So Long Been Dreaming Read online

  The head folk were annoyed at such disobedience, concerned at the blatant disrespect for order and decorum, blaming it on the times and folks giving in to the children’s soft ways, children too young to remember the hardness of skin, how it could be used like a thick-walled prison to deny the blood within. Too young to remember how the sun looked like wet stars in morning dew, and how it walked on wide feet and stood on the sky’s shoulders, spreading its light all over that other place. How it warmed them and baked them like fresh bread, until their brown skins shone with the heart of it.

  But the grasswoman was overstepping her bounds, repeating that same dance, treading on sacred ground that she did not belong to. Not enough that her folk had stolen the other lands and sucked them dry with their dreaming, not enough that they had taken the names and knowledge and twisted them so that nobody could recall their meaning, bad enough that every tale had to be retold by them to be heard true, that no sight was seen unless their eyes had seen it, no new ground covered unless they were there to stake it, no old herb could heal without them finding new ways to poison it, now she had stolen their stories, the song-bits of self, and had trained grasshoppers, like side show freaks, to drum back all the memories they had tried to forget.

  Even the children, thanks to her gifting, were beginning to forget themselves. They hummed strange tunes that they could not have remembered, told new lies that sounded like cradle tales of old, stories about spiders they called uncle in a language nobody knowed, and hopped around like brown crickets, mimicking dances long out of step. They were becoming more like children of the dust than of the pink stone of their birth, with its twin Sun and an anvil for sky.

  And a small loss it was. They had traded the soft part of themselves, their stories and songs, the fingerprints of a culture, for what deemed useful. Out went the artifacts that had once defined a people. Only once did they yearn for the past, when creatures could be swept away depending on their appearance. The grasswoman had even took hold of their dreams. The parents were determined to stop this useless dreaming. They knew if they were to live again, to plant new seed, they had to abandon all thoughts of their past existence. What they wanted were new habits, new languages, new stories to mine in this strange borderland in the backbone of sky. So the command was clear: the stone streets were off limits. You couldn’t go out anymore. Curtains were drawn and the houses shut their great eyelids.

  Order seemed to rule again, but it didn’t last long. That’s when things began to happen. Doors covered with strange carvings and cupboards filled with stones. Furniture was arranged in circles and drawers were mismatched and swapped round.

  At the Kings’ house:

  Who been in this cupboard?

  No one, none had. Grandmama King got mad: everybody in the house knew that her teeth were kept there. Now the little glass dish was full of stones, and from every shelf the stones grinned back at her like pink gums.

  At the Greenes’ house:

  Who scattered grasshopper wings ’cross my desk?

  No one, nobody, not anyone, none was the reply. Daddy Greene choked back disgust. Grasshoppers all in my cup, he muttered, damn crickets.

  At the head folks’ offices:

  Who let them bugs in?

  Nobody had. The bugs had filled the bottoms of file drawers and hid in official-looking papers, fresh piles of pellets and grasshopper dung on settler documents stamped with official seals, the droppings among the deeds for land with their names scrawled across them like spider webs.

  On the tail of all this, a general uproar gripped the settlement. The settlers held a straighten-it-out meeting, hoping to make a decision. They’d held off on the grasswoman’s fate for too long, and now it was time to come to the end of it. They assembled at the home of Mema’s daddy. The girl slipped out of her bed and stood at the door, listening to the groans and threats. She didn’t even wait for their answer. She rushed off down the stone streets and slipped through a crack in the glass, in the direction of the grasswoman’s stone tree. There, she found the old woman settling herself by the okro’s belly, a dark stone cavern that swallowed the light. Her great leaf basket rested in her lap. Another one at her side toppled over, empty.

  They gone get you, the child say.

  Mema was gasping for breath. The air was much thinner outside the settlement’s glass dome. But the grasswoman didn’t act put out. She seemed to know, and had gathered her two great baskets and released the blue-green winged things. But Mema could not see where they had gone and she wondered how they would survive without the grasswoman tending them.

  The little girl tried harder. She scratched her drumskull and tilted her head, staring into the old woman’s face with a question. Never before had the grasswoman meant so much.

  Run away, the child cried. You still got time.

  But the grasshopper peddler just set herself at ease, didn’t look like she could be bothered. Her hair and skin looked grey and hard, like the stringy meat on a bone. She pushed the baskets aside, pressed her palms into the ground and rose with some effort. She stood, sucking a stone, patting her dirt skirt and smoothing the faded rags with gentle strokes. Her hair hung about her eyes in a matted tangle. She seemed to be looking at the horizon. Soon the Sun would set and only a few night stars would remain peering through a veil of clouds.

  Go on, child, the grasswoman said. Fire coming soon.

  Mema hung back, afraid. She glanced at the grasswoman, at her tattered clothes that smelled like the earth Mema had never known, at her knotted hair that looked like it could eat any comb, and her sad eyes that looked like that old word, sea. If only the grasswoman could be like that, still but moving, far and away from here.

  Why don’t you run? They gone hurt you if they catch you, Mema said.

  The old woman stood outside the hollow of the tree, motionless as if time had carried her off. She stared at the child and held out her withered hand. Mema reached for it, slid her fingers into the grasswoman’s cool, dry palm.

  Mema, there is more to stone than what we see. Sometime stone carry water, and sometime it carry blood. Bloodfire. Remember the story I told you? Mema nodded. The grasswoman squeezed her hand and placed it on the trunk of the stone tree. In this place you must know just how and when to tap it. Only the pure will know.

  The girl bowed her head, blinked back tears. The tree felt cold to her touch, a tall silent stone, the colour of night.

  Now you must go, the grasswoman said. She released Mema’s hand and smiled. A tiny grasshopper with bold black and red stripes appeared in the space of her cool touch. Its tiny antennas tapped into her palm as if to taste it. Mema held the hopper in her cupped palm and watched the old woman, standing in her soiled clothing among the black branches of the tree. To the child, the grasswoman’s face seemed to waver, like a trick in the fading light. Her skin was the wax of berries, her tangled hair as innocent as vine leaves.

  Mema pressed her toes against the stone ground, reluctant to go. She looked up at the huge tree that was not a tree, as if asking it for protection, its trunk more mountain than wood, its roots stabbing at the sky, the base rising from what might have been rich soil long ago.

  Can you hear the heart? asked the old woman.

  The child recalled the grasswoman’s tale. The heartstone was where the tree’s spirit slept, in the polished stone the colour of blood, the strength of fire. Whoever harmed the okro tree would bear its mark for the rest of their life. Mema stood there, her face screwed up, shoulders slumped, as if she already carried the okro’s stone burden. With gentle wings, the grasshopper pulsed in her cupped hands.

  The settlers began their noisy descent. They surrounded the stone clearing, outside their city of glass. The little girl fled, her heart in her drum, hid, and watched from the safety of a fledgling stone tree. She saw the grasswoman rise and greet the folk with open palms, an ancient sign of peace. The curses started quick, then the shouts and the kicks, then finally, a stone shower. Tiny bits of rock, pieces scr
aped up in anger from the sky’s stone floor were flung up, a sudden hailstorm. The old woman didn’t even appear to be startled and her straight back, once curved with age and humility, showed no fear. The stones came and the blood flowed, tiny drops of it warming the ground, staining the black stone. They crushed her baskets with their heels and bound her wrists, pushed her up the long dark road. A group of settlers followed close behind, muttering, leaving the child alone in the night. The girl hesitated, her drumskull tilted back with thought, her neck full of tears. After a long silence, she stepped forward, facing the empty stone tree. Then it happened: the heartstone of the okro crumbled, black shards of stone shattered like star dust. She stepped gingerly among the coloured shards. The dark crystals turned to red powder under her feet, stone blood strewn all over the ground. With a cup-winged rhythm, the hopper pulsed angrily in her shaking hand.

  Suddenly, the child made up her mind. She dashed off through the stone clearing the children now called wood, crushing blood-red shards beneath her feet. The hopper safely tucked in her clasped hand, she noiselessly scurried behind the restless, shuffling mob of stonethrowers. Her ears picked up the thread of their whispers. They were taking the grasswoman to a jail that had not been built. The well, someone had cried, a likely prison as any. Mema shuddered to think of her friend all alone down there. Would she be afraid in the cold abandoned hole that held no water? Would she be hungry? And then it struck her, she had never seen the grasswoman eat. Like the hoppers, she sucked on stone, holding it in her mouth as if it were a bit of sweet hard candy. What did she do with the food they had given her, the table scraps and treats stolen and bartered for stories woven from a dead-dying world?

  The grasshopper thumped against the hollow of her palm as if to answer. Mema stroked the tiny wings to calm its anxious drumbeat. Maybe the hoppers ate the crumbs, the child thought as she crouched in the blackness beside the old woman’s walled prison. The well had gone dry in the days of the first settlers, and now that massive pumping stations had been built, the folk no longer needed stone holes to tap the world’s subterranean caverns. Hidden in darkness, the grasshopper trembling in her palm, Mema began to suffocate with fear. The grasswoman had taught her how to sing without words, without air or drum. Was there any use of dancing anymore, if the grasswoman could not share the music? If the world around her had been stripped of its beauty, its story magic? And in the sky was silence, just as in the stone tree, no heartstone beat its own ancient rhythm anymore.

  The grasswoman’s voice reached her from within the well, drifting over its chipped black stone covered with dust. Now Mema could see the soft edges of her friend’s shape, her body pressed in a corner of darkness. If she peered closely, letting her eyes adjust to the shadow and the light, she could just barely make out the contours of the old woman’s forehead, the brightness of her eyes as they blinked in the night. Voices made night is what she heard, felt more than saw, the motion of the old woman’s great eyelids blinking as she called to her. The grasswoman’s voice sounded like a tongue coated in blood, pain rooted in courage, the resignation of old age. Mema drew back, afraid. What if someone saw her there, perched on the side of the well, whispering to the unhappy prisoner in the belly of night? Footsteps called out, as if in answer.

  Quickly, the child jumped off the wall and fell, bruising a knee as she crawl-walked over to hide behind a row of trash cans. One lone guard came swinging his arms and shaking his head. He leaned an elbow on the lip and craned his neck to peer into the well.

  May I? the grasswoman asked, and she put her stone harp to her lips and tried to blow. But the notes sounded strained, choked out of her bruised throat and sore lips, where the settlers had smacked and cuffed her. The guard snorted, became suspicious. Throw it up, he ordered, and the harp was hurled up and over the well’s mouth with the last of the old woman’s strength. The guard tried to catch it, but it crashed on the ground, and the dissonant sound made Mema gasp and cup her ears. There’ll be no more music from you till you tell us where you come from, the guard said, and the well was silent, but in his heart, he didn’t really want to know. Truth was, none of them did. They feared her, the grasswoman who came like a flower, some wretched wild weed they’d thought they’d stamped out in that other desert and fled like a shadow, disappearing into their most secret thoughts. The guard glanced at the little broken mouth harp scattered on the street. They’d probably want him to get it, as evidence, something else they could cast against the old woman, but he wasn’t going to touch it. No telling where the harp had been, and he certainly didn’t want nothing to do with nothing that had been sitting up in her mouth. So he turned on his heel and headed for the dim lights down the street, leaving the grasswoman quiet behind him.

  No, not quiet, crying? A soft sound, like a child awakened from sleep. He shook his head in pity. He didn’t know what other secrets the folk expected to drag out of their prisoner. She was just an old woman, no matter her skin, and anyway, what could they prove against the street peddler, guilty of nothing but being where being was no longer a sin.

  When the guard’s last echo disappeared in the night, Mema crept back to the well and picked up the stone harp’s broken pieces. She held the instrument in her free hand and released the grasshopper on the well’s edge. She half expected it to fly away, but it sat there, flexing its legs in a slow rhythmic motion, preening. She clasped the harp together again, sat down on her haunches, and began to blow softly. As the child curled up in the warmth of her own roundness, she set off to sleep, drifting in a strange lullaby. She could vaguely hear the grasshopper accompanying her, a mournful ticking, and the grasswoman softly crying below, the sound like grieving. Maybe, she thought as her lids slowly closed, maybe the grasswoman could hear it too and would be comforted.

  She awoke in a kingdom of drumming, the ground thumping beneath her head and her feet. The hoppers! A million of them covered the bare ground all around her and filled the whole street. Squatting and jumping, the air was jubilant, but the child could not imagine the cause of celebration. The grasswoman is free! she thought and tried to rise, but the grasshoppers covered every inch of her, as if she too were part of the glass city’s stone streets. All around they stared at her, slantfaced and bandwinged, spurthroated and bowlegged. It was still night, the twin Sun had long receded from the sky and even the lamps of the city were fast asleep. Nothing could explain the hoppers’ arousal, their joy or their number, why they had not retreated in the canopy of night. Not even the world, in all its universal dimensions, seemed a big enough field for them to wing through.

  Mema carefully rose, brushing off handfuls of the hoppers, careful not to crush their wings. The air hummed with the sound of a thousand drums, each hopper signaling its own rapidfire rhythm. They seemed to preen and stir, turn around as if letting the stars warm their wings and their belly. The child tried to mind each step, but it was difficult in the dark and finally she gave up and leaned into the well’s gaping mouth. Grasswoman? she called, and stepped back in surprise. The drumming sound was coming from deep within the well. She placed her hands above the well’s lip and felt a fresh wave of wings and legs pouring from it, the iridescent wings sparkling and flowing like water. The grasswoman had vanished, the place had lost all memory of her, it seemed. Mema called the old woman, but received no answer, only the drumming and the flash of wings.

  She decided to return to the okro, the stone tree where for a time the grasswoman had lived. There was no longer any other place where she might go. There was some that pitied the grasswoman, but none enough to take her in. No street, nor house, only the stone tree’s belly. As Mema walked along, the hoppers seemed to follow her, and after a time, her movements stopped being steps and felt like wind. It was as if the hoppers carried her along with them, and not the other way around. They were leading the child to the okro, to the stone forest, back to the place where the story begin.

  Mema arrived at the grasswoman’s door, and looked at the stone floor covered with b
lood-red shards, the heartstone ground into powder. The okro was no longer dull stone, but was covered in a curious pattern, black with finely carved red lines, pulsing like veins. She stood at the door of the great trunk, and entered, head bowed, putting the distance between herself and time. Was there any use in waiting for the old woman? Mema blinked back tears, listened for the hoppers’ drum. Surely by now, the grasswoman had vanished, taking her stories and her strange ways with her, a fugitive of the blackfolk’s world again. The child took the stone harp and placed it to her mouth. She lulled herself in its shattered rhythm, listening with an ear outside the world, a place that confused her, listening as the hoppers kept time with their hind legs and tapping feet. She played and dreamed, dreamed and played, but if she had listened harder, she would have heard the arrival of a different beat.

  There she is! That old white hefa inside the tree!

  Spiteful steps surrounded the okro, crushing the hoppers underfoot.

  It’s the woman with her mouth harp. Go on, play, then. We’ll see how well you dance!

  They tossed their night torches aside, raised their mallets, and flung their pick axes through the air. The hammers crushed the ancient stone, metal teeth bit at stone bark. Inside, the girl child had unleashed a dream: her hair was turning into tiny leaves, her legs into lean timber. Her fingers dug rootlike into the stone soil. The child was in another realm, she was flesh turning into wood, wood into stone, girl child as tree, stone tree of life. Red hot blades of grass burst in tight bubbles at her feet, pulsing from the okro’s stone floor, a crimson wave of lava roots erupting into mythic drumbeats and bursting wingsongs. Somewhere she heard a ring shout chorus, hot cry of the settlers’ voices made night, the ground fluttering all around them, the hoppers surrounding the bubbling tree, ticking, wing-striking, leg-raising, romp-shaking vibrations splitting the stone floor, warming in the groundswell of heat. And from the grassdreaming tree, blood-red veins writhing, there rose the grasswoman’s hands. They stroked crimson flowers that blossomed into rubies and fell on the great stone floor. Corollas curled, monstrous branches born and released, petal-like on the crest of black flames. The child’s drumskull throbbed as she concentrated, straining to hear the grasswoman’s call, to remember her lessons, how to make music without words, without air and drum, and her thoughts floated in the air, red hot embers of brimstone blues drifting toward the glass-walled city.