Someone Knows My Name

by Lawrence Hill

Some say that I was once uncommonly beautiful, but I wouldn’t wish beauty on any woman who has not her own freedom, and who chooses not the hands that claim her.

I remember wondering, within a year or two of taking my first steps, why only men sat to drink tea and converse, and why women were always busy. I reasoned that men were weak and needed rest.

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 a young child, I was just as quick and capable as an adult when it came time to seed. I knew how to dig with my right heel in the soil, drop seeds in the little hole, cover up the hole with the toes of my foot, move on a step and do it again. I knew how to pull weeds, and I understood that you hoed the soil so that the rain, when it came, would kiss the soil and marry it—not kiss it and run away. Yes, I knew how to cultivate a millet field, and I had been shown that the mind had to be grown.

“Someone knows my name. Seeing you makes me want to live.”

We, the survivors of the crossing, clung to the beast that had stolen us away. Not a soul among us had wanted to board that ship, but once out on open waters, we held on for dear life. The ship became an extension of our own rotting bodies. Those who were cut from the heaving animal sank quickly to their deaths, and we who remained attached wilted more slowly as poison festered in our bellies and bowels. We stayed with the beast until new lands met our feet, and we stumbled down the long planks just before the poison became fatal. Perhaps here in this new land, we would keep living.

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.

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

It seemed to me that we had travelled to the other side of the sun. On this side of the world, the sun was worn out and not to be trusted.

I shivered at night on the sandy earth, and one morning I awoke to find smoke trickling from my mouth. I thought my face had caught fire. I thought that someone had bedevilled me during the night, or branded my tongue. I waited for the burning. I prepared to scream. I held my breath. No smoke. I breathed. Smoke again. It came from within me. No burning. Just smoke. The smoke in my breath continued until the sun began to climb the sky. And then I noticed that others, too, had smoke mouths in the morning.

I felt my stomach churning, my throat tightening. I looked down to avoid meeting their eyes. I was fed, and they were not. I had clothes, and they had none. I could do nothing to change their prospects or even my own. 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.

“I have a hunch that an African can learn anything, if given the opportunity,” he said. “So let’s have an experiment and see how much you learn.”

I now felt, more than ever before, that these people didn’t know me at all. They knew how to bring ships to my land. They knew how to take me from it. But they had no idea at all what my land looked like or who lived there or how we lived.

I had now written my name on a public document, and I was a person, with just as much right to life and liberty as the man who claimed to own me.

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

The pain of my losses never really went away. The limbs had been severed, and they would forever after be missing. But I kept going. Somehow, I just kept going.

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

As a child, I had believed that any decent adult would not let any slave coffle pass unmolested. Yet here I was, silent and unable to act. I had no words of comfort to offer the men, women and children who passed me on the way to the sea, and there was nothing to do as our shoulders brushed on the narrow footpaths.