THERE WAS NO coffin for the first one. The very first girl, who could have been mine and I could have been hers, was Yoshi: fifteen, just like Shivana, a girl unlucky enough to fall in love against others’ advice and her own will. Like me, she was a soul in captivity; unlike me, by slavery and not by thwarted birth. When I first saw Shivana’s wide, lucent, fresh baby eyes fragmented through cracked glass, I hoped for a second that the ocean had just rediscovered Yoshi, lifted her from its bottom to spit her out to give her back to me once again. And it would have only taken 150 years.

The old maid Helene’s stiff, enlarged, aching, broken, cut, tired, and indigo-stained hands had thrown Yoshi into the Atlantic. Nearby Cumberland Island was the only threat to her journey toward aquatic immortality, the only place she could wash up on land for thousands of miles, but Helene needed to take the chance that Yoshi just might make it on past the Golden Isles and into the open blue forever; in a lifetime and without a miracle, she could never make it far enough to wash up on Asia. Helene had had the help of a couple other women who participated despite their disagreement and disgust. But their matriarch had convinced the wailing women that it just wasn’t right to permanently rest a carrying woman anywhere else.

“We gotta set the baby free,” she had told them, while they unrolled Yoshi’s body swathed in the unmended sheets Mrs. Parnell had donated out of mercy and guilt. “That there inside still gots a chance.”

I see Helene, recall that it was she who first wore the white rag on her head, the day she rolled us forever away with a gentle, unnecessary finger push aided by the omniscient guidance of the moon tide. She sits in the high-noon shade of a Georgia oak so deeply rooted its massive, winding trunk was Parnell Estate’s most frequent enclave for the slave children’s occasional privilege of a game of hide-and-seek. She holds a field hand’s fussy newborn in one hand and a crisp, stolen letter in the other. Though she can’t actually read the words Helene can’t stop staring at the letter, a stone of gloom weighs so heavy in her stomach she doesn’t realize every baby she has held that day immediately starts howling. The day before this one, under the cover of dawn, Helene had met the Missus’ helpmate, my Yoshi. The crackle of their footsteps on fallen acorns was the only sound cutting the silence. Out of necessity and fear, Helene and Yoshi first kept their voices to a whisper but by the end they were mouthing most of their words. And today, Helene couldn’t stop crying.