I sang a song as I sprang from the womb—which is not unusual. After nine months many Kongos come like baby birds—crying and craning. What’s strange is that I remember being in my mother’s womb. The heat of the birthing channel, the thickness of the fetal fluid, the embrace of my enemy—Funiculus umbilicalis. It wrapped around my neck before I realized. I opened my unborn eyes to see it reared up over me, and I caught the snake by the throat. I tossed it over my shoulder like a braided scarf. Thus, I was delivered. Embattled and calling like a canary.

I recall the shock of the cold world on my skin, and the hands that caught my slippery form. I can’t forget my mother’s face—because I never saw it. It was hidden from me, and I from her, in accordance with the law. The laws, back then, were many. And this one applied only to us, the darkest race in the southernmost territory—the Kongo.

They say my voice resounded that day. A victorious refrain, although I don’t personally recall the song. Years later, my papa sang it to me again and again, until I remembered:

I am Arika of House Cobane.

Do not swaddle me.

I dare you.

I dare you.

* * *

In keeping with full disclosure, I’ll share my reservations. Men, as you know, are not permitted in birthing rooms in any American territory, except the Northridge, where male doctors attend. How, then, my papa came to hear my first song, from his hut, where he would have been obliged to wait, I cannot know. All I can say, without trampling on his memory, is this: for seventeen years, before I met him and he sang it to me in buttery baritone, that song he could not have heard clung to the back of my throat like coal.

Shortly after my birth, I was settled in the Cobane nursery, with every other baby born in the village that year. They called us brothers and sisters and we suckled from the same handful of heavy-breasted attendants. I milked one ripe coconut, touching toes with my sister, who fed off the other. Across the room, our brothers fed in much the same way. We were not related by blood, but we were closer than family; we were comrades! So close, the lines between us blurred. I was me, and them, and us—and we were comrades!

Instead of one mother, we had many. And every Kongo man was our father. On Sunday afternoons after work in the field, mother would come en masse, forming a line so long it curved like a hazel rainbow. I remember hearing her slough off the week as she waited to mother us, pulling her neck from side to side so it popped.