FIRST LIGHT CAME. Sarat said goodbye to her teacher and made for home. Outside, a soft morning breeze lifted swirls of dust off the ground. Sarat looked across the vast sea of tents; they looked not all that different from the ones that littered the background of the old photograph of Gaines and Joe. Maybe all tents looked the same in wartime.
In the distance, she saw two refugees fighting. One man, drunk and stumbling, had knocked over the other one’s jug of fermenting Joyful. The two men cursed and threw feeble punches at each other but Sarat did not stick around to watch. It seemed such a petty thing to fight over, so inconsequential.
Excerpted from:
REMARKS BY KASEB IBN AUMRAN, PRESIDENT OF THE BOUAZIZI UNION, DELIVERED AT OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY (JUNE 4, 2081)
I have tested your patience, speaking for so long on such a warm day. But I want to say this again: the government of the Bouazizi Union has no desire to impose its will on the affairs of any other nation. I believe we are all in agreement that the end of the troubles your country faces will come at the hands of the people who call this country home, nobody else. (Applause.) But I also believe that all reasonable people of the world—regardless of race or ethnicity or religion—yearn for the same right to liberty, democracy, and self-determination. These are truly universal human ideals, and what we do today to advance them is the most important gift we leave for our children. Wars are temporary; these principles are not.
I remember the first time I came to America, many years ago. I was a young university student, a student at this very campus. At the time, my country was undergoing a bloody but necessary revolution, a revolution that claimed the lives of many martyrs but granted my people the freedom they had, for almost two centuries, been denied.
I remember all the things that fascinated me about America—its vast and beautifully diverse geography, blessed with some of the most awe-inspiring natural wonders on earth; its equally diverse people, living alongside one another in peace, regardless of the superficial differences among them. I saw in the people of this country a spirit I had rarely seen elsewhere, a dedication to liberty so overpowering, it made of many, one. (Applause.) I say to you now, in closing, that I see that very same spirit here today. Whatever challenges America faces in this troubled moment, I am sure the people of this country can overcome. They have done so many times before (Applause), and they will again. And I say to you that my people, the people of the Bouazizi Union who decades ago demanded from their rulers the very same liberation your revolutionaries once demanded of theirs, stand ready as allies to assist in any way we can. We are, all of us on this earth, drawn instinctively to peace, and I believe peace will prevail.
Thank you, and God bless America. (Applause.)
CHAPTER EIGHT
Two days before the massacre, there was a heavy storm. It lasted from dawn to dusk, the gray-muddled clouds oscillating between torrent and trickle. The hardest rain came early. By the time a convoy of Free Southerners’ trucks arrived with sandbags, many of the camp’s older tents had already washed away. The refugees sought shelter in the administrative buildings. Outside, in the stream of mud and wastewater, a doomed armada of clothes and cooking implements and irreplaceable keepsakes floated helplessly. The runoff fed into the ditches and beyond the ditches the creeks and beyond the creeks the now roaring Tennessee.
As the Free Southerners packed the sandbags along the banks of Emerald Creek, cursing and gagging at the smell of the overflowing filth, Sarat and her girls chased after the water-swept mementos.
Soaked to the bone, they scooped up anything of practical or sentimental value: picture frames, coils of fishing line, flags of the state and of the rebels; and keys, most important of all, keys.
The girls worked solemnly. At Albert Gaines’s urging, Sarat had, a few weeks earlier, started a small club of sorts—her very own version of a scout troop. Already she’d wangled four young recruits—the Singleterry sisters from Alabama; Charlie from Georgia, who went by her dead younger brother’s name; and Nadine from Mississippi. Two months before she arrived at Patience, Nadine lost her lower jaw in a Bird strike on Holly Springs. In its place now was a mash of mangled skin and a metal plate that held together what was left of her jawline. Nadine didn’t speak. Of all the girls, she was Sarat’s favorite.
When the girls’ satchels were full, they took the contents to the administrative buildings. There, Sarat unlocked the side door and led them down the stairwell to the hallway leading to Gaines’s office. In the hallway they set the salvaged items down on towels to dry, and then they returned to work.
By sundown the rainfall started to ease; a couple of hours later it was little more than a sprinkle. Sarat ran to the northernmost tents and watched the low gray clouds fall back to the Blue country. In the north the tents were new and largely unused, but none of the refugees had sought shelter there.
The next morning, Sarat instructed the girls to begin taking the salvaged debris out of the hallway. Her recruits laid their findings out on the ground by the side of the building. By the time the camp’s staff became aware of what the girls had done, a mass of refugees had descended on the impromptu lost-and-found. They sifted for things they thought were gone forever and when they found them they cried and hugged the girls and called them angels. By noon there was not a single item left unclaimed.
MARTINA CHESTNUT STOOD for a long time in front of her pristine tent. She observed the corners where the fabric hugged the scaffolding. There wasn’t a single tear, not even a sign that a rainstorm had come through at all. The ground surrounding the tent was a thick stew of mud, and all her neighbors’ homes were collapsed or nearing collapse, but Martina’s home was untouched.
For a moment she was taken with thoughts of divine providence. She began to entertain the notion that some higher power had held its cupped hand over her home. Surely it was no mere chance; surely she had suffered enough to warrant this small act of mercy. Of course others had suffered; some arrived at the camp missing limbs or sight or kin and some were nothing but hollow shells in the shape of the living, but she had suffered too. She had suffered too.
Inside, she found Sarat and Dana on their cots, reading. Dana held a tablet; on the screen there was a Tumble magazine feature on Black Sea chic and the newly resurgent fashion scene of the far northern Bouazizi.
Sarat sat upright on her cot, an old Southern history book in her hands, on loan from Gaines.
“How did you two get back here so fast?” Martina asked. She breathed in deeply; the air inside the tent smelled bittersweet and acrid, a chemical scent.
“She was out all night saving everybody’s trash,” Dana said. “I was in here.”
“Why didn’t you come to the building?” Martina asked. “This whole tent could have been swept right out in the storm.”
Dana chuckled. “You kidding? Simon and a couple of his friends came by a day ago and sprayed the whole thing down. They got chemicals that make the water bounce right off of anything—makes it like it never rained at all. It was a loud storm, though, I’ll tell you that. Barely got any sleep.”
Martina observed her other daughter, who had yet to take her eyes away from the pages of her book.
“You knew ’bout this?” she asked.
Sarat shrugged.
Martina fell silent. She walked past her daughters to her own room. In the last year the woman and her twin daughters had come to occupy the entirety of the tent, as Simon had taken to living outside the camp, only returning for a night or two every few months.
On her bed Martina found another care package from her son. It was a cardboard box that had once held a kitchen mixer. Its top flaps were sealed tight with packing tape.
Martina lifted the box. It felt heavy, perhaps twenty pounds. Without opening it she carried it past the blanket curtain to her daughters’ room. She set it beside Sarat’s bed.
“Take this and give it out to the people who lost their tents,” she said.
“What’s in it?” Sarat asked.