I.

A fully dressed woman walked out of the water.¹ Was the water fresh and potable, or did its salt bite at the imperceptible gash on the woman’s neck? This we do not know, but after her emergence, she sat upon the shore, unaware whether her arrival was a funeral or a baptism. It was both. Who else was under there, deep down, with her? Her name was Beloved and she was not actually a woman. Of her conjuring, Toni Morrison clarifies, “I saw a woman, fully dressed, come out of the river in front of my house. She had on a hat. I was at my desk writing, looking at her.”² Morrison did not know at the time that this ghost would become the eponymous character of her 1987 novel, a fictionalization of Margaret Garner, a historical figure and enslaved woman who slit her child’s throat rather than have them raised in slavery.³

II.

Of the millions captured by ships and transported across the seas, in what is called the Middle Passage, two million and more died above or beneath the water. You are still alive, they said. Yes we are still alive.⁴ They said, you are still alive. We said, yes, yes we are still alive. We veiled our faces in white wool, placed a hand upon each chin, stood atop our spears fashioned of iron, and uttered prayers of devotion to the sea: vos precor veneror veniam peto oroque.⁵ That is how we survived.

III.

All year I have been reading Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake. I am unsettled each time by an image of her family, above which the caption reads: everyone in this photograph is now dead.⁶ Turning the page I see the wake of a cruise ship on the sea, deep and wide, and wince.

IV.

Our weather is damp, mostly, because of the Amazonas to the south, the Orinoco in the west, and the Atlantic to the north. Land of many waters is what the Amerindians called it in a language we won’t remember. The waves bash against 280 miles of seawall so violently that we have to cup our ears to hear each other, knowing that the sea, in its thirst, will strangle us if it wants to.

V.

In my descent I saw, engraved on polished steel, Grant Cole was lynched in Montgomery, Alabama in 1925 after he refused to run an errand for a white woman. Beneath, I thought, there must be gold.

VI.

Where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic, Heracles planted two mountains to separate the sky from the earth, relieving Atlas of his burden. Just beyond these so called Pillars of Heracles, thousands of fathoms under the sea, is the once bustling island of Atlantis where women from Punt traded turpentine and frankincense with the Cadmeans, and the Nok and Sao drew carts filled with gold, ebony, millet in exchange for iron and wool from Thrace.

VII.

“The characters of Touki Bouki are interesting to me because their dreams are not those of ordinary people. Anta and Mory do not dream of building castles in Africa; they dream of finding some sort of Atlantis overseas,” says Djibril Djiop Mambéty, director of the 1973 Senegalese film.⁷

VIII.

When I discover where I am, I will be free. 

IX.

Many have fallen into the sea, or below the ground, to refuse and elude their pursuers, miserable and greedy men who would eat the very flesh from their bones. Britomaris threw herself into the Aegean, chased for nine long months by Minos, the ravenous King of Crete. She emerged the next evening a goddess with a new name, the gift of immortality bestowed upon her by Artemis who cherishes the fugitive above all. Now we call her Aphaia, the invisible one, the one who disappears. They see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination–indeed, everything and anything except me.⁸

X.

καταποντίζω. kata-pon-tizdo. to throw into the sea, to plunge or drown therein. κατα: down, down into, down upon or over, denoting motion from above. πόντος: the sea, especially the open sea, masculine, sometimes for specific seas, such as the Black Sea, otherwise known as The Hospitable Sea, kind to strangers. transitive: to throw someone into the sea. sometimes metaphorically: κ. τὰς βουλάς, to throw plans into the sea, caution to the wind, refuse the will of others, take one’s own advice, to be undetermined, invisible. sometimes passive: ὑπὸ τῆς θαλάσσης to be plunged beneath the sea, to drown under its weight, to escape by sea, in the company of the ocean. also: to sink. rarely of a ship.

XI.

When I discover who I am, I will be free.

XII.

Though they go mad they shall be sane, though they sink through the sea they shall rise again.⁹ Poet and lawyer M. NourbeSe Philip places these words, written by Dylan Thomas, in the preface of her 2008 book Zong! Part benediction and part curse, springing from both Hades and Olympus, Zong! is the sea itself, mediating the realms of the living and the dead, derived from legal documents surrounding the Zong Massacre of 1781.

XIII.

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.¹⁰

XIV.

I have fasted. I have drunk the kykeon. I have taken from the box, and placed what I found in the basket. I will do, show, and say that which is unrepeatable, upon penalty of death. I will drown in the sea. I will be reborn. Immortal, I will dance and eat my fill.¹¹

XV.

Not the sea, but a lake. Not a home, but its fence. Not the tree, but its trunk. This is how Night Coming Tenderly, Black, a photographic series by artist Dawoud Bey, reveals itself to me–in layers and gradients. A reimagination of the sites along the Underground Railroad, the images climb up porches, peek through branches, and follow the clandestine paths 40,000 and more took towards freedom. Untitled #25 (Lake Erie and Sky), 2017 has no end, no edge, all it is is the sea and the sky being licked, tasted, and swallowed in turns by the wind. Who is under there? I turn the brightness of my screen as high as it will go, it does not help because still I am frightened.

XVI.

Let us consider why the soul sheds its wings. Why did the sea gulp down Alcyone and Ceyx emerge and spit them out as a pair of pink-billed halcyon? What about the Titan, Asteria, who leapt into the sea a newly spawned quail, spending her summers shuttling between Africa and Europe, perched on ships that sail forever? And what of Odysseus’ wife Penelope, whose name means “goose with purple stripes,” because her parents tossed her into the sea? It is the nature of the wing to soar upwards, carrying that which is abundant to the dwelling of the gods.¹²

XVII.

He could fly! You hear me? My great granddaddy could fly! Goddam! He didn’t need no airplane. He just took off; got fed up. All the way up! No more cotton! No more bales! No more orders! No more shit! He flew, baby. Lifted his beautiful black ass up in the sky and flew on home. Can you dig it?¹³