Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky

The group enters a throne room, and at the end of the chamber is a gigantic statue of a man seated on the throne. He wears a crown circled by jeweled insects and sits between statues of a leopard and a python. The rest of the room includes life-like paintings and statues of brown-skinned people of all ages. Tristan and Ayanna exchange uneasy glances because getting into the throne room seems too easy. In front of the throne is a circular door in the floor, likely the hiding place for the Story Box. Tristan uses his powers to tell a story about when Nyame owned all the stories. Just as they’d hoped, the circular door opens, and a splendid box that glows green like Eddie’s journal begins to rise. Almost immediately, the python and leopard statues stir, and Nyame commands everyone to leave. Only Tristan can hear Nyame, however.

Nyame believes Tristan is a thief come to take his power. Nyame is held captive by fetterlings, bosslings, and brand flies who bind him to his throne physically and through poison, and he believes Tristan is behind this imprisonment. Tristan uses what he has learned about stories—that they have power and attract the monsters of this land—to free Nyame. Tristan tells the story of how Anansi used trickery to capture Leopard, Python, and a forest fairy. In exchange for them, Nyame gave Anansi the power of storytelling and the original Story Box.

A bossling chases them out of the castle. Using Gum Baby, Tristan activates Kumi, one of the bronze statue guardians, who destroys the bossling. The group talks with Nyame, who is reluctant to follow their plan until Tristan tells him about seeing captives trapped in the Maafa’s hall. Nyame agrees they can take the Story Box, but when they approach the chamber, the god reveals that the Story Box has already been taken and it is not there.

Nyame speaks to Tristan privately. Despite his powers, Nyame is still weakened by the brand fly poison and must keep his sentries to protect the Golden Crescent. Even before the recent conflict, the land of Alke was divided into factions. He tells Tristan that fixing the hole and killing the monsters are just the first steps in repairing these differences.

Nyame decides to help Tristan. He gives Tristan an adinkra that will allow Tristan to see the reality clearly, which in turn will yield better control over the sounds and rhythms that give Tristan’s stories power. Alke is constructed of stories and rhythms, so this is an important gift. Nyame tells Tristan where Anansi’s palace is. Finally, he makes a confusing prophecy: Those who oppose Tristan might be his biggest help, while those who are allies might not be. Tristan is disgusted with the mysteriousness of this pronouncement. Nyame warns Tristan that the quest to secure Anansi’s help will be difficult. He tells Tristan bluntly that he is aware that Uncle C is haunting Tristan.

The companions leave for Anansi’s palace. Using the new adinkra, which makes Tristan’s eyes glow and the story threads holding Alke together appear as words, Tristan easily finds Anansi’s palace and avoids all the traps surrounding it. When they arrive at Anansi’s room, they see fetterlings wrapped in spider silk or broken into pieces. Anansi is not there, and the tumbled dishes and notes make it seem like he and a guest lost out to the fetterlings in the end. Gum Baby must intervene to stop Ayanna and Tristan from getting into another argument that distracts them from the task at hand. Chestnutt discovers from Anansi’s notes that the Story Box is likely in a forbidding mountain stronghold called the Ridge.

The Ridge, the mountain fortress of Isihlangu, is a heavily guarded place that the inhabitants protect with giant rock lasers and that is only accessible through trams. If they can get inside, they can steal the Story Box from the Atrium, the storehouse of Isihlangu’s treasures, according to Chestnutt’s notes. Ayanna uses the air raft to navigate to the fortress, but it takes Gum Baby squirting sap into the lethal rock lasers to save them. Gum Baby’s gum destroys the source of the lasers, and the team is forced to go in for a hard landing to catch up with the tram, which is just leaving as they make it past the lasers.

On board Ayanna’s raft, the group takes a service entrance to the interior of Isihlangu. The interior of the mountain is a series of steep ledges with buildings of dark stone, topped with jewels like dark purple amethysts. Gum Baby, always a source of comedy, sings a rude and catchy song about her “[b]umbly steed” (275), directed at Tristan. The Ridgefolk go up and down the steep heights using obsidian hoverboards. Using his Nyame adinkra, Tristan leads the group to the Atrium. An alarm sounds below. Tristan gets so excited about the idea of being a hero who steals an object of power that he ignores Ayanna’s warning to stop humming the song he has created as a soundtrack for his heroic adventure. Guards capture them.

Thandiwe, a gruff girl not much older than Tristan, oversees the guards. She accuses Tristan and his crew of being thieves of Ridge cultural objects. The guards escort Tristan and company out, where the entire population of Isihlangu waits. They, like Thandiwe, laugh when Tristan admits that he is afraid to take the forebears, or the obsidian hoverboards, on rails down to the council, which will judge the intruders. Under threat of death, Tristan rides the forebear down anyway.

They arrive at a chamber, where the Amagqirha, a diviner, summons the ancestors, spirits who will judge Tristan and the others. Fezile, the leading ancestor, accuses Tristan of being a thief and of kidnapping the people of Isihlangu. Tristan insists that they are not responsible and that the decision of the Isihlangu to seal their borders instead of helping is in part to blame for their city’s losses. This claim causes an uproar. Desperate to protect his mission and friends, Tristan flashes his Anansi adinkra—earning gasps from the audience—and begins to tell one of his powerful stories.

The Amagqirha begins beating out a rhythm, and once Tristan has gathered the shape of his story, he joins in her movements and sounds, then grabs up dust and words to paint a story. He decides to pour everything into the story, following advice from Gum Baby to go over the top with his tale. He first conjures monsters out of old African and Black American folklore like Abiyoyo, a devourer of children, reminding them that they already know of monsters who steal children and treasure.

The fetterlings and the Maafa, he explains, are different monsters who only desire the destruction of life itself. The ugly, massive conjuring of the Maafa terrifies the audience, and Gum Baby falls in a dramatic faint to underscore this terror. Tristan admits that he tore the hole in the sky and freed the evil haint after disturbing the bottle tree. Tristan ends by telling them that only with Anansi’s help, which can only be secured with a prize like the Story Box, can they close the hole.

The elders decide that it would be better to seal the mountain up and hide. Thandiwe convinces them to help instead by pointing out that they are the victims of one of Anansi’s tricks and that sealing the border will not keep them safe. The Story Box belongs to MidPass, she reasons, and the Ridgefolk should give it back. Her words sway the elders, who have just begun to confer again when an earthshaking boom interrupts their discussion.

The loud noise turns out to be one of Tristan’s conjurings come to life—Abiyoyo. In the old tales, children sing his name out over and over before sleep to keep him at bay. If a child makes noise after bedtime, Abiyoyo eats them. Abiyoyo begins chasing the diviner around. Tristan gets Gum Baby to slow him down by trapping his feet in sap, long enough for Thandiwe to remember that the only way to dismiss the monster is by singing out his name. Tristan conjures small children who lure the giant to the stage and trap him in circles. Thandiwe recruits all the children—and some adults—to sing together to make the giant disappear, and the plan works.

After, the elders move to give the Story Box to the Midfolk, but they are interrupted by High John the Conqueror, another figure out of Black folklore.

High John is a special figure: The first time Tristan ever talked with someone aside from Nana about the story was with Eddie, who introduced himself one day in the school library by pestering Tristan about a bad graphic novel Tristan was reading. Eddie told Tristan about his collection of folktales, which he wrote down in his smelly old journal. They became friends at that moment.

High John is handsome, commanding, and insists that the Thicket has been destroyed. The Story Box should therefore come to him where it can do some good. Tristan doesn’t trust High John’s account of the destruction of the Thicket. John seizes Tristan and begins tearing a hole in his spiritual body. Tristan blacks out.

When Tristan wakes up, he is flying through the sky with High John on the back of a monstrous black crow called Old Familiar. John has pulled Tristan into some realm beyond the physical. From Old Familiar’s back, Tristan can see that the Thicket and MidPass have fallen and the monsters hunt the people. High John tells Tristan that relying on Anansi—absent and so far of no help—is a mistake. Tristan should give the box to High John. He reveals that in Alke, stories are what give gods power, hence Nyame’s hoarding of them.

With the Story Box, High John believes he will be powerful enough to save Alke, not just a little place like MidPass. Tristan remembers from Nana’s tales that High John the Conqueror was always the most powerful and favored of the gods, so he is not surprised by this desire for more power. Still, something about High John’s tale feels off to Tristan. When Tristan demands to know why a god like High John is not down there fighting, the frustrated god leaps over the side, taking Tristan with him into the air.

They land in the Thicket. It is burning, and John Henry is using his magic hammer to direct its residents to flee. Tristan arrives at the common dining room, where he sees a fetterling threaten children. Tristan intervenes by conjuring a man of smoke and fire, one who looks like High John. In this form, Tristan frightens the fetterlings and points the children to safety. He also appears to John Henry in the form of Nyame’s adinkra to let John Henry know to bring the Midfolk to the Golden Crescent. Tristan’s intervention comes at a cost. His actions in the Thicket and separation from his physical body weaken him. He is danger of never being able to get his spirit and body back together. High John scoops him up to return him to his body.