Rivers Solomon - The Deep

“I know what it is,” Yetu said, her head beginning to tense and throb. She’d had more interaction in the last few days than she’d had in the past year. Her patience was waning. She could only be the good daughter, the compliant wajinru, and the dutiful historian in short bursts. After a time, the constant conversation and stimulation wore her patience down. She was becoming a sharp edge.

“Well? What is it, then?” asked Amaba, letting her voice get away from her. She spoke loudly enough that Yetu had to swim away several feet. “I’m sorry. Though this would be much less difficult if you answered when I spoke to you, like someone normal.”

“Someone normal wouldn’t be able to tell you that the object is a comb. Someone normal wouldn’t be able to tell you that a comb was a tool the wajinru foremothers used in their hair,” said Yetu. “Someone normal would never know these things. Someone normal couldn’t fill your hole. You are someone normal, and you don’t know anything.”

For several seconds, Yetu’s amaba didn’t speak. She had the look of something wounded, her fins moving in an agitated fluster but her wide mouth puckered shut.

Yetu should’ve felt guilty, perhaps, for her harsh and bitter words, but instead she soaked up the silence, drunk it like the freshest whale milk.

She didn’t mean to be so cruel, but what else was she to do with the violence inside of her? Better to tear into Amaba than herself, when there was already so little left of her—and what was there was fractured.

“I’m sorry,” said Yetu.

“No need. It is already in the past.” Amaba swam closer, so the two were near enough to touch. “I demand too much. Ask too much of you. I don’t even understand why I care so much about that stupid, what did you call it? Comu?”

“Comb,” said Yetu.

In one of the rememberings, there was still hair caught in a comb belonging to the foremother. Salt water had washed any hair strands from the tines of Yetu’s new comb, and now she could only imagine how the bonds of black keratin had once choked the carved ivory.

Yetu didn’t explain to her amaba further. She would not be mined for memories yet.

This one knowledge, this one piece of history, it was hers and no one else’s.

Nnenyo came back not long later with more food for Yetu, but she’d finally had her fill. Her stomach was bloated and overstuffed, so even though she was hungry, she could not bear to eat another bite.

She had become so ragged, not just since the last Remembrance but over the course of her youth and young adulthood. It all had a cumulative effect, didn’t it? She imagined a sunken ship, heavy with cargo, pieces peeling and rusting away year by year like dead scales. Yetu wasn’t as hardy as those feats of two-legs innovation, though. She would die, and corpses were not eternal.

“We are almost ready for you to join us in the womb,” said Nnenyo.

“Already? So fast?” asked Amaba.

“They are ready for the History. They’re working faster than usual, like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

So much for three days. It had only been two. Yetu wasn’t ready.

“It will be fine,” her amaba said.

Her stomach twisted and coiled, and her heart raced. She tried to settle herself, to feel the lovely, cool water entering her gills, restoring oxygen to her blood. But she was suddenly short of breath.

“Don’t worry, Nnenyo. Like always, she will pull herself together in time,” said Amaba.

In the early years, in fact, Yetu had been much worse, unable to keep down food or do such basic things as hold her bowels for more than a few minutes.

“How are you feeling?” Nnenyo asked.

Yetu nodded her head. “I will do what is asked of me.”

“You are a blessing,” said Nnenyo.

“I am what is required,” she said, no warmth left in her even for Nnenyo. Everything tense, she just wanted this whole thing to be over. Fine. Let the Remembrance begin right here, right now, for all she cared, womb or no womb.

“Breathe,” said Amaba. “Breathe.”

“It hurts,” Yetu said, ashamed of the vulnerability. She wanted to flee and be in her discomfort alone, like she’d been this past year. In front of Amaba and Nnenyo, it wasn’t so bad, but the whole of the wajinru people would see her in this state. “I’d hoped to be stronger by this point,” she said. She wanted there to be more of her, to be steady on her feet, or else the Remembrance would steal what remained of her.

“They don’t care if you are strong. Only that you remember,” said Amaba. “Do you remember?”

A flurry of tiny bubbles left Yetu’s mouth as she sighed. “I do.”

“Good,” said Amaba. “That is all we ask.”

WAJINRU FLAPPED THEIR TAIL FINS against the water on Yetu’s command, a steady, pulsating thrum in meter with her beating heart. The pitch of it was deep, so deep. Yetu let the massive waves of their movement consume her. She submerged herself in their energy. All her nerves left her, now that the Remembrance was beginning. The History was her power, and it ignited her. She could do this. She would do this. She would be their savior.

“Remember,” Yetu ordered, voice filling the womb.

Yetu gave them a script, but they knew the words. It lived in their cartilage and their organs, as coded into them as the shape of the webbed appendages on their front fins or the bulbousness of their eyes. She only need remind them. That was all remembering was. Prodding them lest they try to move on from things that should not be moved on from. Forgetting was not the same as healing.

“Our mothers were pregnant two-legs thrown overboard while crossing the ocean on slave ships. We were born breathing water as we did in the womb. We built our home on the seafloor, unaware of the two-legged surface dwellers,” she said. In general, Yetu didn’t tell the Remembrance. She made her people experience it as it happened in the minds of various wajinru who lived it. At the start, however, she preferred to give them some guidance. It made the transition of memories much more efficient when they had context—context Yetu had never had. She’d discovered the History on her own, through out-of-order scraps and pieces. Slivers slicing through her.

Yetu twisted and tensed as pain overwhelmed her. That was something she should be over by now, after all this time, the physicality of it. But she felt her whole body go rigid and then snap. Her body was full of other bodies. Every wajinru who had ever lived possessed her in this moment. They gnashed, they clawed, desperate to speak. Yetu channeled their memories, sore and shaking as she brought them to the surface. The shock of it nearly knocked her unconscious. She had once imagined channeling as a sweet, beautiful flow of energy, the past running gently through her. It was more like slitting an opening in herself so they could get out.

Oh, was this pain real? It didn’t even belong to her. Was there anything about her that wasn’t a performance for others’ gratification?

As Yetu’s body moved with the pain, her subjects moved too. They didn’t quite copy her. That would imply they could see anything but the black of the deep of the sea. They felt her and knew what to do. For once, all were in unison.

To see if the wajinru were ready to move on to the next stage, Yetu tuned in to individuals. Her amaba, Nnenyo, children she’d met over the years, her worshippers. Even with the rush of movement of their in-sync bodies, she could feel unique flourishes in each person. They each had a signature.

She couldn’t determine which was worse: the pain of the ancestors or the pain of the living. Both fed off her. The Remembrance had officially begun, but she hadn’t gotten to the actual remembering part. This was the preparation. Stretching their bodies so they could be open to the truth.