Consequences

4

The year of wedding planning went very quickly. When Brynja and Loki visited the royal tailor mid-year to discuss Loki's clothing and to have Brynja's dress resized, she finally told the story of the gown and why it meant so much to her to wear it.

"Alice was a sweet older woman who lived across the hall from me in Midgard's 1970s. She was at least 80 years old, but she didn't even know just how old she was. She'd seen a lot of the worst of American treatment of people who looked different. I don't entirely understand everything of that country's history, but at one point the light-skinned people in America enslaved the dark-skinned people in America, bringing people in from other nations just for the purposes of enslaving them. They did horrible things to their slaves and kept them from learning while trying to make sure they didn't keep any of their own customs. Rape, torture, all of it was fair game, including working the slaves to death. That ended only a generation before Alice was born and people were still very unkind to one another only because of skin colour. So Alice saw people do terrible things based on that hatred. One of the things some of the light-skinned people did was to hang the dark-skinned people they thought were a threat to their way of life. They weren't, of course, but fear drives people to do awful things, including the fear of the people you've been taught to revile suddenly being successful or living nearby. So they hanged them as punishment, or beat them, or dragged them behind carts to kill them."

At this, Loki, who was being measured by the tailor, interjected, "How can Midgardians enslave one another in that way? They are of the same realm. I can understand that fear of those from other realms, especially if one has not met them, but from those of your own realm?"

Brynja continued her story, "Humans created reasons for this hatred, often based on their religious beliefs or a justification to take the land that these others lived on. They seem very petty, but if you look at our wars to conquer or subjugate other realms, we are not so different. Alice saw these lynchings. She was a woman of meagre means, but her daughter worked hard to reach dreams that she was often told she could not reach simply because of her skin colour. The daughter's name was Abigail. She was engaged to a young minister and they had plans to change their town, challenging the hatred they saw levelled against them. Alice's son stood with them. Alice was afraid for them, but she and her husband supported their children, knowing that if change was going to come, it had to start somewhere and it would not be safe. One night, Alice got word that there was trouble at Abigail's house. When she got there, the house was on fire and her children nowhere to be found. Alice rushed in and grabbed a few precious things- Abigail's wedding trunk, mostly, throwing into it the family photographs and books she could get to before the fire and smoke became too much for the small house. When she left out the back door, the neighbour told her that a mob had showed up and dragged Abigail out of the house, both her preacher betrothed and her brother in tow. Her husband had chased after them. The neighbour safely stowed the trunk and Alice went to find her family. When she caught up to them, Abigail, Alice's son, and Abigail's beloved were hanging from an oak tree. Alice's husband had been shot dead as he had tried to push through the crowd to get to them. Alice fled back to the safety of her friends. In the morning, she gathered the men of her church and they cut down the bodies and buried them in the churchyard along with her husband. This all happened in Midgard's 1920s. Alice kept the trunk with her through the fight for equality as she saw great leaders fall to this same hatred forty years later. When she died, she gave it to me. The round-topped trunk in my collection is hers- I took care of her in her last years and she told me that I was to wear that dress when I finally found my husband and to carry with me the memory of so many young loves it represented- to finally fulfil that dream for that dress. I buried her beside her family when she died and gave her papers and photographs to the church- they were collecting stories. I told them hers."