The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer

by Janelle Monáe

Jordan selected her clothes himself: “Fashionable, but not trendy. Not calling attention to yourself, but not hiding either.” Seshet had sighed. “A Black woman in the business district in better clothes than theirs? I couldn’t hide if I wanted to.” The moment held. These weren’t things normally stated aloud. Her clerk, who looked like the chosen of New Dawn but would never fit easily in their tight folds, gave her a faint, bitter smile. “No,” he said. “That’s why you have to hide under a spotlight.”

But it’s not their passion that scares her; it’s the after hush, the easy sleep of Alethia in her arms, the soft kiss she places, like a brand, on the inner fold of Seshet’s left wrist. The woman who could have treasured this gift, Seshet threw away twenty years ago. So who does Alethia see when she looks at her? Seshet, Director Librarian—or the ghost of the woman she killed to become her?

“The good of the whole,” she says, mocking. “My god, you sound just like them.” I am them, she almost says, fast and hot. She swallows back the cheap shot. Seshet could ascend to elder council itself and she still wouldn’t be more than tolerated in New Dawn. She knows exactly what Alethia means.

Alethia gives her a trembling smile. “I need help. Can I trust you, Seshet?” “Yes,” says Seshet—knowing she is lying, but imagining she might be telling the truth.

Doc Young is bigger than Little Delta, but it’s a part of him; it’s where he’s from, and where he learned to love drugs and music and that crazy, classic life. He’s returned to it again and again over the decades, like a comet around the sun. And like a comet, he disrupts the tides and obscures the stars, he dazzles and he terrifies—and he’s gone before anyone can ask him to clean up the mess.

She felt that mixture of humiliation at the realization that she had been talking to herself and relief that by definition no one was around to know.

Some days Artis had to remind himself that his dad actually existed, that his mother was not a phantom. Remembering the dead was hard work.

“If you want to understand what your Lil Bug just experienced,” Mx. Tangee said, “you all are going to have to try it yourself.” “I ain’t going up in there,” Trell said. “You got to,” Bug cried. “You all do.” “Why, Bug, just why?” Trell asked. He was shaking his head, no-to-the-no-no. “Because you can’t build a future if you don’t dream it.”

young man once asked the visionary science fiction novelist the answer to ending all the suffering in the world. “There isn’t one,” Butler replied. “So we’re doomed?” he asked, confused. “No,” said Butler. Then she delivered the words that would remake my understanding of the future: “There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

Afrofuturism requires both “forward thinking as well as backward thinking, while having a distressing past, a distressing present, but still looking forward to thriving in the future.”