River Sing Me Home

by Eleanor Shearer

The soil on the island was fertile, but everything laid down shallow roots. When the hurricanes came, they ripped up even the sturdiest trees; and when the white men came, they tore children out of their mothers’ arms. And so, we learned to live without hope. For us, loss was the only thing that was certain.

What an opening line

remember one man who leaped off the gangplank, taking with him every other slave he was shackled to. The white men tried to dredge them out of the harbor, but it was too late. Their irons dragged them down.”

Rachel opened her mouth, as if to speak, before cold certainty descended on her. An angry white man with a gun could not be reasoned with.

Wasn’t there something of the Negro about his shifty eyes? Wasn’t his head a little too narrow, hiding a smaller-than-average brain inside?

yooo calm down

All these, and more, Rachel saw as she became more attuned to the river, and she did not feel alone. It was humbling, this much was true. It reminded her that they were far from any human settlement, and it almost felt like a foreign land, though they were still in territory claimed by the British as their own. But to feel alone, as those men had done? To discount all the other life around her, to discount even the gently flowing water and the fertile earth itself as companions in her journey? That struck her as the height of arrogance.

And she started to sing.

So subtle i had to read it again to register the full weight of what just occured

This is how we are remembered. In snatches of song, in dreams, in the smile that passes between mother and child. These are the parts of us that cannot be destroyed. These are the parts of us that feed the roots, and keep them strong. The soil is fertile. Our tree grows on.