adrienne

maree brown

GRIEVERS

Praise

“Grievers is a beautiful debut novella by adrienne maree brown, who is already one of our most important voices in Afrofuturism and true-life worldbuilding. Grievers could not be more timely, tackling loss, plague, gentrification, memory and grief with a path toward hope in a future Detroit. Each paragraph is lovingly crafted, a story unto itself, blending into a tapestry no reader will soon forget.” —Tananarive Due, American Book Award winner, author of Ghost Summer: Stories

“Dune finds her way into our inner spaces as we read Grievers by adrienne maree brown. We are compelled to witness this precise yet unwieldy unfolding spiral of memory and resistance via survival. Grievers is the right book for right now. adrienne inspires us to be present as we try and put ourselves back together no matter how broken this world seems. There has never been a love letter to Detroit and social justice lineages like this one.” —Ayana A. H. Jamieson, PhD founder of Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network

“This Detroit thriller/mystery written by adrienne maree brown is a story full of suspense, grief and an overwhelming sense of community that is determined to survive a city wide mysterious pandemic. Each character will remind you of a Detroit Ancestor or loving comrade in the struggle and has you question what life will be like after hell.” —Siwatu-Salama Ra, Community daughter, Mother, Detroit community organizer, prison abolitionist

“Grievers is a haunting melody. Highly imaginative but with a gruesome practicality, Grievers illustrates the lengths one person will go to in order to have some self-determination in the midst of being desperately alone. I was filled with the deep, aching love that was woven throughout this story. When all that you know and love is gone, gone up in flames, gone mute or just gone ‘away’… you are forced to discover and draw upon all of the resources that are tucked into your family, your history, your city for resilience, self-sufficiency and the ability to truly make a way out of no way. Gritty and tender, it dug under my skin and settled into my Detroit soul.” —Lottie Spady, Detroit activist and healer

Black Dawn Series

With the Black Dawn series we honor anarchist traditions and follow the great Octavia E. Butler’s legacy, Black Dawn seeks to explore themes that do not reinforce dependency on oppressive forces (the state, police, capitalism, elected officials) and will generally express the values of antiracism, feminism, anticolonialism, and anticapitalism. With its natural creation of alternate universes and world-building, speculative fiction acts as a perfect tool for imagining how to bring forth a just and free world. The stories published here center queerness, Blackness, antifascism, and celebrate voices previously disenfranchised, all who are essential in establishing a society in which no one is oppressed or exploited. Welcome, friends, to Black Dawn!

Dedication

This novella is dedicated to Detroit, and to the ancestors who inspired these characters.

Prologue

“We are beginning to understand that we have souls.”—Grace Lee Boggs1

Everything green bursts forth, breaking open any previous container—seed, body, concept, moment. Death is transition, it offers many faces, many sounds and smells, many distinct ways that a living thing can suddenly be absent from a body, which, stripped of the most obvious and appealing miracle, becomes a haven for any creature that can manage the stench.

Death is the way the old let go, leaving the young something to cleave to, to make new as they crawl out of the earth, becoming the home for the next life, unimaginable until it begins to breathe.

1. Grace Lee Boggs was an American revolutionary who dedicated her life to studying and organizing for liberation.

chapter one: Burn

Dune was new to touching death.

The body was heavy in a way it had never been in life; dancing in the kitchen to Marvin Gaye, holding Dune close to its breasts, thick and floating.

The body had a strange odor; ripe compost, late summer. In the last two weeks it had been impossible to keep the body clean as it died, impossible to acknowledge that the body was dying, even though the face was already frozen into a mask of grief.

Dune pulled it towards her now, her hands under the stiff arms, which she had never consciously touched when the body was alive. She found herself surprised at the cool absence of life, expecting warmth to be hiding still in those tight fatty places.

The body was resistant, as if tied to the bed. She pulled again and again, until the body finally came with her, dropping her down as all the weight kept its pact with gravity. The legs flopped open and Dune winced, the smell between the thighs sharp, familiar.

She rolled away, stood up, stepped backwards, some half-sacred instinct quieting her curses. She kicked the baseboard once and gathered her breath. Then she commenced dragging the body to the bedroom door, pulling alternately at the arms, or at the rug beneath.

Soon she was sweating everywhere and her back hurt. She noticed her physical discomfort from a distance, her self tiny and numb inside of her skin. This was so different from the weight she often lifted, trying to carve the softness from her body. When she reached the doorframe, she slumped against it, resting for a moment, the body leaning against her shins.

Sallow light whispered through dark oak blinds, leaving slat shadows on a hardwood floor cluttered with small rugs her mother had brought home from Morocco. Her father had splurged on the blinds in order to take naps. Now the bed’s brass frame burned with sun. Dust motes, set wild by Dune’s labor, caught in the beams, the only motion. The room looked quiet, peaceful.

Her mother would never have let the bed be a mess in daylight.

Her mother had kept a framed poster of Bob Marley in every bedroom since college and she’d put him over this bed after Dune’s father died. No one else Dune knew framed $3 posters, but her mother, Kama, liked things to give the appearance of togetherness.

Her mother would never be in an unseemly pile of nightgown, cold greasy skin and soiled underwear at her daughter’s feet.

Dune looked behind her. Down the hallway, through the kitchen, keeping out of sight of Mama Vivian, down the back porch stairs, through the tall grass, across the yard to the makeshift pyre.

She would do this. No one else would help her. She didn’t want anyone else’s help.

She would let her mother go.

Her flames were small in the spread-out city, black swirling up against the grandiose purple dusk that had swallowed the sky during her slow dragging.

Bonfires and barbecues were a part of Detroit’s summer evenings—usually with cheap beer and a car sound system providing the music. There were less and less places to gather without needing to secure a permit or make a payment.

There were other kinds of fire.

Many nights, Kama had thrown Dune in the back of the car to chase smoke across Detroit’s flat wide cityscape. Kama wanted Dune to know their Black city well enough to pinpoint the fire’s neighborhood from across town. Closing in on a burning house, or abandoned warehouse, young Dune would be captivated by the way flames teased, licked up the outer edges and furled out of windows, always up. The sounds of the fires were oceanic, roiling and massive, crashing down floors. Sometimes brick would glow, but not give.

The fire department would spray water around the edges, letting the empty buildings become ash and air, trying to stop the damage from spreading any further. Neighbors would huddle on nearby porches, theorizing with Kama on arson and what the city would do with the plot of land, hoping it wouldn’t be another skeleton of char or some flavorless condo; unclear what they hoped it would be. Kama’s energy flowed outward, Dune’s flowed inward, a perfect pair.

She watched the stars cross the night sky. Tonight, Dune’s fire was no smoke signal, no cry for help or company, no crisis—she hoped her smoke would keep everyone far away. Tonight, her mother wasn’t blazing across town. She was the fire.

Dune had been sitting at the massive oak dining room table in the kitchen of the house she’d been born in, swiping through photos on her phone. She needed to find a new profile pic, one without Marta in it. Marta had been Dune’s true love and then Marta had been a cheating bitch. It was time to break up on the internet.

Marta had taken this picture, her face soft, sun-kissed and smiling in the foreground. Dune angular, cool and dark-eyed in contrast. Dune was mentally berating her past self—she’d always known better than to put a “happy couple” shot as her profile pic, had given into Marta’s sweet persuasion. Dune wasn’t into social media, didn’t trust it. But Marta felt the opposite, that things weren’t real if they weren’t documented, shared. She wanted everyone to know she “had a man.”

Now none of the good solo pictures on Dune’s phone showed her with her painfully tight cornrows, and she didn’t feel like taking a new pic today.

Kama was washing the breakfast dishes, talking mostly to herself with moments of raised volume, which Dune felt compelled to respond to with grunts, amens. It was sticky hot, all the windows were open in gummy sills, fans twisting their necks in every doorway.

Mama Vivian, Dune’s paternal grandmother, once a formidable Chinese activist in Detroit movements for racial and economic justice, was sitting on her throne in the living room just around the doorframe. Anyone who complimented the big old doors would learn from Kama that they were the “original wood,” though Dune couldn’t say which wood that was exactly and she doubted her mother could name it either.

The shadowy living room was the coolest place during the summer, its windows blocked by the neighbor’s house and the wilderness that grew between the two buildings. The air didn’t move much, but it didn’t boil either.

The configuration was familiar that morning. When Kama cooked or did dishes, Dune often sat like this, at the other end of the table, ignoring her mother companionably. Mama Vivian rarely entered the kitchen when Kama or Dune were in there.

The kitchen was a square room at the back of the house. It felt permanently crowded due to a monstrous table that Kama had gotten for free after someone else’s divorce. They would never have been able to afford such a piece. It was a single slab of rosewood, meant for a dining room with a chandelier, in a suburb—not this railroad of tight spaces. As a family they’d sat around the table for meals a handful of times, mostly calendared holidays, squeezing into mismatched chairs that knocked against the edges of the room.

Their love for Kama showed in the swallowed complaints.

More often they took plates into the living room, eating on little golden trays that folded up and stacked in the corner. Other than Kama, the table was the only thing in their too-small house that was unapologetically big.

That morning Kama stood at the sink, her ass pressed against the upper edge of the chair behind her, head wrapped in cloth patterned with tangerines and palm trees. When Kama looked back to emphasize a point, Dune saw the sweat beading on her mother’s brow and lip as her hands flew through the air with the sponge, the dishes and her opinions.

It was heavy in the heart of the room. Pots and pans hung an inch too low over the table from a silver grid, something Kama had seen in a movie once and said she thought was so elegant. Dune’s father, Brendon, had loved doing things for Kama; quietly delivering her fantasies, even if he always did it a bit differently than the instructions. Kama had to have all the cooking options hanging up there: the wok, steamer, non-stick pans and a massive griddle that seemed to drag the ceiling down.

She only ever used the cast iron skillet that sat on the stove now, thick with oil.

The counter beside the stove was dominated by a decades-old wooden spinning smorgasbord of spices. Dune had read somewhere that spices lost their flavor with time, the bite and purity of flavor falling away. She’d started bringing home small bags of fresh spice mixes from the Spice Miser stand at the farmer’s market: Chili Powder, Parsley and Rosemary, Lemon Pepper, Herbs de Provence. Kama would always say they looked “really interesting,” and then put them up on a shelf with the rest of Dune’s unused kitchen contributions, an impressive collection.

A well-worn bottle of Lawry’s and a mason jar of nutritional yeast sat between the spice wheel and the oven. Those were Kama’s kitchen moves beyond the obvious (salt, pepper, butter, brown sugar).

At the opposite end of the counter was the ancient maroon and cream rice cooker, used less and less as Mama Vivian lost interest in food and cooking. Brendon had used it daily; no matter what Kama was cooking it needed some rice.

On the other side of the oven was a little corner where nothing quite fit. Kama kept her broom and mop back there, even though it was a precarious thing pulling them out, banging the pans above into chorus.

Now Kama was saying something about going to pick up her check from “the capitalist pigs.” “Of course they moved the office down to Fort Street, almost down to the bridge, because the truth is they know come winter it’s gonna be that much harder to get over there on the bus. Its like eight blocks from the nearest stop. Naw, they don’t even want us to get our checks that we earned. Like it’s a handout! Half the city is on unemployment now! And they couldn’t put it somewhere convenient?”

Dune couldn’t fully tune in. They were living week-to-week on the tiny income she earned running dirty dishes to the kitchen at the Standard, supplemented by Vivian’s social security and the tiny unemployment checks Kama had pulled in since getting fired from her last job for being “honest in the face of the bullshit.”

Dune wanted to hear Kama say something about going to find a job, followed by maybe a couple of years of updates on how she was keeping that job. Instead, every day, her mother woke up with brilliant ideas for “making moves against white supremacy;” making lists of who she was going to call and mobilize. By noon she was caught up in researching conspiracy theories online, house maintenance or a visit with a neighbor to share survival technologies for some vague, pending apocalypse. In the evening she would go to or host meetings, always meetings.

Since she’d lost Brendon, Kama had become the child on the high dive who can’t seem to jump. None of her ideas reached the point of having a fundraising plan, collaborators or anything that Dune could see as steps into reality. Dune felt for her—there was no place for the kind of grief Kama walked with. Her mother’s complaints were righteous, but righteousness wasn’t going to feed them.

The ranting rapids of Kama’s words stopped some time before Dune noticed the quiet. Her mom was still standing at the sink, but now she was silent and totally still. Too still. The light coming in the kitchen window moved more than her mother, dappling Kama’s edges.

The hair on the back of Dune’s neck stood up. “What?”

Her mother didn’t turn, didn’t move, didn’t sway. Just stood there, her back stiff, a wall between nations. Dune stood up and walked over, some deep quiet cell in her body telling her not to touch.

“Moms?”

“No, I don’t think it’s a heart attack, but something is wrong! I don’t know what it is. She won’t respond, she won’t move. Fuck oh my god I think she just wet herself! Oh god—she’s kind of crying, but otherwise she’s really still! Like, frozen! No. No! No just frozen in place! Just please fucking send someone to help us. I’m sorry, but please!”

Dune stood next to her mother, yelling into her phone, waving her hands and trying to get a response. Mama Vivian stood in the living room doorway, fists pressed to her silent mouth.

When the ambulance finally came, Kama gave no resistance as the paramedics pulled her from behind the table, strapped her to a gurney, lifted her down the porch stairs and slid her in amongst the mysterious equipment they began attaching to her as the ambulance doors closed.

Dune rushed along behind the sirens in their little rusted brown Chevy, Mama Vivian in the passenger seat, chaste in her uniform of mismatched pajamas, a worn-down terrycloth robe, slippers and furrowed brow. The quiet ride through the overgrown fields and strange new buildings that characterized this part of Detroit felt eternal.

When Dune reached the emergency room she asked everyone where Kama was. The woman behind the counter responded in a flat voice, asking about insurance. The air caught in Dune’s body. They didn’t have insurance. Mama Vivian had something, Medicaid, but it wasn’t much. Kama always said they would save money instead of spending it on something they might never need. Dune was pretty sure there wasn’t much saved.

The woman was wearing a printed hospital top beneath a face that discouraged complex responses. Dune thought of how she and Mama Vivian must look, a panicking Black girl so boyish she was still being carded halfway through her twenties, with her confused Asian grandmother in house clothes. They weren’t formidable, weren’t used to wielding power with strangers; Kama did that. Dune began to beg, but the woman waved her off. “Honey, we’ll treat her. It’s just gonna cost you.”

The doctors at Henry Ford couldn’t find anything medically wrong with Kama. They initially concluded that she was in shock, possibly due to an allergic reaction.

Kama was a full-figured blue-black woman. She had been wronged early and often in life. She grabbed everything by the collar and pulled it in too close—love, babies, joy, pain, disaster. Her anger was as contagious as her laughter. Now her quiet was terrible and grand, filling up the small space behind the curtain and then the room she was moved into.

For four days they fed Kama through a tube, hydrating her intravenously as she stared at the wall. Her lips moved sometimes, but no sounds came out. A rotation of doctors asked Kama tons of questions that garnered no response. They plugged and poked and knocked her, snapped in front of her; always shaking their heads and making serious faces. They had conversations that Dune didn’t want to be a part of, didn’t want to hear; considering and then ruling out heat stroke, aneurysm, blood on the brain and a heart attack. They did scans of her mother’s chest and head, ultrasounds of her belly, an MRI.

They were befuddled by her apparent health.

On the third day, Dune heard someone say the words “spontaneous brain death” in the hall outside the room. She walked out to calmly confront the speaker, kept her voice contained enough that if no one heard the words, they wouldn’t know she was streaming obscenities. It was a kid, a nurse’s aide. He apologized, red-faced, said that he’d been careless. He didn’t take it back, his shoulders pulled in close as he sidestepped away.

Dune fumed for hours until the truth of it broke open in her own awareness. She could not move around the absence of her mother thinking, feeling, being.

A salt-and-peppered Black doctor named Rogers pulled Dune to the side and explained that Kama’s brain activity was limited to the temporal lobe, the amygdala, and that no stimulation had generated any other responses. “She’s not technically brain dead, it’s more the kind of inactive prefrontal cortex we see in the severely depressed, but with the elevated stress hormonal flooding in the hippocampus that we associate with, well, with PTSD. As severe as her symptoms are, this does seem to be psychosomatic.”

This meant nothing to Dune.

Rogers recommended a few weeks of observation, and shared what it would cost each day to keep Kama on life support now that she was stabilized. The number didn’t strike Dune as possible in the real world. The hospital just needed proof that payment was possible, then they would transfer Kama to a long-term room. Dune knew she couldn’t even cover the stay so far.

Kama would have to come home.

“But what do I do? How do I feed her?”

“Broth. Water. And keep talking to her. You never know, the brain is still quite mysterious.” Dr. Rogers had a kind face, but closed. She spread her latex gloved hands, emphasizing how empty they were.

Two weeks later the city named the sickness Syndrome H-8. Dr. Rogers called and left Dune an urgent message. “We are sorry to bother you, but we believe your mother might be patient zero of Syndrome H-8. Please call me back, or when you get this please just bring her back down to the clinic.”

Dune missed that call. She was busy cremating her mother in the yard.

chapter two: Gather

The morning after her mother was made into ash, Dune came to as the sun crested the horizon. She had passed the night on the couch in the living room, an alchemy of whiskey and weed helping her mind quiet for a couple of hours. The detritus was still on the coffee table.

The afternoon before, after sitting by the bed until her mama’s skin was cold, Dune had wrapped Kama in the yellow flowered sheets of her deathbed and dragged her into the yard. She had piled wood, leaves, old print-outs of nonprofit strategic plans and other kindling under and around her mother, thrown matches into the chaotic pyre and blown her lungs out until everything was fire.

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