Each day our numbers dwindled. At the start, there was hardly room in our compartment to breathe. Now, empty spaces hovered. We were lonely for kinsmen gone overboard. In those shackled hours, we’d connected with unknown neighbors and fought for freedom alongside those who had once been enemies. On the ship, we didn’t care who governed the eastern corner of the forest. We didn’t care if a young man had ten cows for a bride price or none at all. We didn’t care how low one chief bowed before another. We didn’t care if our necklaces and other adornment looked too much like our neighbors’. We didn’t care that someone had stepped onto our territory without permission from the council. We didn’t care that some believed in a chi, or personal god, and some didn’t. We didn’t care that someone owed us for the slaying of a lion outside the legal boundary. And we certainly didn’t care that some had riches while others had none. Facing an enemy more formidable than any we’d ever known, all we cared about was surviving. Together.

The evening and the morning were the fortieth day.

* * *

Whenever the sea calmed, we pondered our fate. Where were we going? To the land of our captors? Would we survive there? Did they plan to eat us? Some stared at others who spoke their tongue, but few said anything. We thought about the chaos in our villages that the raids had left behind. We thought about the reaping of crops we’d worked so hard to plant. We thought about young siblings who’d never be initiated. We thought about what it meant to be a man. We thought about the travails of our women. We thought about the joy of courtship rituals. We thought about fufu and kankan and stewed goat. We thought about our unclothed bodies, used for filthy pleasures and nighttime warming. We thought about whether our children would ever honor us again. We thought about ways to make recompense with our gods. We thought about how to tell the story of our bondage to future generations. We thought about learning captors’ language in order to know what they said about us. And we thought about how pale crewmen became so cruel.

With each body tossed into the mouth of the Great Mother, we drifted further from our homeland, our traditions, our people, and closer to a world we knew nothing about. Forsaking hope of ever seeing home again, some of our kinsmen committed crimes against themselves that made us shudder. One man ripped open his throat with his fingernails. Blood gathered upon the plank beneath him, then dripped to the floor in streams of red. He sighed and relaxed until all life escaped him. We called him Jabulani, which means “His smile lights the path.” Another man hummed a dark melody as he slammed his head against a wooden beam in the center of the ship. He repeated this behavior throughout the night. By morning, his humming had ceased and his head hung limp over the edge of the plank. He was a young man, no more than twenty rains. We called him Idirisi, which means “He is dedicated.” Two women, perhaps mother and daughter, sat in a corner facing each other. Somehow they had secured small knives, undoubtedly from the cabin wherein they’d been assaulted, and now, with the force of a hyena’s jaws, buried those blades simultaneously in each other’s bellies. Besides a slight moan, they made no sound. They collapsed in each other’s arms and walked into the spirit realm together. Captor’s kicked and cursed when they found them, bemoaning the money they’d lose, yet their only choice was to feed them to the sea. We nodded as they dragged them away. We called them Andaiye and Adinike, which means “She strives to know herself” and “This one comes but once in a lifetime.”.