Maxim was the last person to speak at the meeting. He was an old man, around the age of our grandfathers—he’d needed a chair to sit on while onstage because his legs wouldn’t allow him to stand for long. There were over one hundred of us in that room, and none of us had made a sound as Maxim told the story of when he was a young man in a poor, cold country in Europe, how he and a group of his friends had burned down a government office building. He told us how they took oil and matches and just burned the whole thing down. His eyes lit up as he recounted the magnificence of the flame and smoke rising on that dark, frigid night. No one ever found out it was them. Months later, they went to another government office and ripped up documents and broke cabinets and sprayed paint all over. Afterward, they sat down on the floor of the office and drank alcohol. Then they urinated on the tables and chairs, laughing. Maxim laughed when he said this last part, and we all burst out laughing too, and clapping. We didn’t stop clapping until he told us that it wasn’t long before the government figured out who was responsible. The government arrested him and his friends; they spent a year in prison. That year was the proudest of his life, he said, because instead of sitting and talking and waiting for someone to do something, he’d done what he could. He’d done what he believed he had to. He’d shown those bastards that he could fight back, and that as long as he had breath in him, he would never stop fighting back.
You should have been there at that moment to see this man’s pride, his fearlessness, how in awe of it we all were. We stood up and clapped for so long the sound of it must have echoed all the way to the west end of the universe. My eyes welled up. Was Maxim’s message for me? For us? I remember all the times when I listened to you talking about it in the village square, saying we ought to hurt Pexton. I didn’t agree with you then. Burning a building seemed so futile. Even burning ten buildings seemed futile. Pexton could rebuild Gardens in a day. But perhaps the point isn’t for us to hurt them in a manner from which they’ll never recover. Perhaps the point is merely to let them know that we’re here. And we’re angry.
Yesterday my friends and I were discussing Maxim’s story in my bedroom. There were six of us, and only one person agreed with me that destroying our enemy’s property could lead to anything good. It’s just not effective, was the consensus. I argued that we can’t decide based on the notion of effectiveness—how can we know that a strategy won’t prove itself worthwhile generations after being deemed a failure? Our duty is to do what we can now. That is what Sonni and the elders are too blinded by fear to see. Waiting for the Restoration Movement to free us is safe but cowardly. I admit that the more I think about it, the more the idea of damaging someone else’s property leaves me uneasy. But my father used to say we can’t do only what we’re at ease with, we must do what we ought to do.
Forgive me the length of this letter. What I most want you to know right now is that I’m open to listening to your ideas about making it clear to Pexton that it’s not over.
I’ll always be one of us,
Thula
* * *
—
In our response, we reminded her of the story about the ants that killed the growling dog, bite by bite. We could do such a thing too. There was no better time to start biting Pexton than now. Kosawa was in danger of becoming uninhabitable. We were about to start getting married, after which children would follow—how could we allow our children to suffer like we once did? If we tried something and failed, wouldn’t it be better to one day tell the children that we’d done everything within our capacity? Thula agreed, writing:
Yes, if we are to be conquered, let it not be because we never fought. Our fathers, brothers, uncles, friends—what did they die for? They died so that we could live peacefully in Kosawa, and if not us, then at least the next generation. No one has the right to make us prisoners on our land. No one has the right to take from us that which the Spirit gave our ancestors. Across America today are pockets of people who were made prisoners on their land. The land of their ancestors was taken from them, and now they live at the edge of society, a plight worse than ours. At least we still walk the paths our ancestors walked, but who’s to say that one day all of our land won’t be taken from us like it happened here? The ancestors of these trampled people in America fought hard and they lost, but what’s most important is that they fought. Much as the story of their defeat saddens me, it heartens me also, because I realize that, like them, we’re not weak, a ferocious creature gave us its blood. The government and Pexton have left us with no choice but to do what we must in order to be heard. They speak to us in the language of destruction—let’s speak it to them too, since it’s what they understand.