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. Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”

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.

Mothers turned their heads when a baby was born, refusing to meet its eyes.

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.

The master and the overseer barked useless orders, unable to be heard over the noise. Eventually, the master rode his horse through the crowd at a gallop, just to get them quiet again. Its hooves kicked one woman’s head in, and she died instantly. But she died free.

The mother spoke a name, and Rachel knew that it was her name—the name she was meant to have before some white man called her Rachel. What the white man gave, he could always take away. But this other name—this was hers. Rachel repeated it. The syllables felt strange in her mouth, but as the thrum of speech vibrated through her, they gave her strength. She was able to stand without stooping. She could feel the pleasant weight of her body, solid and powerful. The mother stepped back and began to dissolve, one drop at a time, soaking the earth underneath her. When she was gone, the soil glistened a deep, rich red.

Those dances had always been folded into plantation life. They took place in the slave quarters, or in the market square of a nearby town. At any time, a white passerby could appear, or the face of the master in a window of the great house, reminding all present that their joy was not boundless; it could not overflow the confines of slavery.

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.

“Me see it in your face. Your pickney. You want to find them.”

All of Rachel’s lost children, crouching in the shadows. She did not have to turn her head to see them. She knew if she tried to look at them directly, they would disappear. They had been her companions, in the corners of her vision or on the cusp of sleep, for many years. She counted them one by one. Eleven children in all.

Mary Grace. Never spoke again after the night the overseer ambushed her in the fields. Sold because they took her muteness as a sign she was damaged beyond repair. No good could come of a silent slave, who could not say yes, massa, no, massa and right away, massa.

“Me can take her from here, Gabriel.”

The old woman held out a hand, with knuckles gnarled like tree roots. “Come.”

“Me name is Bathsheba, but they all call me Mama B.”

“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.”

Mama B’s face was as still and watchful as ever as she looked over Rachel. “We all got our gifts—the things we see that others can’t. All we can do is use them when the time come.”

“Take care of yourself, Rachel.” “Goodbye, Mama B.” On Providence, every goodbye had felt like an almost-death—a passing out of each other’s lives, likely forever. Even though Rachel had no idea if she would ever see Mama B again, this goodbye didn’t feel as painful. The memory of Mama B would always be with her; not a ghost of a memory, but a living thing, like a branch grafted onto her that would keep growing after they parted. As she watched Mama B walk away, Rachel heard an echo of the other woman’s voice in her ear. The connection between all things.

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.

Rachel knew what it was to work hard, but hers had been the hard work of the endless cycle that sugarcane demanded: planting, tending, harvesting, crushing. There was skill in it, but it was the skill of forcing aching muscles to repeat a movement to the point of exhaustion. Mrs. Armstrong’s sewing was a completely different kind of work. No dress was the same. Customers demanded embroidered details on the bodice, or a particular gathering of lace around the sleeve. There were whole hours where all that moved would be Mrs. Armstrong’s nimble fingers as she created a dress just as the customer had imagined. This was the skill of executing minute, precise and constantly changing movements.

This was the Mary Grace of the lost years. Her head was bowed. Rags, torn and gray, were the only thing covering her body. A drop of blood tracked down her inner thigh. Rachel stretched out her hand but it was no use. Her arms were not long enough. She could not reach. Mary Grace raised her head. Lips, cracked and bleeding, spoke. “Me have so much me want to forget.”

Rachel jolted awake. Mary Grace’s face was inches from hers, eyes open and brimming with the same pain as the dream-daughter’s. Rachel touched Mary Grace’s cheek. “Me understand,” she whispered. Some things were best left unsaid.

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.

Now, in Bridgetown, they were bolder. Behind a market stall piled high with dead, glassy-eyed chickens, she saw Cherry Jane, staring at her with a somber look on her face. Walking on a bridge over Constitution River, she saw Micah and Mercy holding hands as they stepped off the side and were swallowed up by the waters below. And there were the nightmares. More feelings than visions—like the feeling of being eaten from the inside out, or of hands wrapping around her throat to choke back her screams.

Rachel remembered Hope, back in the days when they were all together, saying that the harbor was one of her favorite places—and now she understood why. She was awed by it. The pier felt like the ending place of the island, the whole of Barbados sharpened to a single point spearing out to sea. It was a place of beginnings, too. Whatever came to the island came through the harbor.

It was only next to Hope that Rachel realized quite how beautiful Mrs. Armstrong was. It was not like Hope’s beauty—fierce, conspicuous. It didn’t demand to be noticed. But somehow Rachel found her eyes drawn, again and again, away from Hope and toward the easy symmetry of Mrs. Armstrong’s face, like slipping into a cool river in the heat of the midday sun.

BRITISH GUIANA JANUARY 1835

Rachel was momentarily stunned by this offer of genuine assistance. But then he said, “Idle hands only turn to trouble, after all,” and she accepted there was a less charitable reading of his words. In his eyes, the Negro was a brute kept in check only by the wiles of white men like himself, who found ways to control them. She thanked him anyway, and continued cleaning the glasses as vigorously as she could, in case he decided to watch her.

The landlord’s name, Rachel learned from Albert, was Mr. Tobias Beaumont. Mr. Beaumont never asked for her name, and Albert told her not to expect him to. “It was many years me work here before he ask me,” he said.

He talk to me about the future—me wasn’t used to that. Me have no future until Micah draw me into his. When we free, he say. When we free, we gon’ go and find me family. We gon’ go and find your wife. We gon’ have our own land. We gon’ have pickney, and our pickney have them own pickney, and none of us gon’ work in the fields again. “He make me say me wife’s name. Me not say it since me lose her. Susannah. It was our evening ritual, when we make our way back from the fields. We whisper the names of the ones we love like the words of a song. That was the taste of freedom to us, those names on our lips.

“Me do have a story,” Rachel said. “Not a happy one. Me want to tell you about Micah. Everything me know.” She started at the beginning, with the little boy who laughed like a braying donkey. Those were her own words, and they hurt. There were times when she faltered, but she made herself continue. When she spoke of the day she came home from the fields to find the other children from the third gang at her door, their little faces grave, waiting to tell her that Micah was gone, there were tears in her eyes.

The pain faded. The words were not her own, not really. She was merely a vessel for Orion’s memories, as he had been a vessel for Micah’s. And now, Nuno and Nobody and Mary Grace would carry them, too. This was the only way that, in death, Micah could still grow.

Rachel was thinking about family. She was thinking about the river, flowing from source to sea. She was thinking about the arrow of her own life, flying through time on a course that had always seemed set. A course that ripped mothers and children apart—that brought only despair and the gradual decay of a body worked to death. Now, the current of her life had shifted. Or, rather, it had split.

So there was something about the passing of a parent. A cosmic weight that shifted onto the generation below. A child could leave the world without a whisper, but a parent’s death made itself known.

Though the wound from Micah’s death was raw and painful, what had come before was more like sedation—like the thick, heavy fog of a dreamless sleep. Yes, the knowing hurt her—aching pain, searing pain, creeping pain: she felt them all. But if she could go back and erase the memory, erase Orion’s story, and live her whole life in darkness, she would not.

From the edge of the Demerara River, under the stars and with the cool water flowing over her feet, her old life did indeed seem far away.

The encounter with the caiman had shaken them, but it was hard not to find a little joy in it all—this magical, strange river world. The sound of the water as it lapped against the sides of their boat, and the calls of birds that flew low and skimmed the surface—it began to sound to Rachel almost like a song. She could not help but hum along with the river as they paddled, joining in with nature’s melody as they plunged ever deeper into the forest.

Before the river curved and the family was lost from view, Rachel managed to catch the eye of the woman on the bank. She shifted the baby slightly on her hip and she held Rachel’s gaze. Between them passed an understanding. They knew what it was to search for something—to be exhausted, bent double by the weight of loss, but somehow still crawling on their knees, hands outstretched, fumbling in the dark to find the pieces of whatever had been shattered. A family. A home. Just as the woman disappeared behind the trees, Rachel saw a smile flicker across her face, and felt the warmth of the silent words—go well.

“Thomas,” she said again. “It’s me.” She spread her arms wide to welcome him back to her. With a sob of recognition, he collapsed against her. She held up his weight as their bodies fused back together. It was as if he had never left her embrace. The crowd closed around them, and Rachel could feel the hands of family, friends and strangers alike as everyone shared in the joy of their reunion.

It was the healing of something broken that she had buried so deep inside her that no one had ever seen it. And yet it felt right that they were surrounded by people, exposing private pain and joy, loss and restoration, to whoever wished to see it. For all the forest runaways, the fracturing of families was as familiar as toil in the cotton and cane fields or in the kitchens of the great plantation houses. But from time to time, the runaways got to see a family mend.

Trembling, Rachel felt the threads of her life and her son’s, finally able to intertwine. Their story was their own, and there was none like it, before or since. But she also felt the thousands of other threads, the collective weaving together of all lives. The beauty was that they would not be the first mother and son to find each other again, nor, hopefully, would they be the last.

Rachel could tell from the faces of the runaways that each one was reliving with Nobody the moment he had fled the plantation, colored with their own memories of leaving behind their former lives. And however empty their lives in bondage had felt, Rachel knew that everyone in that clearing would have someone—a mother, a brother, a wife, a friend—that they missed. The taste of freedom was bittersweet.

When Nuno was finished, not a single eye around the fire was dry. Pain, loss, dislocation, a search for home—each one of them knew these, too, in their own way. They sat with the grief of it, but with the wonder, too—that somehow, all had survived. Quamina began to sing. His voice was rich, deep, and he poured forth a haunting melody. The words were achingly familiar to Rachel, though she could not understand them, and did not recognize the song. This was a deeper kind of memory, held in body as much as in mind, an ancestral memory that time and distance could not erase, though white masters all over the New World had tried. Rachel felt the music vibrating in her throat, the words tripping off her tongue. Quamina smiled as her voice joined his. Soon, they were all singing.

Thomas Augustus and the other runaways were truly living by Mama B’s philosophy: the connection between all things.

They sat side by side. On the opposite bank, the trees dipped as if in prayer, offering their lowest branches to the glinting surface of the river. Rachel took a deep breath, inhaling the fresh scent of the water and the sweetness of nearby fruit trees. She watched the meandering current and the iridescent dragonflies that danced on the river’s surface.

Me father say that ours was fertile land. The soil sustain us for thousands of years. But soil cannot protect you when the slave raiders come.” They were sat by the ashes of the fire, watching whispers of smoke float from a few still-glowing embers. “Me don’t want to see it,” Quamina continued. “What become of it all. Maybe me too much of a coward. Me just sit here telling stories. The fear that nothing is left—that’s why me know me never gon’ go back. This me home now.”

Tituba nodded. “All grief has power, but the grief a mother feels for a child is the strongest of all.”

TRINIDAD AUGUST 1835

Port of Spain squatted in between swamps in the shadow of Trinidad’s northern mountains. Rachel disliked it immediately. She was no stranger to the sweaty, desperate heat of Caribbean towns, but Port of Spain felt worse than any of the others. Feverish, stifling. On the streets, people gleamed, their skin permanently damp with perspiration.

Suddenly, she was alert, purposeful. She was imbued with a sense of what she must do—a knowledge not spoken but absorbed over a lifetime, perhaps even a part of her before life itself had begun. The feeling was at once universal—an animal instinct she knew she shared with all things—and singular. It was the urgent thought that she must deliver this baby that, through Mercy, carried her own blood inside it.

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.