Chapter 41: The Matriarchs

XLI

Monique still could not quite understand what was happening.

She knew that she sat cross-legged on the remnants of a filthy shag rug in the living room of an abandoned house with Jo-Mel. They traded stories.

And yet:

Monique was experiencing a sense of vertigo. She felt as though she had fallen backwards, had tumbled down into herself. She continued the Telling along with Jo-Mel. She continued to tell her story. But she was now submerged within it, pulled along by its own momentum.

She opens herself to the press of history that washes over her. It floods her senses with more than the human mind alone could possibly process. Monique thrashes about, the story splintering, slipping away.

And then she feels something firm, something solid lifting itself up to meet her, to support her. She finds a rock upon which to stand. There, she meets her Mothers. She meets the Felani.

Mamurakan was not among them. She wandered still, preceded by her daughter and still pursued by Sekunde Paa, who followed her into the places beyond the realms. But each of the inheritants of the Felani mantle, upon their deaths, were welcomed here into the loving arms of their fore-bearers, their peers. The Matriarchs.

Afriya Magharibi, born on the West African plains towards the end of the slave traders' time and the last of the Felani to pass beyond the veil, steps forth, takes Monique by the hand and leads her in amongst the others.

She begins a Telling of her own:

They came for her father first, she said. He was not born to the fires of the Felani, but he was made wise and strong by its bloodline.

The Felani are present in wait within the descendants of the Mad King. It will only truly arise in its fullness within a female child, but a male child, such as Afriya Magharibi's sire, can be a conduit, a powerful mage in his own right.

Magharibi's father was the last of the practitioners of the old ways. He taught his children of their magical heritage and told them of what the world had lost. He told them how they were to someday get it all back. That it would be them or their distant kin who would rekindle the fires of magic.

Monique could see and feel as much of what was being said as Magharibi wove a powerful working with her Telling.

Magharibi continued:

The Merchant Kings had sent assassins in the night to incapacitate her father. He awaited them in the dark, had sent his wife and children into hiding outside of the village. He met them bravely and used all of his skill to hold them. But he was eventually overwhelmed.

Men like him often find themselves battling alone.

Magharibi, her mother and siblings, were found in the wilds beyond the village. They were put in chains and led to the coast and housed there with so many others.

Her mother did not survive the journey across the seas. Her body, freed from their hell, slipped beneath the cold waters. When they came ashore, Magharibi would see her siblings no more. Their paths would only cross through their far distant offspring.

She lived to be a grandmother. So hard during this time of captivity. Especially as she felt the Felani grow restless within her, bound by the placating spells woven over the captives as they festered within the holds of the slave ships.

She was brutalized. Lent out for breeding. Raped and beaten.

But never broken. Her fire raged on until she finally died from its heat and old age.

Her many children were again scattered like sown seeds across the South. Magharibi's raging fires would be a constant amongst their blood.

Monique's line would take root in Mapleton, Ga. They would sprout up through Kentucky and on into Cairo, Il, eventually settling in Decatur; Youngstown; Chicago.

Monique saw them all. She saw them stretched out through time, their yearning, their striven desires reaching out along the branches of a previously unknown family tree.

She could see the brief flashes of light, like glowing fruits along its branches, marking the occasional rise of the Felani along the bloodlines.

Many of them were here, with her now, in the place of this Telling. She could recognize them, match them up to the color and frequency of the lights. They pressed themselves upon her, introduced themselves and their stories to her. They let her know that she was not alone. That she had never been alone.

She had always been surrounded by the love and support of her ancestors, her far distant cousins and aunts and uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers.

She reveled in this metaphysical family reunion. Felt fuller, more complete with the knowledge and connections afforded to one who belongs.

She searched among them for familiarity, sought out missing comforts. She searched for her direct link to this line, to the blood of the Felani. She sought out her mother amongst the throng of the dead.

She was not amongst them.