It's quiet out here. The seagulls. The sun is warm, but it's not too humid. It's actually

kind of a great day for fishing. That's why it sticks. What does it smell like? It smells

like dead fish. It smells like the water. What is going through your head right now? I don't

know. I'm thinking about what they've they went through. I don't know. I just

wonder a lot what it was. What it was like. They say our people were born on the

water. When it occurred, no one can say for certain. Perhaps it was in the

second week or the third, but surely by the fourth, when they had not seen their land or

any land for so many days that they lost count. It was after the fear had turned to despair

and the despair to resignation and the resignation gave way finally to resolve. They knew then

that they would not hug their grandmothers again or share a laugh with the cousin during

his nub shules or seeing their babies softly to sleep with the same lullabies that their

mothers had once sung to them. The teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them so

completely that it was as if nothing had ever existed before, that everything they ever

knew had simply vanished from the earth. Some could not bear the realization. They

heaved themselves over the walls of wooden ships to swim one last time with the ancestors.

Others refused to eat, miles clamped shut until their hearts gave out. But in the suffocating

hole of a ship called the White Lion, bound for where they did not know, those who refused

to die understood that the men and women chained next to them in the dark were no longer

strangers. They had been forged in trauma. They had been made black by those who believed

themselves to be white and where they were headed, black equal slave. So these were their

people now.

What happened here? I mean, we really don't know a lot. A pirate ship by the name of White

...