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By Nalo Hopkinson, first published in Black Stars, Amazon Original Stories
When faced with cultural appropriation and police brutality, two Black women in different generations of the same family combine their ability to perform hoodoo with modern technology to remedy these abuses.
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Plot Summary
In the near future, a white fashion designer named Agnetta Burri comes out with a new line embedded with nanobots that enter the wearer and have them recite quotes from Malawi schoolgirls’ “Forgiveness Quilt”. At the same time, a black arts student named Wenda presents her project to her peers. She imbues racist antiques of black people with ghosts that she calls “inwi” and animates them with a whistle that allows them to break free of their caricatures. They in turn go to antique stores to find other racist sculptures and release them too, garnering national attention for her work. Wenda is elated that her project worked, but soon gets arrested and imprisoned for the theft of the figurines. Concurrently, Agnetta Burri’s fashion line turns out to be a complete lie, and the “Forgiveness Quilt” stories were actually fabricated. The nanobots in her clothes also escaped into the sewers and reentered people’s bloodstreams, making them temporarily recite quotes from the project, but she manages to pay off her prison sentence. She visits Wenda in prison and asks how she was able to turn off her figurines, and Wenda gives her the whistle she used to control them on the condition that Agnetta pay off her class’ student loans and allow her figurines to destroy the rest of the racist antiques. Years in the future, Wenda’s granddaughter Xiomara wakes up to a phone call that her lover, Perry, has been detained at the police station. The police targeted him at a traffic stop, destroyed his car, and threatened his life, traumatizing the couple. Xiomara remembers her grandmother’s technology and consults a memory bank of her to ask if it would be possible to use the remaining nanobots to make everyone black so that there would no longer be discrimination on the basis of skin color. Wenda tells her it is possible, but leaves her granddaughter to make the complex decision for herself. Xiomara wonders if she dares to take such drastic action as Wenda waits to see what she will do.
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