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Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.”
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson
“When was the last time we were here?” asks Nicky as he scans the prox card at the compound gate. It’s quaint technology, at this point, but Nile has learned that sometimes quaint is actually better for security than cutting edge.
“Eighty years ago?” says Joe, with a scratch at his beard, as he follows Nicky through the gate into the outer courtyard. “We came here after the protests in Delhi. What’s-his-name and the anti-Muslim pogrom laws.”
“Modi?” supplies Nile, closing the gate behind her. Both Nicky and Joe hum in agreement. “That must have been Pre-Me.”
The door to the house itself has an honest to god key, because old habits die hard with these two. Nicky throws open the wooden outer doors and they step into the cool of the house.
“Pre-Nile means, what? A hundred years?” Nicky asks, as he drops his bag and starts opening the doors and windows facing the inner courtyard. Lucknow is hot, even in December, and the tiles on the floor and the high ceilings and the breeze from the courtyard all work to mitigate how gross the air feels against her skin.
“I reach 101 years of immortality this spring, so…”
Joe dances across the room, pulling covers off of the furniture. “Since this is almost certainly one of the last houses you haven’t been to, and I’m running out of opportunities,” Joe whips a sheet from an armchair with a flourish, “Welcome home, Nile.”
Nile grins, rolls her eyes. It’s a joke that’s about 99 years too old, but that’s Joe.
“Settle in,” calls Nicky from the far end of the long room. “Dinner will be whenever Joe gets back from the shops.”
Joe looks at Nile and points a finger at himself and mouths, “Me?” and before Nile can say anything, Nicky has crept up behind him, and plants a kiss on his cheek.
“Yes, love, you.”
Nile rolls her eyes, flops onto a newly uncovered couch, creating a cloud of dust in the process, and settles in.
After dinner, Joe and Nicky do the dishes together and Nile fires off the “all good” text to Booker over their encrypted messaging system.
And then, Nile wanders around the house, through the courtyard with its hardy, native plants, by the bedrooms (there are four of them -- a lavish number by Andy’s standards -- and potentially very useful for whenever the next one of them arrives). Nile wanders back over to the sitting room, the room they’d stumbled into initially. The walls are lined with bookshelves, bursting with all sorts of volumes.
Nile heads for the sections with Latin alphabet titles first and finds that eclectic mix of books that Joe and Nicky and Booker leave in their wake. Cheap trade paperback romances (Nicky), literary fiction in colorful hardback (Booker), religious and philosophical treatises (Nicky and Joe), political and cultural criticism (Joe or Booker), and lots and lots of poetry (all of them). Right now Booker is off with Quynh wrapping up some loose ends, but Nile sees him in these bookshelves and feels a little less lonely as a result.
Nile’s circuit of the room eventually leads her over to the books in Arabic (which she can read) and Hindi (which she can’t -- so sue her). Here, she just likes running her fingertips across the spines, feeling the curve of cloth and leather, the bumps of binding thread and embossed titles, the crisp corners of paper and glue. Nile’s fingers touch upon something different, though, smooth and lacquered and she pauses to investigate.
The spine of the book is curved just like she would expect a hardcover’s to be, but it is definitely made of wood. Her mind immediately jumps to the spy movies she grew up with, to bookshelf doors and tiny safes hidden inside books. She knows each of her family members has pulled some clandestine shit over the years. Maybe she’s about to discover some long forgotten top secret mission.
Nile pulls at the wooden book and admittedly she’s surprised that it fully comes off the shelf at all. She notices the seam running down the spine and around the book and the catch, keeping the two halves together, placed on the top.
This isn’t a very good safe if it doesn’t even look like a book. She realizes there’s no painting on the outside, no cover, no title. The object is shaped like a book undoubtedly but it’s not meant to mimic a book, not really.
What is this thing?
So Nile sinks into one of the couches and flips the clasp on the top and it falls open in her lap.
Inside there are a couple of wheels or cogs, a couple of thin, terrifyingly sharp needles, an incongruous explosion of white fluff. She’s never seen anything like it. Definitely spy shit.
Nile closes the whatever-it-is and places it back on the bookshelf and hopes no one will notice.
The next morning, Nile wakes to a note on the kitchen counter and coffee left in the percolator for re-heating.
Nicky has decided to spend their first morning of lying low, of vacation, by heading off to Lucknow’s famous fabric markets. Haggling brings the man a joy Nile will never understand. To each their own. She’s got a couch to sink into and music to play and a book to read. A nap isn’t out of the question either.
By mid-morning, Nile has all the windows and doors thrown open, begging the air for any sort of breeze. She’s got some Miles Davis playing through her speakers and has laid out on a divan with a book propped up on her belly.
Joe tumbles in some time later, hair a mess and rubbing at his eyes.
“Nicky?”
“Markets.”
“Figures.”
Joe slumps down on the floor, leaning against the seat of the divan opposite Nile’s. He stretches and sighs. He gestures at her book. “Find something good?”
Nile grins. “Far from the Madding Crowd.” Joe scrunches up his face -- his reaction to so many British ‘classics’ -- but then Nile adds, “With Book’s annotations” and Joe barks out a laugh.
“How sad was he when he read it?”
“He is extremely in his feelings about Gabriel Oak.”
“Naturally.”
They fall into a small contented silence. Joe’s faraway expression means he’s thinking of his brother-in-arms, recently returned to them all, officially and full-time. Nile thinks of Booker too, with that small, ever present ache of deep, abiding love.
And then Nile’s glance drifts to the bookcase with the non-Latin alphabet books. She pauses for a moment, considering, and then decides wherever the hell not.
“Joe, can I ask you something?”
“Of course, habibti.”
“I found this wooden box on the shelf over there, that’s shaped like a book and it’s got gears and needles and stuff on the inside. Do you know what it is?”
Joe’s eyes alight at the description. “You found it!” He stands and presses an excited kiss to her forehead. “Nicky’s charkha.”
“His what?”
“Book charkha. Oh, Nicky’s going to be just delighted.”
“I’m glad, really, I am. But what is it, Joe?”
“It’s like a mini spinning wheel.” Nile’s eyes might just pop out of her head. A what? “I’d offer to show you, but I’m rubbish at it. Nicky makes it look easy and elegant.” A pause and then, “You want more coffee?”
And that, apparently, was that.
Even before Booker and Quynh joined them, there was bread to bake and pastry to make and card games to play and people to sketch. Afterwards, plenty of lazy mornings spent with her love, TV shows to binge together. Nicky and Joe have been trying to teach the two of them to swing dance. It is a work in progress. Vacation with her family means that Nile largely forgets about the mysterious wooden book.
Weeks into their stay in Lucknow, Booker and Joe head to a cricket match for the sport. Quynh joins them for the sunshine and the refreshments. They leave before the heat has really settled for the day, all adorned in the local colors.
Nicky closes the door on the three of them, already whirling with chaos, and sighs.
And then he says, “Come, Nile. There’s something I wish to show you.”
Nicky leads her into the house’s main room, the one with the bookshelves and couches and divans.
He points her to one of the couches and Nile sits. Her eyes follow him as he crosses the room, scans a shelf. His fingers alight on what he’s seeking. He turns and in his hands is the wooden not-book.
“Joe told me you found my book charkha, but because he is an idiot, failed to give you any more than the most inexcusably basic information.”
“He hadn’t had coffee yet. You know how he is.”
“I do. Nevertheless, this,” he says as he opens the box on his lap, then lays it next to him on the sofa, “was a present from Mahatma during the Independence Movement.”
Nile watches transfixed as Nicky removes the wheels from one side, drops gun oil in key locations, and fastens it all back together. Suddenly there’s a handle on one of the wheels and the whole thing spins. Nicky grins with satisfaction, more to himself than anything else, and continues on attaching another band of thread, setting up a thin, sharp needle with a floof a white still attached to it.
As sure and competent as Nicky is with the set up, it is nothing to the act itself: the way the floof pulls from the fingers of one hand into an almost gossamer strand and then disappears, winding around itself on the spindle, as the other hand cranks at the handle on the biggest of the wheels. It’s like he’s dancing with the charkha. No, Nile decides, it’s like he’s dancing with himself. It’s the same grace with which he wields a sword or kneads a loaf of bread, absolute control over his movements, bending the world and the matter, the molecules around him, to his will.
And then, without interruption of his movements, Nicky asks, “What do you know about the Indian Independence movement?”
“Not much? Just that the Brits royally fucked things up before leaving.”
“Yes, this is another ignominious achievement of that sad, wet island nation.”
“Nicky. We don’t have to do this in English.”
“No, no, English’s inelegance is perfectly suited to this story.”
Nile sighs and waves her hand for him to continue.
“This,” he says, nodding to the white puff in his hand, “is cotton. And cotton, as you know, creates one of the most lightweight and multipurpose natural fabrics. Cotton has long been cultivated in India, and, though the British might’ve gotten into colonialism for the spices and the tea, cheap cotton fabrics turned out to be the real money maker.”
Nile realizes that she knows this story. Her ancestors were stolen from their homes and shipped across the ocean only for their backs to break under the Mississippi sun and for the cotton bolls prick their fingers raw. Her people endured and endured and endured till they couldn’t endure any more. And so they picked up and moved north, to Chicago, to the same old hate and the same old oppressions, just newly wrapped in the shininess of Northern white righteousness.
When she was young, it was a raised fist and a grey hoodie and a litany of names, the symbols of their fight.
She watches Nicky’s smooth, mesmerizing movements and cannot fathom how this was a symbol of freedom from oppression.
As if he can read her mind, Nicky continues, “Almost all of the cotton that was grown and harvested here was packed on ships for English mills to process, to spin and weave. Then the cloth was shipped back here to be sold at prohibitively expensive prices. The fabric was finer, more consistent than what handspinning would produce, but if enough people decided they’d rather put in the time and effort to avoid paying for industrially woven cloth? Well, if you’re a British politician, capitalist, or oligarch, that is an exceptionally dangerous idea. Spinning became a symbol of civil disobedience, a rejection of the dependence on British goods and a declaration of personal and national financial independence.”
“And it worked?” Nile somehow can’t believe that an entire nation of people would make such a decision. Change requires sacrifice, but this? It seemed like a lot.
“Yes and no,” Nicky says with a smile, the one that appears when he’s proud of someone. “As a viable financial choice for the millions of India’s rural poor? I think Mahatma was perhaps too idealistic, or at least underestimated the infrastructure that this sort of true self-sufficiency requires.” Nile hears what Nicky is not saying, which is that he did not because he lived for hundreds of years before the industrial revolution. “But as a method of civil disobedience, it worked brilliantly. Mahatma invented this device, the peti charkha or book charkha, and made spinning a mobile activity. Sit outside on your lunch hour and spin. Spin during your recess from school. Spin in the evenings in the company of friends.”
“Like the Freedom Riders, or the lunch counter Sit-Ins, taking up space in a particular way can be a powerful tool for change.”
“Indeed it is.”
“So how did you learn?”
“I had spun wool before, but not cotton and, though similar, the technique is a bit different. Mahatma taught me on a floor charkha before giving me this one.”
“Mahatma?”
“Mahatma Gandhi.”
“Shut up.” Nile cannot believe that over a hundred years into her acquaintance with Nicolo di Genova he is still dropping tidbits like this that blow her fucking mind.
Nile watches him for a moment and tries to discern what he’s doing to turn the raw cotton into yarn, but his movements are so smooth and the process still looks like magic.
“Can you teach me?”
“You want to learn to spin? It’s not a necessary skill anymore--”
“Nicky, you know how much I like making things. And hate sitting still.”
“Our jitterbug.”
Nile rolls her eyes at the old nickname. “You did not answer my question.”
“Sure, I can teach you to spin. But if we start on the book charkha, you will be heaving it at me and storming out of the room in twenty minutes.”
“You make it look so effortless.”
“But like many things, that does not mean that it is so.”
They share a smile, the phrase familiar from the months of struggle it took for Nile to wield a longsword with any kind of ease or grace.
“Next time we make it back to the US, a spinning wheel will be my treat to you.”
Nile can’t wait.
They’re staying in a little house in Biloxi, Mississippi, within walking distance of the Gulf of Mexico. This was not the original plan, but their time in Jackson working with the folks protesting environmental racism had ended when Booker managed to get himself arrested by local law enforcement.
Feeling banged-up in spirit, if not in body, Nile’s Mediterranean boys had craved proximity to an ocean. She was hardly one to deny them R&R. Sometimes fighting injustice fucking sucked.
This morning, Nile had decided it was high time for a lie in, so she rolls down to the beach mid-morning. She finds her family clustered around Quynh and her frankly ridiculously big umbrella. Nile clocks that there’s something off almost immediately.
“Where’s Nicky?” she calls in greeting.
“Took the truck,” says Joe, rolling over on his beach towel to face her. “Said he had a surprise for you.”
Nile plops down next to Booker and tosses him the sunscreen -- would his pasty ass ever learn? Probably not -- and grins at Joe. “If he’s willing to miss a beach day, it’s certainly something good.”
“I think you will like it.”
“Jo-oe. Give me a hiiint.”
“My lips are sealed.”
Nile sighs and flops back dramatically. She will just have to wait.
When they trudge back to the house that afternoon, Nicky is waiting for them. And next to him, in the sleekly modern living area -- all angles and glass -- sit two curved glories in burnished wood.
Nile’s drawn over to the darker of the two, running her fingers over the lathe-turned beads and coves on the uprights, over the edge of the wheel at the center of it. “Are these…?”
“Spinning wheels, yes. Double treadle. Upright or Castle design.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“You sound surprised?”
“I just didn’t think they’d still look like this, you know?”
“If you’re going to put an object in your living room for use and display, it should be both beautiful and practical, should it not?”
Nile nods and grins. She thinks of the beautifully woven leather grip on Joe’s scimitar, of the handknit sweater Booker pulls on at the first whiff of cold. Beautiful and practical. And then the memory of Nicky dancing with cotton and his book charkha in their living room in Lucknow comes back to her and her hands flutter with excitement at the prospect of learning something both beautiful and practical too.
“When can we start?”
Nile sags in frustration as the wool breaks in her hands and gets sucked away from her.
“This is hard as shit, Nicky.”
“Patience. It will come.”
“I feel like my brain and my hands and my feet are all doing something different at the same time.”
“They are.”
Nile shoots him a look. “You are supposed to sympathize with me, Nicky.”
“It will come.”
“You keep saying that. I’m not sure I believe you.”
Nile looks around at the shreds of wool -- roving, it’s called roving -- that litter the floor around her seat and her wheel. She looks at the strand of massively varying thickness wrapped around her bobbin. And then she looks over at Nicky’s neat column of perfectly consistent spinning.
“Do you remember when you learned how to ride a bicycle?” Nicky asks, quietly, careful about asking about the past.
“Vaguely. I recall a fair number of skinned knees and elbows.”
Nicky chuckles. “You are much like Joe in this regard. It does not surprise me.” Nile sees the memory cross his mind and then his attention returns to her. “But almost miraculously it,” Nicky snaps his fingers, “clicked, no?”
Nile nods. Nicky continues, “and you’ve been able to ride a bicycle ever since. Spinning is the same. Once it’s in your body, it will never leave.”
“You make it sound like magic.”
“What is that quote Booker’s fond of? Any sufficiently advanced piece of technology--”
They finish in unison, “-- is indistinguishable from magic.”
By the end of the night, with much frustration and grousing, Nile has spun two -- two! -- whole bobbins and learned how to ply them together into yarn.
Nile looks at the hank in her hands, all lumpy and goofy looking, and doesn’t know whether she feels proud that she did it or embarrassed that this is all she could manage.
“We must save this one -- your first skein!” Nicky takes the yarn from her hands and holds it up in front of him. “Joe, come look at what Nile made.”
Joe ducks out of their bedroom and trots over to them.
“Art yarn!” he exclaims, as he sinks into the couch and reaches for Nile’s skein. “It’s got such personality.”
“You’re just being nice to me,” says Nile with a duck of her head.
“Hardly,” says Joe, and Nile hears the seriousness and sincerity in his tone. “Once you get good at spinning, once your plys get consistent and your treadling becomes smooth, you will never again be able to create this kind of yarn.”
“Really?”
Nicky nods. “He’s right. I can’t do that anymore, no matter how hard I’ve tried, for any number of Joe’s projects.”
There’s something that unfurls inside Nile at these admissions. In yoga, they call it beginner’s mind, the beauty that comes from needing to pay attention to every little detail. Nile has never really liked yoga, but she appreciates the concept that experts are susceptible to a kind of inattention, a sort of monotony. This, though, is even better. That a beginner creates a kind of gem that will only ever exist right now, at the beginning of their journey. It warms her, gives her confidence, and an appreciation for what she is doing right now, for this first step in the process.
In the days that follow, spinning does settle into her body. She begins to move as one with her wheel. She loses the fiber less frequently. Her plys grow more consistent.
She marvels at her hands drafting the fiber and her feet against the treadles. They could be her ancestor’s, hands owned by another human being, feet privileged to push against the polished wood of a spinning wheel and not the hard ground of a cotton field. They could be her ancestor’s, twisting the thin strands that would get woven into one of the many distinctive textiles made by African peoples. She will never know if it was the bright greens and yellows of kente or the deep reds of shuka or something else entirely that her people made to clothe and protect themselves. That knowledge was stolen from her when her ancestors were stolen from their homes. But she knows they did this, took the fibers from their animals and their environments and transformed them into yarn and transformed yarn into cloth and cloth into clothing and protection.
“It’s a kind of memory, isn’t it?” Nile asks Nicky quietly, as their feet flutter and hands fly at their wheels.
“Spinning is one of many endangered traditional crafts.”
Nile sighs. She’s sure Nicky is right, but that’s not-- “I mean, it’s a connection to the unnamed people who came before us, who spun yarn and clothed their families, who lived and persisted despite whatever odds. All of them did this, in one way or another. It feels like I can remember all of that, almost, by doing this.”
Nile looks down as she feeds some of her spun ply into the wheel and onto the bobbin and she feels herself being twisted into the fabric that connects all humans past, present, and future.
It is a fabric of all things, all the good and all the bad humanity has to offer, of injustice and righteousness, of care and survival, of love.
More than one hundred years ago now, she looked upon the information gathered by James Copley and saw just how influential Andy and the others were. Nile has done a lot of good, she thinks, in the time she’s had so far, but the first time since that day outside London, she finally feels like she’s in it.