The Blueprint

by Rae Giana Rashad

He would remind him he could never trust a Black woman. Hypersexual, manipulative, destructive. In polite company, the men called it sassy.

leading cause of death in white men in the Order.

“Stress is the real silent killer.”

He didn’t understand she had nowhere else to go.

Officers didn’t accept wives assigned by the algorithm like poor men or low-ranking soldiers.

THE PATH WE WALKED TO BECOME Black women wasn’t straight; it was a loop. Starting from nowhere, it brought you back to nowhere.

A smart girl made men believe everything good was his idea.

If you had to have a cage, it was better to have a beautiful one.

If we don’t fix her mouth, that algorithm will assign her to men who will. She can run her mouth for only so long before she turn ugly, and they’ll knock ugly’s head off her shoulders with no hesitation.”

the Order assigned 90 percent of Black men to the Code, the Order’s military.

never hang on to anything too tight. Second, nothing in this world, not even the Order, is enough to kill you.”

Only two short years after this picture, the second civil war began.

“Proposition 1077 is on the matter of Louisiana’s asylum policy for descendants of slavery, DoS.”

although the Order was a two-party system and they fell on opposite ends as a Traditionalist and Modernist, they were still brothers.

My mama was fierce, always had a plan, always ended her stories where she achieved the impossible with, “I descend from Henriette.”

Why have a girl the world would treat like nothing or a son who’d die in the Code?

“Never being free. Find your way. Wherever they send you, get him to write your papers. Get on a train. Nobody owns you unless you believe they do.”

Said I was cruel and selfish and no matter what he did for me, I always wanted more. Said I was a product of my upbringing, brutal and self-centered, like my mother and grandmothers.

Mind warp

They really could do anything they wanted. What would it be like to have that choice?

manager of fiction and nonfiction relics from before Civil War II. Fahrenheit 451, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Annie Allen, 1984, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

“How It Feels to Be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston. Highlighted were the lines “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry.

searching databases on James’s computer for articles on enslaved girls on the slave ships and plantations. Zero returns. If the Order erased these stories, where in history would I exist?

Official Bastien Martin, the official. The president’s son and the interim councilman as of a year ago.

Discipline and work ethic determine success, and sometimes they are the difference between life and death.” Simple words that rubbed salt in wounds. Was my daddy and all the other young men who became RIP tattoos on forearms or murals under bridges or on abandoned train cars simply undisciplined?

“I’ve had my share of heartache, but I still walk through this world as a white man. I can’t pretend to know how hard it is for you.”

At that moment, knowing I could have my papers anytime was enough. To be in control, to have choice—that was what it meant to be free.

He didn’t mean anything by it, but he forgot Black women weren’t paid a salary at all. Black men in Dallas were paid half of what citizens in Austin were paid for the same job. The Council claimed the cost of living was lower in Dallas, so salaries were set accordingly.

paintings of dead men who built societies by taking.

Maybe we all tell different stories depending on who was listening.

THE FALLACY OF MERITOCRACY. THE ORDER IS A DICTATORSHIP.

Solenne, the official’s concubine, made the list two years ago.”

“I’m not trying to change the world. I’m trying to disappear into it.” He swung the bag on his shoulder. “I have my way. Find yours.”

underground Configurator to get off grid,

I’m used to hypocrites.”

Addiction was for the weak. I didn’t admit I’d loved coffee since I was eight.

“Maintaining peace and order in your country is an honor,” he said so gently, it was enough to scrub his quotes on the undisciplined from my mind. “He died an honorable man.”

why Abraham would leave a child in a forest with the cold, snakes, and bears. “We do difficult things, things we don’t necessarily want to do. We master the impossible and emerge a better version of ourselves. All that I am, I owe to my father.”

Traditionalists believe in maintaining the values the Order was founded upon. Morality. Structure. Family.”

Wealthy from cotton, sugar cane, and the bodies of the enslaved, more millionaires lived in Louisiana than any other state. Henriette belonged to one of them.

He said I looked like Jefferson’s Sally. How he imagined she would look with a deeper skin tone. Exquisite,

To continuously want to be a part of a world that didn’t want me—I was a fool.

I could never forget holding the sun.

“I’m proud of you,” she said, voice hoarse. “You know you don’t have to have it all figured out right now, don’t you?”

She stared into me, my oracle, my mama, only eighteen years my senior.

Mama said men need to feel like they’re good people.

Asylum. A person fleeing danger.

That type of evil is not of this world.”

I needed the straight line from girl, to concubine, to mama, to woman. I

Somebody smile and throw you a life preserver, and you call it love when he was the one drowning you in the first place.

“It can’t be love when he holds that much power over you.”