Skin Folk
Authors: Nalo Hopkinson
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #General, #American, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Science Fiction; Canadian, #West Indies - Emigration and Immigration, #FIC028000, #Literary Criticism, #Life on Other Planets, #West Indies, #African American
“Tan-Tan and Dry Bone”:
“Duppy Dead Town is where people go when life boof them, when hope left them and happiness cut she eye ’pon them and strut
away…”
“Slow Cold Chick”:
A strange horror hatches out of an empty fridge—and a strange wonder hatches out of an empty life…
“A Habit of Waste”:
“I was nodding off on the streetcar home from work when I saw the woman—wearing the body I used to have….”
“Ganger: Ball Lightning”:
Their passion was all that kept them together—until the day that passion wanted a life of its own…
“Greedy Choke Puppy”:
“Inside my skin I was just one big ball of fire, and Lord, the night air feel nice and cool on the flame! When your youth
start to leave you, you have to steal more from somebody who still have plenty…”
MIDNIGHT ROBBER
“A unique voice… refreshingly original.”
—
Denver Post
“Fusing Afro-Caribbean soul and speech in an intriguing landscape of spirits… terrifying battle between good and evil.”
—
Black Issues Book Review
“Hopkinson’s rich and complex Carib English is… quite beautiful… believable, lushly detailed worlds… extremely well-drawn….
Hopkinson owns one of the more important and original voices in SF.”
—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“Caribbean patois adorns this novel with graceful rhythms… like gorgeous tissue paper, making an appropriate wrapping for
Hopkinson’s deeper gifts. Beneath it lie complex, clearly evoked characters, haunting descriptions of exotic planets, and
a stirring story…. Veterans such as Octavia Butler work similar miracles…. [This book] ought to elevate Hopkinson to star
status.”
—
Seattle Times
“A wonderfully original story… confirms Hopkinson’s place as a provocative, intelligent voice in contemporary SF.”
—
Toronto Globe and Mail
“Spicy and distinctive, set forth in a thoroughly captivating dialect.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
“Vigorous narrative, vividly eloquent prose… Hopkinson has become one of the most distinctive and original of the field’s
newer voices.”
—Locus
BROWN GIRL IN THE RING
“Hopkinson lives up to her advance billing.”
—
New York Times Book Review
“An impressive debut precisely because of Hopkinson’s fresh viewpoint.”
—
Washington Post Book World
“A parable of black feminist self-reliance, couched in poetic language and the structural conventions of classic SF.”
—
Village Voice
“Excellent… a bright, original mix of future urban decay and West Indian magic… strongly rooted in character and place.”
—
Sunday Denver Post
“A wonderful sense of narrative and a finely tuned ear for dialogue… balances a well-crafted and imaginative story with incisive
social critique and a vivid sense of place.”
—
Emerge
“A book to remember.”
—
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Active, eventful… a success.”
—
Philadelphia Inquirer
Brown Girl in the Ring
Midnight Robber
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
“Riding the Red” © 1997. First appeared in
Black Swan, White Raven,
edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. AvoNova, USA, 1997.
“Money Tree” © 1997. First appeared in
Tesseracts 6: the Annual Anthology of Canadian Speculative Fiction,
edited by Robert J. Sawyer and Carolyn Clink. Tesseract Books, Canada, 1997.
Aspect
®
name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.
SKIN FOLK.
Copyright © 2001 by Nalo Hopkinson.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may
quote brief passages in a review.
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2664-8
A trade paperback edition of this book was published in 2001 by Warner Books.
First eBook Edition: December 2001
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
.
Heartfelt thanks to any long-suffering soul who ever workshopped one of these stories with me. You are Legion, and you know
who you are. And blessings and grace, too, to Betsy Mitchell and Jaime Levine of Warner Aspect, and to my agent, Don Maass.
As ever, love and appreciation to my mother, Freda Hopkinson, my brother, Keita Hopkinson, and my partner, David Findlay.
Thank you to the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council for the grants that helped to support me while I completed
this manuscript.
Contents
OF DOPPELGÄNGERS, DUPPIES, AND DEADS…
T
hroughout the Caribbean, under different names, you’ll find stories about people who aren’t what they seem. Skin gives these
skin folk their human shape. When the skin comes off, their true selves emerge. They may be owls. They may be vampiric balls
of fire. And always, whatever the burden their skins bear, once they remove them—once they get under their own skins—they
can fly. It seemed an apt metaphor to use for these stories collectively.
S
he never listens to me anymore. I’ve told her and I’ve told her: daughter, you have to teach that child the facts of life
before it’s too late, but no, I’m an old woman, and she’ll raise her daughter as she sees fit, Ma, thank you very much.
So I tried to tell her little girl myself: Listen, dearie, listen to Grandma. You’re growing up, hmm; getting dreamy? Pretty
soon now, you’re going to be riding the red, and if you don’t look smart, next stop is wolfie’s house, and wolfie, doesn’t
he just love the smell of that blood, oh yes.
Little girl was beginning to pay attention, too, but of course, her saintly mother bustled in right then, sent her off to
do her embroidery, and lit into me for filling the child’s head with ghastly old wives’ tales. Told me girlie’s too young
yet, there’s plenty of time.
Daughter’s forgotten how it was, she has. All growed up and responsible now, but there’s more things to remember than when
to do the milking, and did you sweep the dust from the corners.
Just as well they went home early that time, her and the little one. Leave me be, here alone with my cottage in the forest
and my memories. That’s as it should be.
But it’s the old wives who best tell those tales, oh yes. It’s the old wives who remember. We’ve been there, and we lived
to tell them. And don’t I remember being young once, and toothsome, and drunk on the smell of my own young blood flowing through
my veins? And didn’t it make me feel all shivery and nice to see wolfie’s nostrils flare as he scented it? I could make wolfie
slaver, I could, and beg to come close, just to feel the heat from me. And oh, the game I made of it, the dance I led him!
He caught me, of course; some say he even tricked me into it, and it may be they’re right, but that’s not the way this old
wife remembers it. Wolfie must have his turn, after all. That’s only fair. My turn was the dance, the approach and retreat,
the graceful sway of my body past his nostrils, scented with my flesh. The red hood was mine, to catch his eye, and my task
it was to pluck all those flowers, to gather fragrant bouquets with a delicate hand, an agile turn of a slim wrist, the blood
beating at its joint like the heart of a frail bird. There is much plucking to be done in the dance of riding the red.
But wolfie has his own measure to tread too, he does. First slip past the old mother, so slick, and then, oh then, isn’t wolfie
a joy to see! His dance is all hot breath and leaping flank, piercing eyes to see with and strong hands to hold. And the teeth,
ah yes. The biting and the tearing and the slipping down into the hot and wet. That measure we dance together, wolfie and
I.
And yes, I cried then, down in the dark with my grandma, till the woodman came to save us, but it came all right again, didn’t
it? That’s what my granddaughter has to know: It comes all right again. I grew up, met a nice man, reminded me a bit of that
woodman, he did, and so we were married. And wasn’t Ithe model goodwife then, just like my daughter is now? And didn’t I bustle
about and make everything just so, what with the cooking and the cleaning and the milking and the planting and the birthing,
and I don’t know what all?
And in the few quiet times, the nights before the fire burned down too low to see, I would mend and mend. No time for all
that fancy embroidery that my mama taught me.
I forgot wolfie. I forgot that riding the red was more than a thing of soiled rags and squalling newborns and what little
comfort you and your man can give each other, nights when sleep doesn’t spirit you away soon as you reach your bed.
I meant to tell my little girl, the only one of all those babes who lived, and dearer to me than diamonds, but I taught her
embroidery instead, not dancing, and then it was too late. I tried to tell her quick, before she set off on her own, so pretty
with her little basket, but the young, they never listen, no. They’re deaf from the sound of their own new blood rushing in
their ears.
But it came all right; we got her back safe. We always do, and that’s the mercy.
It was the fright killed my dear mam a few days later, that’s what they say, she being so old and all, but mayhap it was just
her time. Perhaps her work was done.
But now it’s me that’s done with all that, I am. My goodman’s long gone, his back broke by toil, and I have time to just sit
by the fire, and see it all as one thing, and know that it’s right, that it must be so.
Ah, but wouldn’t it be sweet to ride the red, just once more before I’m gone, just one time when I can look wolfie in the
eye, and match him grin for grin, and show him that I know what he’s good for?
For my mama was right about this at least: the trick is, you must always have a needle by you, and a bit of thread. Those
damned embroidery lessons come in handy, they do. What’s torn can be sewn up again, it can, and then we’re off on the dance
once more! They say it’s the woodman saves us, me and my daughter’s little girl, but it’s wolfie gives us birth, oh yes.
And I haven’t been feeling my best nowadays, haven’t been too spry, so I’m sure it’s time now. My daughter’s a hard one, she
is. Never quite forgot how it was, stuck in that hot wet dark, not knowing rescue was coming; but she’s a thoughtful one too.
The little one’s probably on her way right now with that pretty basket, Don’t stop to dawdle, dear, don’t leave the path,
but they never hear, and the flowers are so pretty, just begging to be plucked.
Well, it’s time for one last measure; yes, one last, sweet dance.
Listen: is that a knock at the door?
R
io Cobre” means “copper river,” perhaps because it used to be customary to throw bright, shiny coppers into the river as an
offering to Oshun, the female deity of the waters.
S
ilky was having dreams of deluges. They’d started soon after she got the news about her brother, Morgan. The dreams frightened
her: mile-high tidal waves that swallowed cities; vast masses of water shifting restlessly over drowned skyscrapers.
In one nightmare, she was living in a cottage on a mountaintop. She was cooking a meal for Morgan, barbecuing fat pink prawns
on an outdoor grill while she and her brother laughed and talked. Far away on the horizon was the outline of another mountain
range, a wide plateau. She heard water running. It irritated her that Morgan had left a tap on—what a way the boy was lazy!
She turned to tell him to go and turn it off, and saw the plateau in the distance. Water was spilling over the top of it,
billions of gallons rushing over that mountain range miles away. That’s what she’d been hearing.