Several danced a new dance toward the ship’s edge where they, burdened with heavy irons, plunged into the Great Mother, pulling with them the willing and unwilling. Their bodies sank instantly out of sight. We watched water swirl where they disappeared. After several days of this new dance, captors made nets that rested beneath the boat and rose instantly when people thought they were free, restoring their bodies to the boat. The recovered were confined to the lower decks where they lay like zombies, unconnected to life’s flow. They were never stable again. Not in their minds. We pitied them more than ourselves. They were already dead.

Big fish awaited our flesh. After tasting our blood, they moved in harmony with the ship, ready at any moment to feed. We wondered if they tasted, in the bodies they consumed, our rage and fury. If they knew they were consuming fire and wrath. If they knew they were now the carriers of human anger and madness. If they knew that the very waters of their living were now saturated with willing and unwilling souls. Of course they didn’t. They couldn’t have known that we, the proud people of the black land, would become their major source of sustenance. They couldn’t have known that, for the next two hundred years, they’d chase slave ships until, long after the trade, they’d swim the triangular route still, looking for rations they could not find. They couldn’t have known that slowly, year by year, the ocean’s water would ingest a people’s fury so completely that hurricanes would come each season and claim lives in recompense for Africans gone overboard. They couldn’t have known that, of the people eaten, some would’ve healed the world. Some would’ve traveled galaxies and discovered life in other forms. Some would’ve healed cancers and diseases unnamed. Some would’ve founded institutions that teach people how to see God. Some would’ve found ways to restore a lost, troubled mind. Some would’ve walked the planet loving the unlovable. Some would’ve learned the language of animals and intercepted their ways. Some would’ve discovered, while yet living, the dimensions of the afterlife. Some would’ve uncovered the secret of time travel, which our people had contemplated for centuries. Some would’ve gone to the bottom of the ocean and retrieved African bones that had been discarded carelessly, and buried them the way a human ought to be buried. And some would’ve spent their lives mourning for a world that spoke constantly of a God but clearly never knew one. We lay in the belly of the ship, trying to imagine their lives in the invisible. Our minds could not see that far. So, instead, we prayed that, in death, they were returned home and that their spirits danced a dance of a new dawn.

The evening and the morning were the sixth day.

* * *

On day seven a young man’s calm, silent disposition captured our attention. He studied our weary eyes, then nodded slowly as if knowing something we didn’t. Distress and trauma had not broken him; he shared our rage, as any man would, but something else occupied his mind. Something deep in the soul that could not be spoken. Something the oppressors could not disturb or destroy. Something unnamable, immeasurable, indestructible. We could not discern his preoccupation, but we saw the empty space in his eyes. This was not his reality. He was here, but he was not here. Whenever we looked at him, he looked through us—staring, it seemed, at something so beautiful, so magical, his gaze could not be broken. Some spoke his language, but he would not answer their inquiries. However, there was no hatred in his silence; only clarity in his eyes revealing that he would never, ever be another man’s captive. Those who knew him called him Abuto, which means “the secrets of the heart are hidden deep within.”