River Sing Me Home

by Eleanor Shearer

Mercy looked back at her son. The grief faded—it would never truly be gone—and she smiled again. “Micah,” she whispered. “Yes. A good name. Welcome, little Micah.”

Nobody looked up at the sky. “We’ve come east,” he said. “The river must flow to the eastern coast.” Mercy raised her head. They all looked at one another. Could it be? They had plunged, unthinkingly, into the river. Had it really brought them where they wanted to go?

He screwed up his face and his cries grew louder and more insistent. Mary Grace came to Rachel’s side and looked down at her nephew. And she started to sing. Her voice was thin from lack of use, but haunting. Each note wavered, vibrating with a lifetime of feeling. No—not a lifetime. A hundred lifetimes. She sang for herself and for all those who had come before. Her song had pain, frustration and disappointment in it. But also joy, relief, love. Hope. The world stopped turning. The sun held its place in the sky. Everything was still as Mary Grace sang. Rachel watched her daughter’s lips moving, the beautiful shapes they took as they formed the words. Nobody was watching, too, moved to tears by his wife’s voice.

Nobody was singing. His voice vibrated through the earth. Not quite the same song—his own, with his own words, passed down from his own people, who had survived all of the chains and the passage and the torture, even death. The two songs blended together to become one because their message was the same. They had survived.

What more could she give her grandson but the fragments of a memory that she had carried with her all this time? The half-forgotten words of a song. Rachel joined her voice with the others and she sang.

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.

I was born and raised in England, I have always had a strong attachment to Caribbean history. I learned about the formerly enslaved women who went looking for their lost children when I was sixteen and attended the exhibition Making Freedom put on by the Windrush Foundation. The exhibition cast emancipation in a new light—not as the gift of white people in Britain, but as something fiercely fought for by the slaves themselves in revolutions and rebellions, from Haiti to Barbados.

I later read the book on which this plaque was based, an oral history called To Shoot Hard Labour (1986) by Fernando C. Smith and Keithlyn B. Smith. The book records the life of Samuel Smith, who was born in Antigua in 1877 and died in 1982. Smith recalls his great-great-grandmother, Mother Rachael, who walked across Antigua after slavery ended to be reunited with one of her daughters. The true story of Mother Rachael inspired the journey of Rachel in this novel.

River Sing Me Home also draws on my own time spent in the Caribbean, staying in my grandfather’s house in St. Lucia. I have such vivid memories of my first visit when I was eleven years old.

Of the impossible blue of the ocean, a hundred shades that caught the light as the sun set, and the amazing warmth of the water as my sister and I made a game of diving through the waves just before they broke against the sand. But I developed a new perspective of the place during my most recent trip, when I was researching my master’s thesis on the legacy of slavery in the Caribbean.

The poverty in a place that is so abundant. The man who stands by the road in the town of Anse La Raye holding a large yellow snake—there are no snakes native to St. Lucia, the man tells you, but they were introduced into the forests by the plantation owners to bite slaves who ran away.

But to me, the Caribbean is beautiful because of its history, not in spite of it. A place where the past is always close to the surface, and echoes of history are everywhere.

Two things stuck out for me from these conversations that helped inform River Sing Me Home. The first was that people were quick to mention the ambiguities around the end of slavery—the fact that the apprenticeships persisted for so long, keeping people tied to the same plantation; the fact that even after apprenticeships ended, economic exploitation continued and people had little choice but to keep working as field laborers; and the fact that it was white plantation owners who received monetary compensation, while the field laborers received nothing.

In Barbados, I saw the statue of Bussa, the slave who led a rebellion against the plantation owners in 1816. In St. Lucia, family members proudly told me that they lived on land where maroons used to be—the people who managed to escape and make a life for themselves outside the plantations. I wanted River Sing Me Home to build on this idea of what it means to be free, and the ways in which enslaved people made freedom for themselves.

Reading Emilia Viotti da Costa’s Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood was invaluable for learning more about this uprising.

It was also important to me to include the character of Nuno in this part of Rachel’s journey, to recognize the violence done to Indigenous communities throughout the Caribbean. I am descended from the Indigenous people of St. Lucia, and my conversations with scholars of Indigenous history helped shape Nuno’s story.

I wanted the characters to speak in a way that reflected the wonderful creole languages of the Caribbean, but also was accessible to non-Caribbean readers.

While visiting for my master’s research, I went to Barbados to meet my grandfather’s sister for the first time. My grandfather left Barbados when he was fourteen, moving first to St. Lucia and then to the UK. His mother and the rest of his siblings died not knowing what had happened to him. Only this last sister was still alive to see him when he retired to the Caribbean.

“You have the same face,” the first guard explained. And it turned out we were in fact related through our great-grandfather. That a complete stranger would be so attuned to my features, and that another stranger would be so open to the idea that I was a long-lost cousin, showed me that although Caribbean families may be fractured to this day, there is always the possibility of reconnection—of, as the St. Lucian poet and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott writes, a love that can reassemble our fragments. I hope this sense of possibility, of love, is something readers will take away from this novel.

Women like Rachel (and the real Mother Rachael) set out to make a kind of freedom for themselves when they brought their families back together again. There is something so wonderfully hopeful in those stories. They are histories that need to be told.

Eleanor Shearer is a mixed-race writer and the granddaughter of Windrush generation immigrants.