Cinderella Liberator Read online

  There is always enough for everyone, if you share it properly, or if it has been shared properly before you got there. There is enough food, enough love, enough homes, enough time, enough crayons, enough people to be friends with each other.

  After the stepmother had gone away, the fairy godmother appeared in a cloud of dark-blue dust. There was nobody in the room but the prince and Cinderella, and this blue woman with magic powers, but the prince hardly noticed the newcomer.

  So, said the prince, you are the girl who ran away. Why?

  Cinderella felt very embarrassed, but she said, I was afraid. I am a servant and not supposed to go to balls and not supposed to have nicer clothes than my stepsisters.

  But her fairy godmother said, You are the daughter of a great judge, who had to go far away to help others and thought his new wife and her daughters would be kind. You are the daughter of a great sea captain, who lost her ship at sea and will come home one day on another ship.

  And besides, said the fairy godmother, nobody is good or valuable because of who their parents are, or bad because their parents are bad. They are as good and valuable as they are in their own words and deeds, and you are kind to mice and bake splendid cakes and have a

  heart full of hopes and dreams.

  What are your dreams? asked Prince Nevermind.

  Cinderella said, I would like to own my own cake shop, and I would like to be free to go see the people on all the farms who raise the food I cook, and I would like to ride the dapple-gray horses, and I would like to see my mother come sailing into the bay on a fine ship.

  All those things seemed so far away. She felt sad for a moment, so she changed the subject. What are your dreams? she asked the prince.

  He replied, after he thought for a moment, I sometimes wish I was not a prince so I would not have people staring at me all the time and wondering why I have so much when they have not enough. I would like to wear the clothes the farm boys wear so I could play without someone shouting that I would get my satin trousers dirty. I would like to get dirty sometimes. I would like to be free to wander the hills all alone (I had to run away from my guards to find out who lost the shoe). I would like to learn how to make things grow and work so hard I sleep deeply all night, instead of doing nothing in the castle. I would like to have friends. Nobody is friends with a prince.

  I would like to have friends, said Cinderella. I am friendly with all the people in the marketplace, and they tell me of their farms and lives and families, but I am not free to go visit, because I must work every day here in the kitchen downstairs. That’s why they call me Cinderella. Because of the cinders in the fire in the fireplace in the kitchen here.

  Well, said the fairy godmother. Not all magic needs me. Perhaps you two are friends?

  I could use a friend, said the prince shyly, but bravely. Would you like to be friends? And then he felt terrible because maybe she would say no.

  She did not say no. She said, Yes, if you would too.

  And then the two of them stopped being people who had no friends.

  5

  TRUTHS and CAKES

  The fairy godmother told Cinderella that she didn’t actually have to stay there and work all day every day. That very day, she put on her boots and got on one of the dapple-gray horses, and the prince got on his black horse. They rode out to the apple orchard that belonged to the kind old apple farmer. There, they stood on ladders and picked apples until they were tired and they had thirty big baskets of apples. The old apple farmer promised to introduce the young prince to the neighbors, the other farmers. And he asked the prince to come back in the winter, when they cut back the branches of the apple trees when they are bare, and in the spring, when the trees are in bloom and the bees are all buzzing around.

  Prince Nevermind rode home to tell his parents he wanted to be a farmer, not a prince, or maybe a farmer-prince, but the fairy godmother was waiting for Cinderella. Go left until you get to the windmill, and then down the lane and up the alley, and you will find your cake shop. Next to it is a stable with five stalls and five dapple-gray horses inside, and the coachwoman lives upstairs from the horses.

  Why didn’t you tell me I was free to go earlier? said Cinderella.

  The fairy godmother said, I was really busy helping some other children, and then I lost the directions to your house. Also, I am here to help people but they have to ask for help. You never asked for help until the night of the ball.

  (It is true that if you want or need help, it is really helpful to ask for it.)

  Nowadays, Pearlita runs a hair salon where she piles up people’s hair as high as it will go, and she’s happy because she’s doing what she loves. Paloma is the seamstress at a dress shop, where she makes dresses all day, because she discovered she liked making beautiful dresses even more than wearing them. They don’t miss the days when they sat at home doing nothing and waiting for life to begin. They are good at what they do.

  One day they went to Cinderella and said they were very sorry for how they had treated her, and that they were wrong, and could they be friends? Cinderella served them slices of cake, and later on Paloma made her some riding pants, and then Pearlita brought over some hair cream for the horse’s tails, and they were friends.

  They became their truest selves, and so did their mother. Their mother, Cinderella’s stepmother, turned into the roaring in the trees on stormy nights. Sometimes you can hear her outside, a strong wind rattling the windows and shaking the leaves off the trees, saying More and more and more, or Mine, mine, mine, and then the hungry wind dies down and she is gone until next time.

  Sometimes that roaring is inside your own heart and head, and then it dies down there, too, the wind in all our heads that says we need more, we need to grab what someone else has and steal it away like the hungry wind. Everyone can be a fairy godmother if they help someone who needs help, and anyone can be a wicked stepmother. Most of us have some of that hunger in our hearts, but we can still try to be someone who says, I have plenty, or even Here, have this and How are you?

  Cinderella runs a cake shop, and sometimes she sits with the people who come in to eat cake and drink a cup of tea and asks them what their dreams are, or what they would be if they could be anything they wanted to be, and what it means to be free. And then she listens, and sometimes she helps. She makes sure that everyone in the town has a birthday cake and goes to a lot of birthday parties.

  Sometimes children running away from the wars in other kingdoms come to town, hungry and frightened and alone. Cinderella finds them, feeds them, and puts them to bed in her attic until she finds other homes for them and gets them started in school. She always welcomes them back in the shop with a big slice of cake and a big hug. And as she got

  older she became good at understanding the wars in people’s hearts and helping them leave those behind, too. She isn’t a fairy godmother, but she doesn’t need magic to be a liberator—to be someone who helps others figure out how to be free.

  Her mother the sea captain has come back and is proud of her. Her father the judge will be home one of these days, but her home will not be with that stepmother he was mistaken about. Someday she will get married, and so will the prince, but not to each other. Right now they are not old enough to get married, so we don’t have to worry about that part of their story.

  Besides, there is no happily ever after, only this bedtime story, and nighttime, and then tomorrow morning, and the day after that, and the day after that, and the spring coming after the winter, and the summer after the spring, and the earth going round the sun, and the lizards sitting on the wall in the sunlight, and the mice coming out in the moonlight to eat the cake crumbs.

  A pair of glass slippers sits in the cake shop window, where they catch the sunlight, too, but Cinderella wears solid boots in which she can stand at the counter or ride a dapple-gray horse out to see her friends.

  Her f
riends include the farmer-prince, Paloma, Pearlita, the bird doctor, the dancing teacher, the painter, and the clockmaker. They include all the people out on their farms where they grow the things the townspeople eat, and the girl who delivers the newspaper and the boy who delivers the mail and the sailors in the harbor and her mother the sea captain in the house with the tower. And all the children in the town, who love her for her cookies and her kindness and her stories about what it means to be free.

  But her friends don’t call her Cinderella, because she doesn’t wear a dress with holes burned by cinders and ashes on it anymore.

  They call her by her real name, which is

  ELLA.

  Afterword

  Cinderella Metamorphosis

  It began, as so many things do, with wandering in the public library. Mine has a used bookstore near the entrance, where I often browse, and one day not long ago I found a little print, a loose page from a broken book, for sale. It showed Cinderella as a cheerful barefoot girl in a ragged, patched blue dress, holding a huge orange pumpkin with both arms. I bought it, thinking I might eventually give it to a child, possibly to my magnificent great-niece Ella (and only while writing this story did I realize that without the cinders Cinderella is also an Ella).

  Later on, I looked at the backside of this image from a book of fairytales. It had a bit of one version of the Cinderella story on it. And after the fairy godmother has turned mice into horses and the pumpkin into a coach, this interchange appears:

  “Here, my child,” said the fairy godmother, “is a coach and horses, but what shall we do for a coachman?”

  “I will get the rat trap,” said Cinderella.

  That passage, in which mice and rats change form, was striking, as was Cinderella’s active collaboration in bringing about the metamorphosis. I realized that this was a story about transformation, not just about getting your prince. And about other relationships, including the one between Cinderella and the fairy godmother.

  One thing led to another, and I decided to rewrite it for Ella (to whom Men Explain Things to Me is also dedicated) and began musing on possible mutations to introduce. The questions were how to preserve something of the charm of transformation and the plight of the child, and how to work out a more palatable exit from her plight than the one we all know.

  Once I’d begun rewriting it, I began looking at illustrations and found and fell in love with the English illustrator Arthur Rackham’s images for C. S. Evans’s 1919 retelling of the story. Rackham is one of the great children’s illustrators from the golden age of children’s picture books, and he made images for everything from the classic fairytales to more contemporary children’s books such as Peter Pan and The Wind in the Willows (and some pictorial editions of adult books, including Gulliver’s Travels and The Compleat Angler). His color work is often full of moody, drab colors and subtle tones, thickets, forests, tangled vegetation, delicate human, fairy, witch, and animal beings who seem to always be turning, fleeing, striving, flying, reaching, twining like vines through the tinted spaces he set them in. The silhouettes are bolder and simpler.

  I’ve always loved Rackham’s work and am thrilled to share it with a new generation. Evans’s retelling is sentimental and rife with ideas that virtue and beauty and upper-class status are more or less the same thing, and the least charming aspect of Rackham’s images are the portraits of the stepsisters as preposterously awkward, ugly creatures, and we did not use those here. But there are other wonders and glories in his illustrations, aside from their sheer beauty. Silhouettes meant that the story might not feel so racially determined as the other images by Rackham (I was amused that some people first mistook the century-old images for those of the present-day Black artist Kara Walker or thought they were rip-offs of Walker’s more scabrous, scathing work with silhouettes—which is itself a conscious nod to the popular silhouettes of another era).

  I was also touched by Rackham’s image of the ragged child at work and thought of unaccompanied minors from Central America and immigrant domestic workers, who are a strong presence where I live, of foster children, and of all the children who live without kindness and security in their everyday lives, all the people who are outsiders even at home, or for whom home is the most dangerous place, or who have no home.

  I liked the spirit of this silhouette-girl that Rackham portrayed. Even in rags she is lively, and she

  labors with alacrity, and runs and frolics wholeheartedly. She is stranded but not defeated. When it came time to write her story for our time, it seemed to me that the solution to overwork and degrading work is not the leisure of a princess, passing off the work to

  others, but good, meaningful work with dignity and self-

  determination—and one of the things the cake shop gives Cinderella, aside from independence, is the power to benefit others, because it’s also a meeting place.

  We are also in an age in which marriage is not how women determine their economic future or their identity, and so marrying the prince was going to have to go, too. Besides, the prince also seemed to need liberation. In the end, even the stepsisters needed to be set free, and if the stepmother was irredeemable, it’s because she’s all of us: insatiable craving and its underbelly, selfishness incarnate. She’s who we all are when we feel poor amid plenty.

  I wanted a story about liberation, about, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor put it in another Haymarket book, “how we get free”; or, as Buddhists sometimes put it, “the liberation of all beings.” I wanted a kinder story, and I took from many other fairytales the theme about being kind to animals as a good thing to do because it’s part of being a good person, but also a handy thing to do since they may return the favor. I wanted to set everyone loose to be their best and freest selves. It’s why the book’s title is Cinderella Liberator, a phrase that carries hints of Katniss Everdeen and Imperator Furiosa and the women of Hong Kong action films like House of Flying Daggers and The Heroic Trio, those powerful women who seize control of the means of production and destruction and move through the world like lionesses.

  I wrote the story first for Ella, and then for anyone and everyone who loves the old stories in which mothers become trees and brothers become swans, in which animals hold conversations and girls open their mouths to speak and jewels and pearls spill out, in which magic models the work of transformation we all have to do for ourselves, on ourselves, all the time, and in which the huge tasks life sets us are clear and dramatic.

  It’s still for Ella and for her younger sister, Maya, and their mom, my first niece, Amanda. For Sam, Kat, and Atlas, who love a good story; for Charlie, Elena, Berkeley, Dusty, and Oscar, who were among the early readers; Ana Teresa Fernández, who was the very-first reader and whose powerful performance project in which she made Cinderella’s shoes out of ice and wore them until they melted was a more ferocious rewriting of the story (a print of one of those ice shoes with her foot in it has the place of honor in my home; I have been living with Cinderella revisionism for a long time).

  And it’s for my grandmothers, Julia Walsh Allen and Ida Zacharias Solnit, both of whom were motherless girls, neglected, undereducated; neither of whom quite escaped that formative immersion in being unloved and unvalued; both of whom are long gone, though the repercussions of their devastation linger.

  My maternal grandmother, Julia, whose immigrant mother died in childbirth, was raised by relatives in Brooklyn. Her education stopped in sixth grade, after which they made her work full time as a laundress while her girl cousins continued with their education.

  My paternal grandmother, Ida, was an unaccompanied refugee child who, after years without parents, made it from the Russian-Polish borderlands to Los Angeles with her younger brothers when she was fifteen. There, her long-lost father and stepmother also treated her as a servant.

  Their tragedies were a century ago and more, but this book is also with love and hope for liberation for every child who�
��s overworked and undervalued, every kid who feels alone—with hope that they get to write their own story, and make it come out with love and liberation.*

  * * *

  * “Cinderella” is a very old story, one version of a primordial story of the abandoned child who wins her way back to well-being (or, as the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folk Tales has it, #510A, the “Persecuted Heroine”). In 1892, Marian Roalfe Cox compiled a book titled Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap o’Rushes, Abstracted and Tabulated. There are ancient Egyptian and Greek versions, a Chinese version from the ninth century with a magical fish and golden shoes, a twelfth-century French version, and various folkloric versions in Norwegian, German, Italian, and other European languages. In the Norwegian version, a talking bull with magical powers takes the place of the stepmother; in the German “Aschenputtel,” a tree grows on the grave of the dead mother of the heroine and fills with birds, who aid her and give her a gold and silver dress—and later peck out the eyes of the stepsisters. In the Russian version called “The Wonderful Birch,” the tree that grows out of the mother’s grave becomes the returning mother. There are violent and vengeful versions, versions with evil witches and no fairy godmother, annoying modern versions focused on marrying up, and dozens of new variations among children’s books.

  And now, one more, with gratitude to everyone who’s taken the time to read it.

  Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books including the best-selling Men Explain Things to Me, along with Call Them by Their True Names, Hope in the Dark, and The Mother of All Questions.