For a moment, Natasha thought the new life she had carved for herself in Ghana would bring her family closer to utopia. Tucked away here, so far from America, this spacious three-bedroom townhouse could be the kind of Black utopia they longed for.
When they first arrived in Ghana five years ago, they were optimistic. Now settled into their new lives, they were pragmatic.
The project was aptly named Utopia. Peter, the man who invited them, said their mission statement was to create a utopia for those who suffered from the Black diaspora. Here in Ghana, they had so many opportunities to re-submerge themselves in their identities. Natasha didn’t know if she believed in this mission or if utopia was something tangible, but she knew it wouldn’t be in America if they were to find it.
Each month, they watched as new American families moved onto the lots. There was an endless supply of development. In the fall, they opened an international school. By next year, they will have finished building a library.
After they finished dinner, they watched the news together in the living room—or at least Natasha watched the news. To help with homesickness, Natasha forced them to spend time with one another every afternoon. Some nights, they would play board games or watch movies, but most unfolded with each one of them in their worlds.
Tonight, her daughter, Alameda, wrapped herself in a blanket, the glow of her phone screen reflecting on her face. While her husband, Benjamin, typed loudly on his laptop.
A news anchor stood on the banks of the Italian coast, looking out at the Mediterranean Sea—a British accent dubbed over their words. “Yesterday evening, almost two hundred people drowned attempting to find refuge in Italy.” The news stations displayed a slideshow of pictures, showing family photos, graduation nights, and wedding days, illustrating that these people who drowned had existed. “The situation is still unfolding here, but we will continue to provide updates with this developing story.”
Natasha turned off the television. Although the Utopia compound was filled with children of Americans and Europeans, she felt the people on the television could be her schoolchildren. Every week, families left Utopia after finding that the compound walls weren’t enough to keep them safe. Then, the following week, there was always another family to fill their place, optimistic about chasing the same sliver of Utopia as her. She didn’t know why they continued to call it Utopia when so many families were leaving.
“Why did you turn the television off?” Benjamin said. “It’s family time.”
“I don’t want her to see that kind of news,” Natasha said. Since moving, their goal had been protecting Alameda. For so long in America, they lived with the omnipresent feeling of the hand above them. Now, new death, destruction, and possibility are following them here.
“I’m old enough to see the world,” Alameda said, still glued to her phone.
“It’s not about seeing the world,” Natasha said. “It’s about not having to see the world.”
“Well, she wasn’t paying attention, Natasha. Besides, I wanted to see what happened.”
“Death, Ben,” Natasha said. “The aftermath is death.” She put the remote down on the coffee table. She went to their bedroom, closing the door behind her. She flipped through the paperback of We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo on the side of her bed, trying to create that festering, fleeting utopia she had longed for. Because she knew if she didn’t find it, the cacophony of voices would swallow them.
The following afternoon, Natasha held up a wrinkled paper with Alameda’s teacher’s cursive across it. Benjamin’s signature was signed across the bottom, waiting for hers to go next to it. “I told you we shouldn’t have let her watch that news report.”
Natasha read through the note again. Alameda and a handful of students in her class refused to participate in any coursework today. They have refused to speak. This behavior must end, or she will face suspension or expulsion.
“This isn’t like her,” Natasha said, tossing the letter on their bedroom dresser. “What has gotten into that girl’s mind?”
“I don’t know,” Benjamin said, “but I’m going to sort this out. If she continues like this, she will have to go to the local schools. Then what would be the point in us coming here?” He charged for the door, unbuckling his belt from his pants.
Natasha blocked his way out of their bedroom. “Let me try to talk to her first.”
“The entire drive home, she refused to speak to me. It felt as if I were her chauffeur instead of her father. What will happen if Peter thinks I can’t even control my daughter? If we don’t belong here, where will we go next?”
“What if she’s homesick? She wouldn’t act this way without a cause.”
When Natasha opened Alameda’s bedroom door, she found her daughter in front of her laptop screen. She lay across the comforter, still in her school uniform.
“How are you feeling?” Silence. Natasha wrapped her arms around Alameda. “Why won’t you talk, hummingbird?”
She typed into her laptop, then turned it around to her. The Silent Strikes, she had written.
“What strikes are you talking about? Why are you striking? You’re a child.”
Alameda opened a web browser. She turned the computer to Natasha. The website was simple: a white background with black text. Across the top of the screen, it read, “THE SILENT STRIKES.” Below the title, a chunk of text was displayed.
Last night, sixty-five refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea on a makeshift raft. Their raft mainly consisted of West Africans seeking to escape conflicts in their home countries. They sought freedom in Italy after being turned away by the Spanish government. The restrictive EU immigration policies have forced an unnecessary number of immigrant deaths. These countries exploit us for resources and infrastructure, leaving us to clean up the mess. This time, we’ve had enough. We will not be marching. We will not be holding sermons. We will not be begging for humanity with our last breaths. Instead, the world will be forced to deal with our silence for seven days.
Requirements to Participate in The Silent Strike
“What have you joined?” Natasha asked. Had this been her fault? They wanted to escape the political impact on Alameda’s upbringing in leaving America. A child shouldn’t have to learn to resist before they’ve learned to live. “Your school threatens to expel you if you don’t start participating in activities.”
Alameda snatched the laptop.
Natasha caught herself. She realized that instead of comforting her daughter, she had harmed her even more. “I’m going to talk to your father about this.” Natasha rested her hand over Alameda’s for a moment. She closed the door behind her. Had she lost the version of her daughter that she had built inside her head?
Natasha stayed home the next afternoon while Benjamin taught at the local university. Alameda still refused to talk, so they decided to keep her home. In their words, they had grounded her. Yet, Natasha knew they had lost what to do with her.
They sent a letter to Alameda’s school saying she was sick. They claimed her tonsils had swollen. Natasha knew her schoolteacher would read through their lies. All the students’ tonsils couldn’t be swollen at the same time, but she felt embarrassed to lack control over her daughter.
Natasha baked a cake for the rest of Alameda’s class. She knew the children needed something to brighten their day. She was scraping the frosting when her phone rang. She saw a text from Jubilee, Benjamin’s sister. She had texted them both: John passed away this morning.
Natasha licked the frosting from her finger. When’s the funeral? she replied.
Sunday, Jubilee responded.
Natasha started looking for flights back to Atlanta. They hadn’t been back home in almost five years now. She wasn’t close to John. John did what he could to stay in contact, but after they moved, John had grown furious with them for leaving. He hadn’t called a single time they’d been in Ghana.
When Benjamin came home, he went to the kitchen and kissed Natasha like any other day. He asked her what she wanted for dinner while he pulled pots and pans from the cabinets.
“I think it’s cheaper if we leave on Wednesday instead of waiting until Friday,” she said, with three tickets in her online cart.
“Tickets for what?” Benjamin said. He pulled vegetables from the refrigerator.
“Tickets to go to your father’s funeral.”
“We’re not going,” Benjamin said. He gave Natasha his full attention.
“What do you mean we’re not going? It’s your father’s funeral.”
“I haven’t talked to him in five years. We’ve been calling him. No response. No letter. Not even a call to his granddaughter. He doesn’t want us there. There’s no need to force closure for something already closed.”
She didn’t want to pressure him, so she left to drop off the cupcakes.
Once she parked outside the school, she felt foolish for baking the cupcakes. If the schoolteacher’s letter were valid, the kids wouldn’t thank her. They wouldn’t even smile. No cupcakes would give them the utopia they desired. No, cupcakes would make John forgive Benjamin and her for leaving. No, cupcakes were going to save the migrants lost at sea. Trading blood for sugar. Foolish. She threw the cardboard box into the dumpster behind the school.
She bought the plane tickets while watching the bulbuls claw at the cupcakes. Would Benjamin refuse to board the plane? Would he scold her for booking the tickets? This was what they all needed. They needed to spend some time in America to understand the beauty they had here in Utopia. Yet family was their only connection to America, their home, and once that was severed, all they would have was Utopia.
They flew into Hartsfield-Jackson on Wednesday afternoon. Benjamin refused to talk to Natasha on the flight. He put the airline headphones in his ears and watched a movie. Alameda was still not talking. She sat there with her phone across her lap. Strangely, grief had taken both of their voices.
As they neared Atlanta, Natasha noticed more people participating in the silent strike. A handful of the passengers on the plane refused to speak to the airline stewardess or anyone next to them. At first, she thought they were mute until she saw some handout cards explaining their rationale.
Even when they landed, Natasha saw more participants. The loud cacophony of sounds that filled the airport was replaced with the quiet, stillness of luggage rolling across the tile and whispered conversations.
“This is so strange,” Natasha told Benjamin as they walked through the terminal. “I didn’t think it would be happening over here, too.”
“Well, you know the internet has a way of casting its webs across the world,” Benjamin said, rolling their luggage behind them. “I don’t know how they expect society to function without them talking.”
Natasha looked around the terminal. Even some of the cashiers at the food stands refused to speak. In the strangest of interactions, Natasha watched customers point at pictures on the menu and cashiers mindlessly press buttons on the screen. Without words, the routine of mundane capitalism had remained ingrained.
The airport police presence felt heightened. A handful were stationed just a few feet apart from one another, alert as if they didn’t know how to manage a protest that hadn’t announced itself—a silent disturbance.
Jubilee had waited for them in the car loading lane. When Natasha saw her standing in front of her SUV, she didn’t recognize her. Five years had passed since Natasha last saw Jubilee. Despite John refusing to talk to them, Jubilee continued to mediate their relationship whenever she spoke to them.
“You’ve grown so much,” Jubilee said to Alameda. Jubilee squeezed Alameda as if waiting for her to respond.
Alameda gave her nothing.
“Her ton… she isn’t talking right now,” Natasha said. “There’s this strike she’s participating in. I’m sure she misses you as much as I have.”
Natasha and Jubilee hugged. “I heard. Is she also doing the silent thing? The way the police killed that Black boy last week… I’m glad our news reaches y’all out there.”
Benjamin and Natasha looked at each other, confused, before nodding. Cars honked behind them, reminding them this was still the world’s busiest airport. They loaded their suitcases into the trunk of the SUV.
Benjamin’s family home was everything Natasha remembered. The field surrounding the house was vast, and a tree line encapsulated the property into its world.
Natasha remembered her trips here when she first started dating Benjamin. The property was quiet, a secluded section that was purely for them. Along the side of the property, Natasha listened to the quiet of the afternoon shattered by loud construction equipment.
“What are they building over there?” Natasha asked as they unloaded their luggage from the car.
“Subdivisions.” Jubilee rolled her eyes. “Lots of them. Everywhere you look around this town. They’re trying to fool White people into coming down here to the middle of nowhere. So much ‘opportunity,’ they say.”
Benjamin and Jubilee took most of the luggage into the house. As they walked up the stairs, Natasha grabbed Alameda by her shoulder and pulled her back.
“When you get in there, you need to speak.” Natasha lowered her voice so as not to cause a scene in front of the others. “I respect what you’re doing, but this is family. You can do whatever you want outside of this house, but you need to talk in there. Your grandfather has passed away, and you need to show some respect. Do you understand me?”
Alameda didn’t respond, so Natasha walked away. She didn’t know why she had attempted to plead with her. They had moved across the Atlantic to give Alameda utopia, and now she had to beg her daughter to speak.
The house was divided into two sections, each with three bedrooms. A modestly large kitchen and living room are mirrored in either section. Jubilee, her husband, and their twins had already unpacked onto the right side of the house, so Natasha, Benjamin, and Alameda set up their belongings on the left.
Natasha unpacked her clothes into the bedroom drawers. She heard Jubilee searching the cabinets for pots and pans through the walls. Jubilee’s husband stole Benjamin away from her, guiding him around the house and asking about Ghana: Was it the motherland? Was the sun as bright and the stars as clear?
When she finished unpacking, she strolled into the kitchen to find Jubilee washing chicken meat and waiting for the oil on the stove to get hot. Alameda was in the living room, ignoring her twin cousins’ questions.
“We were thinking about keeping the house for the children,” Jubilee said. “It would be a place for them to visit during the summers. We could refurnish it for them, so it doesn’t look so dated.”
“That would be lovely,” Natasha said.
“We all need to see our family sometimes. I know y’all must get lonely out there by yourselves.”
“You should come visit sometime. Keep us company.”
They smiled. Jubilee tested the oil by splashing water on her fingertips into the grease. The oil fought against the grease bouncing out of the pot. She laid the chicken strips into the oil, watching the bubbles engulf the meat.
Jubilee’s husband stormed into the kitchen. “What’s wrong with you?” Jubilee said.
“He wants to sell the house,” Jubilee’s husband said.
Benjamin appeared behind him.
Jubilee whipped around from the kitchen stove. “What do you mean you sell the house?”
“We shouldn’t be talking about this now,” Benjamin said.
“I’m sorry. Would you rather we have this conversation when you sold the land and moved back to Africa for the next ten years?”
Natasha motioned for Alameda and her cousins to leave the room. Alameda guided the twins to their bedroom.
“This house has been in our family for generations!” Jubilee yelled. “Father fought the entirety of his life to keep this house for us, and you’ll sell it the first chance you get.”
“If our existence on this land is built by our fight to keep it, are we truly living?” Benjamin said. “Nobody knows better than me how hard Father fought.”
“Like hell! Where have you been for the last five years, Benjamin? Where were you when the developers harassed him about buying the house? Where were you on mornings when we had to drive to the county courts fighting to keep the developers from taking every inch of this town plot by plot? You weren’t here,” the skillet boiled over, and oil and chicken fat poured onto the stovetop. Jubilee turned off the fryer. “Get out. You don’t deserve to be here. He’s not even in the ground yet, and you’re trying to figure out–”
“Benjamin, hear her out,” Natasha said. “Alameda will have somewhere to stay if she decides to visit.”
Neither of them paid her any attention. They kept fighting, going back and forth, until finally, Benjamin stormed away. He went to their room, and they could hear the slamming of suitcases and drawers. Natasha, Jubilee, and her husband stood in the kitchen listening to his chaos. Once he finished, he stormed out of the house with their luggage. Jubilee’s husband chased after him, offering to drive them to a hotel in town.
Natasha stood in the kitchen with Jubilee, and there was a thick silence between them. At this point, Natasha wished she had participated in the silent strikes so she didn’t have to feel obligated to give her an explanation for herself and her husband. The tendrils of the family were complicated. The Atlantic Ocean had acted as a wedge between them, separating them from each other, and each day, the pounding waves against the beaches brought even more distance.
The following morning, they ate at the hotel’s all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. Natasha hadn’t spoken to Benjamin since the previous night. She fell asleep with her back to him.
“You too?” he said, turning off the bedroom’s light.
Natasha didn’t know if or when she joined Alameda’s protest. Everyone else had done so on someone else’s behalf, someone whose voice was lost altogether. Yet, Natasha masqueraded behind their movement to avoid her husband’s embarrassment.
The morning news played in the corner of the cafeteria. One of the news anchors refused to speak, wearing a white shirt with black text across it: “YOU WILL HEAR US.” Whenever the camera panned to her, she stared into the camera. The male co-anchor read her parts for her instead.
“What’s happening to us?” Benjamin said, chewing on his paper-thin bacon strip and dry, puffy eggs.
Natasha stirred her bowl of blueberry oatmeal. Alameda picked at her bowl of cereal, not eating much of anything.
Natasha had passed a piece of hotel stationery to Alameda in the morning. She found a notepad and a ballpoint pen in the bedroom dresser beside a Bible. Do you want to talk about last night? Natasha wrote. Natasha felt as if she were violating the rules of the strike by writing on a piece of paper. She hadn’t even known the strike’s rules in the first place. But she wasn’t striking, was she?
No, Alameda replied in cursive.
“I’m not striking, I just—” Natasha explained, then paused. Why did she feel the need to justify herself to Alameda? Her daughter knew that if she hadn’t fallen silent after the migrants drowned, after the death of the Black boy, after so much loss, why would she choose to join them now?
Do you know when the strike will be over? Natasha scribbled on the paper. When will I hear your voice again?
When they hear us, Alameda had written.
They finished breakfast in each other’s company, listening to their metal silverware speak to one another for them.
Benjamin arranged to meet with Uncle Daryl, John’s lifelong best friend, and personal lawyer after they finished breakfast. When she first met him, Natasha heard the two men trade stories as if they were war stories in their legal efforts. Together, they had created a mutual aid fund for the residents to resist the urge to sell to the developers for short-term gain.
His office was a five-minute walk from their hotel. When they arrived at his office, Benjamin paced around the lobby. Natasha watched him dance his fingers across the picture frames that decorated the walls. There were pictures of Uncle Daryl and John, giving speeches in front of small rallies, as well as pictures of him with politicians, elderly civil rights leaders, and activists. Uncle Daryl exited his back office and wrapped his arms around Benjamin and Natasha. He motioned for them to follow him into his back office.
Natasha motioned for Alameda to stay in the lobby. If his lobby conveyed the sense of his activism work, then his back office conveyed the sense that he was an underpaid, overworked lawyer. Stacks of papers rested across his desk and spread onto the floor. The only spot in the office without a stack of papers sprouting was where his coffee cup sat.
Uncle Daryl pulled out a legal pad and scribbled in cursive. He slid the pad across the table to them when he finished writing. It took them both a moment to decipher the letters: I can’t talk. I’m participating in the strike.
“What do you mean you can’t talk?” Benjamin said. “We need you to talk. I have questions that need answers.”
Uncle Daryl reached for the legal pad. He scribbled again, and they waited for him to finish. The room was silent. The only noise was Uncle Daryl’s pen scratching across the paper. Benjamin turned to her as if expecting her to back him up. I can still answer whatever questions you have, Benjamin read from the first line. It’s good to see you again.
“I want to sell the house, the land, Daryl. I don’t think it’s worth another lifetime of fighting.”
“You will not,” Uncle Daryl yelled. His voice echoed against the walls. They all sat there as if a bomb had erupted in the room. He flipped to a new page on his legal pad, then scribbled as fast as possible.
I have helped your father fight for that parcel of land for my entire life. He thought this land would bring you home, not push you further away. I can’t help you sell this land, this final claim on the soil on which you were born. I can’t change how you feel about growing up here, but please think about what you will leave behind.
When Natasha finished reading the letter, she looked up at Uncle Daryl. She saw a man who sacrificed his life laboring at the expense of his health. He had an unkempt beard, hair that had fallen from his head, and teeth that had eroded to sticks from the amount of coffee he drank. Benjamin left the back office, grabbed his coat, and left the building.
Before they left for Utopia, they had not dreamed of owning land. They sought an escape. Settling in one place made it easier for a storm to strike them. Only through constant movement would they feel safe. They understood that if trouble came to Utopia, Peter would relocate them elsewhere, and they would rebuild. Yet, in this movement, they lost their community.
Natasha sat in the office chair, holding the legal pad. She ripped the paper from the notebook, wrote, thank you, underneath the page, and slid it back to him. Had she betrayed Benjamin? Was she lying to Uncle Daryl? He probably took her silence as resistance, but it was resistance, wasn’t it?
When they returned to the hotel, Benjamin went to his room and lay down. He was still jet-lagged from their arrival. Natasha went with Alameda to the front desk to ask the receptionist for a rental car. She planned on taking her somewhere to get her mind off being cooped up in their hotel room all day.
When she stood before the hotel receptionist, Natasha didn’t know what to say. The receptionist didn’t greet her, and she didn’t want to speak. “Car rentals,” Natasha said as fast as possible, as if muttering a spell.
The hotel receptionist nodded. She reached into one drawer and pulled out a brochure. Was the receptionist silent, too? Natasha put her finger on the cheapest car on the piece of paper. The receptionist typed on the computer. When she finished, she turned the computer screen around to face Natasha. She nodded her head. The payment screen flashed, and Natasha inserted her card. Their ease in finishing the transaction fascinated her. She thought it would be harder. How would they convey the abstract? How would they convey their voices and their anger if neither could speak? Somehow, they had figured out a way of expression to do just that.
When they finished, the receptionist unlocked a box of keys behind the counter and handed Natasha a set of car keys.
The movie theater was a twenty-minute drive from their hotel. Natasha’s GPS instructed her to take the state highway north through several small towns where her parents would have warned her never to travel alone at night. Benjamin had joined them after all. He slept against the backseat window. Alameda sat in the passenger seat, gazing out the window. Since she stopped speaking, Natasha noticed that Alameda hardly used her phone. In this sense, Natasha felt the strike had shifted from resisting speech to emphasizing presence, resisting the pervasive digital suffering.
Natasha wondered how long they could be silent; how long could she be silent? Surely, the world couldn’t go on like this: half of society refused to speak, while the other half refused to listen.
When they arrived at the movie theater, Alameda pointed to the giant movie poster of the movie she wanted to see when they arrived at the stand.
“What are y’all seeing?” the cashier said. Natasha pointed to the movie poster glued to the movie theater counter. “Great, another one.”
Natasha bought the tickets, and they walked into the auditorium, turned their phones off, and watched some lousy comedy movie with some actors Natasha would forget. Natasha slipped her hand into Benjamin’s. He looked over to her. A smile cracked across his face. They laughed.
Natasha reminisced about their initial months in Utopia. Peter gestured towards the compound’s vacant fields and shared stories about the limitless possibilities. He stated that if America was collapsing, their mission was to ensure that Black Americans did not fall with it. Had they come any closer to utopia? Natasha didn’t know. They could sell land, but he couldn’t sell this. They couldn’t outrun this feeling.
She knew that silence wouldn’t bring John back; it wouldn’t save anyone. However, it forced her and everyone else to consider what they were losing while pretending that everything was normal. For the first time in a week, they shared a utopia of happiness, comfortable in each other’s silence.
Cameron Carter is a fiction writer and educator from Atlanta, Georgia. He holds an MA in English from Ball State University and is pursuing an MFA at Georgia State University. He received the 2024 Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright College Award and the Paul Bowels Fellowship and was a Steven R. Guthrie Memorial Award finalist.
These color lithographs are to be found in Victoria Regia, or, The Great Water Lily of America: With a Brief Account of its Discovery and Introduction into Cultivation (1854), a work by amateur botanist John Fisk Allen which documents his attempts to propagate the Amazon’s Victoria regia (now called Victoria amazonica) in the more northerly climes of his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts. See more at https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/william-sharp-s-chromolithographs-of-the-great-water-lily-1854/
