Sycorax's Daughters Read online

  Dedications

  Kinitra D. Brooks:

  To Isabella and Gregory, may this be the first of many times you will see your names celebrated in print!

  And to my lovely co-editors, Linda D. Addison and Susana M. Morris, for going along with all of my hare-brained ideas. You ladies continue to see me through and I thank you.

  Linda D. Addison:

  To Kinitra D. Brooks for conceiving/co-editing this book & co-editor Susana M. Morris for adding precious time to the shaping & all sisters who live/survive/create/nurture Light in the shadows of a hungry universe.

  Susana M. Morris:

  To my wonderful co-editors, Kinitra and Linda, who make work a pleasure.

  To the brilliant authors featured in the collection who make me want to sleep with the lights on.

  Acknowledgements

  Boundless gratitude to:

  John Jennings for bringing publisher Rochon Perry (Cedar Grove Publishing) to us.

  Rochon Perry of Cedar Grove Publishing for her belief and enthusiasm for our project.

  Walidah Imarisha for taking time from her schedule to write an extraordinary Forward.

  To all the authors that contributed to the volume. Thank you for sharing your extraordinary work with the world.

  To all the little black girls who love zombies and monsters and were disappointed when Kendra, the black slayer, died after only two episodes.

  To my Husband, who remains my anchor. To my Mother, for encouraging my love of reading and my Father, for encouraging my love of horror. And to my Sisters who always help me keep it together to face another day.

  —Kinitra

  Foreword

  by Walidah Imarisha

  I first met Sycorax’s Daughters co-editor Kinitra Brooks at a conference called AstroBlackness II in March, 2015 that impacted deeply how I think about horror, oppression and Blackness. Organized by the Black sci fi visionaries John Jennings and Adilifu Nama, it was the second conference of its kind, and the theme was “The surreal, the speculative, and the spooky.”

  The conference was just a few months after the non indictment verdict against Darren Wilson, the white police officer who murdered 18-year-old Michael Brown, a young unarmed Black man. Between Brown’s murder and the time of the conference, countless more Black people had been gunned down by police across this nation, and we see that catastrophe has not slowed. Neither has the outrage, organizing, and resistance led by Black youth under the banner #BlackLivesMatter.

  As part of his testimony to the grand jury who found he should not be indicted for Michael Brown’s murder, Wilson said, “…[Brown] looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked” (emphasis added). Much of our conversations at Astroblackness II centered around three main ways horror relates to Blackness in America: the ways Black people are portrayed as the ultimate evil to justify historically and currently our exploitation, containment, and murders; the fact that for Black people and

  other people of color, the history of slavery, genocide, white supremacy, and colonialism is the only true horror story, and it is one we continue to live every day; and the fact that resistance of the oppressed to these structures has always been seen as the most frightful abomination that could be birthed.

  Through these lenses, we see that horror as a genre often explores how we deal with those pasts that are not past, those corpses that refuse to lay quietly in their unmarked graves, those creatures born of pain, abandoned, who refused to die. In horror, we see the present through the eyes of the past. Sycorax’s Daughters allows us to explore our own connection to history, as individuals and as a society. Horror, as these stories intone, is collective trauma compressed into one tangible form that can reach out and touch you. Ghosts are the past that is not past.

  I appreciated greatly Kinitra’s work at the Astroblackness conference, as it focused on the pressing intersections of both race and gender, highlighting the ways Black women are present or absent (or both) in most mainstream horror narratives, and what messages that sends about society, about Black communities, about Black women themselves. I am so thankful she and the other co- editors Linda Addison and Susan Morris have continued this work not just as analysis, but as a visionary space where Black women explore horror on their own terms.

  Sycorax’s Daughters fundamentally shifts the ways horror stories are told even when using familiar tropes like sirens, zombies, ghosts. Through nuanced story-telling that eschews cheap fright, the reader explores the textured reality of terror, the human in the horror. This collection allows us to challenge the notion this nation holds that Blackness, and therefore Black people, are the ultimate horror. By engaging Black women as both the authors of these stories as well as the majority of main protagonists, we finally hear the so-called “demons” speak.

  These writers seamlessly weave together threads of race and gender into a beautiful tapestry upon which lay these haunting stories, challenging how one of the mainstays of our society is the cautionary tale of the monstrously feminine and the ways women with agency become the worst evil. In these stories Black people’s, especially Black women’s, liberation torment white society in a cold sweat. We see that America’s nightmares are not just raced; they are gendered.

  In many of these stories, the Black women in them would be categorized as the monstrous, but the narratives exist through their eyes. These tales breath humanity back into the masks of horror society have stitched onto our faces. Even living in lands of evil, mutilated by leviathans, most of these characters never become monsters themselves - even when they take life - and perhaps even more importantly, they never become victims. And through this centering of Black women, our understanding of what the real horror is transforms as well.

  The backdrops of these fiendish tales are landscapes of gentrification, white supremacists, brutal cops, and the ultimate horror story, slavery.

  Next to these, devils and vampires are almost banal.

  These tales are also rooted in resistance, in cultural, social, and political histories and conditions, like the early 1980s South Bronx as hip hop is birthed. They happen next to books by Black anti- colonial leader Amilcar Cabral, to a soundtrack of unruly jazz, in the midst of protests against police brutality.

  This collection blends poetry with these horror short stories in a way that challenges our understanding of the monstrous, because every one of the poems is about the reality of Black women’s lives. here is nothing magical, fantastical, or otherworldly about these poems, which are Frankensteined together from the daily wickedness Black women endure. From a blues poem about police violence to one about sexual violence, placed next to these supernatural tales, we see the real everyday terror as the most horrific of them all.

  Sycorax’s Daughters also shows the different relationship Black people have to the supernatural created of sorrow. While the larger white society lives in terror of liberated Blackness, of the “demons” unleashed coming after them, we know many of our spirits haunt us out of love, out of a desire for all that was unfairly stolen from them. And we need them, because sometimes all we have is our ghosts. As hip hop emcee Khingz said, “I’m happiest when I’m haunted/It means I’m not forgotten.”

  Even when the stories hurt, we know it is not intentional. We know this because Toni Morrison wrote in her haunting story Beloved, “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” Blackness is massacred in the streets every day, and every night we perform the alchemic necromancy to bring it back from the dead. And we pay the horrific price.

  Reading this collection, I breathed in these stories and the monstrous resurrection they carried inside them. They have stayed with me, haunting
me, some of them hurting me. And I do not want them to leave, because they bear witness to the ways we live with the past that is not past every moment of the day.

  We Black people cannot outrun our demons. Nor should we ever want to. We will embrace them as our lost Beloveds, and listen to the songs they sing to bring us through the darkness.

  —Walidah Imarisha

  Co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements

  Introduction

  by Kinitra D. Brooks

  Sycorax’s Daughters:

  We’ve Always Been Here

  We named this collection Sycorax’s Daughters because we insist that Black women have always been horror creators. Each author featured is a descendant of Sycorax, the deceased African sorceress in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611). Sycorax and her daughters reflect the culture critic bell hooks’ concept of the absent presence of Black women in popular culture. As Shakespeare ironically, and perhaps unwittingly, develops her, Sycorax refuses to be excluded from the play’s spectacle. Her absence in silenced erasure is subverted by Shakespeare’s depiction of her presence as an idea that produces fear and suspicion in the play’s (white male) major characters. Sycorax’s daughters are directly influencing the trajectory of horror fiction by forcing the genre beyond its centralizationof whiteness and maleness—even as they are deprived of the mainstream access to self-articulation.

  Black women have always been here, creating horror and subverting its problematic obsessions with Negrophobia and Gynophobia. Take, for instance, Zora Neale Hurston’s folktale collection Every Tongue Got to Confess, which is derived from interviews with former slaves in the early 20th Century and highlights Black women’s long-established interest in horror. The literature of the rich communal oral folk culture and tales passed down through generations demonstrate that horror discourse is an established tradition in Black communities. Yet despite growing evidence, including contemporary authors such as Jewelle Gomez, Tananarive Due, and LA Banks, Black women remain an absent presence in horror literature.

  It is here where Sycorax’s Daughters intervenes. For there is radical potential in shifting the center of horror. Sycorax’s Daughters centers Black women horror characterizations and creators in response to the male-centered discourse that dominates contemporary Black horror fiction and parallels the defaulted whiteness of contemporary women’s horror fiction. Sycorax Daughters spotlights the gaps being outright ignored in the horror genre by offering racially gendered horror fiction that exemplifies the work of Black women horror creators and their growing influence in the genre. In this way our project fills the lacunae by privileging Black women’s visions of self in horror over their previous problematic characterizations as constructed by others. Sycorax has ensured that her daughters are provided the opportunity to speak for themselves.

  I implore you to listen to their voices as you read the following works. And pay particular attention to the unique horror epistemologies in their texts that interweave the ancient dictates of the African ancestors with the futuristic exploration of folkloric values.

  Tree of the Forest Seven Bells Turns the World Round Midnight

  by Sheree Renée Thomas

  Thistle stepped over an upturned root that twisted from the dark, wet earth.

  “Your mama live near the river?” “Naw.”

  “Your mama live in a tree?” “Nope.”

  “Then what we doing?”

  “Mama the river and the tree.” She moved with deliberate grace, each footfall a code that unlocked another hidden key. Wilder should have known. Every other word out of her mouth was some strange, cryptic poetry. She was more siren than sage, more whistle than song. In the few months they’d been hanging, he had gotten used to her “magic woman” guise. Bohemian bruja, wide-hipped hoodoo. Unlike the other women Wilder tried to lay with, Thistle felt sincere. At least she was original. Most other relationships Wilder had had, all ended the way he felt now, lost. With the others he would soon lose interest — or they would, tossing him back on the street, the fascination over before it had begun. Then he’d be off, duffel bag in hand, looking for cover. To Wilder, everyone worked so hard to be just like the next. What was the challenge in that?

  Thistle stood with her back to him, all curve and joy, a plum-skinned promise of delight. He tried to follow her, but his feet wouldn’t move. With each step forward he kept stumbling backward, as if his body wanted, needed to withdraw every footstep, to retrace their path under that lone glimmering star. His car was locked and parked way down the road that flanked high above the river. If he hadn’t been with Thistle, he never would have seen the trail.

  “What I’m trying to understand is why we got to come see her in the pitch damn night?” He held himself steady, grabbed hold of a tender birch tree. All he saw was branches and limbs and more wobbly trees. Bark fell away from his hands in flakes, fluttered to the damp ground like layers of skin. “I’m cool with meeting your family, but why can’t we go to Piccadilly or the China Inn? Don’t your mama like buffet? That’s what normal folks do.”

  Thistle turned her head, hesitated. Even in the deepening darkness, Wilder could see her eyes narrow into slits, her full lips poked out like she might offer a kiss. “When have you known me to be normal?”

  Laughter shook the leaves of a mayhaw. Fireflies flitted a warning message in the faded light. Wilder didn’t see. His eyes were in the future, back to the cool thin sheets in the rented room. The air was hot and humid, thick enough to slash a knife through. The sky was full, twilight now turning away from dusk. A super moon and that strange twinkling star Thistle swore was a planet. Which one did she say? Venus. Or was it Jupiter? Wilder used to know stuff like that, back when he thought it was important. Astronomy, astrology, tarot cards, and divination, none of it foretold anything close to what Wilder had come to know, his hard truth. Ghostly light shone through the waist-high grass, and the blossoming weeds cast shadows across Thistle’s face, her arm outstretched to him like a luscious vine. This he believed in, this he could follow — the curved finger of flesh. An open palm, his favorite invitation.

  “It’s just a little further.”

  “I hope she got something to drink.”

  Thistle giggled, moved through the path, a silent wind. Wilder had made her a jacket with spikes on the shoulders and bright, colorful Ankara print for a lining. He hadn’t sewn anything new until she’d tumbled into his life like a weed. In the black, weathered upcycled leather and the scraps from an old African caftan, she looked like the punk queen he imagined her to be. He had woven the jacket for her, his first gift, when she initially refused to go out with him. “I’m not fit for human consumption,” is what she’d said. “Try harder,” is what he heard. Wilder was persistent. He’d followed her, held signs at every protest, passed flyers out with other activists at the Riverwalk, harangued downtown hipsters who would bulldoze century trees for their new LEED condos.

  Finally, at a Mid-South Peace & Justice Center ice cream social, she relented. The jacket she donned like a crown. And she had worn it every day, her second skin she called it, even in the 105° heat.

  But Thistle never sweated. A fact that startled Wilder, made him lie awake some nights and wonder, that, and her spooky, stony sleep. Gulping it down every chance she could get, Thistle drank water like a catfish, slept like an old dead log.

  But each time he saw her, a wildfire in his arms, remarkably awake, or asleep, corpse-like by his side, he grew more fascinated.

  Wilder had met her at a friend’s lecture at Rhodes on the music of John Coltrane, sacred geometry, and physics. Melvin discussed how Coltrane had composed “A Love Supreme” using African fractals and indigenous design, the same design found in ancient West African compounds, in passed-down rites of passage and patterns of braided hair, in the wooden sculptures of the Mende, in pine cones, and even in drops of water. Melvin was a philosopher, the baddest bassist in the world — Time Out New York had declared it, a
nd Wilder knew from personal experience that to be true. Only one other bassist gave him a run, and she wasn’t a bassist at all. She was a goddess; she was music itself, not even a fair comparison.

  Wilder had been planning to give Melvin the full Memphis roots midnight tour when he spied Thistle, fluttering in the periphery of the concert hall. Her back was pressed against the yellow papered wall, arms folded, as if she was too good to squeeze her hips into the plush student seating. Her eyes were closed, head nodding, as if she was hearing some other music beneath Melvin’s words.

  Later Wilder would learn she was rarely still - except, frighteningly so, in her sleep. Awake, she flitted through the world, an emerald-throated hummingbird. Even now she stooped to caress a crooked row of foxgloves. Her bangles stacked high up her arm like brass armor, glinted in the night. “Look how they bow their heads.” She stroked the purple blossoms as if they were pets. “They’re always the first ones asleep.” She rose and darted ahead, a bejeweled black dragonfly.

  Barefoot, Thistle used to collect ferns and moss and polished river stones, dark mushrooms and wild weeds for the birdcages and terrariums she hung throughout the city. She said her found art was a public indictment, a statement from the elders. Wilder never asked who the elders were. He simply chalked it off as more of Thistle’s spirit speak.

  So when she grabbed fistfuls of earth and held them before her nose, as if to breathe a prayer, Wilder only shrugged. “You should take off your shoes,” she said and kicked off her boots, the tongues lolling as if they were hot and tired, full of thirst.

  “Here? I’m not doing that.” Thistle tied her shoestrings together and flung the pair over her left shoulder. The strings got caught in the patch of spikes. She shrugged, the leather jacket arched across her back like a pair of wings. “The earth is cool and damp here,” she said and held out her hand. “Come on, every step is like a kiss.” Wilder shook his head, no. She threw her head back and danced, her toes sinking into the moist grass. “Best massage ever.”