American War(51)

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.