From the New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro, today on The Daily.

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. It'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. Thinking about what 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-shools 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 equals slave. So these were their people now.

What happened here?

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