Rough water at a distance. Dark blue but not too dark. It looks frigid. That this water could be anything but warm had never crossed my mind. And down on the shore, I recoil, startled, when the first waves touch my toes. I think of tears gone stale as the waves thin out and pool languidly around my ankles. A feeling of grief grows and grows inside. This is ancestral water. My first time touching the Atlantic from the coast of West Africa. I walk calmly in, jeans and all, until the water is up to my waist.
Then a wave explodes in my face, the force knocking me back into the surf and leaving me drenched. A second, stronger wave sucks me into the sea; another spits me back on to the sand. I land with such an impact that my mouth fallsopen, and all that cold-as-tears Atlantic rushes down my throat. Another wave drags me down into the deep. I struggle to get to shore, but the water holds me back, pulls me under, and that is when I cry, “Jesus.” But a wave punches me to shore again. I scramble away from the tide, breathing rapidly to calm my heaving chest. I sit for a while on the sand, staringinto the distance at the rough water. My breath evens out. I stand and with a sigh turn left and begin to walk along the shoreline, staying away from the foaming waves. I walk for about a mile, my wet clothes feeling heavier as I go, before I can trust walking into the wake of the waves, ignoring the cold of the water gnawing at my ankles. Flecks of it like spittlefly into my face. Some time later I come up to an area of hundreds of black rocks, most of them long and flat, but here and there are a few large, round boulders. I climb to the top of one, slick with green algae and litter at its bottom. Anexhaustion I have never felt before comes over me, and suddenly I begin to shake uncontrollably, my teeth chattering. I take my shirt and jeans off and sit holding my ankles. My eyes burn, whether from my own tears or from the salt of the sea I can’t tell. I can’t tell either what, or why, words begin to tumble from my gnashing teeth. They might be not words but a keening, repeated over and over until the rattling in my body slows and finally stops. I open my eyes: dark rough water. I slide down the boulder and pick up a little plastic bottle from the litter and wade into the water up to my chest. The waves toss me about as I hold the bottle down in the ocean, filling it to the brim.
Hours later that evening, I drink half the bottle while sitting in the half-darkened room of my villa. I don’t knowwhy, the same way I don’t know what caused me to take the bottle into the raging Atlantic. The remaining half, I tell myself, is the veritable jar of tears I will take across the sea, back home with me.
The port of Dakar. I arrive early for the 10:00 a.m. ferry to Île de Gorée, but at the ticket window I’m told that the next boat will not depart until midday. I sit on one of the blue benches next to an old woman in the waiting area. She is dressed in a green-and-orange skirt with slashes of dark red stripes in the front. She strings colorful beads on a long thread. Every time a bead is strung, she clicks her tongue. She works fast, the belly of the thread distending from the weight of thebeads as they pile on. I begin to count the beads, watching her hands so close that after a while I believe I can hear the silent abacus music of beads touching. I am so absorbed in her work that I jump at the sound of a ferry horn,forgetting for a moment where I am or where it is that I am going. People rise and I rise, too, causing an emaciated black-and-white kitten I hadn’t noticed under my seat to scamper along the wall of the ticket office. It then darts back between the feet of the crowd rushing to queue for the boat. An old man, wearing a white kufi cap and dressed in a longwhite gown, kicks the kitten clear out of the way. Purity and such. We inch slowly up the plank of the boat; the mild morning cool is now almost gone. Yet when I look up at the sky I see some dark clouds, same as the last three morningssince I have been here. There will be no rain; I will see Gorée in scorching heat. I will see Gorée, I think as we inchfarther up the plank. To go to Gorée, I carry a tremendous singing.
Bougainvillea bursts out of every crevice and corner of the island, all the way up to the slave fort. Their paper-thinruby blossoms are the first thing I touch, plucking a few from a wall near the dock as soon as I disembark from the ferry. I keep them in my palm the entire long day I spend walking back and forth from the dock to the slave fort. In that merciless heat, the petals stick to my palms like flayed scabs of skin. Inside the slave fort I consider releasing them through the narrow frame of the Door of No Return into the sea, but instead I jam my hands in my pockets, afraid. I stare at thewater calmly lapping the ledge and splashing over the sill onto the dark dirt of the slave fort. Here is a door with no door; here I am here and yet no return. Outside I blink to adjust my eyes to the sun, not because inside the fort is void of light—plenty of light streams through the Door of No Return—but because shadows appear in dense jumbles wherever they fall. Reknotting around my neck an old scarf of my grandmother’s I have brought with me, I stroll to the dock. At the dock I turn around and stroll back to the slave fort. I do this a few times, but only once more I have the courage to go back inside of the slave fort.
There is a crowd inside. People mill about in small batches, talking in hushed tones. I realize I can’t make out a single accent much less a single language that I can speak as I strain to hear what’s been said. Should I say something, add my voice to the babble? But to whom do I speak? To no one here, I think. As that thought crosses my mind, I see someone, a young boy in a blue shirt, who feigns diving from off the ledge through the Door of No Return into the sea.I jerk toward him, but he walks away, laughing into the shadows and leaving me alone in front of the door. Here is a door with no door. I am here. Then as if arranged by a set manager, a huge container ship glides slowly past, mere distance from the Door of No Return. Behind me I hear oohs and aahs and other cries as if at something amazing. Not until the voices leave can I turn around and exit. I walk to the dock and back up to the slave fort a few more times. On one of these circuits the heat forces me to seek shade under a cluster of almond trees by the shore adjacent to the dock. The container ship is gone, the water glitters in its ancient repose as if it has never been disturbed.
I arrive on a Friday at the beach in Popenguine, a small village about forty-five minutes by car outside Dakar. The beach is three miles of rough pink, reddish, and white sand. A cliff dominates the far eastern corner and offers enough shade for me to lie down and read and write while keeping the sea in full view. I have been naked since I arrived on the beach three hours ago. Except once when a group of three or four boys passed in the far distance, the beach stays empty. Not since I was a child in Port Antonio have I been fully naked on a beach. It calls to the boy in me, this beach: it awakens in me something I recognize as that gleam of alienated majesty Emerson talks about somewhere, that luminous thing that islove. It is past noon now. The sun is at its fiercest, but occasionally a light breeze off the sea ruffles the pages of my notebook. I can smell salt on the air when it blows, and when it does, I play in my mind which of the water’s threegradations of blue the breeze blows from, the cerulean (first), the cobalt (second), or the indigo (third)? Another hour passes. The beach remains empty, not a single pirogue at sea. When I stand, the sun cleanses me of my shadow.
I explore, bringing back shells and stones to my station under the cliff, making little piles of them that become overrun by red ants. A sound rumbles overhead behind me, and I turn, expecting to see a small plane, perhaps a drone, butthere is nothing but the cliff and sky. Some time passes before I hear the rumble again. I get up to look more closely at the cliff and see that under the belly of the very top is a jagged hole the size of two basketball hoops. Breeze threading through the hole makes that groan-like rumble. A breeze blows and I hear it, not as loud as before, but distinct andconstant. Strange that I didn’t hear it earlier in all the hours I had been sitting almost directly under the cliff. Now that hollow roar blends with the incessant shush and whoosh of waves.
I wade in the cerulean part of the water, up to my waist, and stare out at the vast indigo: Beyond that, what? Gorée lies somewhere not far off; therefore, nearby are the currents that the slave ships navigated with relative ease to the Caribbean. How to even grasp the fact that there, right there, the currents of centuries of African pain still move? There are no markers on the sea to indicate those routes; I am reduced to the frail logic of intuition, to wonder as I gaze in another direction of the indigo, thinking this time now of my grandmother’s house, my childhood home, above the Caribbean Sea. I turn my back to the indigo and wade to shore, where I crouch in the surf, feeling the splash of waves in my buttocks; the sun drums down on my back and water hits my chest and face. Thoughts sieve through my mind at each splash, too fast for me to make sense of, except for one: I am here, in a now. There has been no other time than now. Suddenly an overwhelming desire to climb the cliff comes over me.
Except for a patch of grass and a single thorn tree, the top of the cliff is bare of vegetation. The crumbly reddirt of the surface is spotted with white manna-like blotches like the sand below. The soil reminds me of Stokes Hall, a red dirt district in St. Thomas not too far from where my mother grew up. Like many of the districts in St. Thomas, Stokes Hall is named after a former sugar plantation owner, the ruin of whose great house still sits on a hill there. I know Stokes Hall only from car windows. As a kid I would drive through it to get to my high school, Happy Grove, situated on the border between St. Thomas and Portland. Mornings and evenings the red dirt on the stretch of main road would cloud behind the car, and if I was in the back of a pickup truck, as was sometimes the case, the dirt would lightly powder my khaki uniform, my hair, and my face, so light the dust would disappear in an instant. I loved the sight of that billowing red dust each school day, and looking down now at the red dirt of the cliff in Popenguine between my toes, I think how much that red dirt of Stokes Hall, banks of which you could see on the side of the road for several miles, defined that period of my life. Yet, but for the faintest patina that fell on me those school days, I have never touched the red dirt of home. I pat my palms on the ground, patting over and over and leaving my handprints everywhere on the cliff. Perhaps I am trying to find the location above the hole in the cliff where the breeze passes through and leaves a dry rumble. I put my ear to the ground and hear silence. Standing, I take up a handful of dirt and ball my hand into a fist, rubbing the brittle, warm texturewith my fingers as it trails through them into the breeze. When the dirt is all gone, I smell my palm; then I lick the remaining red marks away.
The day ends with this miracle: a meeting with Ayi Kwei Armah. It is extraordinary how that happened, a sort of epiphanic encounter that explanation flattens. When I was going to Popenguine, a friend from Dakar mentioned that a famous old Ghanaian writer whom I should meet lives near the beach there. So excited I was about the prospect of visiting another of Senegal’s sea-town villages that I didn’t register the name of the old Ghanaian writer, nor did I bother to have it clarified. I was open to the meeting, whoever the writer happened to be; all I wished for was to get to the sea. Through a friend of my friend who lives in Popenguine, a meeting was arranged. I met my friend’s friend, herself a writer, at her place first thing when I arrived early in Popenguine. She told me that after I had spent some time at the beach to walk back to her place and then together we would go over to the house of the old Ghanaian writer. I am sure she said his name, but again, somehow, it didn’t ring. What rang was the sea, which I could see from her house, purplish blue from afar. I agreed with the plan and left for the sea.