River Sing Me Home

by Eleanor Shearer

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

Mrs. Armstrong kept her house with the pride and attention to detail of someone who once had little to keep, and Mr. Armstrong leaned back in his armchair with the ease of someone who was born to expect a comfortable home and a wife to maintain its order.

If Hope was a whirlwind, Rachel was the calm after the storm. But Hope’s words, and the way she spoke them, called to something deeper. Rachel had it in her, too.

Things could change. The island that had bound her need not bind her forever.

“Farther along the coast, in Brazil, is the Amazon. They say it is one of the largest rivers in the world. Like a great wound in the shoreline.” He smiled a little sadly. “Even more than all my time at sea, the sight of it humbled me. The life we make for ourselves on land is futile. In the end, the water will win.”

Where he saw water and earth locked in opposition, she noticed that things were not as simple as they appeared. The muddy, fresh water met the salt water of the sea, their colors blending and dissolving into each other at the river’s mouth. The islands rising out of the depths were green and fertile, teeming with life. Coexistence was possible. No one had to lose for the water to win.

She let herself stand upright. This small act of unbending herself was not enough to undo the weeks in Georgetown, and years in Barbados, spent being subdued by labor. But it injected her with fresh hope.

Her body was trembling, and she claimed her ownership of it. Her hands, arms, legs, took new shape, as instruments of her own will.

Her mind was curiously empty—clean, unsullied by any thought further ahead than placing one foot in front of the other.

she thought of herself, and she was able to stand, supporting her own weight, no longer reliant on Orion’s arms. She gave herself permission to live, as she had given herself permission to live before. There was a kernel of something indestructible inside her, that neither slavery nor grief could shatter. Rachel was a survivor. And she would survive.

She realized that the river was neither malign nor benign—it simply existed,

Expectant quiet settled over them all like the warmth from the fire. They waited.

despite the occasional uneven plank, the whole hut had a humble, functional beauty. It was not pretending to be anything more or less than it was.

lay back in the water. The current was slow enough that, except for an occasional kick with her legs or push with her arms, she could lie still. Her ears were under the water’s surface, blocking out all sound. She felt small, cut off from everything but herself, and at the same time completely infinite.

In spite of the noise and the smell, Rachel was glad to be back. Not to be back in Georgetown exactly—she had no particular attachment to it, and would not miss it once she was gone—but to be back among people and all the imperfections of a man-made world. It invigorated her, made her mind and her purpose sharp and clear. Her time in the forest had felt like floating, caught in the gaps between life’s moments rather than inhabiting them in all their richness.

The overall sense was of a vast emptiness, and Rachel was immediately free

she leaned against the railings and looked out to where she could hear, taste, almost feel the sea. She could understand why Nobody had liked this life. It had an easy anonymity to it; each voyage felt like a rebirth. The water underneath you was never the same, and yet its gentle, metronomic rocking could almost fool you into thinking it was. A heady combination of familiar and strange.

She went to sleep with her thoughts whittled down to a single point, and that point was love. The sort of love that, flying like an arrow loosed from a bow, could not miss.

Rachel was thinking of the stories from her childhood that the old women would tell. Stories of heroes and gods and shape-shifters and talking animals. Often these stories featured a journey, and travelers meeting by chance on the road.

Rachel did not fancy herself a hero, and she had certainly received no great wisdom or weaponry from the man with the copper pans. But the spirit of those childhood tales was there, in the brief moment they had shared. “East,” she said. It was their best hope.

He could tell that she knew her own power, and it unnerved him.

flushed with the thrill of her new discovery—that she had no interest in the kind of life she had once lived, resigned to doing someone else’s bidding. She had never thought herself capable of great, life-altering change. She had done what she had to do to survive slavery, and then when freedom came she had thought it was too late. But now, she was almost giddy with the sense that change had come without her realizing. It had been there in every step she had taken away from Providence, in every inch of ocean or river she had crossed.

it did not work—keeping quiet, feigning strength, holding back tears and grief. Rachel had tried it for forty years. It was only now, with thousands of miles behind her, that Rachel saw how futile it had all been. She wanted to tell Mercy to let herself feel again, but it sounded hollow in her head.

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.

What more do they want? Rachel’s mind burst with a thousand answers. There were rivers with mouths as wide as the entire island of Barbados. There was the sea. There were weddings celebrated deep in the forest, away from the misery of the plantations, where love had a cooler, clearer quality to it—like mountain air. There were towns heaving with dirty, grafting people, where the suffering felt different. The work could be as punishing, and the food as meager, but somehow the sheer mass of the hardship, the hundreds of people crammed together in close quarters, made it easier to bear.

It was a rush she had not felt in years, not since she herself had last managed to produce a living child. The feeling of complete, absorbing, unqualified love. 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.