Our women also dreamed of slicing captors into tiny pieces and tossing them into the sea. They said this while we danced. They imagined scratching gray and green eyeballs until they dripped red with blood. They imagined burying knives and twisting them in pale stomachs and throats. One of our sisters lost her life after marring a crewman with her lioness claws. Rivers of blood, like our warrior marks, streaked his face. He was hardly recognizable. They threw her overboard, alive, as she screamed “Ashe! Ashe!” We wondered what our women, in a new land, would teach girls about men. We dared not guess.

The evening and the morning were the fifty-sixth day.

* * *

In the midst of inconceivable rage and guilt, a young man reminded us once again that we, too, had had slaves. That was no secret, we said. But we’d never held them captive to our own spirits. When they paid their debts, they were incorporated into our communities or returned to their villages. Some married our daughters and sons. Some became representative members of our councils. Some trained in our healing arts. Some smoked pipes and drank palm wine with our elders. Some became sages whose wisdom we followed. None were stabbed in the eye. Or raped savagely. Or set ablaze. Or fed, piece by piece, to ravenous beasts of the sea. Our gods wouldn’t have been pleased. The young man sighed heavily and nodded. We’d heard of people from the north, followers of Allah, who’d come centuries before and razed our villages. They, too, took away slaves and brutalized them. But these were not our people. We were certainly imperfect, but we respected life. At least we were taught to.

We needed our elders now. They would know what to say. Captors had been shrewd in leaving them behind. They must’ve known that people devoid of elders are a conquered people. Truth was, in spiritual terms, we were children. A few knew some of our people’s secrets, but most had not completed those levels of initiation. So our normal ascent into maturity and spiritual understanding ceased. It simply leveled out. We came from people who believed that spirituality was a journey one took consciously, and if one sought the upper levels of God, one could know the workings of invisible things. We believed in the ability to transcend the physical world. We knew that spirit was more potent than flesh. This knowledge was barely the beginning of our spiritual consciousness. We’d been taught, all of us, in various ways and to various degrees, that the spirit of a person is everlasting. It’s the body that is temporal. However, in the hull of the ship, it was practically impossible to maintain spiritual clarity while we were being mutilated. Deeper levels of knowing and higher realms of consciousness devolved into theories that seemed to have no application. We couldn’t separate our condition from our convictions. Most had not achieved that mastery.

So we critiqued ourselves. We needed someone to blame. Someone upon whom to lay the responsibility of our Coming. Maybe we were the problem, we considered. Perhaps our feet weren’t fast enough. Unlike crewmen’s feet, perhaps ours were too flat, too thick, too big to have carried us swiftly. Or maybe our lips had failed to deliver the message of impending bondage because, unlike theirs, ours were bold and bulging. We even considered that their abuse of our women might’ve been because our buttocks protruded. This would be true for some of our men, too. None of this had been a liability before. Our bodies had been our glory. We’d painted and adorned ourselves because we thought we were beautiful. Our decorated lips, hair, eyes, buttocks, feet, wide noses had all been expressions of self-adoration. Our body parts were the trademark, we believed, of a sacred, majestic people. Now the ugliness of our situation made us begin to loathe the body we’d once loved. It was a gradual occurrence at first, more a thought than a truth, but we knew that once planted, a seed soon reveals all that it bears.