River Sing Me Home

by Eleanor Shearer

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

Without roots, things die. Many of us did die, at the hands of the white men or in the heat of the midday sun. The soil ran rich with our blood, and the roots fed on our bodies. It made the roots strong. Shallow, but strong. There was hope for this new world, after all.

At the plantation, Rachel had always been made to feel small. With the sea spread out in front of her, she felt small in a different way—not small in herself but a small part of everything that surrounded her. Immersed in the infinite sea. There was freedom in this new kind of smallness, an exhilarating sense that she was in the world, and not just passing through it at a white man’s pace.

“The connection between all things. That we can’t just take; we must also give.” Mama B, too, touched the place on the tree where the bark had been peeled away. “All healing start from there.”

Watching them, Rachel felt a weight being lifted. The wheel had broken. The endless tide of seasons spent planting and harvesting and planting once more—the cycle of harsh life and early death—these had lost their power. There was nothing inevitable in the child’s survival, but there was nothing impossible in it, either. Things were not so set as they had once seemed.

“We all got our gifts—the things we see that others can’t. All we can do is use them when the time come.”

This was the real power of slavery, the long shadow it could cast after its formal end—that even with all this distance between her and Providence, Rachel still lived in fear.

“Freedom mean something different to me. The search, that is the freedom.”

“The not knowing is what hurt me. That’s what slavery take from me—me did not know. Me did not know where me pickney was. And if me stay here, me can never know. That is not freedom. Not to me.”

She would come to learn, by way of the mix of languages she heard spoken, that wave after wave of white men had claimed Trinidad as their own, but she never accepted this as an adequate explanation. It begged a deeper question—why did they come? What did they see in this marshy place that made them so eager to kill one another to have it? But then, Rachel had always been confused by the lengths to which white men would go for the sake of possession. Perhaps their avarice truly knew no bounds—for, even if Rachel squinted, she could see no corner of Port of Spain that would have driven her to conquer it, nor to man the cannons in its defense.

Rachel was glad of something so different, so impossible to understand. This stranger was a reminder that out of the deep furrows plowed for them by slavery, they could all still spill over, scattering in unexpected directions. Nothing was set in stone. This man had made his own path, and so would she.

Her chest unknotted, releasing the ache it had held there since the first loss—since Micah, maybe even since her forgotten mother. It was not completeness that she felt, because her heart bore all the scars of the dead, and the ones left hundreds of miles away. But it was the closest thing to completeness she had ever known. It was acceptance. It was peace.

Rachel had convinced herself when she was younger that white men had no power over her if they never saw her cry, never saw how much they hurt her when they separated her from the ones she loved. It made her sick to think of it now, because they had the power all along. There was not so much strength in dignified suffering as she had once believed.

The baby was a stranger, without speech, unknowable. It would be years before he could say what was on his mind. And yet, love did not wait. Love was there in the beginning—even before the beginning. Love needed no words, no introduction. Existence was enough.

Freedom was his birthright.