of Yendi and their reunion buzzing in his head?

For hours after the ancestors had departed, Winston had laid flat atop his bed, staring at the shadows on the ceiling and running through their clues over and over until he fell asleep. Her birthmarks, her age, where she might be, when she might be. The hints had still been playing in his head when he’d finally drifted off just long enough to be plunged entirely into a nightmare. A memory. The night he’d lost her. 99

Mary, it turned out, had been exactly right to warn Yendi of the Scot. It had taken a while, but sure enough his attentions shifted to her. At first it was suspicion. Mary had disappeared and been declared a runaway, and Yendi—known through all of Bonny Hill as the most rebellious—took whips and beatings for the assumption she’d helped Mary flee. And when that faded and Yendi healed, just as jaded as she’d ever been, the Scot had noticed her.

He’d noticed the adult body that had grown beneath her. He’d noticed she was in the fields under his command. When he’d assaulted her first, Winston had been helpless to do anything, and when Yendi stumbled back to her hut, she’d ordered him not to try anything. He’d wind up dead, she reminded him. And as always, he’d listened to her.

Winston held her close that night, listening to her cry and speak through her tears, proclaiming the freedom she knew was waiting just out of reach. They’d get their freedom and then she’d get her revenge.

But Yendi had always been impatient.

When the Scot had found her again a few days later, she wanted her revenge. So she took it, using all the strength earned from a life of physical labor and a machete she was supposed to use on the sugar cane.

She’d appeared in Winston’s doorway bloody and triumphant, and refused to give him details. She’d just come back to embrace him, to tell him goodbye, to tell him she’d demand to be reborn when she met with the ancestors so she could find him again. The kiss she’d pushed to his lips as her bloody hands held him tight and stained his skin copper had lived on in Winston’s head and on the nerves in his lips long after Bonny 100

Hill’s owners had sent lawmen after Yendi for what she’d done. He’d still felt her touch tingling on his skin when she left her body and the world had folded in on him.

And he felt it as clearly as he felt the sheets on his skin when he bolted out of sleep, heart racing, Yendi’s face covered in nightmare blood still flashing in his eyes. As he sat there, hunched over and panting, trying to erase the memory and the dream both, he decided firmly that he needed to find her now, before the sorrow and the emptiness swallowed him whole. He wanted to see her again, hear her again. He’d tell her of all he’d been doing, how he’d overcome his guilt and fear of changing people and made her proud. He’d been saving their people as he’d been unable to save her.

When the sun rose high enough that Winston was sure it wasn’t dawn anymore and the Blackrose servants would already be up and milling about their tasks, he finished dressing and made his way out of his bedroom. He strolled down the hallway, rounding the top of the staircase and beginning his descent to the first floor. Unlike usual, there was noise coming from the dining room that made Winston slow on his way there.

He wasn’t use to the general sensation of conversation in his house. He hadn’t indulged in such closeness with anyone since Yendi’s death and the horrors that had followed it—his family being killed, he himself being separated from the others and sent away from Bonny Hill.

And that loneliness crept into him and stayed there, a creature of its own, writhing under his skin and controlling him like a puppet.

He paused in the doorway, seeing two of his current servants setting a place for him and filling his plates with food. Freshly sliced mango, star fruit, and pear decorated a small plate. Eggs and vegetables and thinly sliced strips of salt fish on another. 101

Alecia and May, he recalled their names to be. He didn’t often bother to learn much of the servants that passed through, but he remembered Alecia and May as particularly friendly and particularly determined to be changed.

“And what him do?” Alecia asked, looking at May with a laugh still lighting her face. Evidently, he’d walked in mid-story.

May laughed brightly, shaking her head and waving a hand before her in an effort to collect herself. “Mi soon tell you,” she said, still fighting for air and apparently losing, for she succumbed to her laughter before she could form an answer, making Alecia laugh as well.

The sight made his heart heavy. It wasn’t right to be jealous, he reminded himself, he’d had a life before they were even born, as full of laughter as theirs was now, but it still stung.

Winston shifted his weight between his feet, making the wide floor board he stood on creak just loud enough to earn both Alecia’s and May’s attention.

Both women straightened, turning to face him directly, and nodding their heads politely. “Good morning, sir,” Alecia greeted with a friendly, if impersonal smile.

“Good morning,” Winston returned, nodding to Alecia and May, who echoed the greeting. “Thank you both for breakfast,” he continued, stepping into the room. “It looks good.”

Alecia gave him another smile. “Of course, sir.” She made a small gesture to

May, beckoning her to come along as Alecia took a step toward the door that led into the kitchen. “Oh, sir, if I could ask you a question?” 102

The word sir made him stiffen, but he didn’t bother protest it. Every servant who came through Blackrose treated him with the same respect that bordered on deification.

Obeah did that most of all, he suspected. It always made people’s eyes go wide with wonder, made them move with trepidation around him lest he curse them and damn them for all eternity.

A white man’s curse, that Obeah had been transformed from something intended to help into something to be feared. Even people who sought its protection were intimidated. Winston didn’t know the word Obeah when he was young; Guzumba, even, was unfamiliar to him. All he knew was his personal connection to the world here and beyond. But without consulting any Obeahmen or Obeahwomen, white men had named it and outlawed it as black magic and spread fear on the island. Alecia and May were no different. They watched him with that same fearful admiration. He couldn’t blame them, but it made him all the more certain he needed a partner.

Winston pulled himself from his musing and turned his attention to Alecia, moving in the direction of the table and pausing when he stood across from them. He slid his hands into his pockets. “What question?” he asked.

“We’ve been wondering where Tami is.”

It wasn’t a question really, but an accusation. That he’d done something to Tami.

Changed her, perhaps, or made her disappear some other way. “Tami left,” he answered.

“She didn’t like the changing.”

Alecia blinked in surprise. “Oh.” 103

The servants who came to him knew what he did, but the Obeahmen and women never seemed to. A cruel twist of fate, really, that the only people he met with connections to the ancestors had never heard his reputation.

“She’s perfectly well,” Winston added because the way Alecia and May were still staring at him made him think they doubted that she was. “But it frightened her to know what’s done here.”

Alecia nodded again. “Oh.”

How could it possibly be reconciled, he wondered, that Alecia could appear to agree with Tami’s fear all the while living at Blackrose with the sole purpose of being changed? How could they live on his land and fear him? He felt a heaviness in his chest.

Did they fear for their lives so much they preferred to live in fear of what he’d do to them than in fear of someone else? At the very least, even if they kept distance as he did, they were of the same people. That had to count for something, and apparently it was enough.

Again, Winston cleared his throat, clearing the thoughts from his mind. “Her mother lives in St. Thomas somewhere in the mountains. I assume she went back,” he offered. “She was free to leave just as any of you are. No consequences.”

Alecia offered him another smile. “Of course. We’ll leave you now sir.” She nudged May and followed her friend to the door into the kitchen, slowing briefly to acknowledge Winston with a faint shadow of a smile.

And alone again, Winston sighed, sinking down before his prepared food. He couldn’t help wondering, as he stabbed a fork into a slab of mango before dropping the utensil and picking it up with his fingers sticky juice and all, what had driven the pair of them to Blackrose. Perhaps they’d been in situations like Mary and hadn’t had any choice 104 but to look for a change before it cost them their lives. After all, maybe Yendi would still be alive with him, not reborn who knew when and where, if he’d had the foresight to change her that very first day the Scot had touched her.

He didn’t know what they did to white women who killed white men but he suspected it was less vile than what they did to Black women who did it.

But he hadn’t wanted to change Yendi just as he didn’t want to look at a changed

Mary. It was easy now, changing people he didn’t know, but it was something entirely different to change the skin of people he knew and loved as they were. Hypocritical morals, he knew, but he couldn’t help feeling that way.

Regardless, he hoped Alecia and May were driven by some sort of desperation.

All the questions he had over the morality of his behavior certainly couldn’t be assuaged if he knew he was whitening people for their unfettered vanity rather than their safety.

Even as it was he felt a faint twinge of regret when he pulled the color from someone’s skin. His only relief was nurturing roses with what he’d stolen. But he ignored that feeling most of the time and did so now, thinking instead of the ancestors’ clues.

He ran the hints through his head once more, taking a bite of starfruit and feeling the familiar twang of acid sweetness against his tongue. Mama Juba and Maven’s hints were helpful if too broad, but Dante’s was more specific. Yendi would be listening to music in a crowd.

Slouching at his dining room table, Winston thought over all he’d seen in all his years and those he’d visited when he probably had no business doing so. He’d seen plenty of music there, but when had he seen a crowd worth mentioning? Only a few times 105 in all his travels which at the very least gave him a place to start. A festival or a concert, whatever it was called.

He’d seen one in 1992, and if Yendi was currently living in a year he’d already seen then perhaps it would be a good place to begin his search. With a renewed determination, Winston burned through his breakfast, swallowing whatever food he could stomach. He had no more time to waste; he had to leave now and start his search. The longer he waited, the longer he’d have to live in the endless emptiness he’d occupied for so long. And Winston was growing impatient.

Back on Bonny Hill, when Winston was just on the cusp of adulthood was the first time he’d ever considered the possibility of seeking out the descendants. After all, if he could talk to the ancestors, then why not the descendants? He’d been thinking it for quite a while, ever since he’d grown comfortable enough with the ancestors that he could see their memories as brightly as his own and see their foggy figures walking the same earth he did. But he’d avoided trying it for one main reason: fear of seeing something just as hopeless as his own life.

The very first time he’d sought out the voices and sights of the descendants, he’d felt particularly bleak and helpless about the state of things, when a friend came to his hut seeking any help he could find for a lashing that had set his back to searing flame. That night, with his friend unconscious half out of exhaustion and half out of agony, Winston decided to reach out to the future and see what he could. He had to know, after watching such agony, if there was any point at all. Generally speaking, he tended to favor quiet acquiescence—unlike Yendi and her endless reserves of protest—believing that avoiding 106 the notice of white eyes would let him live until he was really free to do so. But if there was no freedom on any horizon, he would rather join Yendi’s side, rather go out fighting than cowering into old age.

He sat on the floor, back against the wall of the hut, and reached out along a thread of connection like he had with the ancestors. A touch more tenuous and unfamiliar as he floated into that distant, calm place in his mind where time and place and memory met and blended. It was a thread he was forging himself, extending it to the future generations who sat like blurry flames in his mind, beckoning. He extended that shadowy spirit hand of his soul, feeling unfamiliar fingers lace through his and pull him forward, launching him through a tunnel of unfamiliar sights, sounds, smells, until he burst forward into sunlight.

A street corner, bustling with black bodies in bright clothes, and behind him a shop with the doors wide open, letting heat and salty breeze sweep into the confines of thick plastered walls. Winston was utterly still, looking around in wide-eyed apprehension. He’d never seen so many people, never seen such bright clothing, such scant clothing. He’d never seen so many of his people milling about laughing and talking and shopping without white overseers lurking somewhere nearby, never heard anything so loud as the festival music that raced down the corridors of the streets.

And then, suddenly, Winston felt out of place. He’d never felt more alone, more intrusive than he did just then, watching the descendants living their own, unfettered lives. And he a voyeur, observing and not quite understanding all they did. But the sights made him smile, made him come back again and again, and now filled him with hope that he might really find Yendi there in 1992. 107

The haze of pulling himself through time faded slowly, sound breaking through the fog of confusion first. Again, he was in the city, the sounds of chatter and car horns and rushing footsteps and above it all, the loud pounding of music that weighed against his ears both enthralling and overwhelming. The mist cleared as he blinked his eyes, welcoming in the sight of sunny, thriving Montego Bay. The colorfully painted storefronts, the wide streets with people darting in between cars to cross. Fresh food floated into the air, so hot it almost felt heavier than the weight of sunbeams. Meat and smoke and spices caught up on the air and swirled around him, making his stomach hollow in anticipation.

But he wasn’t here to play the tourist as he had so many times before, though he had to admit it was tempting—that foreign, tourist solitude never did sting like the solitude at home.

Winston squinted against the sunlight, pulling at the collar of his shirt that suddenly felt too warm as he stood on a cement street with limited shade, and glanced at the sky where he could already see the shift beginning from afternoon to evening. He walked down the street, taking a turn in the direction of the music before realizing he had hardly an idea of how to actually get there. He paused, looking around for someone who didn’t seem as endlessly busy as the other hustling bodies, and started down toward a shop with a small patio on the outside.

“Excuse me,” he said, stopping at the stoop where an old man with long dreadlocks sat, one sandaled foot propped up on his knee. 108

“Wah gwaan?” the man asked, tilting his head up and glaring at the sunlight to get a good look at Winston.

Winston nodded that all was well, then returned the greeting. “Wah gwaan?”

“Mi deh yah, yuh know,” the man answered with a hearty, rasping chuckle. “Yuh need help?”

Winston nodded. He needed a lot of help, frankly. Now that he was here with music buzzing somewhere near him, he felt a new sense of helplessness. He was supposed to find Yendi in a city as big as Montego Bay at grown? The plantation hand in him shuddered at the prospect and longed desperately to rope someone else in to help him, but telling this man on the street he was an ancestor come to find the reborn love of his life in a crowd wouldn’t be particularly effective, so instead he mentioned the music.

“Weh di music ah come from?”

“Seet ova deh suh,” the man replied, lifting a hand to point over to another street.

“Reggae Sunfest.” The man gave another hearty laugh, shaking his head and leaning back in his chair. “Go see, eeh?

“Thanks,” he offered.

The man nodded. “Bless up.”

Winston returned the phrase distractedly, then walked down the street, speeding as he headed for the festival. His pulse raced in his neck. The skin on his hands felt too small, stretched over his thumping veins. He hadn’t expected to be so nervous, but he was. If he found her here, what would he say? Would he manage to convince her to come back with him, back into that history of suffering? The Yendi he knew would say yes, unequivocally. She wanted to help, to make change for their people in strides of such a 109 size he doubted they existed in the future. For all its problems, it couldn’t really compete with enslavement, he’d found. But would a Yendi who had known the pleasures of freedom really agree to come back? She’d never lived to see freedom, not even the semi freedom Winston knew in the 1830s, and maybe the pull of real, 1990s freedom would keep her here.

Winston shook off his concerns and focused instead on the climb up a grassy hill that overlooked the concert. The first time he’d been in 1992, he hadn’t bothered to look at the source of all that enchanting music, and now that he finally stood before it he was wonderstruck at the sheer size of it all.

Rows and rows of screaming people, jumping and singing, waving their arms, dancing in what little space they had, fawning over the performers up on the stage who sang and spoke and yelled into a tube Winston would later learn was called a microphone. This close to the show, the music was even louder, thumping against his ears so loudly he almost winced at the sensation. He’d never heard anything so loud, certainly nothing so loud that caused so much cheer.

He listened to the fast-talking men on stage, jumping around in too-big clothes that hung almost shapelessly from their bodies. Such ill-fitting clothes that somehow gave Winston the impression of style when he looked around at the crowd and saw that many of them wore similarly oversized outfits.

From where he stood, it was too far to actually see the faces of the men jumping around the stage, but he didn’t need to really, not to tell how good a time they were having. How good a time everyone was having. 110

Winston was transfixed. The music soared into him and through him and made his body sway of its own accord, so loose and happy and hopeful he’d never felt anything like it before. The cheers of the crowd wove through him, filling him, astounding him with all the emotion, all the brightness that was held within it.

What a confused joy he felt, surrounded by people who looked like him, only happier. They danced, they drank, they screamed, they sang. They didn’t feel whatever chains he still felt snug around his ankles, not as they lost themselves to the rhythms that echoed and raced in the heavy air.

Under the waning afternoon sun, Winston slipped his way into the crowd, looking at the face of every woman he passed in the hopes that one of them would set off those chills and flutters Yendi always did. He didn’t know what face he was looking for beyond the fact that she’d still have her same birthmark and that in all likelihood she’d be fairly light. He’d rarely seen a mixed person in his long life that wasn’t.

So as he wove through the crowd, he slowed near any mixed looking girl, trying to catch a glimpse of any markings, trying to catch their eyes to see if they sizzled when they met his. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

And this crowd was never ending. So never ending that as the sun began to drop and a purple haze descended the sky, he still hadn’t made it all the way through.

Already his legs were weary, and sweat dripped down the length of his face. He lifted the hem of his shirt, leaning down to wipe his forehead with the soft fabric, knowing that within a moment his skin would be gleaming again. He wished this crowd was smaller. He wished the sun would just set already and give him that initial relief of 111 shade. He wished the ancestors had been more specific rather than cursing him on this endless search.

On the stage, the performers were switching, a duo saying their goodbyes to the crowd and being met with the roar of cheers as another man strolled out from somewhere off stage. As the music started up again, the new performer began, shouting into the microphone as the crowd echoed whatever message he offered. Winston ignored the music that had once charmed him so much, focusing his entire being on making it through this crowd and looking at every face he passed as he did.

And then his ear snagged on the word browning. Again and again the performer, clad in what Winston could only describe as an oversized yellow suit coat and equally baggy white pants with hair that rose in an impossibly neat square, professed his love and devotion to his browning. And in response, the crowd seemed to cleave in half. One half cheering and singing along, the other jeering, cursing the singer and his lyrics.

Browning. Brown skinned. Light skinned. Mulatto. Octoroon. Whatever the word it had the same meaning: black but light enough to be admired.

The song stopped him in his tracks, made his stomach clench. Here too? Here in this city positively humming with the life and success and culture of his people the lighter skinned were still preferred? Even the dissent in the crowd couldn’t loosen the surety he felt that even this far in the future he couldn’t seem to outrun what had always plagued him.

Yendi flashed in his head, that serious, drawn line of her brow as she worked on another slave and pulled the color from her skin. For safety, he reminded himself. Safety, not vanity. Safety, not division. Safety, not superiority. 112

But… was that what they had been doing? Reminding those people they helped that white was better than black? Enforcing those slave owner ideals? Was that why his people never really trusted him, never really bonded with him? No matter what he said or did, they could tell he had already been corrupted by the same hands that had whipped him?

He didn’t know how long he would’ve wallowed in his own anxieties had a voice to his side not broken through his train of thought. He blinked himself back to reality, turning to see a young, brown-skinned woman singing along with the song, her smile wide, her hair let loose and wild, curly and windblown. Freckles dotted her nose, her light brown eyes focused on the stage as she swayed and sang along. Her hair curled along her neck, covering whatever chance he would’ve had to look for Yendi’s birthmark no matter how he tried. And then, as if his intent focus could be felt on her very skin, she turned to look at him, a smile pulling at her lips.

“Wapm man!” she shouted over the noise when their eyes met.

He nodded at the greeting, returning the smile she gave him as she continued to sway to the song and asking after her as well, taking a step toward her when she shrugged with a coquettish smile. “Wah yuh name?”

“Vivi.”

“Winston.” He nodded to the stage. “Yuh like this song?”

She grinned. “Love it.”

Again the chorus began, the singer praising a brown skinned girl once more and receiving a torrent of dissent from the crowd though before him Vivi simply sang along.

And he knew resolutely it wasn’t Yendi. It didn’t matter how she was reborn. Not when, 113 not where, not what body she occupied, this would never be Yendi, this woman who relished in this song without a care. The realization landed like a punch, and he slipped past her in the crowd before she could return her attention to him, continuing his search and ignoring the weight of disappointment in his stomach.

He was a drowning man, he had been since Yendi died. Grabbing for anything to keep him afloat and knowing nothing would really hold him. All that sorrow, all that loneliness, all that misery swarmed around him like riptide. The crowd around him felt like a sinkhole, folding in on him, trapping him in all he’d done and all he’d lost.

Winston pushed through the crowd, weaving in and out of moving, sweating bodies, desperately seeking a breath of air that was his and that he wasn’t forced to share with at least thirty people around him. He hurried, moving faster and faster until finally he cleared the crowd, his heart pounding in his ears, sweat pouring a thick line down his back and across his face, and when he finally reached the clearing of grass, he collapsed down to his knees, heaving for air.

His ears were sore, his legs were sore, his eyes were sore. His entire body throbbed and ached, his head most of all. He was alone. Even with all these bodies pressing in on him, their sweat and their breath, he was alone. All alone.

To be clear, Winston Campbell was used to being alone. Ever since he’d lost

Yendi and been separated from his family, he had accustomed himself to solitude. But it wasn’t until that fruitless trip to 1992 that he really felt the ache of what it meant. The ancestors, or at least Dante, must’ve sent him into a crowd as punishment, to make him face those demons that were his only consistent company. 114

It had been a waste, that trip, and he was intent on setting it behind him. Which he tried to do the following morning when he woke and jogged down the stairs and down the halls into the dining room. This morning, unlike the morning before, the dining room was already empty, his breakfast laid out waiting for him and before it sat a letter on vaguely yellowed paper and sealed with a deep red splotch of wax.

He sank into his seat, taking a long drink from the glass of water on the table, and extended a hand to flip over the neatly folded letter, narrowing his eyes on the writing on the back of it.

Scrawled in impeccable penmanship was the name Mrs. Robert Tyndall.

He rolled the name around in his head, trying to find any flicker of memory. He didn’t think he knew a Robert Tyndall, though the more he thought of it, the more the name Tyndall sounded familiar. Perhaps he’d known one in another decade. A forefather or something. Regardless, he sliced underneath the wax seal with a knife nonetheless and unfolded the perfectly creased sheet.

It addressed him by first name as if he knew the sender rather intimately, and he scanned quickly through the words. General pleasantries, asking after his wellbeing and the state of his estate. And then near the bottom a mention of an unwed daughter in need of a husband, particularly a husband like himself.

He almost snorted. A husband like himself? Black and immortal? Is that what

Mrs. Robert Tyndall meant? Surely she had to know he was Black, and surely for most people on the island even his wealth couldn’t ease that particular flaw. 115

Disinterested, Winston nearly tossed the letter down when the signature at the very bottom caught his attention. Catherine. And below that, in post script, a note to give her best to Annie.

He paused. Annie as in Annie Palmer? Who was Catherine Tyndall to know him and Annie both? Admittedly the name Catherine was familiar, but it wasn’t particularly unique enough to warrant any immediate understanding. He repeated it to himself two, three, four more times until a sudden recognition flared through him. Catherine. The sudden image a runaway slave appeared in his mind. A young woman who had appeared bruised and bloody on the doorstep of Blackrose back when he’d been training Annie.

It was the first time Annie changed anyone, leaving the young runaway pale as any English noble and going so far as to give her hair an unusual strawberry tint. A young woman who hadn’t given them her slave name but had declared, looking in the mirror at her new, pale face, that she would be known as Catherine and that when next they heard her name it would be as the woman of a Great House.

Apparently, she’d succeeded. Apparently, there had been at least one of his people that Yendi’s technique had helped. He wished it eased the guilty uncertainty gnawing at his stomach, but it couldn’t, not when he could still hear the uproar in relation to that song still echoing in his head.

Regardless, Catherine was alive and well and Winston couldn’t muster any interest beyond that as his thoughts returned to Yendi and where he might next look for her.

1992 hadn’t been the only festival he’d seen, it had simply been the most impactful for him, being the very first one he’d seen. So as he lay endlessly awake in the 116 night, he’d thought again and again until the vibrant memory of another music festival came to him. The music was different, the beats faster, the dancing harder, the clothing even smaller. He remembered the crowds swaying and cheering and moving, and he remembered the momentary thrill of it, of seeing a gathering so utterly overflowing with life.

Perhaps Dante, in all his favoring of Yendi, had opted to let her be reborn in a life so much brighter, so much more joyful than her first.

Winston surely hoped so, swallowing down the last of his breakfast and slipping the letter in his pocket to be dealt with later, he decided that he would visit the descendants in 2017.

There were things from his first trip to the 21st century that Winston should have bothered to remember before hurrying back. The noise that was so much louder than the noise at home and even the noise of the 90s that felt damaging against his ears. The crowds in the streets that felt overwhelming. The clothes that were even brighter than in the 90s, even skimpier, even more suitable for the heat.

But he didn’t. He didn’t think to, didn’t have time to.

So here he stood in the year 2017 just on the cusp of evening as another music festival raged around him, utterly unprepared for the assault on his senses. How much more intense it was than the one in 1992, with music blasting from every direction, making the air itself vibrate, the particles of humidity capturing every note and letting it ring just a touch longer than it would have otherwise. 117

Again, he’d changed into his modern clothes, opting this time for knee-length shorts and a tank top in an attempt to ward off the heat brought by a crowd. As he wove through the streets that were cast in a warm glow and dotted with darkened shadows that dulled building outlines, Winston was glad for the choice in clothes. There wasn’t as much breeze here as there was at Blackrose where there was nothing but trees and fronds to block the gusts of wind, but here, the throngs of people and the heavy buildings trapped in the heat and made a thick sheen of sweat spring up on his skin.

The crowd thickened the nearer he drew to the venue, people mingling and celebrating in every free inch of space. Chatting, drinking, eating, dancing, laughing. He peered through the crowd, narrowing his gaze as if it could focus his attention, until finally it landed on a young woman making her way through the crowd with a microphone, trailed by a young man with a camera trained on her.

He’d encountered people like this before, interviewers who were always easiest to find outside big events like this, and he’d hoped it would tonight. Everyone suddenly got organized when a camera appeared, presenting their faces and their best sides, waiting for their turn to have all the attention fall on them. Looking at the size of the crowd, he figured following the interviewer as she made her way through the festival would be his best chance at finding Yendi if she were here.

Winston jogged across the grassy, dusty ground until he reached the site of an interview just beginning and slowed. The bulb on the camera cast a wide circle of bright, clean light that illuminated the features of the interviewees, ridding them of the shadows wrought by dusk. Winston stood just outside the circle of light, hugging the line of shadow with a group of fellow observers as he listened to the interview. 118

The interviewer, a young woman with a neatly rounded afro and dark, almond eyes, cleared her throat and asked in a sharp, friendly voice almost entirely unaffected by the local accent, if the interviewees were ready. When they nodded their affirmation, she began, looking at the camera man as she began to speak.

“Y pree,” the interviewer greeted, a wide smile on her face.

“Yeah, y pree,” the shorter of the two women returned.

“Tell the people your names,” the interviewer said, holding the microphone out to them both.

“Deedee,” the shorter of the two said enthusiastically, smiling widely at the camera and gesturing at herself.

The taller woman at her side leaned in to speak into the microphone, looking a touch more disinterested than Deedee, one hand rising to smooth the top of her brightly dyed hair. “Mi name Marcia.”

“All right Deedee, Marcia,” the interviewer said, leaning in as if she and the women before her were intending to exchange secrets, “tell me now, we’re talking about bleaching, what you think?”

Deedee leaned into the microphone, apparently far more willing to speak than her friend. “Bleaching makes us beautiful,” she announced, laughing when her friend did.

“Look here suh, everybody want bleach, everybody. It makes us proud, yuh know? We can afford fi bleach, we can look pretty. The males don’t want females black like tar, yuh know?”

She was bold enough, Deedee was, to be Yendi, but looking at her, at the proud way she showed off her lightened skin, Winston doubted it was her. He craned his neck 119 when Deedee tilted her head, looking for the telltale birthmark and finding himself relieved in spite of himself when there was nothing there. There was nothing inherently wrong with Deedee, but it would be a lie for him to claim he wouldn’t be upset if Yendi had been reborn hating the skin she was in.

The interviewer raised her brows inquisitively at Deedee. “But why? Look at me, huh?” She waved her free hand over the air before her body. “Mi dark and mi like it.”

“And that is fine for you,” Deedee agreed, still laughing. “But mi rather be lighter, eeh? Mi have cake soap and lotion and mi gud.”

Blue soap, Winston had learned after his first visit to the 21st century, laundry soap for bleaching clothes and apparently skin. He had felt that familiar knot of doubt when he’d heard it the first time and been forced to consider to what extent the descendants would go to look lighter. Felt that familiar worry that maybe he and his complete whitening of so many people had contributed to it. He pushed the thought away.

He was helping, that’s all he’d ever done was try to make his people safe in the hostile world the white people had put them in. And right now it didn’t matter. All that mattered was Yendi.

“Marcia, what you think?” the interviewer asked, directing the microphone at the quieter of the pair.

Winston shifted his attention to the woman standing beside Deedee, looking over her face as if somehow he would find something familiar there. She was pretty, young, round faced with bright black eyes. He peered at her, trying to catch a glimpse of her neck when she brushed her straightened hair to the side. She did it a lot, moving it from one shoulder to her other, a nervous tic if he had to guess. 120

“Mi soon tell you,” Marcia began thoughtfully, eyes lifting to the sky as if it would tell her what to say. “Bleachers want to feel pretty, right? So we bleach. Some of we look whiter than white people.”

“Bleachers have lost their way,” another voice interrupted. “I’m Jamar,” the man introduced, giving the camera a grin. He stopped between Marcia and Deedee, leaning forward to claim the microphone. “Bleachers never know what color they’re gonna be.

White, brown, splotchy, some blacker than before, and for what?”

Deedee kissed her teeth, pushing the man away with a single disinterested hand

“’Nuff talk Jamar.”

Jamar began to defend himself, but Winston couldn’t find it in him to pay attention. This wasn’t a conversation for him, he told himself. This wasn’t why he was here. He shifted, turning to look at all the other women who had gathered, waiting for their turn in the interviewer’s spotlight. No, no, no. None of those faces looking back at him was Yendi’s.

“Historically,” the interviewer interjected, “lighter skinned people got better jobs and were seen as wealthier, is it something to do with that?”

Marcia shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Wealthy and pretty,” Deedee agreed. “Look at all the artists,” she gestured vaguely in the direction of the stage, “lots of them bleach too.”

Had he contributed to that as well? Was that why Tami had left him? Was that why Yendi had been taken from him? As punishment? What hypocrites the entire world, ancestors and all, were if that was the case. 121

Bitterly, he ignored the thought and continued his scouring of the crowd whose features were still illuminated by the interview’s light. The exhaustion of searching was setting in, that same empty hopelessness he’d felt in 1992, looking at all those unfamiliar faces and knowing deep down that Yendi wasn’t among the crowd.

Why had he come here? To endure all this liveliness and music that made him feel even worse than he had at Blackrose. The silence was better for his wallowing.

Still, he forced himself to watch the crowd as they milled around, looking even at the performers on stage in the hopes that one of them would have that familiar Yendi spark. But there was nothing, no matter how he looked at all those faces. He didn’t want to hear anything more or see anything more.

It didn’t take him long to deduce Yendi wasn’t there, and so he drew himself away from the festival and all the life that came with it.

Perhaps his search was doomed to be fruitless, Winston thought as he stalked through the streets of Montego Bay. The air was still and stuffy, clinging to his limbs as he tried to wade through it to a place of enough solitude he could disappear without drawing any attention.

Finally, several streets over, the crowds began to part, giving Winston enough space to finally find an empty corner where he could disappear.

The return to Blackrose weighed heavily on Winston’s mind the following morning, creating a whirl of doubt and defeat that made him antsy. When the garden and the study couldn’t calm him any, Winston found himself on the back of a horse, the lush green of his island blurring as he rode through it. 122

“She’s not out there, is she?” he demanded, accusatorily at the sky. The ancestors could hear him. They always could, the spirits of the dead who looked over them all. Not quite angels, not quite gods, but something else entirely that gave them guidance and help. And, right now, the forces that were set out to drive him to the edges of his patience.

“Is she?” he shouted.

There was a moment of silence when all he could hear was the beating of his horse’s hooves, the beating of his pulse in his ears, and then a voice boomed from all around him, surrounding him like a gust of wind that refused to disperse. Dante.

“Because you can’t find her she isn’t here?” Dante asked. He didn’t materialize, but Winston didn’t need him to. Even without revealing his face, the dismissive sharpness to Dante’s voice was more than enough for Winston to tell exactly what he would be looking at.

“I’ve looked,” Winston insisted, “she isn’t here.” There was an edge of desperation in his voice that he knew Dante could hear, but he ignored it. “And if she is… then I need help.”

Winston lifted his still young face to the sky, his expression shifting as his brows drew together beseechingly. “Please, Dante, I need help.”

All around him the wind stilled, getting so heavy he almost doubted his horse would be able to continue moving forward. And then, quicker than before, the wind picked back up, swirling about his head as Dante’s voice returned sharper than before.

“We gave you clues.” 123

“Then I need more clues,” Winston snapped. How else could he search? Where else could he search? If the ancestors weren’t here to help guide him then why was he burdened with hearing them in the first place?

It hadn’t been a burden in his youth, but ever since he’d lost Yendi it had grown more and more cumbersome when he heard from the ancestors. When they chided him, or told him of another person in need. And they so often did, telling him to help the people who crossed his threshold however they needed. Being changed, being moved, getting money or clothes or food or roof to shelter under until a storm had passed.

And Winston, hollow as he was, always acquiesced. But what about him? When would they set out to help him as they did everyone else? Hadn’t he always pleased them?

He asked as much of Dante and was met with more silent stillness.

“I’ve always done all you asked!” Winston repeated, shouting at the sky now.

“What more can I do before you help me?”

Laughter distorted on the wind floated all around him, mocking, incredulous.

“Done what we asked? You think we want you to get rid of all our descendants? No sah!”

Winston’s grip tightened on the reins of his horse. “What?”

“Change, change, change, Winston! Enuff!”

“It’s because of you I can even do that!” Winston returned sharply. “You taught

Yendi, she taught me. If you didn’t want me to change our people then why did you let me?”

The wind snorted at him. “Mi no let you do nutten.”

“You taught Yendi,” Winston repeated firmly. 124

“To save one gyal. Not change every Black person you see.”

Winston wanted to protest, to insist that wasn’t true. He helped those in need, just as the ancestors had told him to time and time again. He wasn’t reckless, he wasn’t. But he couldn’t find the words, instead all that came out was: “Then take my power away! I don’t want it anymore!”

Again the spirit wind chuckled. “What yuh want? Yuh want to run away to the future like you always do? To see the way your descendants live with what you’ve done?

The mess you caused is here, Winston, fix your own house before you abandon it.”

Winston cried out for Dante again, but he could tell by the way the wind lightened that he was already gone. It couldn’t be true, that Winston was disappointing the ancestors after all this time. They were the ones who had blessed him and helped him and taught him. If he wasn’t supposed to be changing people, then what was he supposed to be doing?

Mama Juba would’ve stopped him if he was in the wrong, wouldn’t she?

You’re a good boy, she’d told him over and over through all the years he’d been forced to walk this land. Young but good.

Compared to her, he was still young, still foolish, still in need of her wisdom. But she’d never condemned him for what he’d done. She sighed and shaken her head at the sight of him losing whatever ties he had to the human world, but she’d never told him he was wrong. Was that why they’d sent him to the future then? Knowing he wouldn’t find

Yendi but forcing him to see the harm he’d caused. There was no end to it, and there was no one to hold his hand through that realization. 125

He’d been doing all this to please them. It was always for the ancestors. Because what else did he have left? And if the ancestors were truly displeased with him, all of them, not just sour-faced Dante, then there was nothing left.

All around him the sounds of the wild had come back in full force with Dante’s departure to wherever the spirits of the dead rested. The birds began to chirp again, the distant crash of waves harmonizing with their hearty bird songs, and somewhere, off in the distance, the sound of human voices. Human song, to be more specific.

Carried on the air like clouds, the distant notes of a song reached out toward him, beckoning him to come closer. The horse he rode reacted before he did and trotted off, possessed by the same enchanting melody that was beginning to entrance Winston. It was familiar, somehow. Not the words, but the melody, the mishmash of voices and the bursts of laughter at forgotten lines or missed harmonies.

It sounded like… home.

His horse trotted through the well-worn path that had been so trodden it was more dirt than grass, drawing ever nearer to that singing.

What would have once been a slave village but now he supposed were servants’ quarters began to peek through the forest as they continued on. By the time they reached the clearing of small, dilapidated houses, the singing had grown so loud they silenced the worried that had been writhing in Winston’s mind. His horse slowed and he hopped down to the ground, looping the reins around a wooden pole and walking further into the village.

How similar to Bonny Hill, he thought. He hadn’t spent much time on plantations after Bonny Hill and hadn’t employed enough servants of his own to warrant such 126 quarters, and the sights, the smells, the sounds brought him back through time. His limbs felt looser, as if all those years of nothingness couldn’t weigh him down when the music was lifting him up.

A crowd of people appeared in the distance, half of them singing, half of them watching. The lyrics greeted him the further in he walked, but the meaning bounced off his ears, something about God, something about faith, as his eyes fell on a young woman standing at the side of the crowd.

She was short—at least compared to the older woman she stood beside—and she swayed absentmindedly back and forth, clapping her hands to the beat and mouthing the words along with the singers before her. Her dark hair, not quite black, was braided back neatly in two distinct plaits, and her brown skin was smooth with youth, undisturbed but for a faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her smile as she sang pushed her cheeks up, making her eyes bend into an arc, and when she turned to face the woman at her side, her hair shifted from her neck, revealing the smooth expanse of the column of her throat and the distinctive birthmark hugging the side of it.

Slowing, his eyes widening, Winston stared at the young woman before him and trailed nearer to her. The song still swirled around him, but his attention was fixed firmly on her when she turned to look at him. Her eyes were different than they had been when she was in another body in another time, but there was a familiar shine in them that made her irises shimmer like water. And then she smiled at him, just the top row of her teeth showing, glistening white in the sunlight. For just a moment, he held his breath. Yendi.

Her name this time around was Femi. 127

After the initial stunned stillness faded, Winston made his way to her side and introduced himself as clearly as he could against all the noise. She’d smiled at him, the friendly smile of an interested stranger that had twisted his heart in simultaneous joy and sorrow. Femi, she’d told him her name was.

Just like everything else, it was so similar and so close but still wrong. But he could get used to the name as he could get used to everything else if there was a chance to have even a part of Yendi back.

She’d raised her brows when he told her his name was Winston, had looked down at his outfit that looked so out of place among the field workers that had been singing, and asked where he was from. Another plantation not too far, he answered. She’d looked at him again and her dark brows had risen even more. Evidently she’d figured out he was an owner, not a worker. He couldn’t tell from her face if she was impressed or not. He’d have to learn all the tics of her new face.

Now the sun was set, and the music, the eating, the dancing had yet to really settle down. Tomorrow was Sunday, and tonight was a night for celebrating all they had and all that might come. He’d forgotten what it was like, being surrounded by people like him, living on a plantation with his people. He couldn’t rightly say he missed it and all that came with it, but moments like this, in the glowing dusk with heavy home cooked food twirling in the flames and jokes and laughter he’d grown up with made him long.

Sitting on the ground, knees facing the sky and his arms looped around his shins,

Winston watched the world around him, foreign and familiar. The grass was tall around him, bending in the breeze and running cool, whispery fingers over his legs where his 128 bare skin was exposed under rolled up pants. Above him the sweeping palm trees rustled and murmured, knocking heavy coconuts together as they swayed.

And for just a moment, Winston’s mind was still. And light, suddenly, when Femi reappeared from the crowd, a freshly picked mango in each hand.

A tentative smile appeared on her face and she scurried just a touch to reach him.

She sank to the ground enthusiastically, crossing her legs beneath herself and extending a well-tanned arm to offer him one of the mangos. “From my favorite tree,” she declared, her smile widening when he took it.

“Thanks,” he answered genuinely, tossing the mango in his hand and catching it in a single motion. Under the weight of Yendi’s—Femi’s he corrected himself sharply— gaze he lifted the fruit to his mouth and took a bite, the bitter skin giving way to the plump fruit and a bursting sweetness of mango juice that ran a sticky line down his chin.

Wiping the juice from his chin with the back of his hand, Winston nodded in approval at the mango, then at Femi as he chewed. How long had it been since he sat in the grass with a full, fresh mango in his hands? Not since he’d felt like a boy.

“Good, eeh?” she asked, clearly pleased with herself and the fruits she’d retrieved.

Winston nodded. “Very good.”

When Femi turned her attention to her own fruit, Winston let his attention linger on her. He didn’t know this young woman, when it came down to it. There were parts of her just like Yendi—her eyes, the way she wrinkled her nose and narrowed her brows in displeasure, the surety in her every step and word—but all the memories they’d shared were gone. Replaced by memories of this new life he had no part in. Bonny Hill had 129 become Whiteheath. Slavery now servanthood. And, he had a sinking feeling after watching them interact for the better part of the evening, that he had been replaced with

Badrick, the blacksmith Femi had introduced him to.

Winston had only managed to speak to her a few times over the past few hours with only the polite idleness of strangers. In fact, her announcing he should try a fruit from her favorite tree was among the most personal things they’d mentioned.

Was there nothing of Yendi’s consciousness left in her? Maybe it only needed to be reawakened. Maybe beneath all these new memories were the old ones, waiting in a forgotten chamber for someone to open the door and let them rush out.

“Are you looking for new workers?” Femi asked, looking up at him with those eerily familiar eyes. Again, she offered him a smile. Certainly she was friendlier than she’d been as Yendi who was eternally hostile to outsiders.

Winston cleared his throat and blinked, forcing his attention back to the present moment. “I could always use new workers,” he answered. A safe answer, he figured.

“You live nearby, right?” she asked. When he nodded, she hesitated thoughtfully, her fingers playing absentmindedly with the mango pit she still held. “I heard an

Obeahman owns a plantation near here,” she said, casting an assessing glance at him. “Is that you?”

Well she was direct as Yendi had been. Winston couldn’t help the amused smile that tugged at his lips, and nodded. “Yes, it is.” He cocked his head at her. “Does that frighten you?” 130

Just as Yendi would have, Femi bristled at the challenge, sitting up straighter, her shoulders squaring and her eyes narrowing. “No.” She leaned toward him, as if prepared to tell him a secret, her voice lower when she continued, “I’m an Obeahwoman.”

His brows rose. “Oh?”

She shrugged. “Apparently. I make different mixtures, you know? Talk to the ancestors, that sort of thing. I didn’t know it was Obeah, but my mother calls it that.”

Femi grinned. “She says it’s illegal.”

Winston made a noise of agreement. “So it is. Englishmen say it is.”

“Badrick says they only made it illegal because they’re afraid.”

He found himself reluctant to agree but he nodded nonetheless. How could he not agree with something so blatantly true? And what possible reason could they have had to outlaw a practice with no standard? Winston’s Obeah was different than everyone else’s, he knew, there was no reason for it all to be outlawed so generally if not for fear. “That’s true,” he heard himself admit.

“How foolish to fear something like that,” Femi answered. “They don’t even know what it is.”

A chuckle escaped him before he could stop it. He’d heard that sort of comment before, on Yendi’s lips instead of Femi’s, but the same words nonetheless. How could she be so like the woman he missed and yet someone entirely different?

“So what do you do?” Femi asked. She tossed the mango pit over her shoulder into the darkness as contemplative silence filled the space between them.

Somewhere in the crowd a deep voice was telling an Anancy story and hearty laughter accompanied the spider outsmarting the patoo and making the bird live in a tree. 131

How like Anancy they all felt, downtrodden and overcoming all the predators in their way. How Winston wished at the moment he had any of Anancy’s cleverness to explain to Femi what he did without overwhelming her.

With any luck, his words would make her remember, but he didn’t let himself believe that, not after all the strife he’d gone through to find her in the first place.

“I work with skin,” he said after several moments of thoughtful silence. He watched her eyes, searching for any spark of understanding, then added: “Changing it.

It’s complicated.”

Femi furrowed her brows. “What does that mean?”

“It’s difficult to explain. Easier to show.”

Something in his words made her straighten, a vague air of suspicion in her movements. “It’s something bad?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.” Still she looked at him doubtfully, so he spoke again. “An old friend of mine taught me. Yendi, her name was.”

She nodded, but no flicker of familiarity appeared on her face, and Winston felt a coil of disappointment winding in the base of his stomach.

“Jack Mandora, mi nuh choose none!” the storyteller’s voice announced from the crowd, laughter lacing every word. Absolving himself from agreeing with any of

Anancy’s antics, ending his story and letting another voice rise up in his stead to tell another.

Femi cleared her throat, as if taking her cue from the storyteller and deciding she should start a different conversation as well. 132

That pit in his stomach deepened. She didn’t want to talk about it more, she didn’t want to know about Yendi, had no memory of her. Femi wanted to know what he did but didn’t trust it, not the way Yendi would have. He shouldn’t have expected this young woman, this… stranger, to understand, but he wanted her to so desperately.

“Do you want another mango?” she asked suddenly.

Winston forced a smile and nodded. “Yeah. I’ll take one.”

Femi returned the smile, relieved, and pushed herself up to her feet. “Do you hear the ancestors too?” she asked, brushing off the back of her skirt.

Surprised, he tilted his face upward to look at her. “Yes, I do.”

“Will you tell me what you hear?”

Winston nodded. “Of course.”

Femi’s smile widened, faint dimples appearing below the tips of her lips. “Good.”

Winston watched her turn and fade into the darkness, pausing only to speak to

Badrick the blacksmith who followed her on her way to the mango tree. He ignored the gnawing feeling of disappointed aloneness that yawned wide in his gut, and focused on the fact that he’d found her. Yendi. Finally, he’d found his love after so long wandering the world without her. She was different, Femi was, and it made him feel lonelier than

Blackrose ever did. Seeing those eyes he loved so much and knowing the same Yendi wasn’t behind them.

But she’d given him just a hint, asking about the ancestors even as she eased away from the suspicion she had of his skin changing. Yendi was in there somewhere, and

Winston would find her. No matter where, no matter when, Winston would find his

Yendi. 133

Part II: Femi

Femi couldn’t sit still in the carriage. She wasn’t used to it, being stuck in that jolting seat, the sun beating down on her with such little breeze to ease the heat.

Normally, she would be running, bare feet in the soil, so trained since birth to endure the ground and whatever might be contained within it that she didn’t wince when she stepped on a rock or a stick. But in this carriage, she was antsy, dying to move, dying to take these shoes off. She’d worn shoes before, but not nearly enough to be used to how tight they were and how hot they made her feet.

She’d wanted to ride in a carriage since she was a child, but now she couldn’t remember why. Now that she was being shipped off, sent away from Whiteheath to the

Blackrose plantation. All she wanted was to be let out, to run back to the small village that had been the closest she’d ever known to a home, quasi-orphan that she was. The servants that had embraced her when her own, pale-skinned mother hadn’t. The blacksmith she wanted to spend her life with. The spirits that wandered Whiteheath and knew her by name. Would they follow her? Or would they abandon her as she was being forced to abandon them?

Today, Femi was to be a lady, the lady that the white half of her mixed blood said she always should have been. Today, she was being driven off of Whiteheath property, away from the eyes of the Tyndall family and their horde of not-quite slaves and shipped off to a husband. Her husband. 134

She drew in a deep breath, and dropped her chin to her chest, focusing on her hands rather than the road ahead, bouncing her knees even faster than the carriage jostled

Around her the dusty road grew narrower, bowing palms arching over the smoothed path and dotting it with irregular stripes of shade that were a welcome respite on Femi’s burning hot head. The trees reminded her of the neat, groomed rows of trees that stood at attention on either side of the path leading up to the Whiteheath Great

House.

How many times had she run up and down that path of packed dirt? Weaving under the shade of tree umbrellas and lingering outside as long as she could before she had to be inside to serve her mother. And now she doubted if she’d ever see it again.

Now, when the carriage jerked, the wide wooden wheels clunking over rocks lodged in the road, Femi was jolted back to the present.

She was almost to Blackrose and the husband that waited for her. Already a husband, not a fiancé. It had been a proxy marriage. Uncustomary, but she was a little brown servant, so who really cared enough to protest? No one, apparently. No one with any means to put a stop to it. Her mother had spoken on her behalf and bound her legally to a plantation owner. Tidy and brushed away from the public eye, just as Catherine liked all things to be.

Before her, the pale plaster of the Blackrose Great House rose up in the distance, the sky was dark from an impending storm, the clouds hanging low in the sky, weighed down by the thunder and rain that swirled behind their softness. Initially, she’d assumed the name Blackrose was an arbitrary name, much like Whiteheath being no whiter than 135 any other great house, but Blackrose was lined with its namesake, the walkway marked by rose bushes with jutting black petals.

As the carriage slowed, Femi stared down at them, those petals that looked too sharp, like slices of stone rather than the soft petals she knew them to be. The carriage stopped before the main staircase that led to the double doors set back on a wide porch.

Like Whiteheath had been, the lower two floors of Blackrose were made of stone while the very top was smooth plaster that, now that she was close enough to really look at it, was a pale yellow and not the white she’d thought it had been.

Rohan, the driver, was one of the oldest servants from Whiteheath, hopped down from his bench and made his way to the side to hold up a hand to her. She hesitated, looking down at that large hand made rough by a lifetime of work, as if resisting his offer would permit her to stay in the carriage and return to Whiteheath with him. But she knew better than that.

Sucking in a breath, she took the offered hand and let Rohan half guide, half lift her from the carriage, releasing his hold on her only when she stood surely on her own feet.

He straightened to his full, intimidating height and rubbed his large hand over his low-shorn hair, lips pursed thoughtfully as he looked at her. He’d always been quiet,

Rohan had, unwilling to speak without being provoked into a conversation. There was a simmering resentment in his eyes whenever he looked at the Tyndalls that had made

Femi nervous around him since she was a child, but he had always been kind to her nonetheless. 136

Now, seeing him straining to find words to say to comfort her, seeing the effort that made his expression tighten, she felt suddenly worse. If even Rohan pitied her, what did that mean for her fate?

“Walk gud, Femi,” Rohan said finally, his voice soft. An echo of a smile grazed his dark face, the same sadness and sympathy all of Whiteheath’s servants had been giving her since word had spread of her marriage.

Take care, be safe, he’d warned. The black, Patois-speaking residents of

Whiteheath often left with those words, walk gud, but she somehow she’d always felt the words weren’t for her. Or they shouldn’t have been. No matter how much she longed to be part of them, she knew there was a divide between them, knew that even their language must’ve sounded out of place on her tongue.

She fixed Rohan with a small smile of her own and released the hold she had on his hand. Smoothing the skirts of her dress, Femi wet her lips and sucked in a breath deep enough to make the bones in her neck tense as her dark eyes shifted to take in the Great

House before her.

“Thank you, Rohan,” she answered quietly.

Out of the corner of her eyes she saw him nod, then hesitate before retreating to the carriage once again. She only had a single bag of belongings and she took it in her own hands, not wanting to trouble the servants of Blackrose with something so small before she’d even had a chance to meet them.

Then she took a step forward, listening to the carriage linger before slowly being pulled into motion, and lifted her hand to knock once, twice, three times against the heavy wood. There was movement behind the door, footsteps against stone floors and the 137 clank of a heavy door separating as it was pulled slowly open to reveal a short, dark skinned woman in the doorway.

The woman wasn’t much older than Femi, and narrowed her eyes at Femi’s face, perhaps squinting against the sunlight streaming into the house or perhaps glaring at the young woman standing before her.

Femi cleared her throat, preparing to speak, but the woman spoke before she could.

“Femi?” she asked.

Femi nodded, the motion jerky, and shifted her weight between her feet.

The woman opened the door wider and stepped to the side. “Come in. The good master expects you.”

Without another word, the woman turned and started back into the house, leaving

Femi to stumble in after her.

She pulled the door shut and followed the other woman inside, looking around at the wide interior of the house. It was similar to Whiteheath with its high, sweeping ceilings and parlors and dining areas all set off to the side through rounded doorways.

Nothing much of note, in her opinion, a Great House not unlike any other.

The woman whose name she still hadn’t managed to ask for led her down a hall that she expected would lead to Winston Campbell’s study, but rather than stopping where she guessed that room would be, the woman continued on toward a door at the end of the hall. A door leading outside into the gardens.

Though she’d only just walked inside, Femi squinted against the sunlight as she stepped back outside, the smell of flowers pouring into her nose the further she stepped 138 into the meticulously kept gardens. Roses bloomed on all sides of her, just as black as the ones that lined the front steps, but beyond them were other flowers, pinks and oranges and yellows like the flowers she knew from Whiteheath. Palm trees stretched up to the sky, lush green vines slithering up their trunks and the sides of the tall Great House.

And there, in the midst of the blooming flora, stood a man. His back was facing her, but from the perfect cut of his coat she could tell immediately that he was the master of the house.

The woman turned to Femi and held out her hand, nodding to the bag in Femi’s grip. “Let me see your bag,” she said. “I’ll put your things in your room.”

Wordlessly, Femi let the other woman take her bag, her eyes still set on the man turned away from her. For a moment there was silence, nothing but the buzzing hum of heat bugs that seemed to live in the very air itself until, with the Blackrose maid already gone into the house, her husband straightened from the flowers he had been inspecting and began to turn.

Instinctively, she straightened, holding her shoulders back and trying her best to keep her chin raised when he finished turning and stood facing her directly. Femi inhaled to soothe her tremulous nerves, and stared her husband dead in the eye, forcing herself to meet those irises that sparkled black in the sunlight.

He looked younger than she thought he would and somehow older as well, his skin smooth but not so smooth as to be exactly youthful. He was ageless, more like, with dark black irises that twinkled against the whites of his eyes. His nose was wide, the low bridge of it a touch crooked she guessed from a break in youth that hadn’t been properly healed. And then he smiled, his thick lips spreading to reveal impossibly straight, 139 impossibly white teeth. Winston Campbell was… Black. So this is what her mother wouldn’t tell her, this was why he accepted Femi, mixed up mess that she was.

But that wasn’t what made her eyes widen, none of it was.

She knew him.

She’d met him at Blackrose.

“Oh.” The word slipped from her lips before she could stop it, and she cocked her head to the side, staring at Winston in disbelief.

The man who’d visited Whiteheath on a Sunday evening, who’d stayed all night listening to the music, who’d eaten mangos with her and talked of their faith and unsettled her just enough that she’d thought of the devotion of his gaze well into the next morning.

He took a step forward and her eyes dropped to the sight of his rolled-up pants and bare feet sunken into the soil. “Femi,” he greeted. “I’m so happy you’re finally here.”

“Winston,” she said tentatively, her eyes narrowing ever so slightly on his face, looking for some trace of deceit, some sort of explanation for his seeking her out as a wife after knowing her only one evening.

Winston Campbell grinned, deeper than his first greeting smile had been, apparently relieved to find she remembered him. “You seem surprised,” he tilted his head to look at her, slipping his hands into the pockets of his pants. “Did your mother not tell you my name?”

“She did,” Femi answered with a nod. “But I didn’t expect it to be you.” When

Catherine Tyndall had told Femi the name of her soon-to-be husband, Femi remembered thinking she’d heard the name Winston recently, but the recognition had been overtaken 140 by the fact that she was to be wed to a strange plantation owner, and she hadn’t given the name a second thought.

Femi paused, shifting between her feet, when Winston’s word choice suddenly registered. He’d said mother, so plainly, as if Catherine’s mixed daughter was common knowledge. “Did you call Catherine Tyndall my mother?” she asked.

“Should I call her something else?” he sounded amused, and the twist at the corner of his lips suggested he was holding back another smile. “She is your mother.”

“She told you?” Femi continued in disbelief. She knew her mother had arranged the marriage, but she’d assumed Catherine had been acting the part of a benevolent mistress with a fondness for her maid, not that she’d admitted to Winston her biggest disgrace.

“She didn’t have to,” he answered plainly. She expected him to explain himself further, but instead of doing so, he pulled one hand out of his pocket to gesture around the garden absentmindedly. “I’m afraid I must finish some work, so why don’t I show you your rooms so you can get settled? I’ll join you for dinner.”

Winston lingered for just a moment, but when Femi didn’t offer another word, staring at him in stunned silence instead, he started past her, nodding for her to follow as he led them into Blackrose and up the stairs to her rooms.

Femi lay flat on her back in the center of the large bed placed in the center of her bedroom, head turned so she could watch the sunlight change as it crossed the sky, inching ever closer to evening. Her thoughts were too heavy, weighing her head down to the plush mattress, but no matter how still she tried to make her mind, she couldn’t stop 141 thinking of Catherine and her sudden decision to take Femi from the only life and the only makeshift family she’d ever known on Whiteheath land.

Femi shifted her attention to one of her hands splayed out on the bed. Her hands were smooth, too smooth, too soft for the life of labor she was supposed to have lived.

Her ruddy brown skin stretched tight over her knuckles, marred only by a few splotches of freckles, a mark of just how much time she’d spent sweating under the Caribbean sun against her mother’s wishes.

You’re already dark enough, her mother reminded her again and again.

That wasn’t true. Femi was mixed. A mulatto, the other Tyndall servants taught her. And she had spent the entirety of her life on the Tyndall property, trained to serve

Catherine Tyndall, the lady of the Great House, her biological mother who had told the world upon Femi’s birth that her fourth and final child had passed before she’d made her final descent into the living world. Well what else could Catherine say, when she looked down between her legs and saw that black, curly hair on a brown skinned baby’s head?

Only Femi and Catherine—and apparently Winston—knew whose blood ran through

Femi’s veins, and she suspected the secret was part of the reason Catherine had gone to such great lengths to get Femi away from Whiteheath now that she was older and more likely to talk.

The morning Catherine had told Femi of her plans for Femi’s future, Femi arrived in her mother’s bed chamber to help her dress, sweating from the run to the Great House and later than she ought to have been only to find Catherine sitting on a plush hassock in a dressing robe rather than in bed as she usually was. As Femi stood frozen in the 142 doorway, Catherine beckoned her over and invited her to sit, telling Femi she had exciting news to share.

“Well,” Catherine began with a breath and a sigh. “You know I’ve always loathed you being bound to a life of servitude, yes?”

Slowly, Femi nodded. Her eyes dropped down to her hands, and she started to crack her knuckles as if each distinct popularcould shatter the tension hanging humid in the air.

“Stop that,” Catherine scolded, putting a firm hand on top of both of Femi’s.

She’d always hated the sound. It, she told Femi, reminded her of broken fingers, of violence and pain.

Femi complied, nodding once and putting her hands under her legs in an effort to forget about the knuckles that still needed cracking. The untouched knuckles throbbed under her thighs, begging for attention, but she ignored the sensation and forced her gaze back to Catherine.

Catherine exhaled and removed her hand from Femi’s. “Thank you.” She straightened, sitting up higher as if to assert an air of authority, unaware of how much she intimidated her daughter even lying in bed. “As I was saying. You know I detest your status as a servant. My… relations”—Femi could hear the hesitation in her mother’s voice, even here in her bedroom she was remiss to claim any parentage—“shouldn’t be degraded in such a way.”

Femi ignored the familiar clench in her stomach at the idea that somehow she was being worsened by associating with the servants who had long been the only people she had, even if their acceptance seemed tenuous at times. 143

Catherine ignored Femi’s discomfort, continuing on with her absentminded insulting of the people Femi wanted so desperately to belong to. “For a long time I was fairly hopeless, as I’m sure you know. Because what could I expect in a future for someone like you, Femi, dear? Your father—”

Physically, Femi bit down on her tongue. Edward Tyndall is not my father she wanted to say. Instead, she balled her fists still wedged under her legs and looked away from her mother, not wanting Catherine to notice the tightening of her jaw, the red flush of angry embarrassment that climbed up her neck, heating her from the inside out.

From the looks of it, her mother was continuing undaunted, entirely oblivious to the discomfort that made Femi clench her hands. “—has been noticing how much time I spend with you and has some concerns about the allowances I give you. He fears the other workers may become angry with the privileges you receive. And what can I say to him? You know he doesn’t know you as his daughter. And he really is being kind, he just cannot abide by a streak of rebellion in our servants because it’s perceived that you are favored.”

Here, Catherine leaned forward, overcome with an enthusiasm that seemed foreign on her face as she clutched Femi’s hands, utterly unaware as Femi stiffened at the unfamiliar comfort. “But I have found a solution.” Catherine paused, inspecting Femi’s face and waiting for her to show the same excitement still written across her own face, speaking again only when Femi managed to muster a weak smile of her own. She held her daughter’s foreign hands close to her chest. “A husband.”

No, she wanted to shout at her mother. Rather she live out her life as a poor servant on the plantation she had worked endlessly and tirelessly to find a place with 144 varying success. She wanted to wed Badrick, to the man she’d loved since she was a child, a man whose name she had a sinking feeling her mother didn’t even know. Instead, all she could manage was the short question: “Who is it?”

Catherine exhaled in what could only be relief, the tight line of her shoulders stooping ever so slightly as if Femi’s question had relieved her of a great weight. “His name is Winston Campbell. He owns the Blackrose plantation which means you thankfully won’t be too far from home after the wedding.”

Home? Femi almost scoffed at the suggestion that the Whiteheath Great House was her home. But she didn’t ask her mother what she could possibly mean by that as

Catherine continued on about what a great match it would be, and asked instead why Mr.

Campbell wasn’t already married.

“He simply hadn’t found a wife until this point.” Her mother’s words were rushed, her tone over calm, as if she had rehearsed this answer ahead of time.

In other words, a lie.

Femi’s brows drew together, folding a sharp crease into the flat of her forehead.

Then it was something. Winston Campbell wasn’t just a bachelor, there was something about him that compelled her mother to lie and compelled all other mothers to keep their daughters out of his grasp.

“Why would he agree to marry me? He hasn’t ever seen me, has he? Does he know I’m…” Femi trailed off, letting her mother fill in her silence with whatever description she wanted.

“Darker skinned?” That was one of her mother’s favorites, as if Femi were simply tan, as if she and Helena were the same but Femi had spent a bit too long in the sun. She 145 recoiled from the word black, even more so from the word mulatto, as if somehow being between white and black was worse than simply being one or the other. “Yes.” Catherine dropped Femi’s hands and smoothed the skirt of her nightgown, her gaze dutifully turned from her daughter. “He knows.”

“And why would he settle for me?”

“Femi, please.”

And that was that. Catherine didn’t want to answer her, and Femi couldn’t bring herself to ask again. So Femi left, bolting out of the Great House and running fast as she could to Badrick, feeling the chilled sting of tears against her skin as she did.

She remembered him standing by the shed he worked in, wide eyed as she ran to him tears pouring down her cheeks with Catherine’s promise to marry her off fresh in her mind. Without a question, he’d embraced her, had let her cry and rant until her throat was sore, and had promised her senselessly that he would find her. Don’t worry, he’d told her, resting his cheek against the side of her face, please don’t worry, Femi. It was the first time she couldn’t follow Badrick’s advice.

The piercing heat of orange, setting sunlight shot through the window of her

Blackrose bedroom, directly seeking Femi’s eyes and snapping her out of her musings when she blinked the discomfort away and forced herself to sit up. Still squinting, she slid off the edge of her bed, stretching as she crossed the room toward the door and into the hallway; she didn’t want to be late to dinner.

Sitting in the dining room, watching as a pair of servants—one the woman who had guided her into the house and the other another young woman she hadn’t seen until 146 now—began to lay out dinner, Femi watched the doorway, waiting for Winston’s form to fill it.

The familiar woman poured a glass full of water and placed it before Femi, gaze lingering on her as she did.

“Thank you,” Femi said.

The woman nodded and stood sharply, casting a glance at her fellow servant when she did.

Femi felt a familiar twist in her throat. She’d only been here a few hours and already the servants had decided she didn’t belong with them, that they wouldn’t bother with her. She cleared her throat against the thought. “I’m afraid I don’t know either of your names,” she said, forcing a smile to her face.

Again, the women exchanged a look, then the more familiar one nodded.

“Alecia.”

“Alecia,” Femi repeated. “I’m glad to meet you.” Then she shifted, looking expectantly at the other woman.

“I’m May.”

“It’s good to meet you, May.”

May nodded, a thoughtful smile tugging at her lips, then stepped toward the table.

“I wanted to ask—”

“May,” Alecia interrupted sharply, cutting her friend off with a quick shake of her head.

Femi looked between them both, feeling that tentative bond between them turn volatile, and sat forward in her seat, looking between them both. “No, please, it’s all 147 right,” she said, smiling with what she hoped was an encouraging rather than irritated smile.

“No, Ms. Campbell, I’m sorry,” May answered.

“Please, call me Femi.” She felt the urge to stand and join Alecia and May where they stood on the other side of the table, but she resisted, clenching her hands together under the table and defying the impulse to crack her knuckles. “I don’t mind answering questions,” she continued with a shrug, “I know it must be odd for me to be here so suddenly.”

May hesitated, chewing on the inside of her lip so it sank in just around her cheekbone, and nodded. “Well… are you an Obeahwoman?” she asked quickly, as if the words might burn her tongue on the way out if she didn’t get rid of them soon enough.

Femi hesitated. At Whiteheath, half—if not more—of the servants had watched her warily. Because she was mixed and favored by the Great House, yes, but mainly because of her association with Obeah. They didn’t want to be cursed or sent to Hell.

They didn’t want to be caught anywhere in the vicinity of the illegal practice. And from the looks of it, Alecia and May were the same way, watching every shift in Femi’s movements like prey wary of their predator, waiting for her to do something to validate their fear.

“Well, I…”

Before she could find the words to finish her statement, both Alecia and May straightened, turning to face the doorway where Winston stood. He looked bigger here than he had at Whiteheath, as if he was fed by the land he owned, as if being the master of the house that stood around them made him larger. 148

“Mr. Campbell, sir,” May said, voice a touch higher, a touch more on alert than it had been when she spoke to Femi. “Dinner is set.”

“We’ll leave you now,” Alecia said.

Winston nodded at them both, offering a vague word of thanks as he continued on into the room, dark eyes directly at Femi. He pulled out the seat opposite her and sank into it, an easy smile on his face as if she hadn’t just met him for the second time as a legally bound spouse.

“How have you been settling in?” he asked, lacing his fingers together and resting his elbows on the surface of the table. His eyes were wide, expectant, a faint smile ever present on his lips, as if he’d been waiting for her and now that she was finally here he couldn’t stop his excitement.

Femi paused, finding refuge in her glass of water that she raised hastily to her lips. Winston unsettled her. He hadn’t at first, when he’d wandered onto Whiteheath and they’d first spoken, but as that night wore on and he became more evasive about what he did, she’d grown warier, and suddenly being made his wife certainly didn’t help.

She swallowed down a gulp of water and cleared her throat. “Blackrose is beautiful,” she answered finally, schooling her features into a smooth smile.

Winston nodded. His gaze lingered on her then he forced himself to look down at the plate of food that had been placed before him.

She watched him, following his movements as he lifted his utensils and sliced into a piece of chicken arranged artfully on the plate, then followed his lead, copying his movements with her own. Desperately, she tried to come up with something to say—if she was to live with this man then she might as well try to get to know him—but her 149 mind was blank. All the same the silence grated on her, curling up and down her arms, making her skin itch from the discomfort.

“It’s not so different from Whiteheath,” she finally said into the silence.

“Most plantations are rather the same,” Winston agreed.

“Where do the servants live?” she asked, looking up from her plate to find his attention was already on her. “I didn’t have a chance to really look around.”

Winston paused, chewing thoughtfully, and took a deep drink of his water before speaking, tilting his head in a vague shrug when he did. “A few houses out past the fields.

Not much of a village.”

“No?” That was surprising, for a plantation this size. Maybe a blessing as well, that she wouldn’t have to try to charm so many people. “Why not?”

“I don’t have many servants,” he answered. “And those that are here don’t stay long.”

Femi raised her brows in surprise. “Why not?”

“They come here for help and once they receive it, they go on their way.”

“What sort of help?”

Winston smiled at her, absentmindedly, as if he was so pleased by her question that he couldn’t stop himself, and put down his knife and fork, giving her his full attention. “They come to me for safety, usually. For protection from people looking for them or help changing themselves so they can be freer than they were before.”

Femi’s brows furrowed. “We’re already free, aren’t we?”

“Supposedly. I help make it true.” 150

“What do you mean by changing people? You mentioned it before as well, at

Whiteheath. You said it was complicated.”

“And it is,” Winston agreed. “It’ll be easier to show you than it would be to explain.”

He wanted her to ask more, he wanted her to be interested and ask to see his secrets, she could tell in the tone of his voice, in the way his brows lifted just a touch. In her years she’d learned well how to read people, how to tell from the looks on their faces, the shifts in their voices how she might convince them to accept her, and Winston, odd as he was, was ultimately no different than anyone else.

Femi offered her husband another smile. “Will you show me?”

Winston’s dark eyes glinted in the candlelight, and he nodded. “With pleasure.”

He leaned forward, the pulsing shadows of the candle casting his face in an ever-shifting glow. “Tomorrow, if you’re up to it.”

Instinctively, she nodded, and when he answered her nod with a smile, she allowed her attention to return to her meal.

Femi spent the rest of her meal in silence, forcing herself to focus on the food before her that had been so carefully prepared. She’d never had a meal like it, one that was served to her with no expectation of her helping and no expectation of her cleaning up afterward. It felt odd, as if another role she had had been taken from her.

When her plate was near empty and she was too full to eat anymore, Winston rose from the table and gestured for her to do the same. A ring of nerves cinched tightly about her waist as she followed him. She’d been given her own bedroom, but surely, he expected her to share his bed. She was his wife after all. 151

But when they reached the upper level of the house, he bid her goodnight outside of her door, waiting until she made her way into the bedroom to continue down the hall with the same steady, thudding steps she’d already come to associate with him.

In silence, she stood just before her closed door, waiting to see if Winston would return, and letting her shoulders sag when it became apparent that he would not. A relief, she decided, that she wouldn’t have to perform as a wife tonight. But the relief was chased by a familiar gnawing worry that she wasn’t supposed to be here either. She’d been brought here to be a wife, and yet… Winston didn’t seem to want her as a wife.

She frowned, moving to her bed and sinking down on it, dropping her chin into her hands as she stared at a spot on the shadowy floor. She couldn’t do it again, be so alone, and without Badrick to cling to it was up to her alone to change it. She didn’t care for the pressure.

When Femi woke to sunlight, her dreams lingered in her mind like a sticky morning fog, hazing her waking motions with a sort of grogginess that couldn’t be erased no matter how much she doused her face in cold water.

She’d dreamt of Badrick first, of the little house she liked to pretend they would have together. A memory, more than a dream, of Badrick sitting beside her in the servants’ gardens, his body solid and warm against her side, his expression furrowed into a scowl as it usually was. In the packed soil with a sharpened stick, he wrote their names beside each other, showing Femi—who had never learned to read—what the letters that made them looked like. She’d traced the shapes with the tip of her finger and told him she liked the look of their names together. He’d grinned, breaking that glower that lived on 152 his handsome face, and then drew the outline of a house around their names, promising a future together both of them continued to cling to, a future Femi still dreamt of now in

Blackrose.

She’d wanted to linger in that dream, but it had bled swiftly into a different dream of another Great House. A house on a hill, with blurry, unfamiliar faces all around. It wasn’t until Winston’s voice appeared in her dream that she was jolted into consciousness. Stay with me, dream Winston had told her. Begged, more like, with tears in his eyes as she lay looking up at him.

She supposed he was asking the same of her now, demanding that she stay on as his wife, but she did her best to push her dream away and all the confusion that had come along with it. Badrick bleeding into Winston felt like more of a nightmare than anything else, and, she decided, she had no need to keep remembering it. Besides, she had another thing to focus on today before Winston showed her around: she wanted to win over the house servants.

Femi dressed quickly and slipped out of her room, hoping she wouldn’t run into

Winston on her way downstairs. Hurrying down the main staircase, Femi made her way toward the kitchen and slowed just outside the door when the sound of voices floated out to greet her. Alecia and May again, she recognized their laughter from the night before.

“I saw Henry after,” Alecia was saying. “Him look right, yuh know? Him look gud.”

“But mi will miss him something fierce,” May answered, her voice heavier than it had been the night before. 153

“Find him when Mr. Campbell changes you. Henry say him will wait for you, eeh?”

The two of them laughed, and Femi nearly turned and left before she could intrude any further when the sound of footsteps and a noise of surprise made her turn.

“Mrs. Campbell.” Another of the few Blackrose servants named Ini who stood at least a head taller than Femi and who Femi had only seen very briefly her first day.

“Femi, please,” Femi corrected distractedly, looking back into the kitchen to find

Alecia and May now acutely aware of her presence. Being caught eavesdropping was not the way she’d intended to try starting a conversation with them. She resisted the urge to frown and returned her attention to Ini who began to speak again.

“Did you need something, ma’am?” Ini asked, smoothing her hands over her apron then clasping her hands together and lacing her fingers.

“Oh, I just wanted to say good morning to everyone,” Femi answered uncertainly, pulling her features into a conscious smile.

For just a moment, Ini’s face betrayed her surprise, but she hid it smoothly and nodded graciously, stepping into the kitchen and bringing Femi along with her.

When Femi crossed the threshold into the kitchen, both Alecia and May stood up straighter, facing her directly and offering her pleasant greetings that she returned. And then silence, filled to the brim with fidgeting and a distinct lack of confidence on Femi’s part. How easy the prospect of winning over the Blackrose staff had seemed in the confines of her room, without the weight of three sets of eyes on her.

“Sorry, Mrs. Campbell, but can we help you?” Alecia asked, looking at both Ini and May as she spoke. 154

Femi hesitated, looking at all three of them as she cleared her throat, then shook her head. “Oh, no, I just…” she cleared her throat again. “I always used to help in the kitchen, I just wanted to come and…” she trailed off, shrugging once. “See if I could help with anything.”

“You don’t need to do that, ma’am,” Ini replied before the younger two women could speak. “The mistress of the house doesn’t need to do the cooking.”

“I don’t mind, really, it’s better than being in my room,” Femi said with a light laugh, trying for a touch of humor she hoped would be common ground.

May offered her a smile in response. Probably pity, she guessed, but she appreciated it nonetheless, it was better than the polite silence Alecia and Ini favored.

Still, none of them openly protested her presence so she lingered, finding comfort in the familiar motions of preparing breakfast, in the feeling of other bodies around her. She’d only been here for a day and already she missed Whiteheath and all of its residents. Of course she missed Badrick and what few friends she’d managed to make in her life, but at the moment she missed even the people who cared little for her. At the very least, she knew what their expectations for her were, knew how to predict their behavior.

She wanted to hear Rohan dealing with the horses, wanted to hear Bembe’s off- key whistling as he sucked on a chunk of sugar cane, wanted to hear little Ronica’s high laugh when the tallest field hands lifted her up on their shoulders. Alecia, May, and Ini with their grudging acceptance of her presence were a poor substitute for all the life that bloomed in Whiteheath, but it was better than nothing. 155

A few minutes passed, and Ini removed herself from the room first, moving stiffly as she passed Femi. Watching her go, she assumed Ini was in charge of the other workers. Certainly, May and Alecia appeared to loosen with relief once she was gone.

It reminded Femi distinctly of Catherine, that raised chin of disdain. Ini didn’t bother say it aloud, but she didn’t have to, Femi could read the disapproval in her every step. She didn’t think Femi should be fraternizing with servants just as Catherine thought for the entirety of Femi’s life. When her mother had first seen her running around the fields with Bembe as a child, she’d scolded her for lowering herself to the level of a servant. Femi wasn’t to play with the servants, her mother had told her firmly, she was better than that.

No I’m not, a young and apparently insolent Femi had protested. The servants were the ones who were raising her after all, how could she be too good for them? But her mother was insistent and had scolded some of the other servants for letting her favored worker—because she never could or would claim Femi as a daughter—play with the other children.

Catherine’s disapproval had pushed Femi into isolation and she guessed Ini’s intended to do the same, for without her the kitchen eased into a more comfortable silence, Alecia and May moving in practiced synchronization as they prepared breakfast and Femi slicing fruit as she’d offered to do several minutes prior. Essentially, it was busy work, but she was glad for the task nonetheless, and the chance to blend into the kitchen scene when her hands were busy. Alecia left first, with a tray full of freshly prepared food that she walked out to the dining room, and when they were entirely alone,

May moved quickly from her spot to claim a stool opposite where Femi sat at the table. 156

Femi looked up in surprise, nearly slicing her fingers rather than the slab of pineapple she had been cutting up.

“You said mi can call you Femi, right?” May asked, leaning forward on the table, resting her forearms on the surface.

“Yes, absolutely,” Femi answered. She put her knife down and gave her attention to May, feeling her features lift in grateful relief when May spoke to her of her own volition.

“Then mi can speak freely to you?”

Femi nodded.

“I must tell you because I like you, you seem kind.” May tapped her fingers on the cool tabletop in rapid succession, first finger to pinky then again. “You won’t make friends with any of the servants here.”

A ball of dread grew heavy in the pit of her stomach and she shook her head in faint confusion.

“And nothing against you, Femi. But we don’t stay here long.”

Winston had said as much at dinner, but it still didn’t make much sense. Who would leave a plantation like Blackrose with a landowner who didn’t seem to care very much about how it was run so long as his meals were ready on time? It didn’t make sense to her. She said as much to May.

“Mr. Campbell isn’t an ordinary Obeahman. He’s had partners come before you to try and learn what he does, but they always leave. Tami was here just before you, but she left when he tried to teach her his ways. Alecia says Tami dislikes white people too much to work with him.” 157

Femi frowned in confusion. “What does that mean?”

“Well—”

“May, we need help.”

Ini’s voice interrupted them, and they both turned to see the older woman standing in the doorway, arms folded across her chest. May sighed and rose from her seat, offering a mumbled word of excuse to Femi before stepping out into the hallway.

Ini set her attention on Femi and nodded her head respectfully. “Mr. Campbell will be having breakfast soon. We’ve set a place for you as well.”

Absently, Femi nodded. “Yes, thank you.”

She rose from her seat and made her way out of the kitchen, wiping her fruit- sticky hands on the skirt of her dress as she did, too distracted to remember she no longer wore a servant’s apron at her waist.

Femi passed most of the day wandering Blackrose’s land, looking at the plants that sprouted and wondering just what she would do to fill her time until Winston finished whatever he was doing for long enough to show her his study where, as he told her, he did the majority of his work.

When the sun was setting and evening was painted across the sky in thick purple streaks, Winston found her on the border of the fields and nodded for her to come along with him back to the house. She followed along behind him, trying to commit the halls to memory as he led her through the Great House and down toward the study. Before her,

Winston pushed the door open and welcomed her into the room, lighting the lanterns to send a sweeping swatch of glowing warmth through the room. 158

“You try to protect our people, Femi, you told me so yourself when we were at

Whiteheath.”

Femi nodded.

“I do as well, but to do so I have to change them.” He smiled at her when he spoke, and extended an arm as if to guide her further into the room, but he paused before his hand could actually make contact with her, and dropped his arm. Instead, he stepped past her to retrieve a ring of keys hung up near the door.

Winston continued on, moving keys until he held the smallest of them in his hand, and walked up to a closet, slipping in the key and twisting it. The door sprung free and he grabbed the corner of the door, stopping it from swinging completely open, and turned to face Femi.

“Come look Femi,” he said, waving her closer.

Femi hesitated, then forced herself forward a step and another until the closet was directly before her and the weight of Winston’s presence was directly at her side. She didn’t want to look at the closet, didn’t like the way Winston seemed to come alive at the prospect of showing her whatever lay within. But nonetheless she stayed there, watching as he pulled the closet open and a rush of rose scented air swept out to meet her.

She could do this, she reckoned, face whatever he had to show her, accept it the way she’d taught herself to accept everything else that had come her way. A mental resistance and an outward acceptance. The easiest way to get along, she’d discovered.

Femi squinted through the darkness, seeing nothing but shadows until Winston reached up to retrieve one of the lanterns hanging against the wall. The flickering 159 candlelight bloomed in the darkness, filling every corner and dousing the entire closet in brightness that exposed its contents to her in its entirety.

Clothes, the likes of which she hadn’t seen before. So brightly dyed and covered in words and images so unlike the designs she was accustomed to seeing. So much more intricate than even the wealthiest of clothes she’d seen hanging in the Tyndalls’ closets.

But simple, sleeveless shirts she couldn’t imagine Winston wearing.

She glanced at Winston, but he wasn’t looking at the clothes, instead he looked off to the left side of the closet, glancing between her and whatever hung just beyond where she’d been looking. Femi followed his gaze, turning her head to look at her side where the candle’s illumination was just a touch weaker, leaving it dimmer than the rest of the closet. But it didn’t matter. There was enough light for her to see what looked like the silhouette of a woman. It was hung up on a hanger that swung from a bar at the very top of the closet, the bottom of it swinging in the air.

Her pulse started, her veins sore from the throbbing, but she leaned forward nonetheless, her breath coming short, her face contorted in confusion. It looked almost like clothes. Clothes designed to hug every dip and curve of a young woman’s body.

Made of a fabric that looked—

She leaned even closer, eyes narrowing. It looked like skin.

A noise somewhere between a gasp and a curse escaped her lips and she stumbled back a step, eyes wide and unblinking as she stared at those empty, swinging bodies. Four skins total, hanging beside each other like ironed shirts in a wardrobe.

“Don’t be frightened.” 160

At the sound of Winston’s voice, her attention snapped away from the closet’s interior to the face of her husband. Don’t be frightened. The words echoed in her head.

Don’t be frightened? How could he tell her that, how could his voice be so gentle, laced in an emotion equal parts disappointment and affection.

Don’t be frightened.

“Those aren’t real,” Femi said, her voice more of a question than a statement. She shook her head, daring another glance at the skins before returning her attention to him.

“Are they?”

Winston inspected her for a moment, a look of solemnity crossing his face, then he walked past her, over to the far side of the room where a couch was placed against the wall, and sank into the cushions. An invitation, she suspected, but she lingered where she was, staring at those things, her thoughts swirling.

“Femi,” Winston said, his voice the only sound in the room. It was as if even the wind that swept endlessly about the island had been sucked out of the study when that closet door was flung open.

Femi pulled in a breath, trying to still her mind, and turned to face Winston.

Unwillingly, she crossed the floor to his side, sitting on the opposite end of the couch, her attention almost immediately drifting back to the still open closet.

“This is my work,” Winston began. “I told you I change people.”

“Kill them?” Femi asked, her words stilted, “is that what you mean?”

Winston sighed heavily, as if he’d answered this question endless times and being asked once more exhausted him. “I don’t kill them. I take the color out and I keep it to 161 dye my roses,” he explained. “I let our people hide in society as white people, that’s what

I do. I protect them.”

What could he possibly expect her to say to that? Femi shifted in her seat, looking away from him again and crackling her knuckles, each one cutting the silence with a sharp snap. When she looked back at him, Winston was looking at her hands in what she could only describe as confusion.

“When did you start doing that?” he asked, eyes fixed on her knuckles.

She bunched her hands. “What do you mean?”

He paused, as if just registering what he’d asked, then shook his head. “It’s nothing.” Winston let a thoughtful silence descend then turned his attention to her, expectant.

He wanted a question, she could tell. He wanted her to be curious about the horrors he kept in that closet, wanted her to look at what he’d done right in the face rather than shy away or flee as her legs itched to do.

Her heart was too heavy in her chest, moving too rapidly and too slowly all at once, a familiar panic setting in that accosted her every once in a while, when there were no answers in her head only questions and worries. What had he done? Why had he done it? Why did he want her to see it? What did he expect her to say? What did she have to say to make sure he didn’t do it to her as well?

“How do you do it?” Her voice was distant in her ears, foreign like it belonged to someone else entirely. There was something oddly magnetic about Winston, equal parts frightening and alluring. There was a familiarity in his features she couldn’t quite explain, that made her want to stay, as if he could give her that promise of home she’d 162 sought her entire life. But those skins were sharp shadows in the corner of her mind that made her want to flee, to run down the road as fast as she could, as far as she could.

Winston’s features eased, and he sat back against the couch. “It’s part of my work with the ancestors,” he answered. “I learned it a long time ago from a loved one,” he said, gaze heavy on her. “Yendi.”

Yendi? She recalled him saying the name to her at Whiteheath, but she didn’t know what to make of it beyond that, so she nodded, waiting for him to continue on.

Winston still paused, looking at her face with newfound scrutiny like he expected more of a response from her, then cleared his throat, clearing away the weight of that name she didn’t know, and spoke again. “We take out the color and leave the person pale and free and safe, most of all.”

“But alive?”

Winston smiled. “Always alive. That’s the purpose, to set them free.”

“We’re already free,” she protested.

He kissed his teeth dismissively. “You grew up on a plantation, no? How many of those Black people were free? Free like your white Momma?”

Femi didn’t know what to say, but his passion held her there, the excited urgency in his voice, the light in his eyes. “None,” she heard herself say.

“I free them. Hear me now, Femi. What I do is take off that dark skin and replace it with that pale skin. Like your Momma.”

Femi frowned. “What does that mean?”

“Catherine Tyndall. Your Momma. Born Ronica the slave. She ran away and found Annie Palmer, yuh know her?” 163

Femi did know her. Annie Palmer, the mistress of Rosehall. A dangerous,

Christian woman who went through more slaves than anyone dared count. She nodded.

“I taught her and now Annie helps people like I do. She peels off their skin and sets them free. She helped Ronica, turned her into a white woman with light hair and light eyes. Catherine Tyndall.”

Femi shook her head, leaning away from Winston and whatever impossibilities spilled from his lips. Catherine Tyndall, her own mother… a slave? That was impossible.

Catherine’s dark skin peeled off and replaced with something else? Impossible. “That’s not true,” she said stubbornly. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Haven’t you ever wondered why you came out so?” he asked, nodding to her brown skin, her curling hair.

She had wondered. Endlessly. But that didn’t mean Winston was telling the truth.

“I don’t believe that,” she insisted.

“Think Femi,” Winston implored, leaning forward toward her. “What use would I have lying to you?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. Because for all the ways Winston’s story didn’t make sense it answered questions she’d always had. Where else could she have come from, undeniable mixed from parents without a drop of color in them?

She dropped her gaze to her lap, to her freckled brown hands. Edward Tyndall really had been her father all along. She’d always been Catherine’s legitimate daughter, a full-blooded Tyndall that Catherine had rejected all the same.

“I’m telling you the truth,” Winston maintained. “This is what I do.” Again he extended a hand in her direction but stopped before making any contact with her, 164 resisting from reaching out and grasping her hands. His voice was still in a fervor when he offered, “I could teach you too, Femi.” She hadn’t noticed before, but her name sounded off on his tongue, as if he still had to practice before he could say it properly.

“Together we can help our people.”

An offer to belong somewhere, not just as Winston’s wife, but his partner. The first glimmer of possibility she’d had since Catherine had ripped her from all the promises Badrick had offered her. A place unmarred by Catherine’s past and her dislike for Femi’s features, a place at the expense only of her morals.

“What about the ancestors?” she asked him tentatively.

“They bestowed the knowledge in the first place,” he replied dismissively, waving away the thought.

He had to be telling the truth, after all, how could he be taking the very skin off of living bodies and leaving them alive if he didn’t have the blessings and favor of the ancestors? But still, the voices she’d heard, proud as they were, resilient as they were… she had a hard time believing they would teach him such a thing. What became of those changed people, she couldn’t help but wonder. What were they now that they’d severed ties with their pasts?

How many times she’d wished she could be darker, wished there wasn’t that little separation between her and everyone else because the people in power favored her looks.

No amount of wishing could close the distance between her and her blood family or her and the fellow servants she’d dreamt could be her family. And here were the abandoned skins of people who had had a place in the world, a real, solid place in the world and had given it up. 165

Before her, Winston was still looking at her, taking in every shape, every dip and rise of her face with an intent that almost made her squirm.

Femi swallowed her discomfort and cleared her throat. “You said you could teach me,” she tried, wanting the silence hovering over them to fade.

A grin bloomed on his face and he nodded, relieved. “I can. I will. We’ll help our people together, Femi.”

Our, together. What sweet words to hear that filled her with a slightly bitter warmth. Was she really so desperate that she would let herself get sucked up further by this man’s delusions and depravity?

Maybe, she decided, she could give up whatever qualms she had over the whole thing, maybe she could give up the stab of disgust that burned through her at the sight of those hollow things in the closet. She could belong here, at Blackrose, at Winston’s side if she did, and she felt herself nodding at Winston. And, in that same moment, she felt a sinking helplessness at the impression his thoughtful expression gave her: that he didn’t really want her.

Femi had agreed to training with Winston. She’d debated it for a while but found herself agreeing nonetheless. What were the chances she could actually get back to

Badrick and that the pair of them could get away from Whiteheath before her mother found her and put a stop to it? What were the odds she would find anywhere else that embraced her so openly? Even if Winston’s desire for her was odd and seemed a touch uncertain, it was better than nothing, and good enough for her to agree to training. 166

But sleepless as she was the following dawn, standing on the balcony and letting the morning breeze sweep around her, she found herself doubting. Whatever Winston was doing, helping people or not, it wasn’t what she’d thought her beliefs and her practices were for.

Though slavery on the island had been abolished for most of Femi’s conscious life, Whiteheath held the memory of suffering and still echoed with misery. And when

Femi walked through the sugarcane fields and her bare feet felt the wet dew of morning soil, she wondered if blood too seeped through the dirt and into her soles. Perhaps it was the blood of her own ancestors that soaked the ground and made it fertile enough for all of this lushness to grow. She’d never know, of course, but she wondered. Wondered enough that whenever she could, she slipped out of the Great House in the early morning to walk the fields and talk to the spirits she knew lingered.

She could hear their voices on the breeze, could see their shadows tromping through the grounds, and felt their touch on her arm, comforting, protecting, warning. It was from them that she’d first heard the mutterings of curses and protections, a nameless faith she’d thought was hers and her ghosts’ alone until the other servants had given her a word to match the feeling: Obeah. Of course, Catherine had tried to put an end to the habit as soon as she learned of it—it was illegal after all—but regardless, to Femi, the ancestors were for advice and love and help, not for whatever Winston was practicing. At least, that’s what she’d always believed, though it was possible, she supposed, that she had been wrong.

Well, it was simple enough, she decided. She turned from the balcony and strode back inside, slipping into shoes and hurrying into the shadowy hall before she could think 167 better of it, directing herself toward the gardens. She would simply ask the ancestors herself.

Winston’s rose garden was endless. So endless she couldn’t help remembering that his dye came from the bodies he changed. How many had given him their color?

How many bodies did it take to dye a rose?

Femi pushed the thought away and continued on through the bushes, noting and ignoring the persistent scratch of thorns that pricked her calves through the thin material of her nightdress. She wanted the roses to engulf her entirely, to block out the sight of

Blackrose and all its menacing size in the dim dawn light. She continued pushing through the leaves and bushes until they surrounded her on all sides, until everything but the garden was obscured from view, and she forced herself to take in a deep breath.

The air was particularly clear tonight, the breeze faint enough the trees in the distance barely shuffled as it carried fresh, faintly salty tasting wind to where she stood.

Pausing to look around her, to make sure she was entirely alone in this garden of half-forgotten memories, Femi lowered herself slowly to the ground, crossing her legs and keeping her back straight. She folded her hands in her lap and lifted her chin to the sky, letting her eyes fall shut as she took in a heavy breath and held it for a moment longer than she normally would, then exhaled slowly.

“I need help,” she said into the air. “Anyone, please, I need help.”

Normally, when Femi heard the ancestors gossiping on the wind, it was a faint but ever-present sound all around her, living and breathing with the rest of the world as though the spirits had never left. But whenever she reached out to them first, whenever 168 she attempted to call for them, the world grew still, as if by returning to the world they’d once fully inhabited froze the very time Femi lived in.

And sure enough, that soft, salty breeze faded all around her, a silence she’d learned accompanied death settling all around her, silencing even the distant calling of birds and the jittering of bugs. Only when she felt the distinct weight of someone’s gaze upon her did Femi force her eyes open, lowering her chin to look directly before her. She squinted through the hazy darkness, surprised to see two unfamiliar misty figures seated before her.

One of them was an old woman, a shadowy smile across her face that was gently distorted by the shifting of her foggy form. Her round nose crinkled ever so slightly, similarly round cheeks rising with the shape of her smile that made her black eyes glitter.

“Femi,” she said warmly, wrinkled face crinkling even more when her smile deepened.

She lifted a gnarled hand to her chest and tapped above her heart twice. “I’m Mama

Juba.”

Femi returned the smile and nodded her head down once respectfully. “Hello,

Mama Juba.”

Then she turned her attention to the younger looking woman at her side. For a moment she was pale, the color of coconut flesh, and then when her hazy body shimmered under the still-present starlight, she was dark, sable-skinned and smiling. A pang of familiarity shot through Femi, but she couldn’t place it. She’d never seen this ancestor before, she was sure of it. Most of the time, she only ever saw a spirit by the name of Dante, who had looked out for her since she’d been born. His was the first ancestral voice she’d ever heard, and he was who she’d expected to see now. 169

But this woman, older than Femi but somehow entirely outside the constraints of age just as she appeared to be free of the restraints of body, given the colors of her hair, eyes, skin changed again. Femi knew her, somehow. Had she died young, or had she chosen to look this way for Femi? She never did know if the ancestors remained as they were in death or if they returned to a way they had been in life.

“Hi baby,” the woman said, a smile curling at the corner of her lips, saying the words with such ease Femi could tell she said them often.

Did she say them often to Femi? A wave of frustration overtook Femi’s thoughts.

Why did she know this woman she’d never seen before? What couldn’t she remember?

Why was she so familiar? Why were the memories attached to her so far removed from

Femi’s consciousness?

“I’m sorry,” Femi said, swallowing. “I don’t know your name either.”

The smile the younger woman wore shifted, a touch of melancholy to it where before there had been only affection, but her voice was genuine when she spoke. “They warned me you might not.” Her appearance shifted again, darkening once more, and she leaned forward toward Femi before answering: “It’s Mary.”

“Mary,” Femi repeated, hoping saying the name herself would spark some memory. It didn’t. In fact, it made it a touch worse. She knew that name, not just in a general sense, but a blurry image of someone long forgotten and buried in the very depths of her cloudy memory. She bit back her frustration and focused instead on why she’d summoned these ancestors in the first place. Winston and his work. 170

“You want to talk about Winston, eeh?” Mama Juba asked with a knowing tilt of her head. She laughed lightly, the sound worn and vaguely scratchy though just as bright as the smile she still wore.

Mary shifted, crossing her legs as Femi did, and turned her attention to the rose bush nearest to her side. She ran a ghostly hand over the petals, making them dip under the weight of a phantom breeze. Momentarily, she was corporeal, and Femi found herself wondering how much of the wind was always the movement of spirits. Perhaps that was why Mary seemed so familiar; maybe Femi knew the touch of Mary’s spirit, maybe it had followed her around for years.

“Him tell you?” Mary asked, turning her gaze to Femi suddenly, removing her fingers from the rose and letting it bob back into place.

“He showed me the skins,” Femi answered.

“And you want us to tell you why he does it,” Mama Juba guessed.

Frankly, Femi could have used some clarity on that front, but that wasn’t why she’d called the ancestors. Winston wasn’t hiding anything from her, he was willing to answer her every question, explain his every motive. At least it seemed that way. But she didn’t really care about why he did what he did, beyond the overly enthusiastic explanations he’d given her about being some sort of savior.

So she shook her head. Cleared her throat. “No, I… wanted to know if this is what we’re meant to be doing.” When neither Mama Juba nor Mary offered her an answer, she shifted and spoke again. “I thought we were connected to the ancestors for healing and guidance and memory, but… Winston is changing our histories, isn’t he? He’s erasing our people.” 171

For another moment, both ancestors were silent. Mama Juba cast a meaningful glance at Mary then slowly looked at Femi. “He believes he’s saving them,” Mama Juba said carefully.

“I know he does. What I mean is…” Femi hesitated, unable to find the words. She could feel the weight of their stares on her and she wondered if they preferred Winston to her. Maybe they would resent the questioning, maybe she really had been wrong and this was why they were given the abilities they were. Maybe Winston had been right all along and she had been wrong. Maybe Mama Juba and Mary were testing her and getting ready to tell Winston to give up on her if she disappointed them.

She wished Dante had come instead of these ancestors who looked entirely too comfortable at Blackrose, as if they’d been here long before her and would be after as well.

“You mean is he going against us by changing people?”

Femi looked up at the sound of Mary’s voice, soft like the whisper of leaves on the wind, full of understanding as if she could see through Femi’s hesitation even without

Femi daring another word. Femi nodded. “Yes.”

Mary blew out a breath. “I had those thoughts a long time ago. I was changed, in life, by the young woman who taught Winston to do the same.” Mary paused, looking carefully at Femi’s face, looking like she expected Femi to remember some part of her story.

Winston had mentioned his teacher briefly, but she didn’t know enough about it to respond to Mary’s words with anything more than a nod. 172

“But I gave up that part of myself so that I wouldn’t be killed. It was hard, but necessary.” Mary gave her a small smile. Then she paused thoughtfully. “Winston does it more often than it used to be done.”

“Is he wrong?” Femi asked.

This time Mama Juba spoke, her voice tender. “We can guide you, Femi, we can’t make your choices.”

“I thought we were connected to the ancestors to learn how to protect each other, and to learn the wisdom of the past so we don’t make the same mistakes over again,”

Femi said quietly. It was something Della, an old servant at Whiteheath who had been connected as Femi had, had told her when she’d first learned others could hear the ancestors as she could. She’d lived by Della’s words ever since, explaining her connection to the ancestors as the older woman did, but perhaps Della had been wrong.

Or perhaps that’s how it worked for her but Femi wasn’t lucky enough to have it be so.

“That’s true, pickney,” Mama Juba began affectionately. “Why yuh seem unsure?”

Femi scratched the length of her eyebrow, fidgeting under the pressure of both spirits’ gazes and unsure how she should answer Mama Juba without accusing the ancestors of being wrong. She’d never made such a claim before and she doubted they would react well to it. “All this change seems wrong, but you all approved of it.”

“We give our suggestions and our knowledge and our power,” Mama Juba answered, “We can’t control what our descendants do with all we offer.” 173

What was that supposed to mean? Was he wrong then? Had Winston gotten it all wrong and manipulated the gifts they’d given him, using the ancestors’ words and guidance to change their descendants rather than honor their memories?

And what did that mean for her? Was she to stay here and go along with it as

Winston would have her do? Was she to stand up to him and tell him what he was doing was wrong? Was it even wrong? Mama Juba really hadn’t given a clear answer and from the looks of it, Mary didn’t intend to either.

Femi frowned. “But…” She trailed off. She looked down at her lap, smoothed her fingers across the fabric of her skirt.

“Ask another question. I can see you have one.” Mama Juba instructed, a light lilt of amusement lacing her words.

Femi scratched the patch of skin below her ear, the spot where every once in a while, she caught of glimpse of a birthmark in the mirror. “Am I wrong to stay?”

“Why yuh want to stay?” Mary demanded. Her voice wasn’t so soft as it had been, but her expression was still kind. “Yuh don’t seem to like it, why stay?”

“Because I…” Femi swiped her tongue across her bottom lip in contemplation. “I have a place here.”

“You don’t belong anywhere else?” Mary asked.

Femi drew her shoulders up. “Not really. I don’t think so.”

The corners of Mary’s lips curled up gently, affectionately. “Maybe you should think about it more. This time around, try living for yourself, eeh?” 174

Wasn’t that what she was doing? Wasn’t trying to find a place all her own living for herself? Femi wanted to ask, wanted Mary to tell her explicitly what she should be doing if what she was doing was wrong, but before she could ask, Mary spoke again.

“Where do you want to belong, Femi?”

Where? Was it a choice? Femi stared at Mary in confusion, watching the young woman shift colors again, ultimately returning to her darker shade. Was this what happened, she wanted to ask, you changed yourself in life so your spirit was unsure of itself even in death? What did that mean for Femi who hadn’t changed herself so concretely, but had tried to change little bits of herself no matter where she went, trying to belong in a world that wouldn’t quite have her? Was she to spend eternity wandering and wondering?

Mama Juba looked up at the lightening sky. The world would wake soon and the noise of it all would be so loud Femi wouldn’t be able to hear Mary and Mama Juba speaking in the face of it. Their time would be up soon, and Femi hadn’t figured anything out. If anything, she was more confused than she had been before.

“Trust yourself, baby,” Mary said. When Femi looked up at her, she was smiling again. She extended a foggy hand to Femi and gave her an affectionate squeeze on the arm that went almost entirely unfelt.

It was a soft, ghostly echo of human touch that made Femi wish she could embrace Mary more fully and cling to her with every bit of strength she had in her arms.

But before she could linger on the thought, both Mama Juba and Mary were on their feet, preparing to disappear back to wherever it was the ancestors rested. 175

Mary looked down at her again thoughtfully, and Femi was struck once more with the feeling that she should have already known Mary. “Thank you,” Mary said, smiling through the words as if she’d been waiting to say them and finally being able to lifted a great weight from her back. Then, before Femi could ask what in the world Mary could be thanking her for, the beautiful ancestor began to fade, her last words before departing caught up on the returning breeze and sweeping around Femi’s ears once Mary’s body was already gone: “But this time think of yourself.”

Around Femi, the world burst back to life, the rising sun waking whatever had been slumbering and filling the air with a cascade of noise that startled Femi back to the present. Again, she was alone, and still, she was completely unsure what she was supposed to do.

She heaved herself to her feet, mulling over what Mama Juba and Mary had had to say to her as she began picking through the roses that seemed intent on tripping her every time she took a step.

It was only then, as she was making the trek back to the Great House that a particular phrase of Mary’s stuck in her head. This time around. What was that supposed to mean? Had her feeling been right then, that she did know Mary somehow? If they’d met before, why couldn’t Femi remember it at all when Mary so obviously seemed to?

This time Mary wanted Femi to be selfish, apparently. Had she been selfless before? In a time she couldn’t remember?

Femi felt her face shift into a frown. How was she supposed to find a place for herself, or even decide what to do with Winston’s work if she couldn’t even remember all 176 of her own history? Surely she couldn’t be trusted with the memories of their people if she couldn’t even be trusted with her own.

The feeling gnawed at her, biting a hole in her gut that seemed to widen the nearer she drew to the Great House. She didn’t know herself. She’d resented the world for rejecting her, but apparently her own memory had rejected her first.

The knowledge throbbed in her head, putting a pressure behind her brow and deepening her scowl. In her whole life, in all the world she’d known, Badrick had been the one she’d run to, had been the one to accept every part of herself, but had he seen her for all that she was, for all that Mary seemed to see? Or had he only known what Femi had known?

Maybe she’d willfully forgotten herself to be accepted; it wouldn’t be the first time she’d pushed some part of herself away in the hopes of being welcomed. But she always kept that part of herself with her, just quietly. But what if in all the changes she’d made to herself she’d made a change as permanent as Winston made and lost some part of herself for good?

When Femi’s focus returned to the world around her, she found herself at the door to the Great House and let herself inside, closing the door behind her and pushing out the dawning morning as she did. She should go up to her room and get dressed, she decided, but when she started down the hall she found herself stalling at the door to Winston’s study. Impulsively, she strode into the room, letting the door swing shut behind her as she made her way to the closet.

It was unlocked this time. Apparently now that she knew his secret Winston didn’t seem to care about keeping it secured. She extended a hand and pulled it open, 177 letting the penetrating sunlight that streamed in from the windows fill up every crevice of the closet. The twinkling sun illuminated those hanging skins and Femi found suddenly that they didn’t stun her so much in the daylight. There was a sort of melancholy beauty to them, those vessels of memory that their owners had left behind. Perhaps she had a skin of her own hanging somewhere, containing all that was missing from her own memory.

Absentmindedly, Femi extended a hand and drew her fingers across the nearest skin, surprised to find it was soft, almost like silk as it ran against her fingers. Was there a way to get it all back? Maybe Winston knew. Maybe he would teach her if she asked; he’d seemed more than willing to train her when he’d shown her the contents of the closet in the first place.

“Oh.” Winston’s voice broke through the silence she’d grown used to. His steps sounded too loud as he crossed the floor toward her, stopping several paces away and clearing his throat when he came to a stop. “I didn’t know you were awake.”

She wondered what she looked like to him now, standing there in a nightdress, her fingers inspecting the skins she’d reared back from the night before. “Train me,” she murmured, her attention still on the skin before her.

Femi turned just in time to see a pleased surprise flit across his face, and before he could ask if she meant it, she answered his unspoken question: “Teach me everything you know.”

178

The hope that Winston, who seemed to know her better than he had any right to, would be able to help cure all of Femi’s uncertainty was what she clung to when she met

Winston outside in the gardens later that afternoon.

She was dressed in day clothes now, and had her wits more about her than she had had in the wake of her conversation with the ancestors. Then she’d been an impulsive mess, ready to agree to anything Winston had to offer her in the hopes of him curing her confusion, but now that a few hours had passed, she was simultaneously more collected and ready to hear what Winston had to say to her and less willing to plunge into whatever cursed Obeah he found himself practicing.

She stood among some of the larger rose bushes that snuggled in around her legs, welcoming her into their territory and smoothing their leaves against her skin whenever they could. Maybe she should just stay in the garden, she thought to herself, the flowers seemed more than content to have her with them.

Well, looking at Winston now, it appeared he did as well. His features were smoothed into an easiness she hadn’t seen on him before, the faint shimmer of a smile ever present at his lips. Perhaps it was relief, that she’d agreed to let him show her his work. Perhaps he was simply pleased the wife he’d taken on could look at what he’d done without balking.

Either way, Winston looked utterly pleased standing in the rose garden now, with the sun high above them lighting their faces and making shining sheens of sweat popularup on both of their brows. He rolled up his sleeves, revealing dark, taut forearms that tightened and shifted as his hands moved to push away the cumbersome fabric. 179

“I’m glad you’ve decided to work with me,” Winston said, squinting against the sunlight to look at her.

Femi nodded, a small, polite smile at her lips. I’m still not completely sure, she wanted to tell him. She didn’t know if she’d be able to actually do it herself if it came down to it, strip someone of their identity and feed them a new one to exist among the very people who hated them. She wanted to learn what Winston knew, she wanted to see who he thought she was meant to be. But she didn’t know if she could really do it herself, make people feel as disconnected and confused as she’d always felt. It seemed more a punishment than anything else, even if the spirit Mary had said it saved her, even if Femi knew how much easier it was to blend in and survive than stand out and suffer.

But she didn’t tell him any of her uncertainties. Winston had offered her a tentative lifeline, and it was better than drifting entirely anchorless.

“You seemed unsure before,” Winston continued, eyes still narrowed on her, trying to perceive whatever it was she wasn’t telling him.

“I was.” Femi swallowed, blinking and shifting her attention to the nearest bush and a particularly small ant that shimmied across the leaf, so determined she was sure it knew exactly where it had come from and where it needed to go. She said nothing more, and in the silence, Winston spoke instead.

“What changed?”

Femi lifted one shoulder in an unfinished shrug. “I talked to the ancestors this morning.”

Winston lifted a brow. “And they told you to train with me?” 180

“They told me they couldn’t tell me what to do.” When Winston’s expression turned to amusement, betraying his own less than helpful experiences with the ancestors,

Femi smiled. “I had hoped they’d be clearer.”

“Except a few I find they tend to prefer riddles and hints,” Winston said in agreement. Then he tilted his head in interest. “Who did you talk to?”

“Two women. I’d never met them before,” Femi answered. “One was named

Mama Juba.”

Recognition lit Winston’s face and an affectionate warmth made his smile a touch more welcoming than it had been before. “I often speak to Mama Juba. Since I was a pickney.” For a moment, he appeared lost to memories, then he returned his focus to

Femi. “And the other?”

“Her name was Mary.”

Winston stilled, that warm expression shifting into something else, a tinge of melancholy tightening his features. “Mary?” he repeated.

Again, Femi was struck with the sharp sense that she should have known Mary, should have known her as more than a shadowy spirit, should have known her in flesh and blood when her skin didn’t shift in the moonlight. She nodded. “Mary. She knew you, she’d been changed.”

A silence fell over Winston, his expression going cold and thoughtful. His eyes shifted back and forth, looking at something Femi couldn’t see, as if he was staring through the very world they stood on. Then he looked back up at her. “What did she look like?”

“Oh… well, she kept changing.” 181

“Changing?” he demanded.

“The way you change people. Only she was going back and forth.”

Winston wet his lips, silent again for a moment before speaking. “How did she seem?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was she upset?”

“No,” Femi answered with a shake of her head. “She seemed… happy. She thanked me,” she continued, letting her bewilderment seep into her voice as she looked at

Winston, hoping to see some of her own confusion reflected in his face. But instead, his expression was still distant, still melancholy with just the hint of relief at the corners of his mouth, remembering something that completely evaded Femi’s understanding. She cleared her throat, eyes wide when they met his once again. Her brows pinched together.

“Did you know her?”

Winston’s answer came out on a distracted exhale: “yes.”

He offered nothing more, nothing but silence as he returned to his staring at nothing, eyes shifting back and forth as he thought. Then suddenly he looked up at her and a flare of desperation pulled across his face. “Don’t you?”

Femi looked at him in confusion. “Don’t I what?”

“Don’t you know her?”

Uncertainly, Femi shook her head. A stark look of disappointment crossed

Winston’s features, and she was struck again with the feeling that he didn’t want her there, that everything she did was a sad disappointment to the master of Blackrose.

“Should I?” she asked tentatively. 182

“No.” The word was clipped, and when Winston blinked again, all that thoughtful stillness was gone, replaced by a seriousness as he regarded her, a foreignness, as if he’d never really looked at her face before.

She wanted to ask him something more, wanted to make him explain himself, make him tell her why he had looked at her so hopefully earlier and now stared at her with frustration. But before she could find the words to demand an explanation, his attention was on the flowers and he gestured for her to join him where he stood.

Thoughts still reeling with the image of Mary and the memory of Winston’s absentminded scowl, Femi stepped through the plush garden soil toward Winston and stopped at his side, just a step away so their arms wouldn’t brush when he moved.

“What is your Obeah like?” he asked, his voice softer than it had been before.

Apparently, he’d pushed away whatever had dissatisfied him, and when he turned to look at her, his expression was easy with just a touch of warmth as it had been before.

Femi swallowed, trying to follow in his stead and forget all that she’d just watched flit across his face, and shrugged. “What do you mean?”

“What do you feel when you connect with the ancestors?” He specified.

Femi hesitated. How could she put it into words, that feeling that filled her very blood when she reached out to the voices on the wind? She felt them around her all the time, cradling her spirit the way no living hands had ever been able to do. And when she extended a hand to them, calling out to them, the ancestors around her seemed to rejoice, grasping at her hand as if they couldn’t wait to pull her into their world.

She didn’t know enough words to explain it, all that connectedness she felt in the world, that thrum of souls both living and lost that hung in the air like humidity. 183

Still, when she was faced with Winston’s patiently expectant face, she forced herself to speak. “I guess… it feels sort of like…” she trailed off, looking at the garden surrounding them. “Sort of like a garden.”

Winston’s brows twitched toward each other, a similarly twitchy smile attempting to pull at his lips. “A garden?” he asked.

“Yes, a garden,” she repeated. “The way all the roots are and the different leaves and petals. When I touch a plant like this one,” she reached out, brushing her fingers along a blooming rose before her, “I can feel the bugs on it that make the leaves shake.

And I can feel the stem that holds it straight. And I can feel the other leaves around it and the petals curling around me. And I can hear the sound of the other plants nearby moving, and when I walk I can feel all the roots tangling together under the soil and making the dirt bunch up.” She turned her head to face Winston, hoping to see what he thought of her comparison and finding instead a sort of wonder in his eyes as he stared at her, as if she was, for the first time today, living up to his hopes.

Femi cleared her throat. “When I practice, it feels sort of like that. I can feel all those ancestors and I can hear them and if I reach out hard enough, I can touch them, just like this flower.” She blinked uncertainly at him, then, at his silence, asked: “Does that make any sense?”

“Yes,” Winston said through a gentle smile. “It does.”

Around them, the wind picked up, lifting the scent of roses until it swirled all around Blackrose and overtook the distant scent of heat and salt that always hung in the air. Femi looked back down at the roses and let her fingers linger on the petals before speaking. 184

“Is it similar for you?”

“Sort of,” Winston said. “Perhaps not so poetic,” he added, a slight lilt of jest in his voice that eased just a touch of the tension in her shoulders. He sighed thoughtfully, running the palm of his hand over his head as he did. “You sound like my old friend. The one who taught me how to change people. She spoke of her practice the same way.”

Somewhere off in the distance she heard the familiar noise of plantation life, animals and people, laughter and chatter, carried to them on the breeze and so distant she couldn’t see any of the people making the noise. But for once, she didn’t feel that incessant pull to find them and join them. She wanted to hear what Winston had to say to her, to keep this place she had right now, at his side, looking at the roses and sharing their understandings of the world.

“This is how she explained it to me: there’s a spirit in being Black. There’s history and heritage and unity in it, same as with the ancestors. She taught me to feel for it the same way you feel for the ancestors, and when you feel it, you reach out to it like an ancestor’s hand. Like pulling at a root. You have to dislodge it, weave it through all the other roots to get it free. You weave that thread through all the other parts of the soul.”

Winston’s fingers tightened suddenly on a black rose petal and pulled it loose from the stem in a single, sharp motion. “You unwind it, and you pull it free.”

Was that possible, she wondered, feeling out just a portion of someone’s spirit and extracting it? She’d never considered it that way before, had never thought of trying to separate someone into different parts of themselves. 185

And just where would that leave her? Mixed as she was, did she still have that certain spirit in her that Winston believed in? Could she feel it in herself the way he felt it in everyone else?

She looked down at where her fingers still rested against the flowers, momentarily captivated by just how light she looked against them. Had she always been so light? Was there really something missing in her?

“Probably easier just to try,” he offered, leaning forward in an attempt to recapture her attention. “It’s much weaker than in a person, but you can still feel it in these flowers.” He gestured at the garden that circled them. “The color is from our people, and some of the essence lingers.”

“If some of it lingers, what happens to the changed people?” Femi asked. She stroked a finger over a rose, stilling when the pad of her first finger reached a thorn. “Are they always missing something?”

Maybe it happened to her. Maybe whatever her mother had lost being changed had been passed down to Femi when she was born. Catherine Tyndall had let go of whatever essence Winston recognized and her daughter had been born lost.

She looked up at Winston, biting the inside of her cheek uncertainly and feeling the familiar throb at her fingers to crack her knuckles wishing that releasing the pressure there could release all the pressure building in her chest. She resisted the urge.

“No,” Winston answered easily. He cleared his throat, a faint frown creasing his expression. “I don’t think so.”

“Have you asked them?” 186

“Mary was happy about it,” he answered. Again his eyes got that distant look, focusing on the roses before him but looking through them, through to something Femi couldn’t see. “She would have died otherwise.”

“Would you ever do it?”

Would he give up the part of himself that he was so ready to take from everyone else? She had a distinct feeling that he wouldn’t, that somehow he drew a distinction between himself and everyone else.

Winston whipped around to look at her, brows tugging together. He looked at her face, staring at her features so intently she almost squirmed under the pressure. It was almost as if her face was suddenly foreign to him and he wished to understand it. His frown deepened. “Why would I?”

Hesitantly, Femi shrugged. “If you had to. If it would save your life.”

His eyes narrowed on her briefly, then he returned his attention to the flowers.

“Would you?”

Femi paused. If she did would the Tyndalls welcome her into their home? Would she have brothers and a sister the way she always wanted?

A memory resurfaced suddenly, Helena staring at her as she prepared the youngest Tyndall’s clothes for the day. You’re quite pretty. She’d told her. She didn’t have to add that she considered Femi pretty for a colored girl, but it was clear enough. If

Femi had let someone like Winston change her would Helena have meant it? Would she be complimenting her little sister genuinely, telling Femi that her dark eyes and stray sprinkling of freckles were charming? 187

Did Femi even want that? Under all the longing she’d had since she could remember, were the Tyndalls actually what she wanted?

Suddenly she was unsure. She didn’t want to die, but the idea of having Winston or someone like him take something out of her very spirit just so her physical body could survive made her frown.

“No.”

The word escaped her before she could think about it, a sudden, distinct condemnation of what Winston had shown her. She wished she could take it back. True as it was, what if it ruined every shred of closeness she and Winston had had moments before?

“I mean…” Femi shifted the weight between her feet. “I don’t think I would.”

Winston made a noise of contemplation, then returned his attention purposefully to the flowers. “Try to feel the spirits,” he murmured, directing her attention to the roses with a sweep of his arm. He pulled at a thick branch, tugging it down until the leaves extended in Femi’s direction. “Try.”

The conversation was over, that much was clear. He’d ended it before she could push him to admit that some part of him still rebelled against the idea of changing someone. But rather than pursue it, Femi nodded shallowly and directed her own attention to the leaves, taking hold of one branch with her own hand, ignoring the sting of thorns as she did.

Femi dreamt of Mary that night and woke up with that whispering voice still echoing in her ears and the stone weight of guilt in her chest. 188

In her dream, Mary had been back in her mortal body, staring at Femi with wide, watery eyes. Her face had been pale, getting darker at her chin and turning into the deep brown of her original skin by her neck, as if the color was being slowly leeched from her face. And in Femi’s hands was a spool of black thread that she couldn’t stop pulling at. It gathered, thicker and ever longer as Femi pulled, stealing the color from Mary and leaving her permanently altered.

When she jolted out of her sleep, her back was running with sweat and Mary’s eerie voice saying thank you continued to ring in her ears. Mary thanked her, in that dream, but Femi couldn’t shake the guilt loose. In her dream, she had been the one to change Mary, she had been the one to steal that part of Mary. And even as she realized she wanted to stop pulling that color out of Mary’s skin, she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t undo it.

Needless to say, by the time she joined Winston in the garden she was less than thrilled to continue on trying to feel whatever spirit he did in the petals of black roses. For hours the day before she’d examined those roses, trying to feel what he felt and finding nothing but flowers. Whatever sense of history and memory Winston had tried to convince her lived on in these petals she had a hard time believing in.

“Are you ready?” Winston asked without turning to look at her when she appeared in the gardens.

His words were clipped, slightly irritated, slightly disheartened. However frustrated she’d been at being unable to understand what he wanted her to, he evidently felt tenfold. She nodded though she knew he couldn’t see her, and joined him where he stood. 189

Today she was barefoot, hoping that being able to feel the earth directly would somehow help in her efforts. It was worth a try, she reasoned. She couldn’t be any worse off than she had been yesterday.

Femi sank down to her knees in the soil, feeling the familiar damp coolness of the dirt sink through the fabric of her skirt and into her kneecaps, pleasant in the face of the heat that poured down on her from the sky. She inhaled, a breath deep enough to make the cavern of her ribs expand, then let her eyes close, let the world grow just a touch still as she listened for the sound of spirits all around her.

Her dream flashed through her mind again, that thread she was wrapping around her fingers, the feeling of it in her hands, the feeling of it coming from Mary’s body. And suddenly, she felt it in the flowers. Fainter than it had been in her dream, but still there, shifting with the memories of a life long since lost.

It reached for her, that thin, trembling spirit, and Femi gasped, rearing back as her eyes shot open. She fell back against the palms of her hands, staring at the roses before her, feeling suddenly weighed down by the melancholy that sat like velvet on their petals.

“You found it.” Winston’s voice drew her back from her contemplation and she turned sharply to look at him.

“Yes,” she answered breathlessly. “Does it always feel so… sad?”

“Not always.” Winston sighed, pushing himself up from where he sat and moving to Femi’s side where he dropped down into the soil. His leg bumped hers. “The first time

I felt it, it seemed that way.”

“Then why did you keep doing it?” 190

He pushed a long exhale between his lips and pulled his legs in so his knees faced the sky, wrapping his arms around them as he thought. “I suppose the sadness felt less than the grief.”

She furrowed her brow. “What does that mean?”

“There’s a sadness in changing someone, and knowing they’ll never be quite the same. But it’s so much less than the grief of losing them entirely. Often that’s the choice: changing or mourning.”

“Not now,” Femi countered. “We’re free now. It’s different. Not like slavery, we can do more now. There are more choices, aren’t there?”

He blew out another breath, dark eyes squinting up at the sun. “Yes and no.” For a moment he was silent, then he turned to look at her, brows tugging together in contemplation. “Have you ever thought of the descendants?”

“We’re descendants, aren’t we?”

He nodded. “But I mean the descendants beyond us.”

Admittedly, she didn’t spend much time thinking of the future generations. She had enough to think of here and now with what odd combination of ancestors and the living occupied her life, that there was often little space for considering the future. Still, she answered: “I suppose so.”

“Well,” he began, looking back up at the sky. “If you saw them, then you’d understand why I keep doing what I do.”

“Saw them?” she looked up at him, examining his profile as he stared up at the passing clouds. “Have you seen them?” 191

Winston nodded, still staring off into the distance. “I visited them. The way the ancestors visit us. Things don’t change the way we hope they will.” He turned, looking down at her suddenly, a certain, familiar sadness in his gaze. “Which is why I hope you’ll keep trying this.”

“What do you mean things don’t change?”

“Every generation I’ve seen changes and keeps the same prejudices, Femi. People still resent their skin, people still punish others for their skin. In the future I’ve been able to see, our people are still at risk for color.”

“That doesn’t make changing them right.”

“But is it wrong to help?” Winston challenged.

Femi paused. No, she wanted to say, it wasn’t wrong to help, but that guilt she’d woken with was still a weight in her chest. “I don’t know.”

“Then try it first,” Winston said, directing her attention back to the flowers bowing in the breeze. “Then maybe you’ll know.”

Femi had been working with feeling the memory and spirit of color for a little over two weeks when Winston summoned her to his office. The weeks she’d spent working with Winston had been surprisingly enjoyable for the matter they dealt with. He told her stories of the descendants, recounting images and conversations that seemed entirely out of her imagination, showing her the clothes that sat in his closet of secrets that had seemed otherworldly the first time she’d seen them, promising he would take her to see the descendants if she wanted. And in return she had kept working on feeling that spirit until it came as easily as reaching for the ancestors. 192

They had created a sense of normalcy that eased so much of that displaced uncertainty that had plagued her in her first few nights at Blackrose, so as she made her way through the Great House heading for Winston’s study, there was little on her mind beyond wondering what they would talk of today. That is, until she rounded the corner into the study and saw another person standing before Winston’s desk. Alecia.

Almost she turned and left, wanting to retreat from the study before Alecia caught sight of her, but before she could consider disappearing, Winston’s voice stopped her.

“Femi,” he greeted from where he sat behind his desk. He rose, taking a step beyond his desk toward the doorway where she still stood.

Alecia turned to face her, smiling politely and dipping her head in a nod of acknowledgment.

“Come in.”

Femi hesitated for another moment, then propelled herself forward, pulling the door shut behind her and freezing a few steps into the room. When Winston continued around to her side, Femi cleared her throat, speaking softly. “What’s going on?”

“Alecia wants to be changed,” he said plainly. “I’d like you to help me.”

Femi felt her mouth dry, accompanied by a persistent throb in her veins as her nerves spiked. She took a step away from him, looking at Alecia for a moment before returning her gaze to Winston. “I don’t know if I can.”

“Try.” Winston fixed her with a smile, a familiar, warm smile reminiscent of the smiles he’d been offering her as they trained, as they—as far as she could tell—had begun to bond. There were still moments when he grew inexplicably frustrated when she didn’t understand something he said, but overall, he’d been kind, so kind she’d kept 193 training and working in the hopes that she’d find a way to overlook her hesitations.

Surely, he wasn’t entirely wrong, she’d taken to thinking.

It was that train of thought that made her nod stiffly and uncertainly. That made her step forward when his smile deepened in approval and relief.

Femi crossed the room to stand at Alecia’s side, then stopped, looking up at the taller woman uncertainly. Winston came up behind her, lifting a heavy hand to rest between her shoulder blades, and, lowering his voice, spoke to her as if they were simply still training.

“Close your eyes,” he instructed softly. “Feel for that spirit again.”

That was easy enough. This was what she’d been training for, wasn’t it? Femi shut her eyes, pushing away all her hesitance, all her worries, and exhaled a deep breath to steady herself. The ancestors’ voices sounded around her but she ignored them, seeking that newly familiar spirit instead, that held culture and memory and history in its quiet existence.

And there it was, so much more vibrant than the hollow memories that lived in flowers, a different spirit entwined with Alecia’s and as bright and alive as she was. Femi extended a hand toward it, preparing to dislodge it from the rest of Alecia’s being, prepared to weave it through all the different shapes and notches of her soul, when she froze. She couldn’t do it.

She couldn’t.

Mary’s flickering face appeared in her head. That guilt in Femi’s chest. That feeling of displacement that had hung over Femi her entire life. And she… couldn’t do it.

She couldn’t take this part of Alecia away from her. Alecia had decided this, but Femi 194 hadn’t decided to be dragged into this mess. She didn’t want that responsibility. She didn’t want Alecia’s spirit to hover over her and resent her for all time.

“I…”

Femi heard her voice before she could stop herself, heard that scratchy whisper of her usual words, as shaky as her hand as she lowered it back to her side. “I can’t do it.”

Around her the room grew heavy, still as if she had destroyed whatever life had been within it. She took a step back from Alecia though the hand Winston still held on her back stopped her from moving further.

“Why?” Winston’s voice was soft when he spoke, lifted just slightly by confusion. “You can’t feel it?”

“No, I can, I just…” the weight of his hand on her made Femi still, made her eyes drop to the floor. “I can’t.”

She felt the disappointment coil down his arm, making the hand he held against her deflate. She felt him take a step away from her, then heard him sigh a sigh deep enough she knew it made his shoulders slope without turning to look at him. “Alecia,” he addressed, his voice heavy with a certain weariness Femi was more than sure she’d put there, “excuse us, please.”

Alecia lingered for a moment, looking between Femi and Winston, then nodded absentmindedly, her gaze still holding onto Femi’s as she took a step toward the door.

She crossed the study in a few steps, pausing only briefly by the door, then ducked quickly into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind herself and leaving Femi and

Winston alone once again.

“Is something the matter, Femi?” 195

Femi looked down at her hands, weaving her fingers together and holding them tight against her stomach as if she could press all her worries back inside herself before they escaped. She walked past him, aiming for one of the plush couches along the wall, and sank into the cushions. Inhaling a deep breath, she watched as Winston followed her lead, sitting at her side and leaning forward, forearms on his knees, impatient for her answer.

“I don’t think I can change Alecia,” Femi said.

Winston’s face screwed into a look of confusion. “Why? What happened?” When she didn’t offer a response, he continued, “Is it something with Alecia?”

“No. It doesn’t matter if its Alecia, or May, or Ini, or you, or me, it’s just that I can’t do it. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do it.”

For a moment, Winston didn’t react, then he wet his lips. A deep sigh escaped him and he ran his hands up the length of face and over the curve of his skull, stopping when his hands reached the top of his neck and resting that way, head falling forward.

“Winston, I—”

“I thought you understood,” he interrupted before she could finish her thought.

“You seemed like you did.”

“I just don’t think I can… I think… maybe changing people is a mistake.” Femi straightened in her seat under the pressure of his silence, and swallowed uncertainly. “I just think that taking part of someone away from them is—”

“I don’t care what you think,” Winston shouted suddenly, jumping to his feet. He whipped around to face her. “I care what Yendi thinks!” 196

His study rung with the echo of his declaration and Femi jolted in her seat, an undeniable thud of nerves in her chest. She looked up at him wide-eyed, a furrow sprouting between her brows. “Yendi?” she echoed in disbelief. “What are you talking about?”

“Yendi!” Winston repeated, a desperate fervor springing into his voice. “That’s who I want, that’s who I’ve gone to the end of the world to find, not you!”

Femi’s breath came thin in her chest, never quite filling her lungs enough to soothe her, and she rose unsteadily to her feet, staring up at Winston as if she’d never really gotten a good look at his face. And maybe she hadn’t, maybe she’d never been able to clearly see what hints were contained in the lines of his face.

Every training session flashed in her mind. Every time he couldn’t suppress his irritation with her, every time he expected her to get something she just didn’t, every time he expected her to have a certain opinion and she fell shy of his expectations.

He didn’t want her.

Plain and simple.

Her chest hollowed and she felt the weight of it as it sank, threatening to pull every part of her into that same heavy nothingness. He didn’t want her. He hadn’t meant it when he’d offered her a place by his side. He had never really wanted her.

Her palms felt damp and her knuckles throbbed so heavily she wondered if cracking them would even relieve the pressure of if she’d have to snap her fingers off entirely for any sort of relief. Femi forced another breath, ignoring the way it shook down her throat, and stared at Winston in disbelief. She could cry, she could feel the press of 197 tears behind her eyes, but there was no one to run to, only Winston and his deceit. She felt a bloom of her own fury rising, and she met his glare with a glower of her own.

“Why marry me, then?” Femi demanded, shaking her head at him in utter disbelief. None of it made any sense. “If you want Yendi, then be with her.”

“You’re Yendi!” He rubbed a hand over one eye, as if this whole situation exhausted him, as if yet again she’d inconvenienced him. “You were supposed to be.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Yendi died when we were young, but she was reborn in you. That’s what the ancestors told me. That’s why I came to find you.”

“I thought you knew my mother,” Femi protested. He’d helped change Catherine, he’d said, helped her become a Tyndall and bring Femi into a world unsuited for her.

He snorted. “I did, but I didn’t care about that. Why would I care what Catherine did once our business was finished? I came to find you because whatever is left of

Yendi’s soul on this earth is supposed to be in you.”

Was that it then? That’s why she’d been forced onto Blackrose? To fulfill

Winston’s grief-born fantasy?

Perhaps it was true. Perhaps that was why she’d always felt so out of place, so out of touch with all the people around her. There was another life living inside her spirit with memories and desires and experience Femi could never quite access. Maybe Yendi had known Mary. Maybe Yendi had known Winston. But Femi had none of those memories. All she had was that hazy veil that hung between her and everyone she’d ever met. Had the people of Whiteheath ever even distanced themselves from her? She had 198 been so sure, but maybe it had been Yendi’s memories clouding her ideas and perceptions.

But she wasn’t Yendi anymore. She was Femi. Not Femi Tyndall, not Femi

Campbell, just Femi. She’d never been surer of herself than she was now, staring down

Winston and knowing that for all her uncertainty, she was more than certain this wasn’t what she wanted.

“I’m not Yendi,” she declared, holding Winston’s heavy stare with one of her own.

He scoffed. “Surely not. I thought you were like her at first, but I was wrong.

Yendi wasn’t a sniveling, self-conscious little child like you are.”

Suddenly she regretted everything she’d told him, every moment she’d opened herself up to him and all his impossible ideas. The world blurred before her, the beginning haze of tears springing half out of hurt, half out of hate. He’d seen all that she tried to hide from the world, all the worries that stained her soul, and dismissed them as nothing more than a child’s tantrum. Winston had made her uncomfortable from the first time she’d met him, but she’d never hated him as she did now.

“I’m a child?” Femi echoed, offense creeping into her voice. It didn’t matter that she’d connected with Winston better than she’d connected with anyone else, it didn’t matter that he’d shown her kindness. All that mattered was that he didn’t want the person she was, he wanted a distant memory of a person she wasn’t. Badrick hadn’t understood everything about her, but he’d tried. Tried to understand Femi as she was and love all that he could see.

“Why?” she continued. “Because I don’t want to change people the way you do?” 199

“You taught me how to do it! Yendi taught me how to save people, and I thought you’d remember once I taught you in return, but it was useless. The ancestors must’ve made a mistake. You’re not Yendi.”

“Yendi was wrong to teach you,” Femi countered. She shoved past him, shoulder hitting his arm as she went, and stormed to the closet, pulling open the unlocked door and letting sunlight wash the contents of the closet in a yellowy glow. Fully aware of his attention on her, Femi reached into the closet and pulled out what few skins still hung in there, dropping them to the floor and ignoring his sound of protest as she reached for the clothes he kept in there, yanking them out of place and throwing them on the floor where they landed in a rumpled heap. “This is what Yendi left you with. Nothing.”

“Watch your mouth,” Winston snapped through clenched teeth.

“You don’t know who you are either,” Femi continued, ignoring his words. “Look at this, you’re changing people, you don’t know what year you’re in, you don’t even know what you want!” She tilted her head at him in mock sympathy, clucking her tongue as she looked down at the skins and back up at him. “You don’t even know if you’re supposed to be doing this, do you?”

“Enough,” he spat, the anger in his face etching deep lines of displeasure where usually there was the smoothness of ageless skin.

“And most of all, you don’t know who you want. You’re married to me when you look at me and think you’re looking at a ghost!”

Winston stalked across the room, stepping over the clothes and the skins littering his study floor, and stopped a step away from her, looking down at her with eyes that 200 glinted with fury in the sunlight. “You’re not a ghost, you’re right here. And even if you don’t remember, I’ll remember for you.”

“I’m not Yendi.”

“I remember your touch, I remember your voice, your laugh. I remember everything, Yendi. Together we’ll—”

“I don’t want to stay here! Not with you!” Her declaration was too loud in the silence and momentarily she wondered if Alecia and the others could hear them fighting.

A part of her wanted them to hear, wanted them to understand what they were getting themselves into if they agreed to be changed. Let them hear all her regret for ever playing any role in this change, let them hear how Mary regretted what had been done, let them hear that Winston, their Obeahman, didn’t even know what to think of what he’d done.

Maybe he was just as much an outsider as she was. Maybe they were perfect for each other.

A bitter laugh escaped him. “Where are you going to go?” He mimicked her pose, tilting his head equally mockingly at her. “Back to Whiteheath? To the mother who doesn’t want you? To the blacksmith who can’t do anything for you?”

“At least he knows who I am.”

“I know who you are!”

“You know who you want me to be, but that’s not who I am.”

Winston shook his head. “It’s who you could be.”

“No,” she countered swiftly. “That’s not who I want to be.” She cast her attention down at the carnage on the floor, the blackness of memories abandoned and purposefully 201 forgotten. She looked at the sad droop of those empty holes where mouths with plump lips should have been. “I don’t want to change anyone,” she continued, “I won’t do it.”

When he didn’t answer, when all he did was stare at her with those dark eyes,

Femi looked up at him, shaking her head as she tried to steady her voice, ignoring the vague waver in her words when, finally, she said: “I won’t change myself anymore either. I’ll never be Yendi.”

“And where does that leave me?”

She’d never heard his voice like that, never heard it so desperate, so young. He stared at her with eyes wide, brows drawn up and together, bare and confused as if she knew everything about him, as if she could fix all of his problems. And perhaps she had been that person for him once, the person who could soothe the crinkle in his brow and make him laugh until his stomach hurt from joy instead of fear. Perhaps he’d clung to her as she clung to Badrick, relying on her to wipe his tears and walk him through the world.

But that was Yendi, and she was not.

“Yendi…” Winston shook his head. “Femi. Please.”

It was tempting, she had to admit. She’d grown comfortable at Blackrose, even, to some extent, grown comfortable with Winston and his impossible expectations for her.

But if she stayed, would she always be Yendi-Femi?

“I can’t do it, Winston. Not this.”

“Then don’t. But stay.” He caught her eyes with his own, beseeching. “Femi,” he insisted. “Stay. Help me, teach me. Anything.”

“I’m not Yendi. I can’t be Yendi.” 202

For just a split second, Winston’s resolve seemed to waver, then he extended his arm and took hold of one of her hands, squeezing his fingers around her. “Stay with me,

Femi.”

How good it felt to be wanted, Femi thought. And here was Winston, begging for her to stay, knowing full well she wasn’t the Yendi of his dreams and asking for her anyway. How desperate he was to keep even a part of the person he missed so much, as desperate as she was to have anyone see her as she was and welcome her anyway.

Badrick had tried, had always been a silent shoulder for her tears, but he had never really understood what it was to be lost as she was.

But Winston, lost as he was on his own, saw her. Even if it disappointed him, he understood.

Perhaps she did belong here, with him. Both of them so desperate for another person to want them and need them that they would do anything for it. But could she do this? Could she live at Blackrose and watch him rip the roots right out from under the people that came to him? Could she go on working with him all the while knowing full well that he might never change his mind?

Femi bit the inside of her cheek thoughtfully, looking at Winston’s face, feeling the weight of his hand around hers.

And then Femi closed her fingers around his.