She Would Be King

by Wayétu Moore

“You curse,” she said again, though she understood that he spoke a different language. “I’n mean to hurt you. I thought you mean to hurt me,” she said.

Alike spirits separated at great

distances will always be bound to meet, even if only once; kindred souls will always collide; and strings of coincidences are never what they appear to be on the surface, but instead are the mask of God.

The ship anchored in Key West in 1845, long after 1808, when slave trading had been outlawed in America.

To spend the money and time required to send them back would be as maniacally racist as the man who brands his slaves as cattle, as the patrol who hunts for the thrill of seeing black flesh burn, the bigot, the motherfucker.

Settle them in Monrovia. And if other ships are found or captured, send them there also. Send them all back.”

We will die reciting, and in the name of our new and honest freedom, in the name of our liberty, we shall call this land, our new and bold and free and honest country, Liberia!”

like many families in Monrovia did, the Sinou settlers felt it was their responsibility to provide economic opportunity and access to civilization to indigenous people.

as an American abolitionist would to a Southern state with a significant Negro population. If the abolitionist offered a Negro a job tending his farm and that Negro turned it down, the abolitionist would take offense, because how dare the Negro neglect the opportunity of his own life’s advancement?

“I did not have a home of my own. But my life was saved and it is my duty to save in return. People who even once, who even cast me away from them,” she said. “People who turned me away and, even now, do not recognize me or care to know me. My people, who now think I am white. Who think me cursed. They are still my people.”

Life. If she was not a girl or if she was not a woman; if she was not a woman or if she was not a witch, she would be king,”

love—that beautiful other mask of God.