11.27

Pacing hates me, so this too is an endless chapter.

He explains everything is boring and ordinary. He says they’re now pariahs, meaning only three other kids will sit with them! Yeah, that’s definitely the most horrible it can possibly be. Those other kids include Winnie Reid, the only member of the Jackson Debate team and yet another reminder that there appear to be plenty of people Emothan could have struck up a conversation with instead of bitching about how boring everyone is.

Then Lena’s invited to his family’s Thanksgiving party, which is a big deal to her because apparently casters don’t celebrate it, because the festival of eating a bunch of food has such limited appeal. Anyway blah blah his family does family stuff. Apparently he’s got an Aunt Caroline, no mention which side, and apparently she’s super knowledgeable about old architecture and antiques, so naturally she won’t be consulted about the historical Greenbrier or the current amulet, since he said this is during a boring period and by fuck he will not be wrong.

Then he reports that some of his (female, naturally) relatives are dumb and can’t spell. It’s especially annoying when they’re ancient women and probably didn’t have a particularly good education, but sure, it just means they’re dumb.

This is one of those weird things about stories – you’ll sometimes get male characters surrounded by female ones, but it’s generally to disdain them and highlight how unfair it is he has to put up with this. A woman surrounded by men is just normal, a man surrounded by women is a huge imposition.

His aunt starts in on victoriously offering to provide him this year’s reenactment costume.

I’d almost forgotten I had to dress up as a Confederate soldier for the Reenactment of the Battle of Honey Hill if I wanted to pass history this year. Every February, there was a Civil War reenactment in Gatlin; it was the only reason tourists ever showed up here.

Again, reenactments require Union soldiers. They’re in high demand. It’s entirely possible that this guy might explicitly require you to sign up as Confederate, but it’s not the only uniform you can wear to one of those things.

Lena reached for a biscuit. “I don’t really understand why the reenactment is such a big deal. It seems like a lot of work to re-create a battle that happened over a hundred years ago, considering we can just read about it in our history books.”

Anyway, this sets off one of the women insisting that You can’t learn ’bout the War for Southern Independence in any textbook. You have ta see it for yourself, and every one a you kids should, because the same country that fought together in the American Revolution for independence, turned clear against itself in the War.”

Okay, see, name aside, that actually just seems like making it super serious business. Honestly, forcing history students to take part in reenactments seems a really great idea, particularly if it can hammer in how much it sucked. My history teacher pointed out we used to have wars in this country about every twenty years, because that was about how long it takes to have a new crop of young people grow up and think a war’s a good idea again.

Another one crimes in about how The Civil War turned this country against itself, oftentimes brother against brother. It was a tragic chapter in American history. Over half a million men died, although more of them died from sickness than battle.”
“A tragic chapter, that’s what it was.” Aunt Prue nodded.

Yes, it’s very good to remember that war sure is a bad thing, and the deaths by sickness are a particular issue because they really underlied the complete and utter disregard for the lives of the men involved. One of the only actual crimes of the north was in their treatment of prisoners – both side’s POW camps had deplorable, abusive conditions, but at least in the south it was a matter of actually not being able to handle the number of soldiers due to incompetence and the fact they hadn’t bothered to grow food crops, while the north appears to have been doing it in retaliation.

Lena’s apologetic.

“It’s all that peanut brittle Carlton brought by.” Aunt Prue looked at Lena apologetically.
“I have a hard time with too much sugar.”
A hard time staying away from it.

Christ, Emothan.

She wasn’t racist, though admittedly that may be because it’s hard to be racist in a world of only white Protestants. She wasn’t even particularly non-racistly crazy – War for Southern Independence is an okay description of events compared to War of Northern Aggression, and all she thinks Lena should know is how it was really awful and tragic. You could be having this conversation about any subject where an adult thinks the kids today don’t understand it from just hearing about it in books, which is to say, any subject at all.

And then she’s apologetic and admits she was overreacting.

To which you say BECAUSE YOU’RE A FATTY.

Then we find out that his dad’s new book is Maybe the most important one he’s ever written. and I thought it was gothic romance though? Please may this not be a plot point.

“It’s a love story. It’s really been a journey, this book. The great American novel. Some might say The Sound and the Fury of my career, but I can’t really talk about the plot. Not really. Not at this point.

Okay, you write romances, so, no shit. Also, please please god may this not be about Ethan Prime and Lemony Mistress.

Then reality freezes. Emothan’s still aware, because sue, and Lena and Amma are unaffected because Amma’s the one doing it to talk to Lena, having decided that just asking her to help out in the kitchen a moment was too subtle. Or obvious. Something. It’s called a time bind, because we’ve already seen binding be used in a dozen different ways, so what’s one more?

Amma looked up at the ceiling, “Thank you, Aunt Delilah. ’Preciate the help.” She walked over to the buffet and cut a piece of pumpkin pie. She put it on a fancy china plate and laid the plate in the center of the table. “Now I’m gonna leave this piece for you and the Greats, and you be sure to remember I did.”

Also, what would ghosts actually want?

I mean, let’s say they can get some sort of spiritual enjoyment from food being in their vicinity. I still don’t see why they’d want it left out to be eaten by opossums. Well, I mean I might, but that’d be on the basis that they’re adorable, and in that case I’d just say to put down some cat food and you can have the pie – better for everyone involved, really.

This ritual sacrifice thing is really more about the way our own psyche works – we enjoy eating food, so maybe if we give the scary thing something we enjoy, it’ll do us a favor! It’s much like Halloween making perfect sense as an outgrowth of our own culture rather than an actual date where the fabric of reality is thin.

If ghosts like the presence of food even though they can’t devour it, you’d think offerings to them would be more like making yam pie when everyone living prefers pumpkin. Instead of doing traditional stuff because it’s what your grandma did, you do it because it’s what grandma liked.

Also, if mortals can’t have power, how can mortal ghosts have power?

Anyway, Amma then explicitly says that yep, not a caster, you can be a capital-letter whatever and be “just” mortal.

Casters could do that, stop time. Lena had told me. But only incredibly powerful ones.

So in rankings, where is a natural on that? We did just have Lena wondering if she’d done it accidentally, so I’m going with top of the top.

“I didn’t do a thing. I only asked the Greats for some assistance and Aunt Delilah obliged.”
Lena looked confused, or frightened. “Who are the Greats?”
“The Greats are my family from the Otherworld.

Hm……….. Between this and Lena’s avoidance of the issue regarding if it’s the afterlife, maybe they’re not her blood relatives at all. If she’s venerating caster ghosts, that would not only dodge the question of how being a ghost grants you powers but also really hammer in how useless our token black voodoo mammy is in the scale of things. She’s not just housekeeper to Emothan’s family in place of her own, she’s housekeeper to dead casters in place of her own dead relatives!

Amma then finally moves the plot along by telling Lena that her mom is Sarafine and is coming for her.

So – wait.

We know that if you go dark, your parents/parental figures kick you out. This would appear to suggest that they also take from you whatever children you have – unless her mom had her at fifteen or so and asked them to take her kid in the same way Ridley left for fear of harming Lena, for which Lena was hella ungrateful. And going with the fact Ridley really didn’t display any evil that can’t be chalked up to everyone she ever knew turning their back on her, even if that happened, it seems more likely her mother would realize she’d been effectively tricked into giving up her child. Regardless, it seems most likely her mother had her post-sixteen, just because that’s when most people have children, so the kid must have then been outright stolen from her.

How do we square it with the attack on Lena earlier? Well, there’s the fact everyone’s consistently worried about someone coming to get her, not her being brainmurdered at a distance. If they were playing tug of war over Lena’s soul, that could have been the true problem – also, they were trying to strengthen the binding, and for all the light side is being treated as right and natural, the book’s also explicitly said that pre-sixteen, Lena and the rest are aligned to neither. A light-only binding might not hurt Lena as much as it would a dark-aligned force, but you pump it up high enough and it’s going to start doing damage.

(Ryan being unharmed tells us nothing – not only were they apparently doing the binding right on top of Lena, which sure seems like it’d amplify things, but she appears to be a rare pre-sixteen light aligned caster.)

Furthermore, there’s the fact that everyone’s apparently concerned about Lena going dark, and the whole doom-everyone sure seems like reason for them to kill her at fifteen and 364/365ths if they decide the odds are looking bad. That seems like a good motivation to get her mom to start trying in earnest to get her away from the place, and even to keep pushing when it’s harming Lena so much – better hurt than dead, right?

“I don’t understand. My parents died when I was a child, and my mother’s name was Sara. I’ve seen it on my family tree.”

Dammit Lena you were one of the less stupid ones! Why must you betray me? Also, seriously? “My mom’s name is only almost the same as that other name you said, clearly there’s no connection at all!”

“Your daddy died, that’s the truth, but your mamma’s alive as sure as I’m standin’ here. And you know the thing about family trees down South, they’re never quite as right as they claim to be.”

Actually, since there’s no black people I imagine southern family trees would be a lot more accurate than they are in our world.

“And she’s Dark?”
“She’s the Darkest Caster livin’ today.”

And seriously there’s now gradations of a binary choice? I hate this book.

She keeps wanting to know why the lies and stuff, and it’s all just filler.

Amma jerked around as if someone behind her had tapped her on the shoulder.
“What’d you say, Aunt Delilah?” Amma turned to Lena. “We don’t have much time left.”
The pendulum on the clock began to move almost imperceptibly. The room began to come back to life. My dad’s eyes started to blink slowly, so that it took seconds for his lashes to brush his cheeks.

Okay, better question – did you actually stop time there or did you just freeze a local area?

People often view magic and science as opposed, but they don’t understand it’s not a ray guns vs wand distinction, or even a mass produced vs powerful individuals setup. Magic is a fundamentally outdated outlook, one that doesn’t tend to concern itself with what’s going on outside your immediate vicinity. Thus, causing the sun to set or rise or freeze in the sky is certainly a sign of great power, but not the sort of power to be manipulating the movement of a planet. I mean, I just got my father to start playing Okami, and one of the first abilities is the power to draw a sun in the sky. You can do this to turn day into night, and then later, during the day, a woman complains the sun isn’t bright enough to dry her washings…so you draw another sun “nearer” to her clothes, which is to say, in the sky nearby. I mean really, is making two stars in our solar system really an appropriate response to damp laundry? Wouldn’t that cause lots of horrible stuff? Before that you draw a new star to complete a constellation that’s actually a hiding spirit, and can you imagine how much damage a new sun appearing somewhere would do? Maybe that just wiped out another solar system or two in the process! Plus the fact that for the light to be reaching us currently, it must have been created eons in the past, or else dotting ink on the sky creates both the star and all the light on the way to it.

Point is, “stop time” would mean to have frozen the universe. And I don’t think you can stop time locally, because, well, it’s time, everything’s connected (plus, if everything’s paused locally, that’d do weird stuff to the air, and how can Emothan be both frozen and still able to think? Thinking’s done with electrical pulses in the brain.)

So it really must be a hold physical objects effect and somehow Emothan’s fighting it off, but in that case, it’s really not a time power at all. You’re not slowing or speeding time, you’re holding things still as the rest of time progresses.

But in that case, you only need to freeze the people you don’t want hearing, rather than freezing the clock. I guess the clock could be to prevent anyone noticing the jump, but people will also notice if it turns out all the clocks and watches there somehow became ten minutes slow.

But whatever, it’s over with and will probably never appear again despite how insanely useful it could be when used for something less stupid than a chat.

He tries to telepathically reassure Lena, but she doesn’t want to talk and just heads home silently. So he follows her in.

“Uncle Macon! Uncle Macon! Wake up! The sun’s down, I know you’re not asleep in there!”

In case we didn’t get it, this triggers a whole soliloquy from Emothan about how he hopes Lena will explain what her uncle is:

Whatever he was, he didn’t seem like an ordinary Caster, if there even was such a thing.

She explicitly told you he wasn’t an ordinary caster, or at least not an ordinary one of her line.


The way he slept all day and just appeared and disappeared wherever he felt like it, you didn’t need to be a genius to see where that was going.

No, he doesn’t. You first met him before supper when he was dressed normally, and that was earlier in the year, the days should be long enough it wasn’t after dark. There’s been no mention since then I can remember about him not being awake during the day.

The house had reverted to what I suspected was Macon’s preferred state, dilapidated antebellum finery.

What?

What exactly makes it his prefered state? First time you enter, it’s magazine land. Second time, it’s decidedly not dilapidated antebellum finery. Third time, you were mostly focused on how decked out everything was, but sure, let’s say that was the same one. Fourth was a giant castle. Now you’re in the fifth time by my count, marking the second or third time it’s been antebellum finery and the first time it’s been dilapidated.

I was secretly relieved not to be standing in a castle. I wished I could stop time and go back three hours. To be honest, I would have been perfectly happy if Lena’s house had transformed into a doublewide trailer, and we were all sitting in front of a bowl of leftover stuffing, like the rest of Gatlin.

Well, he had to find something to sneer about now that the primary southern staple of them colored folks are MIA.

Macon stood there in the doorway, a disheveled mess. He was in rumpled linen pajamas, only what it really was, I hate to say, was more of a nightdress. His eyes were redder than usual and his skin whiter, his hair tousled. He looked like he had been run over by a Mack truck.
In his own way, he wasn’t all that different from my dad, a fine mess.

I thought that parallel was being hammered in as soon as you claimed he never got up before dark. Anyway, continuing our fuck you tour, who the fuck cares, it’s not like pajama pants are more dignified.

Anyway, unlike Emothan, Pretty Suit manages a susprising lack of caring about something so trivial, focusing instead on the Lena screaming in his face.

I caught a glimpse of his bedroom. It looked like something out of Phantom of the Opera, with wrought iron candelabras standing taller than I was and a black four-poster bed draped with gray and black velvet. The windows were draped with the same material, hanging sullenly over the black plantation shutters. Even the walls were upholstered in fraying black and gray fabric that was probably a hundred years old.
The room was pitch dark, dark as night. The effect was chilling.

I kind of think that sounds more Dracula than PotO. I mean, I guess it’s all generally gothic… Also, why is Emothan still trying to judge age after it’s been hammered in that everything is totally mutable? Maybe the walls are frayed because he’s feeling frazzled by his niece screaming in his face. Maybe they’re actually pristine. Maybe they’re actually dust and they only look merely a hundred years old because his control is still mostly in place and just slipping a little right now.

As Macon stepped through the doorway, he emerged into the hall perfectly dressed, not a hair out of place on his head, not a wrinkle in his slacks or crisp white shirt. Even the smooth buckskin shoes were without a scuff. He looked nothing like he had a moment before, and all he’d done was step through his own bedroom door.

And that’s why we don’t need any of them colored folks in this book.

See, we view certain things as attractive because they indicate high resource investment. Pretty Suit is clearly a good mate because he’s capable of fluffing out in some expensive feathers, which also want either requires significant spare time to care for or significant power to make others like slaves for example do it for you! You will have the most well scrubbed of babies with him. Unless you’re a slave, in which case it’ll be wallowing in filth while you scrub his suit.

And see, that’s what’s pissing me off here. The book is throwing the trappings of the aristocrat before us, and it’s now explicitly erased the real reason they have those attractive trappings. You should not worship people for standing on the backs of the laborers to look pretty! Making them flat out not exist seems to be avoiding this problem, but what’s it’s really doing is reinforcing the idea this is pretty and has no consequence and you should like people like this, even though in real life, this kind of thinking is really, really bad.

I don’t think I can really say it’s always wrong, but when you’re setting it in a South Carolina antebellum plantation house in a book involving the tragic love story of two slave owners while no black people exist, it’s always wrong.

She raves a bit and he says that he’s doing everything he can to keep her safe.

“That’s not true,” she spat back at him. “You haven’t told me about my powers. You haven’t taught me how to protect myself.”
“I don’t know the scope of your powers. You’re a Natural. When you need to do something, you’ll do it. In your own way, in your own time.”

So now we know what her power is. It’s to do anything anytime she needs to. Well then.

So she chucks a vase right next to him and he’s all holy shit but instead he decides to just ignore her and start talking to the only other dick-haver in the room.

“It will be even more dangerous, I’m afraid, in the coming weeks. Things have changed. Don’t leave her alone. When she is here, I can protect her, but my mother was right. It seems you can also protect her, perhaps better than I can.”

Which, surprisingly, does not calm Lena down but for some reason pisses her off more. It’s probably her uterus wandering.

They stared at each other, a Ravenwood and a Duchannes, two branches of the same twisted Caster tree.

Yeah about that. Why didn’t he just keep his mom’s name? Apparently all his dad was ever good for was beating him, and it’s not like he cares about anyone else’s opinion.

She demands to know why her mom’s coming for her (because they stole her daughter still seems the most obvious choice) and he won’t explain that either, and she demands again that he teach her magic and he says the exact same thing about not having a clue what she can do, but this time adds that her smashy trick makes him think she’s even more awesome than he thought, and I guess the compliment he tacked on this time makes her accept what he said about not knowing.

And we’re finally done with that. Just most of the book left.