Someone Knows My Name

by Lawrence Hill

Never have I met a person doing terrible things who would meet my own eyes peacefully. To gaze into another person’s face is to do two things: to recognize their humanity, and to assert your own. As I began my long

march from home, I discovered that there were people in the world who didn’t know me, didn’t love me, and didn’t care whether I lived or died.

The abolitionists may well call me their equal, but their lips do not yet say my name and their ears do not yet hear my story. Not the way I want to tell it.

But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.

Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two can only be separated by force: peanuts in candy, indigo in glass, Africans in irons.

One of these people will find my story and pass it along. And then, I believe, I will have lived for a reason.

That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn’t matter; in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.

“They call it Manhattan,” Lindo said, “after the Indian word for ‘hilly island,’ Manna-hata.”

My children were like phantom limbs, lost but still attached to me, gone but still painful.

‘Beware the clever man who makes wrong look right.’”