Most of us had never completed it. We wondered if we would be men in a new land. We wondered if pale people had standards of manhood different from our own. We wondered if even our own still applied since we’d been stolen and taken away. We wondered if perhaps the gods would exempt us from certain manifestations of character since we never learned them. We wondered so many things. Things about God we’d never been told. Things about nature we beheld but did not understand. Things about women we’d never experienced. Things about life we’d pondered but not comprehended. Now, on the ship, those things seemed unimportant, although weeks earlier they’d been our absolute preoccupation. We wondered whether the pale boy had completed his first initiation. Or whether his people even had such a system. If not, we thought, no wonder pale boys become murderous, treacherous men.

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

* * *

On the sixtieth day, we awakened to the cries of a woman in labor. We knew the wailing. We’d heard it a thousand times. But not like this. Her howling contained no joy. Usually, in our village, when a mother bore a child, excitement reverberated in her screeching. Children gathered outside her hut, shouting with glee, beckoning forth the newborn babe. Once arrived, the infant was passed to the children first that they might welcome another playmate into the fold. Their noisy delight was the mother’s comfort. Now, in bondage, our sister-mother would have to bear her child alone. We were surprised it had survived at all. As her belly ballooned, we knew she would bear not just any child, but a rare spirit. She had marched with us, suffered in the holdings on the coast with us, and now endured the nightmare of the ship. Most babies would’ve returned to the invisible place from which they come, but this one chose to join us nonetheless. This child was different. This child knew something. It was coming to say what we could not hear, to remind us of what we’d forgotten, to foretell a future we could not see.

The pain of what happened next lives in our collective memory. It mauls our souls each day. Yet it must be told. Silence guarantees no healing. It promises that the child’s life would be forgotten and that its mission might, one day, be thought insignificant. Silence is the enemy of history, and history is all we have.