Sugarcane and Indigo

This Is Important, Child

There is no such thing as a weed. A weed is just a word for a plant that grows too well where it isn't wanted.

    Stories are a lot like weeds that way. They have a way of popping up where you least expect them. They're like dandelions. They float around the wind waiting for the right place to set down roots and when they do - and believe me, they always do - those roots are so strong, your great-great grandbaby will spend forever trying to pull them out.

    Or maybe stories are more like cancer. You leave one loose end and they'll keep on growing.

But one thing I know is that every good story starts with once upon a time. For example, once upon a time there was a girl whose father built coffins. Caught you already, didn't it? Or perhaps, once upon a time a child bled at the foot of a God. Or maybe, once upon a time there was a God of stories who forgot that stories didn't care who told them.

Stories are like the branches of a tree. They all head in different directions but follow one back enough and you'll see that they all split from the same source

    Once upon a time, there was a coffin-maker. The type of coffin-maker whose work was so beautiful it had men looking forward to death. So great was this coffin-maker's talent that the gods would sometimes sneak down from wherever they'd been hiding to try out the coffin for themselves.

    It so happened that this coffin-maker had no sons to pass on his talent but he did have a single daughter. She was the type of child that was marked for death long before she was born. She came out sickly, eyes wide as if she was already searching for the grim reaper. She never grew very strong. It was said that the lightest of winds could knock her over and that every day she lived was a day she stole her life from a God's hand.

    She would watch her father carve the life of the deceased onto the wood of these coffins and she'd wondered what story he'd carve on her's. Would he carve the story of a sick child who lived just long enough to burden their parents? Or maybe he'd carve the tragic tale of a girl who didn't get the chance to experience life. Maybe if he was feeling generous the day she died, he'd carve a story full of love, a tale of a father who lost his only child.

    She'd sit and watch her father carve coffin after coffin after coffin and she realized she didn't want any of those tales to be her story. So, one day when she was still very young she approached her father in his workshop and asked him to teach her his trade. He looked down at his keen eyed daughter and frowned. She wasn't even strong enough to lift the tools.

    "I'll grow stronger, papa. I promise," she had assured him.

    With the sigh of a man who knew his child would fail, he placed his great tools in her tiny hands and proceeded to teach her how to carve. She'd have to put the tools down every ten minutes her arms would begin to hurt so bad, but she'd always pick them up.

    Some say that that's why she didn't die. That she made a deal with death to just finish her last project and then he could take her. Death never knew, though, that she never had just one last project. Some say the gods saw how her     coffins were even more beautiful than her father's and commanded death to spare her till her gift waned. Whatever the reason, the child grew stronger each day till one day she was grown.

    Maybe you think this is a happy story. Maybe you think the girl got married. Maybe you think she had a child of her own to teach carving to. Maybe you think that happy ever after was guaranteed.

    Well, you'd be wrong.

    The girl was stolen in a raid. She was sold and carried across the Atlantic chained to hundreds of others just like her. She was sold to a sugarcane farm where her hands grew bloody sifting through the stalks everyday. Her back was marked with ropes of scars from the sting of the whips. Her belly grew round with the master's child. Her hair was shorn off by the master's wife for the audacity of having her husband's child.

    But her eyes - those dark, endless ocean-at-night eyes - they never lost their keenness. And her hands - those bloodied skilled hands - they still remembered how to carve a coffin capable of luring a God. And her child - a child that would never know the rolling plains of her homeland or the heat of her father's workshop or the kindness of her mother's eyes- would never be a slave again.