A Siren Call for Vengeance

My Story

When I was 19 years old, my mother was dying. I rushed home from school on holiday and straight to her bedside, she wanted to see me before things took a turn for the worst. It had been about a year since we'd seen each other, and in much better health. She had been sleeping when I walked in. I intended to let her rest a while, unsure of how much she might be in need of a good rest, but as I turned to leave, she woke up and asked me to sit down, there was something important she wanted to talk to me about.

"I need to tell you something," she said to me, sleep melting from her voice. "There is a story I need to tell you before I die, to, perhaps, help as you move forward in life."

It was almost thirty years ago. My mother was travelling back from her study abroad across the ocean. Initially, the flight was nothing but smooth sailing, but then they began to experience some troubles, storms, she guessed, strong storms. The flight crew did their best to control the situation, but the plane went down somewhere over the Atlantic. The flight crew readily deployed the few life rafts that were on board as passengers frantically donned the provided life vests. However, panic overtook the passengers as the plane encountered the ocean water, and many people were thrown or forced, without life vests, into the ocean in their attempt to flee the sinking plane; my mother was one of them.

"The water was so dark and so cold that I was sure this was the void and that death had already taken me," my mother explained to me. "And yet, at the same time, I could feel my body fight for life, what little it still held. Desperately, I struggled to swim upward toward the surface. It felt like I was moving through molasses rather than through water. As I neared the surface, I could feel something in the water; some other presence, is the best I can describe it. Panic and desperation spurred me further toward the surface but a hand grabbed a hold of my ankle, dragging me back down. The water nearer the surface was much more transparent and I could see bodies below me, some bloated, some mere bones, all with sallow skin, chains hanging loosely from their limbs, all looking back at me, reaching for me. I could hear their voices, a chorus in my head and heart. I tried to swim away from them and certain death, desperate to live. They held me there in peril; they told me of themselves, showed me their fate, why we chanced to meet. And then they saved me, returned me to the surface at the last moment between life and death when I long thought that I would join them, and asked that I, in turn, right the wrong done to them. On the surface, the chorus quieted, replaced by the splashes of other passengers saving each other, though the presence was still there, felt only by me. Although I've never spoken about it, that night has never left me, and neither have they."

My mother did her best to describe to me what she had been shown that night in the cold dark Atlantic Ocean. The chorus had revealed itself to be the souls of Africans lost en route to slavery in the New World, our ancestry. The spirits showed her their kidnapping from their home, showed her the treachery of their crossing the ocean in captivity, showed her their involuntary sacrifice.

"The pain and the sadness of what they showed me..." she shook her head, holding back tears. "I cannot even begin to express. I know no words that would do it justice. It is something you would have to experience for yourself.

"When we were rescued, and I'd made it back home, I resolved myself to righting history's wrongs."

For her, that meant revenge. And I suppose that is what it meant for our ancestors as well. It was too large a task to track down who exactly captured and shepherded millions of Africans to slavery, and then trace forward to their present day lineage. So she settled for any white man she could entrap.