The census, thirteen years after the story of the shipwrecked captain, says nothing about her origins, but I can feel it, I know she was African. I also feel that if there were just thirty-seven families, probably no one cared much that the second-richest man on a recently occupied island, with neither flag nor religion, had married – according to the cachaco’s book – one of his own slaves. I have a name for the foremother who survived the trans-Atlantic journey, the one I met amid the thirst of the Barrack blockade. I feel relieved, push away the computer for a moment. My thoughts swerve, joyful. I see a web weaving itself into existence, I see the eyes of my grandmother who was told nothing. I’ve corrected an act of Historical oblivion: Sarah, your children won’t ever forget you again.

I linger between the lines of the census for a while. There are several other Sarahs, probably thus christened for the same reason as my own ancestor: the censors’ pragmatism in the face of African names, the forced conversions to Catholicism. There are also a handful of French names I’ve never seen before, people who must have emigrated or mixed until they disappeared. How many mute histories could finally speak their piece if paper could truly bear witness, how many blank spaces filled with each item of information, what an indescribable feeling to find someone else in my constellation, in my altar to the dead, knowing that any new discovery, anything prior to 1793, is practically impossible. There will be no more names on my foremother’s branch, no more European languages or official records.

Torquel’s christening must have secured his forceful fate, with his Norwegian name that supposedly means ‘the ceremonial cauldron of Thor’. He wound up on San Andrés, I think, amid the great Caribbean-bound migration of young Scots in the mid-eighteenth century. Almost all of them went to Jamaica, St. Kitts or Antigua. ‘The forgotten diaspora’, the Scots-Jamaican professor Geoff Palmer calls it. There’s even a return programme for descendants of the Scottish migrants to the colonial world – but not for the Caribbean people of today, just for Americans, Australians and New Zealanders. Disembarking on an island that these new arrivals would have perceived as deserted, Torquel Bowie surely did whatever he felt like, regardless of the conventions upheld by everyone else, the rest of the Caribbean. He must have paid special disregard to the considerations of the Spanish crown towards the ‘nonexistent’ soul of the enslaved Africans, a justification charged to the church in forbidding unions between ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’, given the threat this posed to the structure of the colony’s productive project. That’s no longer any reason to forget you, Sarah, my Sarah.

I want to write back and thank Rudy, but the next attachment distracts me. It’s completely different.