Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Read Online Free PDF Page B

through the ribcage of the perfect daughter I had borne.
    With her breastbone for my risha, I knew the song of my grief would be powerful enough to move mountains.
    I look up at the firebirds. When they awaken, fire will cover everything that falls into their line of vision. The pine forest will burn. Gazelles and wildcats will flee for their lives. Villagers, too.
    My mother told me the music was not for setting the firebirds against the Ottomans, but that was before they murdered my child. Her granddaughter. She cannot stop me.
    She will not stop me.
    “Awake, spirits of the mountain,” I sing. “Children of the sun. Fakr-ad-Din is taken to Constantinople. There is work to be done.”
    The great birds shiver. They ripple. They begin to glow.
    In the always-shade of the cliff face, the firebirds open their eyes.

Art by Alice Meichi Li

Free Jim's Mine
by Tananarive Due
----
    May, 1838
Dahlonega, Georgia
    “He out yet?” Lottie’s husband, William, breathed behind her, invisible in the dark.
    Lottie’s heart sped, a thumping beneath her breastbone that stirred the child in her belly.
    “Don’t know,” Lottie said. “Hush.”
    She stared from her hiding place behind the arrowwood shrubs, heavy belly low to the soil. They had slipped past the soldiers at Fort Dahlonega, and now they were twenty yards west of the mine’s gate, which stood open wide as miners escaped the cavern’s mouth for the night. Shadowy figures ambled toward them, unaware.
    Would she know her Uncle Jim in the dark? Lottie had not seen her father’s brother in five years. Until then, he’d come to see mama two or three times a year after Lottie’s father died. But now he was a freeman – the only free Negro she knew. Free Jim, everyone called him.
    Mama said God shined light into his massa’s heart one day and he wrote up Uncle Jim’s freedom papers after church. But most said Uncle Jim bought a mojo and poured a powder with calamus, bergamot, and High John the Conqueror root in his massa’s morning tea.
    As tiny feet kicked at her, Lottie vowed she would name William’s baby Freedom. If only she could find Uncle Jim and survive the night, they could all change their names.
    A few white miners remained huddled at the gate while she waited and hoped to see Uncle Jim’s beard or his shock of white-splashed hair. One by one, the miners untied their horses. About a dozen colored men emerged last, but they did not have horses. Instead, they shuffled down the road as fast as they seemed able, lanterns swinging. Uncle Jim, born a slave, had slaves working for him?
What makes you think he’ll help you?
The forlorn call of a bullfrog hidden somewhere nearby reminded Lottie of swinging from a rope on a rotting oak branch, slowly to and fro.
    They would not make it without Uncle Jim. Would not make it to the state line, or to the farmhouse in North Carolina where the Quakers would come fetch them. The last few days’ horrid rain had stopped at last, but they would be cold tonight. Lottie couldn’t remember when her clothes last had been dry.
    “Go to ‘em, William,” Lottie said to William. “Say you lookin’ for a few days’ wages. Say you wanna talk to Free Jim.” Panic made her voice sound twelve instead of seventeen.
    “They’ll know that’s gum,” William said.
    Without the wagon, they had been forced to go to Uncle Jim in Dahlonega, where William had been reared. Cherokees weren’t welcome since the Army started marching families off. William said he’d rather die running with her than let the white man choose his home.
    “Whatever you gonna say, hurry and say it, Waya,” she told him.
    William’s mother had given him a Cherokee name, Waya, though he used William outside of his boyhood home to set white men at ease. William pressed his palm to the side of her belly, head bowed. Then he stood and crept past the brush and up the road toward Lot 998 – Free Jim Boisclair’s mine.
    The chatter at the mine entrance went quiet