Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon
To everyone I will ever be, and ever was.
Author’s Note
This story takes place on stolen land. While Sorrowland is set in a United States with a speculative and amorphous shape, the geography and settings explored are based on areas traditionally stewarded by the Tonkawa, Caddo Nation, and Lipan Apache in what are colonially known as Central and East Texas, as well as on lands historically, inhabited by various Plains nations with shifting territories, including the Apsáalooke/Crow, Oceti Sakowin/Sioux, and Arapaho, in what settlers have designated Wyoming and Montana. No story of the so-called United States is complete without an understanding of its foundation on genocide and dislocation, nor without acknowledgment of the Indigenous people still here fighting the ongoing occupation.
I wrote this book in England, a single nation among many in Europe responsible for genocides not just on Turtle Island but countless worldwide. I hope that even as Sorrrowland delves into the pain these colonial states have wrought, one might see the joy, triumph, and humor of those who resist, resist, resist. That said, there is no mincing words about some of the darker themes in this book. Note discussion and instances of racism, misogyny, self-harm, suicidality, and homophobia, inclusion of animal death and explicit violence, and references to sexual violence that have taken place off the page.
I hope you find in this book whatever it is you need right this moment.
PART ONE
KINGDOM PLANTAE
1
THE CHILD GUSHED out from twixt Vern’s legs ragged and smelling of salt. Slight, he was, and feeble as a promise. He felt in her palms a great wilderness—such a tender thing as he could never be parsed fully by the likes of her.
Had she more strength, she’d have limped to the river and drownt him. It’d be a gentler end than the one the fiend had in mind.
Vern leant against the trunk of a loblolly and pressed the child naked and limp to her chest. His trembling lips lay right where the heart-shaped charm of a locket would be if she’d ever had a locket. “So that’s how it’s gonna be, hm? Win me over with lip wibbles?” she asked, and though she was not one to capitulate to bids for love, this baby had a way about him that most did not. There was courage in his relentless neediness. He would not be reasoned out of his demands.
Vern reached for the towel next to her. With what gentleness she could muster, and it wasn’t enough to fill a thimble, she dragged rough terry over the baby’s mucky skin. “Well, well,” she said, cautiously impressed, “look at you.” Vern’s nystagmus and resultant low vision were especially troublesome in the waning light, but pulling her baby close lessened the impact of her partial blindness. She could see him full-on.
He was smaller than most newborns she’d had the occasion to handle and had inherited neither her albinism nor her husband Sherman’s yellow-bonedness. His skin was dark, dark-dark, and Vern found it hard to believe that the African ancestry that begat such a hue had ever once been disrupted by whiteness. The only person Vern knew that dark was Lucy.
Viscous cries gurgled up from the child’s throat but died quickly on the bed of Vern’s skin. Her flesh was his hovel, and he was coming to a quick peace with it. His bones were annals of lifetimes of knowledge. He understood that heat and the smell of milk were to be clung to or else.
It was a shame such instincts would not be enough to save him. As much as Vern had made a haven here these last few months, the woods were not safe. A stranger had declared war against her and hers, his threats increasingly pointed of late: a gutted deer with its dead fawn fetus curled beside; a skinned raccoon staked to a trunk, body clothed in an infant’s sleepsuit; and everywhere, everywhere, cottontails hung from trees, necks in nooses and feet clad in baby bootees. The fiend’s kills, always maternal in message, revealed a commitment to theme rarely seen outside a five-year-old’s birthday party.
Another girl might’ve heeded the warnings to leave the woods, but Vern preferred this obvious malevolence to the covert violence of life beyond the trees. To be warned of bad happenings afoot was a welcome luxury. People might’ve followed Vern off the compound when she’d fled if there’d been a fiend there discarding dead animals as auguries.
“Hush, now,” Vern said, then, thinking it was what a good mam would do, sang her babe a song her mam used to sing to her. “Oh, Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn. Oh, Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn. Pharaoh’s army got drown-ded! Oh, Mary, don’t weep.”