Cypress wasn’t sure she wanted to jeopardize her position in the colony by going to see the men. She’d seen men before; there was not the mystery, like there was for Gisa. Then a curtain opened, and Cypress saw her mother in labor; her very own real mama from Charleston was in the black hole giving birth; and all around her were the female guards carrying small Sassafrasses and Indigoes, toddler-sized Mahlons and Lallahs.

“Oh my god.” Cypress caught herself from speaking too loudly. “Oh, Jesus.” Most of the “bearers” were black and Latin. “Oh god, not again.” Cypress held onto the walls. She was swooning; all of slavery gushing from her stomach.

“That’s my mother. I’ve got to get my mother out.”

She kept repeating this while Gisa gently reminded her that they could come back all the time; that no one knew. And Cypress couldn’t explain that her people had done this before, filled wombs over and over until they collapsed, or the body let go. Brought children to the soil never to be seen again, bred spirits to be smashed, sold, played with until their connection to the idea of humanity was obliterated. Gisa tried to calm her, leading her further into a black tunnel that opened onto a moat. A huge glass building surrounded by armed guards in purple helmets was in the middle. Cypress could see crocodiles and alligators meandering through the waters. Her skin shuddered. Then she saw them. Boys on the lower levels; young men in the middle levels; old men on the top floors. There was a loud buzz. The men came toward the glass walls that enclosed them, to inject their sperm into individual tubes running the length of the prison.

Cypress thought of all the porno shows she had ever seen or heard of; women masturbating on the stage in front of three hundred men; women hung from trapezes so anyone could eat their pussies for the admission price; women passed around from man to man to be sodomized, cut, beaten. This spectacle belonged with those. Even though no one touched the men, or watched them “perform,” the threat of violence, the humiliation, was inherent. Cypress wondered if the boy on the third floor, second cage, was Ariel; he looked like Ariel, and she wanted him out of there. Then she heard one of the guards shout.

“Hurry up, old man. We don’t have all day!”

Cypress looked to the highest windowed cage, and there was her father, with his hands behind his back, refusing. Cypress was stunned.

“All right, let him have it,” the guard said, and his entire cage crackled with electricity; he was being shocked to submit.