Dreamland Burning by Jennifer Latham

Author:Jennifer Latham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult Fiction / Mysteries & Detective Stories *, Young Adult Fiction / Social Themes / Prejudice & Racism *, Young Adult Fiction / Historical / United States / 20th Century *
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2017-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

Rowan

The fact that Geneva thought she could tell a body had been brown-skinned from its bare skull messed with my head.

My first reaction was to assume she was full of shit. I mean, how could you possibly tell skin color from bones? Then I remembered the glob of hair I’d pulled off the skeleton, and figured maybe there had still been some skin on it. But when I asked, Geneva assured me the matted gnarl had been pure, unadulterated, flesh-free human hair.

“I know he was black from his skull,” she said.

My internal you’re-a-racist radar pinged like crazy, and I started hating her just a little bit. She didn’t seem to notice. Then again, when it came to the living, Geneva didn’t notice much.

“Skull morphology is influenced by the environment a population evolves in,” she said. “I can evaluate discrete skull characteristics and match them up with typical profiles for geographically distinct human groups.”

Translation: black people’s skulls are different from white people’s skulls.

And she didn’t stop explaining there. “For example, eye orbits tend to be sloped in people with European ancestry, rounded in American Indian descendants, and rectangular in groups from sub-Saharan Africa.”

Ping.

“And nasal openings evolved high and narrow in Europeans, heart-shaped at the base in Native Americans, and wider in dark-skinned Africans.”

Ping ping ping.

But even though what Geneva said had rubbed me wrong in all kinds of ways, I hadn’t had any trouble accepting what creaky old Mrs. Manos taught us in ninth-grade Bio—that the closer your ancestors lived to the equator, the more likely you were to have dark skin. Melanin protects you from ultraviolet radiation. More UV at the equator, more melanin. It was evolution. It made sense. So why was it hard to accept that there might be other differences? Ones that ran deeper than skin?

I’ve got some ideas about that now, but when I walked out of the back house that afternoon, all I knew was that I felt dirty. And since Mom keeps the thermostat pegged at sixty-seven so she can wear sweaters all summer, a long, hot shower in our house feels good even if it’s a hundred degrees outside.

My shower, by the way, has four spray nozzles and an overhead rainfall faucet and is amazing. I stood underneath it a long, long time, steaming away the tension in my shoulders, washing my hair slowly. I rubbed shampoo over the bumps and ridges of my skull, wondering what it would look like after I died and all the skin and fat and muscle were gone.

I traced the bones of my face—the ridges at the tops of my eye sockets, my cheekbones, my jaw. Water cascaded over the brown of my hands, the pinks of my nails, splashing onto the white shower tiles at my feet.

If Geneva had my skeleton on a slab in front of her, what would she see? The white ancestors on Dad’s side who’d left Germany and Ireland for greener American pastures? Or the black men and women from Mom’s who’d

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