I don’t want to stay. I want to see Uncle June. I have to make sure he’s all right.
But I will see him. Not me, but a different version of me. Uncle June and I have been thrown into separate timelines and there is nothing I can do about that now.
I can make a difference here, though, for the Nokira. I can stay here with Santos so Kaizahn and the Nokira can exist.
You do what you can, Lil Bit, Uncle June said.
I laugh to myself and sniff. My eyes burn. Because we will return thousands of years from now. Only it won’t be exactly us, will it?
“How many times has this happened?”
I don’t realize I’ve said it aloud until Santos responds. “An infinite number of times, I think.”
The Great Leaping, Kaizahn called it. Leaping and simultaneously creating new timelines.
Finally, I look up at Santos and nod. She hands me a lemon Fruitbomb. I unwrap it and pop it into my mouth as I lean back into my seat, kick my feet up onto the dash, and take in the fiery sunset. Santos leans back, too. This certainly wasn’t what I signed up for, being left behind on a swampy alien planet and helping to birth a new species. Plus I’m pretty sure there’s nothing on this rock that tastes this good. Maybe in a few thousand years. I tuck the candy wrapper into my pocket. As a reminder.
A few tears slide down my cheeks, and I don’t bother wiping or sniffing them away, not even when the huge transport flies up through the burning sky and we are left behind.
This is the end.
But it’s also another beginning.
GILDED
By Elizabeth Acevedo
THE INGENIO OF THE ADMIRAL DIEGO COLÓN
LA HISPANIOLA, 1521
Tía Aurelia, the healer who raised me, says my mother was a stoic woman, evidenced by the fact that she did not cry out, not even once, as I pummeled myself from her body. She simply squatted in Tía’s leaf-thatched bohío, and pushed me forth. She caught me with her own two hands, hands still covered with mineral dust from the gold she’d been panning for in Río Ozama. Tía Aurelia says the metal on my mother’s palms mingled with the slick that covered my body and turned me into a gilded, black being.
She says I was god touched, gold touched, from that moment forward.
The other ladinos stood outside our bohío, listening to sounds they never thought they’d hear again. I was the first babe born breathing to a negra. To the ladinos, I was proof that survival here was possible. But I was also a troubling omen: the first of a future generation born on this island and domesticated, declawed by their own lack of memories. The blood that puddled down Mamá’s legs would not stop, and although Tía Aurelia packed her body with herbs and prayed, calling on the true names of God, and stretched out a hammock for Mamá to rest in, Mamá’s strength exited her body in much the same way I had: one hard breath after another until she was emptied of life.
Her gift to me? The gleaming palm print that could not be scrubbed off my back, and the magic that came with it. Tía Aurelia, who has seen more than she can recount, and has story upon story of unbelievable marvels, said she’d never seen anything like it, flesh transferring to flesh a miracle of metal. Even as an infant when I would cry, the tin spoon would rattle in the trencher. If I was having a nightmare Tía would have to put down her sewing, since the needles might fly out of her hand without warning.
There are rumors that some of the Tainos have the ability to disappear into thin air. Other stories whispered late at night assert that there are dragons to the west that crawl out of a lake on hind legs and speak with the voice of a man. Some even say they have seen a negra, blue as a moonless night, wandering through the mountains with backward-facing feet, in her throat a song that lures soldiers deeper and deeper into the woods until they are never seen again.
But I have never heard of someone quite like me, born with the ability to bend copper and bronze to my will.
My gift looms over me like the fifteen-foot cane we harvest at the ingenio, as dark as the molasses I stir all day. Metal sings to me. Sometimes when the admiral is coming to watch us work, I can hear the copper buckles on his shoes even though he is still several miles away; I usually warn the others to put a bit more strength into their swinging arms. It’s the same when I’m at the ingenio working with molasses. I stand at the large bronze vats, and as I get tired the big metal spoon makes itself lighter, helps make the stirring easier. When a ladino gets injured, they come to our bohío. Tía numbs them using a tonic of rum spiced with anise, cinnamon, and cloves. As long as the injury is not in a visible place, I bend scraps of metal to graft a broken bone, or seal a bleeding wound. Every single ladino at the ingenio has had my touch on their body, and they pray over my hands, and they help keep my abilities secret.
If the admiral knew, or any of the friars, they would burn me alive—for only a bruja can manipulate the elements, and a witch is considered a blight on the world.
When I was a babe, the ladinos kept me hidden from the admiral. Children, like women, are rare here. They are not brought to work the land, or considered valuable stock, and although I have heard of other babes born after I was, I was not raised near other children. But when I turned three the admiral was made aware of my presence, and he put me to work. Tía Aurelia says it was a trap. The moment I proved useless the admiral would have me killed or would force me into the forests, but my ability to metal-whisper was helpful; back then we were working in the mines. Every week when we had to lay ore at the admiral’s feet, it was my pile that stacked up the highest. I knew exactly where all the largest deposits of precious metal were.
I was branded lucky, but not magical, and the difference was enough to spare my life.
I was ten when the admiral and I negotiated my coartación, or manumission. The opportunity to buy one’s freedom was not something that had ever been offered on the admiral’s ingenio, although we had all heard of ladinos elsewhere who were given the chance. Tía says it is a way to keep the slaves hoping. Pick one slave to make the others believe that if they work hard enough maybe they, too, will be presented a chance at liberty. And how better to inspire—and strike jealousy—than to offer freedom to the youngest at the ingenio? At least, that is how Tía believes it to be, and from her night work she knows the intention of men like the admiral better than their own wives do, which means she is probably correct.
And so as a child with freshly washed hair and dirty-soled feet, I stood in front of the admiral and an appraiser, who determined I was worth the purchase price of seven hundred pesos, to be paid in seven years. An almost impossible amount if I was not attuned to metallics. But these men did not know I was a girl formed by impossibilities.
When the rivers of gold dried up at the Río Ozama, the admiral moved us four leagues west and transformed his estate into this ingenio, a massive sugar mill. And so we, his ladinos, laid brick for his dungeon, set the doors for his armory, and raised his entire mill: an altar to sugar. Despite his grand palace in the center of the city, he had us build a new house with ballroom and bedrooms. For ourselves we built a tight circle of bohíos bordering the fields we would work. And we prayed to be useful enough to live another day, for the admiral was known to have the guillotine ready for any slave who was considered lazy, or worse, rebellious.