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takerfoxx · 4 years

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Notes on Restless

A day overdue, but here it is! My thoughts on writing Restless.

Restless is, in many ways, the most important arc in the story, not because it is the most plot or character significant (though it definitely is very important to both), but because it was one of the first, if not the first story arc I planned out, and have been cooking up in the back of my mind and working toward ever since this story started. And, as indicated by the title, it is one big reference to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Restless, which is my favorite episode and also featured all of the main characters trapped in their little dream worlds.

What can I say; I like dream sequences!

In fact, and I know I have mentioned this a few times already, but it bears repeating the first chapter of this arc was literally the very first scene I thought up for this story, back when I was still in post-episode 9 depression and wanted nothing more for Kyoko and Oktavia to reunite somewhere and be happy together (well, the story definitely gives us the former, but, um, not really the latter, because I am still a sadist). If memory serves, my original vision had the two of them and Mami relaxing in a fantasy-world hot spring that had a bunch of big crystals everywhere (because I like crystals), only for them to be interrupted by the sound of something moving nearby, and, upon inspection, they would find the doll version of Charlotte watching them.

Obviously that scenario’s gone through a lot of fine-tuning, especially when it comes to Charlotte. And the crystals got moved to the end of the story after the hot spring had been removed, but hey, they still made the final cut. Regardless, I did settle on a finalized version some years ago, and the final cut came out more-or-less exactly as I envisioned, down to Mami and Charlotte going off alone for some, ah, quality time.

The only new addition was Jerky’s little scene and the Sayaka/Oktavia flirting sequence, and, well, that happened. I honestly don’t know if I’m even allowed to say much about it without getting into trouble with someone, even though I wrote it, but let’s just say the time has come to finally kick things into high gear on that end.

Okay, so onto the dreams!

Kyoko’s dream was of course the one I came up with first, and yet ended up being the shortest. I guess it’s because while she’s white-hot mess of issues, she’s at least a straightforward white-hot mess of issues, and honestly, it came out more-or-less how I initially planned years ago, with very little addition.

Now, Mephisto gave us a pretty clear breakdown of what the individual girls’ dreams meant thematically when she started torturing them directly, but it bears repeating that Kyoko’s dream was mainly dealing with her poor reaction to loss (the concept, not the meme), specifically the loss of Sayaka to Oktavia, and her stubborn and yet misguided quest to bring Sayaka back at any cost.

We start with a perfect repeat of her dream from waaaaaaaay back from chapter five, when she was first waking up from being drugged. I was originally just going to begin with the continuation, but it had been so long since that chapter that I just copied and pasted the original dream so we can have it in its entirety, which included the all-important image of Sayaka dissolving into silver fishes.

From there it’s mainly Kyoko’s singleminded quest to find Sayaka at any cost. And from there, we see her think that she’s found her time after time, only to be disappointed, from thinking that Madoka was Sayaka (and it’s a shame that they never interacted more beyond that single episode, as they had a good dynamic), to nearly catching the silver-fish Sayaka only to have her torn away, to finally finding the fake fish-faced conductor Sayaka, further establishing her inability to accept Oktavia as not being Sayaka. The hole that her father left in her heart and how deeply she misses him even with what he did does come up, but she abandons catching him once Kyubey makes it clear that doing so is impossible, as well as showing that while she still loves her father, part of her still does not forgive him and she truly believes that he went to Hell.

Also, was that the first time I’ve had Kyubey show up and have original dialogue? Because it might be!

Mephisto’s first appearance has her occupying the same role that she would in everyone’s dreams, that of a surly gatekeeper. She’s a bouncer in Kyoko’s dream, a ticket-taker/ride operator in Sayaka’s, a hostess in Mami’s, and a receptionist in Charlotte’s. And in each one, she lets the dreamer pass while making it clear that doing so is probably a bad idea. Her design was a lot of fun, though there truly is no significance to her rainbow dreadlocks, punk-rock aesthetic, or denim outfit, other than I liked the way they looked. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Annabelle Lee and the dockengauts have very short appearances in the nightclub, as despite all the pain they’ve put Kyoko through, she is still so singleminded in her pursuit that she considers them nothing more than obstacles to be overcome, which Annabelle Lee would probably be annoyed to hear.

As for Mami’s weird striptease, well, Kyoko is just now having to grapple with her own budding sexuality, and it stands to reason that Mami would have been an early crush for her. The “ending” though shows that while she’s more-or-less okay with Charlotte, she is still very aware of how Mami died.

Like Annabelle Lee, Elsa Maria would have the same role in everyone’s dream, the same role she had in Annabelle Lee’s feverish dream during the Help arc, that of the person who points the way to what the dreamer is seeking while still advising against it, which is always ignored. Though don’t read too much into her working with Mephisto in the end, as it’s not the real Elsa Maria and Mephisto is still the one in control.

And what better place for Kyoko, now Ophelia, to start her quest to find Sayaka for real than the same train station that she originally lost Sayaka in?

Anyway, while this chapter came out basically as originally envisioned, there are a couple things that I wish I had included, firstly a scene where Kyoko loses her necklace while being swept along by the current for Sayaka to find it later, and to have the sound of the crying child from the beginning to continue throughout the whole chapter, showing that she still hadn’t forgotten her quest to find her sister, as impossible as it might seem now.

Sayaka’s dream had largely to do with her and Oktavia’s issues with personal identity, and the dichotomy that Oktavia feels at all times, but translated through Sayaka’s eyes. In fact, bits and pieces of both their personalities are present through the circus (and given that Rumia’s dream took place in a circus in Imperfect Metamorphosis, it does just seem to be a recurring theme with me). The whole knight in shining armor for Sayaka is obvious, as is her sense of righteous justice as what Lily did. But her dynamics with the various characters that she comes across, her memories in general, her growing attraction to Kyoko, and her annoyance at being addressed incorrectly is all Oktavia.

It’s the two Kyoko encounters I want the highlight. The first at the shooting gallery shows that while Oktavia does love Kyoko, she is getting quite fed up with the constant nicknames in place of her actual name, while the second in the dunking tank shows her growing concern that Kyoko’s dogheaded persistence is only going to keep getting her hurt until there’s nothing left, as well as show her growing sexual attraction to Kyoko as she is progressively more stripped.

Mami and Charlotte’s brief appearance was in part to get them on the dream, and so show that that while Oktavia cares for them deeply, she’s not nearly as worried about them as she is Kyoko, hence why they’re here so briefly. Also, them pushing Ticky Nikki around in a stroller, aside from being Nikki’s only appearance this whole arc, was also a tip of the hat to the original Restless episode from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as Giles’s dream had him and his girlfriend pushing a stroller around through a carnival in the middle of a graveyard.

The Freakshow was a mixture of the traumatic monsters both Sayaka and Oktavia had to encounter, from the various witch familiars and to Gertrud, the first witch Sayaka ever saw, to the witch form of Charlotte, who traumatized Sayaka deeply, to Brooklyn, who briefly showed up earlier and was sort of Oktavia’s nemesis in The Heist and targeted her specifically, which left a mark.

And that whole business with Annabelle Lee “pouring” Kyoko into the tank was to lean more into dream logic, where deeply personal fears tend to be translated through nonsensical imagery. I’ve had plenty of dreams where I’d “lose” a close friend or family member because they got turned into a jar of dried corn or something and I’d just be so devastated and obsessed with turning said corn back into my loved one, and it’d be very serious and emotional, and it wouldn’t be until I had woken up that I’d realize, “Dude, dried corn?” Plus, her guilt about stabbing Annabelle Lee was a reference to Sayaka’s own increasing guilt when she realized that she wasn’t the shining hero she had wanted to be.

The clown dance is pretty self-explanatory, in that Sayaka spent so much time killing witches and treating them like monsters only to become a witch herself. Plus, given how quick her downfall was, it serves to reason that she would think of herself as a clown. Plus, I just like Lily as a character, and wanted any excuse to use her as much as possible.

The whole bit with the train station acting as the loading gate for the roller-coaster is also fairly obvious. That’s where Sayaka became Oktavia, hence the cart turning into the wheelchair, or the coaster track leading into Oktavia’s barrier. I’m honestly not too thrilled about the coaster going through Genocide City, because while having it make an appearance makes sense, since it’s literally Oktavia’s first memory, but if I recall, I had the hardest time settling on a location for the rollercoaster to ride through before heading into the castle. I tried Freehaven, the outside of the high school, and returning to the circus itself before just settling with Genocide City, which honestly was chosen mainly because the deadline was coming up and I had to go with something. I guess it works though.

There really isn’t much to say about the reversed Kyoko/Oktavia fight, as it’s literally just a perspective flip of their final battle. Incredibly important and significant as it embodies the entirety of Sayaka’s aspect as the “Monster” of her dream and hammered in her connection to Kyoko? Absolutely. Has much that I can explain that isn’t literally sitting right on the surface? Nope.

We do get Mephisto basically spelling out Sayaka’s contradictory identity in her final days though, in which she was the valiant knight she always wanted to be, she was the damsel in distress that Madoka and Kyoko tried and failed to rescue, and she was the monster holding that damsel captive. No doubt that part was inspired by the meme of the Dragonborn princess paladin who was hired to rescue herself from herself.

From there, the “Monster” is slain, and the cute mermaid Oktavia von Seckendorff is born, the only time during her own dream that she makes a full appearance. She then is treated to a montage of Sayaka’s memories, but of course, they mean nothing to her.

However, I would like to point out what amounted to the payoff of a joke I had set up literally years ago. Readers of all my stuff might remember that way back in Rhapsody of Subconscious Desire, another story that took place in a dream world, Kaguya Houraisan was split into two identical copies of herself, called Head and Body, who encountered Oktavia swimming around in a large aquarium, who in turn shot them a rude gesture and swam off. Here, we finally see the inverse of that scene, which is why a couple of previously unseen twin girls showed up with no explanation.

Next is where the dreams start to converge. Oktavia finds Kyoko’s necklace (which, again, I wish I had included in Kyoko’s dream. Maybe in time I’ll go back and edit it in) and meets the silver fish’s from Kyoko’s dream, absorbing them and turning fully into the princess and, as a result, Sayaka Miki finally returns in full.

Funny thing about that.

At this point, I didn’t know how much the whole Sayaka thing would play out, and originally she would just be Oktavia in a dress. But after having Sayaka’s memories intrude again and again, I thought, “Huh, wouldn’t it be fun if she just became Sayaka again for a short time? Have a weird inverse of the Oktavia situation?” and went ahead and did it.

This choice led to…major consequences.

Mami’s dream is next, and despite being the one that I literally had planned out the least ahead of time, ended up being the most fun to write. Naturally, her dream dreams with her immense guilt over having been Kyubey’s poster girl for so long, helping him ensnare several innocent girls into his scheme as well as kill them off herself when they became witches. Also, it served as a little nod to Candeloro’s job as a baker in WN. Anyway, the whole thing was heavily influenced by Sweeney Todd, in that victims are misled into doing something they think is innocent, only for them to be gruesomely murdered and sent off to be turned into food.

The world of candles is just something I thought would be neat imagery, so infer from it what you wish. However, it is interesting to note that Mami is the only one to have a dream that features Annabelle Lee as the persistent antagonist that she is, showing up over and over to antagonize her. There wasn’t an intended reason for this, but come to think of it, with Kyoko focused on her endgame, Oktavia just wanting her friends to be safe, and Charlotte obsessed with what was lost, Mami would be the one most living in the nowness of their situation, convinced that she is finally in Hell for her sins.

In the restaurant, Mami is indirectly guilt-tripped by Shizuku for essentially abandoning all of her responsibilities to help Kyoko, and is then given a choice: abandon her quest and stay with her loved ones, or continue on with her “duty” despite all warning signs, thereby sealing her own destruction. Charlotte even goes so far as to beg her directly to not go on, but Mami refuses, saying over and over again that she is, “On the clock,” signifying how being a magical girl essentially took over her entire life after her parents’ death, and how full she threw herself into it to shield herself from her own loneliness.

And from then on, her fate is sealed.

While descending the long staircase, the father of Mami’s occasionally mentioned former crush Ryu Hagane shows up to chastise her for throwing her life way in making her contract, and then Mami’s actual love Charlotte shows up on the big TV to remind Mami of what she was now throwing away, and curiously, when she brings out the doll version of herself, it’s not to remind her of how Charlotte kill Mami (though the worms coming out of the doll’s mouth shows that Mami still hasn’t forgotten), but to remind her of how Mami had tried to kill Charlotte upon their first meeting, as her own guilt is more powerful than even the trauma from having her own head bitten off. Annabelle Lee emerges again, and in the process, the staircase is destroyed. Mami’s choice was made. There is going back.

Sure enough, when she enters the classroom, the marionette corpse of Kazuko Saotome (a reference to how she was killed and eaten in the Oriko timeline, in addition to just being very creepy) spells out to Mami’s face what an idiot she was for trusting Kyubey, how many lives she had ruined by doing so, finishing with Homura showing up to basically say, “I told you so.”

Annabelle Lee attacks again, and Mami is sent into a montage of battles she has fought since their disastrous adventure begun, but with each of her assailants being replaced at the last second by one of her friends, showing that even after forgiveness, she still feels like she’s their murderer, as well as driving home the point that in all of her battles to defend herself over the course of this story, she was still just fighting and hurting other magical girls, and regardless of which side they were on, they were all still victims of the same scam.

Annabelle Lee is finally defeated and put down, but there is no victory, only horror at what Mami had done. She flees, but finally finds herself in the Hell she always felt that she deserved, pursued by the zombified corpses of all the monsters that had defeated her, from Lily, who had stolen her mind and made her commit atrocities, to the wild girls, whom she had slaughtered, to the Worm, whom had killed her in her arrogance.

She escapes, but that just leads her back to the bakery, signifying that no matter what, the second she had made that contract she had been doomed. It didn’t matter if she was leaping through the sky in an extravagant outfit, effortlessly defeating monsters with her magic, or if she was sinking into her own despair with a darkening soul gem, it was all the same. She was just food for the Incubators, to be chewed up and discarded, thrown into the mouth of the Worm and run down by the same vehicle that had killed her parents.

She then wakes up in the hospital, reliving a twisted version of when she had been recovered from the car wreck that had taken her parents, taking her back to her first sin that still haunted her: only saving her own life with her wish and letting her parents die. And thus, she is turned into the same monster she had spent the last few years fighting: the witch, Candeloro.

The whole bit in the hospital was a twisted version of what it must have been like for the original Mami to wake up in the hospital and learn that her parents had died. No doubt Mephisto’s dream doctors would have continued to further twist the knife had Ophelia and Sayaka not violently intervened (which gives us a rare case of blood instead of mist). And Candeloro is brought into the party, and with a Cyberpunk reference no less!

Charlotte’s dream comes last, and in my opinion, is the most multi-layered. The bulk is focused on how bitter she is at having her perfect life with her wife stolen away and how many people she resents for it, her own feelings of helplessness at being unable to prevent it, and also it addresses her own guilt at having killed Mami to begin with and how much she fears the return of the Worm that did it, but also she seems to be the only person that has some subconscious awareness of how Homura is timelooping them over and over again, forcing them to relive the same torturous sequence of events (probably has something to do with Homura being the one who killed her after she ate Mami).

In the first loop, Mami is taken by Annabelle Lee, and Charlotte is totally helpless to stop her. This is pretty obvious: Annabelle Lee has been a thorn in her side since day one. It was because of her that they were ambushed in Cloudbreak and forced into their horrible adventure. And more directly, it was because of Annabelle Lee that they fell into the Etherdale to begin with, leading to them all being enslaved by Lily and Charlotte and Mami being forced to commit atrocities.

Also, it’s hinted that the city that Charlotte is forced to march through is the same one Kyoko had been following her father through in her dream, indicating that their minds are already crossing over.

The second is a little more complicated. Yes, Charlotte and Kyoko are on better terms. Yes, they’re getting along. Yes, Kyoko apologized and they bonded. But if it weren’t for Kyoko, then none of this would have ever happened. If it weren’t for Kyoko, Charlotte wouldn’t have lost her home, wouldn’t have been targeted by Reibey, and wouldn’t have to suffer being pursued by dockengauts and valks, two creatures that she has an acute phobia of. So there is still some hard feelings there.

The third is when Charlotte is forced to confront something about herself, that no matter how many people she blames, her own actions still played a part as well. Now she is the one riding the Worm. She is the one who cost Mami her life. And in the hospital, it was her misguided wish that cost her her mother, whether she knows it or not, as well as why she became a witch in the first place.

Couple notes about the hospital: first, the cheese slices do signify how Charlotte threw her wish away for something as stupid as cheesecake, but are also another reference to the original Restless, in which a man carrying cheese slices shows up in each of the characters dreams, just to be weird.

Also, Charlotte’s magical girl outfit was in part inspired by a 4koma MamiLotte doujin from before The Rebellion Story, in which Charlotte becomes human again and crushes on Mami big time. And her outfit consists of a double-breasted coat and skirt. Also there were parts taken from the character notes from Walpurgisnacht, in which one of her familiars is an early draft of Human!Charlotte, before Nagisa had been designed, and she’s depicted holding a staff topped with the wrapped candy charm.

The final loop is where Charlotte fully becomes Nozomi (a name I think I just took from another fanfic that gave her that name) and finally defeats the Worm, this time ridden by Homura Akemi. After all, Homura Akemi is the one resetting things over and over again, forcing Charlotte to relive the same terrible events over and over. And as for that rooftop meeting…well, explaining that would be telling, so infer what you will.

The next chapter is mainly spent playing catch-up, gathering all the characters together and pushing toward the final battle with Mephisto. Here, things get less symbolic and more character based, so there’s a lot less to explain. Ophelia’s path of destruction through Sayaka’s carnival and Mami’s school are basically in line with lucid dreaming, in that once you know that you’re in a dream, everything just feels so much less solid, leading Ophelia to take down the ravaged versions of Brooklyn and Annabelle Lee with ease. Also, that scene with her talking to the dying Lily was an American Gods reference, which featured a similar scene.

So let’s talk about the big thing with this chapter. Let’s talk about Sayaka.

Originally the plan was to go straight from Charlotte’s dream to the fight with Mephisto, but then I realized what a bad idea that is. I mean, Sayaka was back! It’s something that’s been hinted and talked about all through the story’s run, but now it’s actually a thing. The original Sayaka Miki, the one that fell into despair and became a witch, is now back, and without having merged with Oktavia and gaining her memories. She’s thrown literally into the middle of things, during the gang’s weirdest adventure yet. And, it should be noted, her most recent memory is literally sitting with Kyoko in the train station, right before she became Oktavia. That is one hell of a bad day.

Obviously she reacts poorly, and who can blame her? And give her credit, she pulled herself together pretty quickly. However, she did pick up very quickly on Kyoko’s feelings for her. And why shouldn’t we just start saying it? It’s obvious to everyone! But obviously, as short as it was, Sayaka’s brief return will have major consequences that will play out over time.

Anyway, obviously everyone else has their own identity crisis. Mami turns fully into Candeloro, which provides a measure of relief from her own shame, while Kyoko as Ophelia is the rare witch that remembers everything while still sticking fully to her witch identity.

As for Charlotte, her case as Charzomi is easily the weirdest, with her constantly shifting back and forth between Charlotte and Nozomi, and her own memories fading in and out, forcing her to work extra hard to stay focused. It’s been suggested that this might serve as a metaphor for gender fluidity, and while this wasn’t the intention and thus I can’t speak to its accuracy, I can see and support the applicability. Still haven’t worked out what the long-term consequences of that will be, but I do want this to play into her future character development.

The walk up the tongue was mainly me realizing that the fighting was going to start soon, and Sayaka was going away right after, so I had one last opportunity to make the most out of her presence and I was determined not to waste it.

So we ticked off the boxes on everything we ought to address with her. She cleared the air with Charlotte over having to watch Mami get eaten. She finally got to hug Mami (well, Candeloro anyway) and got everything she wanted to say off her chest. And with Ophelia, she naturally wants to know more about exactly what Kyoko has been getting up to with Sayaka’s other self.

Sayaka again confronts Ophelia about how she feels about her (or, well, Oktavia, or maybe Sayaka? It’s weird), and naturally she is kind of freaked out by it. Remember, from her point of view, her relationship with Kyoko had been nothing but antagonistic. Whether Kyoko had been attacking her or trying to help her, Sayaka always resented her presence, so now suddenly being dropped into the middle of things and learning that her one-time rival now has a thing for her? Well, can you blame her for getting a little freaked out?

Also, it’s worth pointing out how the script had been flipped with everyone’s new identities. Now it’s Ophelia and Candeloro with the witch names, while Sayaka still thinks of them using their old names, causing them discomfort, but she has no problem calling Charzomi whatever because they had just met and she didn’t care.

And then we get to the fight, and of course it has to be a pro wrestling match. I’d also like to point out that there were a lot of songs I wanted to use for this chapter but was unsure of where to put each one. Originally the climb up the tongue was just going to have generic thrash metal playing the background, while Mephisto’s entrance theme was going to start with Mr. Sandman, only to transition into Bad Reputation (which is Ronda Rousey’s RL entrance theme), but then I was like, I should put Welcome to My Nightmare in there somewhere. And then I remembered that Cult of Personality is a thing, which is also CM Punk’s entrance theme, so I finally decided to move the first three songs to the tongue scene and have CoP as Mephisto’s entrance music.

And finally, we come to the last chapter. The magical girl fight scene was another one of those checklist things I wanted to have so long as I had Sayaka around. That way, I could actually build some real KyoSaya moments to make the KyoTavi angst all the more potent, as Sayaka realizes that she is developing an attraction to Kyoko as they fight side-by-side, letting me recreate that magical little moment from The Rebellion Story in which Sayaka basically confesses in the middle of the battle, complete with Charlotte ruining the mood.

I’ll admit, I kind of skimped out on Mephisto’s witch design and didn’t give it as much thought as I could have, but that part was never important. The important part was to recreate a classic witch fight and let the girls interact during it. I am proud of the Charlotte’s Web joke though.

What happens next is to establish that it doesn’t matter how hard they fight or how smart they are, they simply cannot beat Mephisto now. She’s taken complete control, enough to flick them through their various personas on a whim turning them into Puella Magi, then to human!witches (basically the Walpurgis Nights girls), then to full witches, then to the classic squad from the bulk of the story (bringing Oktavia back briefly), then to vanilla humans. It doesn’t matter. Mephisto has them, and can do whatever she wants.

From there, she separates them again and subjects them to a condensed version of their previous dreams, with the same themes but different imagery. Kyoko is subjected to a sermon about her poor responses to loss from her dead father, as he really lays into her over how much damage she had done. And I gotta admit, even I felt pretty bad just for writing that scene. Because I know torturing Kyoko is kind of this story’s MO, but damn.

Sayaka is a little more nuanced. Yes, the identity issues from her own dream are brought up, but it’s more focused on a new issues: mainly, now that Sayaka is back, she not only has to grapple with all the weirdness that she’s been thrust into, but also with essentially having been replaced. We see the vision of her friends getting along happily without her, the friends she had pushed away and alienated having moved on without her, Madoka basically having replaced her entirely with Homura. Of course this is not reflected in reality, as by this point in the world of the living they probably haven’t even found Sayaka’s body yet due to the time difference, but it is definitely that Sayaka would easily believe.

The next part is basically the whole reason for bringing Sayaka back in this manner. Mephisto then shows Sayaka a real memory that of Oktavia spending time with Kyoko, Mami, and Charlotte and being loved and accepted by them.

Sayaka’s character arc in the original series was driven by her letting her insecurities cause her to overcompensate and destroy herself, and Oktavia has largely been characterized as what Sayaka would be like if she didn’t have those insecurities. Sure, she’s had the shadow of the original Sayaka hanging over her, but for the most part this hasn’t seemed to bother her much, aside from getting annoyed at being called the wrong name, but it’s been taken for granted that sooner or later being thought of as Sayaka instead of herself by Kyoko was going to come to a head.

But here we have one of those happy unplanned gold veins, something I hadn’t planned on doing but am thrilled gets to happen now: we have Sayaka being forced to come to terms with living in Oktavia’s shadow.

Yes, they’re the same person. Yes, Oktavia is just Sayaka with her memory wiped and many of her self-destructive issues cleared away. But as WN demonstrated, it’s not as clear cut as that, and there is still some degree of separation between the two. And the infamously self-loathing Sayaka would most certainly be messed up by being confronted by a version of herself that people like and enjoy being around, that doesn’t feel the need to prove anything. And this is coming right off the heels of her realizing that she might have feelings for Kyoko after all (even if that is in part because of her empathetic connection to Oktavia), only to have it thrown in her face that it was Oktavia that Kyoko really loved, when she herself never did anything other than push Kyoko away. Granted, she had good reason for doing so, given that the first thing Kyoko did was try to kill her, but the point stands.

The Kyoko/Oktavia dynamic has always been messy due to Sayaka’s constant presence, but I kind of feel that that was unfair to Sayaka herself, as she deserves better than just being a memory, and I wanted her to have an actual voice in the whole deal, to be able to express her own feelings about it, even if it does complicate an already incredibly complicated situation.

Anyway, the next bit is pretty self-explanatory, with Mephisto further twisting the knife by replaying Sayaka’s last conversation with Madoka and really driving home what a wreck Sayaka had been at the time. Remember, from Sayaka’s point of view, that whole moment was only a few hours ago, at most!

Mami’s was very interesting, because the whole trial bit is self-explanatory, but it’s actually a reference to the bizarre trial that made up the final episode of the classic mindscrew TV show The Prisoner, which featured a jury wearing masks, the plaintiff sitting on an ornate chair on a raised platform, witnesses being pulled out of steam-filled holes, and an extended singalong of Dry Bones. Granted, I mainly knew about it because Reboot, one of my favorite shows, also referenced it in a dream episode of their own, but I liked that episode, and wanted to rip it off.

For the witnesses, we first get the expected faces from the show itself, but we also get a few new ones. Brooke Alexander was already named once before when Mami was reflecting on the various girls she had trained, Janice Goldberg was made up specifically for this scene, but we also get Michiru Kazusa, from the really weird spin-off manga Kazumi Magica, who was established as having a past with Mami. Kazumi Magica had its problems, but I did like a lot of the characters (i.e. The Twins), so this seemed like a good time to bring in another one.

Charlotte’s dream is the most straightforward, as it’s basically just her first dream condensed into a claw machine. What I wanted to put focus on was that Charlotte is the one character that knows who Mephisto is, as her role as the team scholar who does the most reading, she would actually have heard of the Ideal Witches, and thus would really understand just how much trouble they were all in.

And at the end of each segment, Mephisto gives each of them the same offer: submit willingly and be given a pleasant fantasy while Mephisto digests their souls, or continue to resist and get digested anyway, only in eternal torment. And her offer would give them each what they wanted the most. Kyoko wants her loved ones back, Sayaka wants to be loved and appreciated, Mami wants forgiveness, and Charlotte just wants to go home. And in light of what they were facing, can any of them be blamed for wanting to take Mephisto up on her offer?

Enter Jerky.

Jerky was a ton of fun to write for, and judging by the overwhelming positive response to his segments, bringing in the baby space raptor was a good idea. Like I’ve said before, his bits were one big love letter to Raptor Red, a novel by paleontologist Robert Bakker which tells of the life and times of a female Utahraptor from the Utahraptor’s point of view. And the nice thing about Jerky is that he’s smart enough to know the does and don’ts, but simple enough to be uncomplicated. He’s an animal. An exceptionally smart animal, but still an animal. He knows that he loves Kyoko and is loyal to her, he’s been made to understand that he can’t let Charlotte, Mami, and Oktavia see him, and he knows that Kyoko’s skin is softer than his and he needs to be careful, but beyond that he couldn’t care less of their various issues. It’s refreshingly simple.

As such, when confronted with a complete inexplicable threat such as Mephisto, something well beyond his ability to comprehend, he’s worried, he’s scared, he doesn’t know what to do, so he defaults to his predatory instincts.

When in doubt, start biting.

And it does the trick, because something that needs to be said is that while the Ideal Witches are powerful, they’re not omnipotent. Mephisto needed to lure the girls in and submerge them fully in her dream in order to control them the way that she did, but in the real world, she was vulnerable once she had manifested fully, allowing Kyoko to break free long enough to fire the final shot.

In the end, everyone escapes, but not unscathed. Kyoko especially had been scarred even further, in part from the dream of her father, but also from having to watch Sayaka basically die again, leading to her reaching what very well might be her breaking point. Mami’s slipping deeper into depression, having been forced to once again confront all the damage she unwittingly did as a magical girl, Charlotte is fully fed up with everything that had happened to them. And Oktavia? Well, now that it’s been shown that Sayaka Miki can and has come back, suddenly her own identity issues are going to become worse. She’s really going to have to grapple with Sayaka being an actual person with a legitimate claim to her body, especially since when Sayaka came back, she effectively traded places with Oktavia instead of merging with her. That’s gotta be scary.

At the very least, Kyoko did not reject Oktavia. In some way, she does understand that Oktavia is her own person, and she’s coming to respect that. But there are some deep wounds having to do with Oktavia’s creation, and they’re both going to have to come to terms with a great many things in the days to come.

And at the very end, it’s shown that Mephisto is weakened but still alive, and she’s pissed! We also learn that one of the girls did accept Mephisto’s offer before she was defeated, so that’s definitely going to come up later. And we meet the rest of the Ideal Witches. Obviously there is more to come with them, so I will say nothing further.

Anyway, I guess that’s it. Feel free to message me if you want anything explained further, or just make your own interpretations. Either is fine.

#resonance days #restless

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/22/kicked-off-the-land

This article makes a strong case for reparations. Two brothers spent years in jail for a civil contempt CHARGE for trying to protect their property. THEY WERE NEVER CHARED WITH A CRIME.

Kicked Off the Land

Why so many black families are losing their property.

By Lizzie Presser | Published July 15, 2019 | New Yorker Magazine | Posted July 19, 2019 | Listen 👂 to article on website.

This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica.

In the spring of 2011, the brothers Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels were the talk of Carteret County, on the central coast of North Carolina. Some people said that the brothers were righteous; others thought that they had lost their minds. That March, Melvin and Licurtis stood in court and refused to leave the land that they had lived on all their lives, a portion of which had, without their knowledge or consent, been sold to developers years before. The brothers were among dozens of Reels family members who considered the land theirs, but Melvin and Licurtis had a particular stake in it. Melvin, who was sixty-four, with loose black curls combed into a ponytail, ran a club there and lived in an apartment above it. He’d established a career shrimping in the river that bordered the land, and his sense of self was tied to the water. Licurtis, who was fifty-three, had spent years building a house near the river’s edge, just steps from his mother’s.

Their great-grandfather had bought the land a hundred years earlier, when he was a generation removed from slavery. The property—sixty-five marshy acres that ran along Silver Dollar Road, from the woods to the river’s sandy shore—was racked by storms. Some called it the bottom, or the end of the world. Melvin and Licurtis’s grandfather Mitchell Reels was a deacon; he farmed watermelons, beets, and peas, and raised chickens and hogs. Churches held tent revivals on the waterfront, and kids played in the river, a prime spot for catching red-tailed shrimp and crabs bigger than shoes. During the later years of racial-segregation laws, the land was home to the only beach in the county that welcomed black families. “It’s our own little black country club,” Melvin and Licurtis’s sister Mamie liked to say. In 1970, when Mitchell died, he had one final wish. “Whatever you do,” he told his family on the night that he passed away, “don’t let the white man have the land.”

Mitchell didn’t trust the courts, so he didn’t leave a will. Instead, he let the land become heirs’ property, a form of ownership in which descendants inherit an interest, like holding stock in a company. The practice began during Reconstruction, when many African-Americans didn’t have access to the legal system, and it continued through the Jim Crow era, when black communities were suspicious of white Southern courts. In the United States today, seventy-six per cent of African-Americans do not have a will, more than twice the percentage of white Americans.

Many assume that not having a will keeps land in the family. In reality, it jeopardizes ownership. David Dietrich, a former co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Property Preservation Task Force, has called heirs’ property “the worst problem you never heard of.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture has recognized it as “the leading cause of Black involuntary land loss.” Heirs’ property is estimated to make up more than a third of Southern black-owned land—3.5 million acres, worth more than twenty-eight billion dollars. These landowners are vulnerable to laws and loopholes that allow speculators and developers to acquire their property. Black families watch as their land is auctioned on courthouse steps or forced into a sale against their will.

Between 1910 and 1997, African-Americans lost about ninety per cent of their farmland. This problem is a major contributor to America’s racial wealth gap; the median wealth among black families is about a tenth that of white families. Now, as reparations have become a subject of national debate, the issue of black land loss is receiving renewed attention. A group of economists and statisticians recently calculated that, since 1910, black families have been stripped of hundreds of billions of dollars because of lost land. Nathan Rosenberg, a lawyer and a researcher in the group, told me, “If you want to understand wealth and inequality in this country, you have to understand black land loss.”

By the time of Melvin and Licurtis’s hearing in 2011, they had spent decades fighting to keep the waterfront on Silver Dollar Road. They’d been warned that they would go to jail if they didn’t comply with a court order to stay off the land, and they felt betrayed by the laws that had allowed it to be taken from them. They had been baptized in that water. “You going to go there, take my dreams from me like that?” Licurtis asked on the stand. “How about it was you?”

They expected to argue their case in court that day. Instead, the judge ordered them sent to jail, for civil contempt. Hearing the ruling, Melvin handed his eighty-three-year-old mother, Gertrude, his flip phone and his gold watch. As the eldest son, he had promised relatives that he would assume responsibility for the family. “I can take it,” he said. Licurtis looked at the floor and shook his head. He had thought he’d be home by the afternoon; he’d even left his house unlocked. The bailiff, who had never booked anyone in civil superior court, had only one set of handcuffs. She put a cuff on each brother’s wrist, and led them out the back door. The brothers hadn’t been charged with a crime or given a jury trial. Still, they believed so strongly in their right to the property that they spent the next eight years fighting the case from jail, becoming two of the longest-serving inmates for civil contempt in U.S. history.

Land was an ideological priority for black families after the Civil War, when nearly four million people were freed from slavery. On January 12, 1865, just before emancipation, the Union Army general William Tecumseh Sherman met with twenty black ministers in Savannah, Georgia, and asked them what they needed. “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land,” their spokesperson, the Reverend Garrison Frazier, told Sherman. Freedom, he said, was “placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor.” Sherman issued a special field order declaring that four hundred thousand acres formerly held by Confederates be given to African-Americans—what came to be known as the promise of “forty acres and a mule.” The following year, Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act, opening up an additional forty-six million acres of public land for Union supporters and freed people.

The promises never materialized. In 1876, near the end of Reconstruction, only about five per cent of black families in the Deep South owned land. But a new group of black landowners soon established themselves. Many had experience in the fields, and they began buying farms, often in places with arid or swampy soil, especially along the coast. By 1920, African-Americans, who made up ten per cent of the population, represented fourteen per cent of farm owners in the South.

A white-supremacist backlash spread across the South. At the end of the nineteenth century, members of a movement who called themselves Whitecaps, led by poor white farmers, accosted black landowners at night, whipping them or threatening murder if they didn’t abandon their homes. In Lincoln County, Mississippi, Whitecaps killed a man named Henry List, and more than fifty African-Americans fled the town in a single day. Over two months in 1912, violent white mobs in Forsyth County, Georgia, drove out almost the entire black population—more than a thousand people. Ray Winbush, the director of the Institute for Urban Research, at Morgan State University, told me, “There is this idea that most blacks were lynched because they did something untoward to a young woman. That’s not true. Most black men were lynched between 1890 and 1920 because whites wanted their land.”

By the second half of the twentieth century, a new form of dispossession had emerged, officially sanctioned by the courts and targeting heirs’-property owners without clear titles. These landowners are exposed in a variety of ways. They don’t qualify for certain Department of Agriculture loans to purchase livestock or cover the cost of planting. Individual heirs can’t use their land as collateral with banks and other institutions, and so are denied private financing and federal home-improvement loans. They generally aren’t eligible for disaster relief. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina laid bare the extent of the problem in New Orleans, where twenty-five thousand families who applied for rebuilding grants had heirs’ property. One Louisiana real-estate attorney estimated that up to a hundred and sixty-five million dollars of recovery funds were never claimed because of title issues.

Heirs are rarely aware of the tenuous nature of their ownership. Even when they are, clearing a title is often an unaffordable and complex process, which requires tracking down every living heir, and there are few lawyers who specialize in the field. Nonprofits often pick up the slack. The Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation, in South Carolina, has cleared more than two hundred titles in the past decade, almost all of them for African-American families, protecting land valued at nearly fourteen million dollars. Josh Walden, the center’s chief operating officer, told me that it had mapped out a hundred thousand acres of heirs’ property in South Carolina. He said that investors hoping to build golf courses or hotels can target these plots. “We had to be really mindful that we didn’t share those maps with anyone, because otherwise they’d be a shopping catalogue,” he told me. “And it’s not as if it dries up. New heirs’ property is being created every day.”

Through interviews and courthouse records, I analyzed more than three dozen cases from recent years in which heirs’-property owners lost land—land that, for many of them, was not only their sole asset but also a critical part of their heritage and their sense of home. The problem has been especially acute in Carteret County. Beaufort, the county seat, was once the site of a major refugee camp for freed people. Black families eventually built homes near where the tents had stood. But in the nineteen-seventies the town became a tourist destination, with upscale restaurants, boutiques, and docks for yachts. Real-estate values surged, and out-of-town speculators flooded the county. David Cecelski, a historian of the North Carolina coast, told me, “You can’t talk to an African-American family who owned land in those counties and not find a story where they feel like land was taken from them against their will, through legal trickery.”

Beaufort is a quaint town, lined with coastal cottages and Colonial homes. When I arrived, last fall, I drove twenty miles to Silver Dollar Road, where Melvin and Licurtis’s family lives in dozens of trailers and wood-panelled houses, scattered under pine and gum trees.

Melvin and Licurtis’s mother, Gertrude, greeted me at her house and led me into her living room, where porcelain angels lined one wall. Gertrude is tough and quiet, her high voice muffled by tobacco that she packs into her cheek. People call her Mrs. Big Shit. “It’s because I didn’t pay them no mind,” she told me. The last of Mitchell Reels’s children to remain on the property, she is the family matriarch. Grandchildren, nieces, and nephews let themselves into her house to pick up mail or take out her trash. Around dinnertime on the day I was there, the trickle of visitors turned into a crowd. Gertrude went into the kitchen, coated fish fillets with cornmeal, and fried them for everyone.

Her daughter Mamie told me that Melvin and Licurtis had revelled in the land as kids, playing among the inky eels and conch shells. In the evenings, the brothers would sit on the porch with their cousins, a rag burning to keep the mosquitoes away. On weekends, a pastor strode down the dirt street, robed in white, his congregants singing “Wade in the Water.” Licurtis was a shy, humble kid who liked working in the cornfields. Melvin was his opposite. “When the school bus showed up, when he come home, the crowd would come with him and stay all night,” Gertrude said. When Melvin was nine, he built a boat from pine planks and began tugging it along the shore. A neighbor offered to teach him how to shrimp, and, in the summer, Melvin dropped nets off the man’s trawler. He left school in the tenth grade; his catch was bringing in around a thousand dollars a week. He developed a taste for sleek cars, big jewelry, and women, and started buying his siblings Chuck Taylors and Timberlands.

Gertrude was the administrator of the estate. She’d left school in the eighth grade and wasn’t accustomed to navigating the judicial system, but after Mitchell’s death she secured a court ruling declaring that the land belonged to his heirs. The judgment read, “The surviving eleven (11) children or descendants of children of Mitchell Reels are the owners of the lands exclusive of any other claim of any one.”

In 1978, Gertrude’s uncle Shedrick Reels tried to carve out for himself the most valuable slice of land, on the river. He used a legal doctrine called adverse possession, which required him to prove that he had occupied the waterfront for years, continuously and publicly, against the owners’ wishes. Shedrick, who went by Shade and worked as a tire salesman in New Jersey, hadn’t lived on Silver Dollar Road in twenty-seven years. But he claimed that “tenants” had stood in for him—he had built a house on the waterfront in 1950, and relatives had rented it or run it as a club at various times since. Some figured that it was Shade’s land. He also produced a deed that his father, Elijah, had given him in 1950, even though Mitchell, another of Elijah’s sons, had owned the land at the time.

Shade made his argument through an obscure law called the Torrens Act. Under Torrens, Shade didn’t have to abide by the formal rules of a court. Instead, he could simply prove adverse possession to a lawyer, whom the court appointed, and whom he paid. The Torrens Act has long had a bad reputation, especially in Carteret. “It’s a legal way to steal land,” Theodore Barnes, a land broker there, told me. The law was intended to help clear up muddled titles, but, in 1932, a law professor at the University of North Carolina found that it had been co-opted by big business. One lawyer said that people saw it as a scheme “whereby rich men could seize the lands of the poor.” Even Shade’s lawyer, Nelson Taylor, acknowledged that it was abused; he told me that his own grandfather had lost a fifty-acre plot to Torrens. “First time he knew anything about it was when somebody told him that he didn’t own it anymore,” Taylor said. “That was happening more often than it ever should have.”

Mitchell’s kids and grandkids were puzzled that Shade’s maneuver was legal—they had Mitchell’s deed and a court order declaring that the land was theirs. And they had all grown up on that waterfront. “How can they take this land from us and we on it?” Melvin said. “We been there all our days.” Gertrude’s brother Calvin, who handled legal matters for the family, hired Claud Wheatly III, the son of one of the most powerful lawyers in town, to represent the siblings at a Torrens hearing about the claim. Gertrude, Melvin, and his cousin Ralphele Reels, the only surviving heirs who attended the hearing, said that they left confident that the waterfront hadn’t gone to Shade. “No one in the family thought at the end of the day that it was his land and we were going to walk away from it forever,” Ralphele told me.

Wheatly told me a different story. In his memory, the Torrens hearing was chaotic, but the heirs agreed to give Shade, who has since died, the waterfront. When I pressed Wheatly, he conceded that not all the heirs liked the outcome, but he said that Calvin had consented. “I would have been upset if Calvin had not notified them, because I generally don’t get involved in those things without having a family representative in charge,” he told me. He said that he never had a written agreement with Calvin—just a conversation. (Calvin died shortly after the hearing.) The lawyer examining Shade’s case granted him the waterfront, and Wheatly signed off on the decision. The Reels family, though it didn’t yet know it, had lost the rights to the land on the shoreline.

Licurtis had set up a trailer near the river a couple of years earlier, in 1977. He was working as a brick mason and often hosted men from the neighborhood for Budweiser and beans in the evenings. Melvin had become the center of a local economy on the shore. He taught the men how to work the water, and he paid the women to prepare his catch, pressing the soft crevice above the shrimps’ eyes and popping off their heads. He had a son, Little Melvin, and in the summers his nephews and cousins came to the beach, too. One morning, he took eight of them out on the water and then announced that he’d made a mistake: only four were allowed on the boat. He threw them overboard one by one. “We’re thinking, We’re gonna drown,” one cousin told me. “And he jumps off the boat with us and teaches us how to swim.”

In 1982, Melvin and Gertrude received a trespassing notice from Shade. They took it to a lawyer, who informed them that Shade now legally owned a little more than thirteen acres of the sixty-five-acre plot. The family was stunned, and suspicious of the claim’s validity. Many of the tenants listed to prove Shade’s continuous possession were vague or unrecognizable, like “Mitchell Reels’ boy,” or “Julian Leonard,” whom Gertrude had never heard of. (She had a sister named Julia and a brother named Leonard but no memory of either one living on the waterfront.) The lawyer who granted the land to Shade had also never reported the original court ruling that Gertrude had won, as he should have done.

Shade’s ownership would be almost impossible to overturn. There’s a one-year window to appeal a Torrens decision in North Carolina, and the family had missed it by two years. Soon afterward, Shade sold the land to developers.

The Reelses knew that if condos or a marina were built on the waterfront the remaining fifty acres of Silver Dollar Road could be taxed not as small homes on swampy fields but as a high-end resort. If they fell behind on the higher taxes, the county could auction off their property. “It would break our family right up,” Melvin told me. “You leave here, you got no more freedom.”

This kind of tax sale has a long history in the dispossession of heirs’-property owners. In 1992, the N.A.A.C.P. accused local officials of intentionally inflating taxes to push out black families on Daufuskie, a South Carolina sea island that has become one of the hottest real-estate markets on the Atlantic coast. Property taxes had gone up as much as seven hundred per cent in a single decade. “It is clear that the county has pursued a pattern of conduct that disproportionately displaces or evicts African-Americans from Daufuskie, thereby segregating the island and the county as a whole,” the N.A.A.C.P. wrote to county officials. Nearby Hilton Head, which as recently as two decades ago comprised several thousand acres of heirs’ property, now, by one estimate, has a mere two hundred such acres left. Investors fly into the county each October to bid on tax-delinquent properties in a local gymnasium.

In the upscale town of Summerville, South Carolina, I met Wendy Reed, who, in 2012, was late paying $83.81 in taxes on the lot she had lived on for nearly four decades. A former state politician named Thomas Limehouse, who owned a luxury hotel nearby, bought Reed’s property at a tax sale for two thousand dollars, about an eighth of its value. Reed had a year to redeem her property, but, when she tried to pay her debt, officials told her that she couldn’t get the land back, because she wasn’t officially listed as her grandmother’s heir; she’d have to go through probate court. Here she faced another obstacle: heirs in South Carolina have ten years to probate an estate after the death of the owner, and Reed’s grandmother had died thirty years before. Tax clerks in the county estimate that each year they send about a quarter of the people who try to redeem delinquent property to probate court because they aren’t listed on the deed or named by the court as an heir. Limehouse told me, “To not probate the estate and not pay the taxes shouldn’t be a reason for special dispensation. When you let things go, you can’t blame the county.” Reed has been fighting the case in court since 2014. “I’m still not leaving,” she told me. “You’ll have to pack my stuff and put me off.”

For years, the conflict on Silver Dollar Road was dormant, and Melvin continued expanding his businesses. Each week, Gertrude packed two-pound bags of shrimp to sell at the farmers’ market, along with petunias and gardenias from her yard. Melvin was also remodelling a night club, Fantasy Island, on the shore. He’d decked it out with disco lights and painted it white, he said, so that “on the water it would shine like gold.”

The majority of the property remained in the family, including the land on which Gertrude’s house stood. But Licurtis had been building a home in place of his trailer on the contested waterfront. “It was the most pretty spot,” he told me. “I’d walk to the water, and look at my yard, and see how beautiful it was.” He’d collected the signatures of other heirs to prove that he had permission, and registered a deed.

When real-estate agents or speculators came to the shore, Melvin tried to scare them away. A developer told me that once, when he showed the property to potential buyers, “Melvin had a roof rack behind his pickup, jumped out, snatched a gun out.” It wasn’t the only time that Melvin took out his rifle. “You show people that you got to protect yourself,” he told me. “Any fool who wouldn’t do that would be crazy.” His instinct had always been to confront a crisis head on. When hurricanes came through and most people sought higher ground, he’d go out to his trawler and steer it into the storm.

The Reels family began to believe that there was a conspiracy against them. They watched Jet Skis crawl slowly past in the river and shiny S.U.V.s drive down Silver Dollar Road; they suspected that people were scouting the property. Melvin said that he received phone calls from mysterious men issuing threats. “I thought people were out to get me,” he said. Gertrude remembers that, one day at the farmers’ market, a white customer sneered that she was the only thing standing in the way of development.

In 1986, Billie Dean Brown, a partner at a real-estate investment company called Adams Creek Associates, had bought Shade’s waterfront plot sight unseen to divide and sell. Brown was attracted to the strength of the Torrens title, which he knew was effectively incontrovertible. When he discovered that Melvin and Licurtis lived on the property, he wasn’t troubled. Brown was known among colleagues as Little Caesar—a small man who finished any job he started. In the early two-thousands, he hired a lawyer: Claud Wheatly III. The man once tasked with protecting the Reels family’s land was now being paid to evict them from it. Melvin and Licurtis saw Wheatly’s involvement as a clear conflict of interest. Their lawyers tried to disqualify Wheatly, arguing that he was breaching confidentiality and switching sides, but the judge denied the motions.

Earlier this year, I met Wheatly in his office, a few blocks from the county courthouse. Tall and imposing, he has a ruddy face and a teal-blue stare. We sat under the head of a stuffed warthog, and he chewed tobacco as we spoke. He told me that he had no confidential information about the Reelses, and that he’d never represented Melvin and Licurtis; he’d represented their mother and her siblings. “Melvin won’t own one square inch until his mother dies,” he said.

In 2004, Wheatly got a court order prohibiting the brothers from going on the waterfront property. The Reels family began a series of appeals and filings asking for the decree to be set aside, but judge after judge ruled that the family had waited too long to contest the Torrens decision.

Licurtis didn’t talk about the case, and tried to hide his stress. But, Mamie told me, “you could see him wearing it.” Occasionally, she would catch a glimpse of him pacing the road early in the morning. When he first understood that he could face time in jail for remaining in his house, he tried removing the supports underneath it, thinking that he could hire someone to wrench the foundation from the mud and move it elsewhere. Gertrude wouldn’t allow him to go through with it. “You’re not going with the house nowhere,” she told him. “That’s yours.”

At 4 a.m. on a spring day in 2007, Melvin was asleep in his apartment above the club when he heard a boom, like a crash of thunder. He went to the shore and found that his trawler, named Nancy J., was sinking. Yellow plastic gloves, canned beans, and wooden crab boxes floated in the water. There was a large hole in the hull, and Melvin realized that the boom had been an explosion. He filed a report with the sheriff’s office, but it never confirmed whether an explosive was used or whether it was an accident, and no charges were filed. Melvin began to wake with a start at night, pull out his flashlight, and scan the fields for intruders.

By the time of the brothers’ hearing in 2011, Melvin had lost so much weight that Licurtis joked that he could store water in the caverns by his collarbones. The family had come to accept that the dispute wasn’t going away. If the brothers had to go to jail, they would. Even after the judge in the hearing found them guilty of civil contempt, Melvin said, “I ain’t backing down.” Licurtis called home later that day. “It’ll be all right,” he told Gertrude. “We’ll be home soon.”

One of the most pernicious legal mechanisms used to dispossess heirs’-property owners is called a partition action. In the course of generations, heirs tend to disperse and lose any connection to the land. Speculators can buy off the interest of a single heir, and just one heir or speculator, no matter how minute his share, can force the sale of an entire plot through the courts. Andrew Kahrl, an associate professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Virginia, told me that even small financial incentives can have the effect of turning relatives against one another, and developers exploit these divisions. “You need to have some willing participation from black families—driven by the desire to profit off their land holdings,” Kahrl said. “But it does boil down to greed and abuse of power and the way in which Americans’ history of racial inequality can be used to the advantage of developers.” As the Reels family grew over time, the threat of a partition sale mounted; if one heir decided to sell, the whole property would likely go to auction at a price that none of them could pay.

When courts originally gained the authority to order a partition sale, around the time of the Civil War, the Wisconsin Supreme Court called it “an extraordinary and dangerous power” that should be used sparingly. In the past several decades, many courts have favored such sales, arguing that the value of a property in its entirety is greater than the value of it in pieces. But the sales are often speedy and poorly advertised, and tend to fetch below-market prices.

On the coast of North Carolina, I met Billy Freeman, who grew up working in the parking lot of his uncle’s beachside dance hall, Monte Carlo by the Sea. His family, which once owned thousands of acres, ran the largest black beach in the state, with juke joints and crab shacks, an amusement park, and a three-story hotel. But, over the decades, developers acquired interests from other heirs, and, in 2008, one firm petitioned the court for a sale of the whole property. Freeman attempted to fight the partition for years. “I didn’t want to lose the land, but I felt like everybody else had sold,” he told me. In 2016, the beach, which covered a hundred and seventy acres, was sold to the development firm for $1.4 million. On neighboring beaches, that sum could buy a tiny fraction of a parcel so large. Freeman got only thirty thousand dollars.

The lost property isn’t just money; it’s also identity. In one case that I examined, the mining company PCS Phosphate forced the sale of a forty-acre plot, which contained a family cemetery, against the wishes of several heirs, whose ancestors had been enslaved on the property. (A spokesperson for the company told me that it is a “law-abiding corporate citizen.”)

Some speculators use questionable tactics to acquire property. When Jessica Wiggins’s uncle called her to say that a man was trying to buy his interest in their family’s land, she didn’t believe him; he had dementia. Then, in 2015, she learned that a company called Aldonia Farms had purchased the interests of four heirs, including her uncle, and had filed a partition action. “What got me was we had no knowledge of this person,” Wiggins told me, of the man who ran Aldonia. (Jonathan S. Phillips, who now runs Aldonia Farms, told me that he wasn’t with the company at the time of the purchase, and that he’s confident no one would have taken advantage of the uncle’s dementia.) Wiggins was devastated; the eighteen acres of woods and farmland that held her great-grandmother’s house was the place that she had felt safest as a child. The remaining heirs still owned sixty-one per cent of the property, but there was little that they could do to prevent a sale. When I visited the land with Wiggins, her great-grandmother’s house had been cleared, and Aldonia Farms had erected a gate. Phillips told me, “Our intention was not to keep them out but to be good stewards of the property and keep it from being littered on and vandalized.”

Last fall, Wiggins and her relatives gathered for the auction of the property on the courthouse steps in the town of Windsor. A bronze statue of a Confederate soldier stood behind them. Wiggins’s cousin Danita Pugh walked up to Aldonia Farms’ lawyer and pulled her deed out of an envelope. “You’re telling me that they’re going to auction it off after showing you a deed?” she said. “I’m going to come out and say it. The white man takes the land from the black.”

Hundreds of partition actions are filed in North Carolina every year. Carteret County, which has a population of seventy thousand, has one of the highest per-capita rates in the state. I read through every Carteret partition case concerning heirs’ property from the past decade, and found that forty-two per cent of the cases involved black families, despite the fact that only six per cent of Carteret’s population is black. Heirs not only regularly lose their land; they are also required to pay the legal fees of those who bring the partition cases. In 2008, Janice Dyer, a research associate at Auburn University, published a study of these actions in Macon County, Alabama. She told me that the lack of secure ownership locks black families out of the wealth in their property. “The Southeast has these amazing natural resources: timber, land, great fishing,” she said. “If somebody could snap their fingers and clear up all these titles, how much richer would the region be?”

Thomas W. Mitchell, a property-law professor at Texas A. & M. University School of Law, has drafted legislation aimed at reforming this system, which has now passed in fourteen states. He told me that heirs’-property owners, particularly those who are African-American, tend to be “land rich and cash poor,” making it difficult for them to keep the land in a sale. “They don’t have the resources to make competitive bids, and they can’t even use their heirs’ property as collateral to get a loan to participate in the bidding more effectively,” he said. His law, the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, gives family members the first option to buy, sends most sales to the open market, and mandates that courts, in their decisions to order sales, weigh non-economic factors, such as the consequences of eviction and whether the property has historic value. North Carolina is one of eight states in the South that has held out against these reforms. The state also hasn’t repealed the Torrens Act. It is one of fewer than a dozen states where the law is still on the books.

Last year, Congress passed the Agricultural Improvement Act, which, among other things, allows heirs’-property owners to apply for Department of Agriculture programs using nontraditional paperwork, such as a written agreement between heirs. “The alternative documentation is really, really important as a precedent,” Lorette Picciano, the executive director of Rural Coalition, a group that advocated for the reform, told me. “The next thing we need to do is make sure this happens with fema, and flood insurance, and housing programs.” The bill also includes a lending program for heirs’-property owners, which will make it easier for them to clear titles and develop succession plans. But no federal funding has been allocated for these loans.

The first time I met Melvin and Licurtis in the Carteret jail, Melvin filled the entire frame of the visiting-room window. He is a forceful presence, and prone to exaggeration. His hair, neatly combed, was streaked with silver. He didn’t blink as he spoke. Licurtis had been given a diagnosis of diabetes, and leaned against a stool for support. He still acted like a younger brother, never interrupting Melvin or challenging his memory. He told me that, at night, he dreamed of the shore, of storms blowing through his house. “The water rising,” Licurtis said. “And I couldn’t do nothing about it.” He was worried about his mother. “If they took this land from my mama at her age, and she’d been farming it all her life, you know that would kill her,” he told me.

The brothers were seen as local heroes for resisting the court order. “They want to break your spirits,” their niece Kim Duhon wrote to them. “God had you both picked out for this.” Even strangers wrote. “When I was a kid, it used to sadden me that white folks had Radio Island, Atlantic Beach, Sea Gate and other places to swim, but we didn’t!” one letter from a local woman read. She wrote that, when she was finally taken to Silver Dollar Road, “I remember seeing nothing but my own kind (Blk Folks!).”

In North Carolina, civil contempt is most commonly used to force defendants to pay child support. When the ruling requires a defendant to pay money other than child support, a new hearing is held every ninety days. After the first ninety days had passed, Melvin asked a friend in jail to write a letter on his behalf. (Melvin couldn’t read well, and he needed help writing.) “I’ve spent 91 days on a 90 day sentence and I don’t understand why,” the letter read. “Please explain this to me! So I can go home, back to work. Sincerely, Melvin Davis.” The brothers learned that although Billie Dean Brown’s lawyer had asked for ninety days, the court had decided that there would be no time restriction on their case, and that they could be jailed until they presented evidence that they had removed their homes. They continued to hold out. Brown wasn’t demolishing their buildings while they were incarcerated, and so they believed that they still had a shot at convincing the courts that the land was theirs. That fall, Brown told the Charlotte Observer, “I made up my mind, I will die and burn in hell before I walk away from this thing.” When I reached Brown recently, he told me that he was in an impossible position. “We’ve had several offers from buyers, but once they learned of the situation they withdrew,” he said.

Three months turned into six, and a year turned into several. Jail began to take a toll on the brothers. The facility was designed for short stays, with no time outside, and nowhere to exercise. They couldn’t be transferred to a prison, because they hadn’t been convicted of a crime. Early on, Melvin mediated fights between inmates and persuaded them to sneak in hair ties for him. But over time he stopped taking care of his appearance and became withdrawn. He ranted about the stolen land, though he couldn’t quite nail down who the enemy was: Shade or Wheatly or Brown, the sheriffs or the courts or the county. The brothers slept head to head in neighboring beds. “Melvin would say crazy things,” Licurtis told me. “Lay on down and go to sleep, wake up, and say the same thing again. It wore me down.” Melvin is proud and guarded, but he told me that the case had broken him. “I’m not ashamed to own it,” he said. “This has messed my mind up.”

Without the brothers, Silver Dollar Road lost its pulse. Mamie kept her blinds down; she couldn’t stand to see the deserted waterfront. At night, she studied her brothers’ case, thumbing through the court files and printing out the definitions of words that she didn’t understand, like “rescind” and “contempt.” She filled a binder with relatives’ obituaries, so that once her brothers got out they would have a record of who had passed away. When Claud Wheatly’s father died, she added his obituary. “I kept him for history,” she told me.

Gertrude didn’t have the spirit to farm. Most days, she sat in a tangerine armchair by her window, cracking peanuts or watching the shore like a guard. This winter, we looked out in silence as Brown’s caretaker drove through the property. Melvin and Licurtis wouldn’t allow Gertrude to visit them in jail. Licurtis said that “it hurt so bad” to see her leave.

Other members of the family—Melvin and Licurtis’s brother Billy, their nephew Roderick, and their cousin Shawn—kept trying to shrimp, but the river suddenly seemed barren. “It might sound crazy, but it was like the good Lord put a curse on this little creek, where ain’t nobody gonna catch no shrimp until they’re released,” Roderick told me. Billy added, “It didn’t feel right no more with Melvin and them not there, because we all looked out for one another. Some mornings, you didn’t even want to go.”

Sheriff’s deputies came to the property a few times a week, and they wouldn’t allow the men to dock their boats on the pier. One by one, the men lost hope and sold their trawlers. Shawn took a job at Best Buy, cleaning the store for eleven dollars and fifty cents an hour, and eventually moved to Newport, thirty miles southwest, where it was easier to make rent. Billy got paid to fix roofs but soon defaulted on the mortgage for his house on Silver Dollar Road. “One day you good, and the next day you can’t believe it,” he told me.

Roderick kept being charged with trespassing, for walking on the waterfront, and he was racking up thousands of dollars in legal fees. He’d recently renovated his boat—putting in an aluminum gas tank, large spotlights, and West Marine speakers—but, without a place to dock, he saw no way to hold on to it. He found work cutting grass and posted his boat on Craigslist. A white man responded. They met at the shore, and, as the man paid, Roderick began to cry. He walked up Silver Dollar Road with his back to the river. He told me, “I just didn’t want to see my boat leave.”

The Reels brothers were locked in a hopeless clash with the law. One judge who heard their case likened them to the Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” who attempts to guard his forest against King Arthur. “Even after King Arthur has cut off both of the Black Knight’s arms and legs, he still insists that he will continue to fight and that no one may pass—although he cannot do anything,” the judge wrote, in an appeals-court dissent.

In February, nearly eight years after Melvin and Licurtis went to jail, they stood before a judge in Carteret to request their release. They were now seventy-two and sixty-one, but they remained defiant. Licurtis said that he would go back on the property “just as soon as I walk out of here.” Melvin said, “I believe that land is mine.” They had hired a new lawyer, who argued that it would cost almost fifty thousand dollars to tear down the brothers’ homes. Melvin had less than four thousand in the bank; Licurtis had nothing. The judge announced that he was releasing them. He warned them, however, that if they returned to their homes they’d “be right back in jail.” He told them, “The jailhouse keys are in your pockets.”

An hour later, the brothers emerged from the sheriff’s department. Melvin surveyed the parking lot, which was crowded with friends and relatives. “About time!” he said, laughing and exchanging hugs. “You stuck with me.” When he spotted Little Melvin, who was now thirty-nine, he extended his arm for a handshake. Little Melvin pulled it closer and buried his face in his father’s shoulder, sobbing.

When Licurtis came out, he folded over, as if his breath had been pulled out of him. Mamie wrapped her arms around his neck, led him to her car, and drove him home. When they reached Silver Dollar Road, she honked the horn all the way down the street. “Back on Silver Dollar Road,” Licurtis said, pines flickering by his window. “Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm.”

Melvin spent his first afternoon shopping for silk shirts and brown leather shoes and a cell phone that talked to him. Old acquaintances stopped him—a man who thanked him for his advice about hauling dirt, a d.j. who used to spin at Fantasy Island. While in jail, Melvin had been keeping up with his girlfriends, and eleven women called looking for him.

Melvin told me that he’d held on for his family, and for himself, too. But away from the others his weariness showed. He acknowledged that he was worried about what would happen, his voice almost a whisper. “They can’t keep on doing this. There’s got to be an ending somewhere,” he said.

A few days later, Gertrude threw her sons a party, and generations of relatives came. The family squeezed together on her armchairs, eating chili and biscuits and lemon pie. Mamie gave a speech. “We gotta get this water back,” she said, stretching her arms wide. “We gotta unite. A chain’s only as strong as the links in it.” The room answered, “That’s right.” The brothers, who were staying with their mother, kept saying, “Once we get this land stuff sorted out . . .” Relatives who had left talked about coming back, buying boats and go-karts for their kids. It was less a plan than a fantasy—an illusion that their sense of justice could overturn the decision of the law.

The brothers hadn’t stepped onto the waterfront since they’d been back. The tract was a hundred feet away but out of reach. Fantasy Island was a shell, the plot around it overgrown. Still, Melvin seemed convinced that he would restore it. “Put me some palm trees in the sand and build some picnic tables,” he said.

After the party wound down, I sat with Licurtis on his mother’s porch as he gazed at his house, which was moldy and gutted, its frame just visible in the purple dusk. He reminisced about the house’s wood-burning heater, the radio that he’d always left playing. He said that he planned to build a second story and raise the house to protect it from floods. He wanted a wraparound deck and big windows. “I’ll pour them walls solid all the way around,” he said. “We’ll bloom again. Ain’t going to be long.” ♦

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