When Powers of Sun Magnified

After childhood years spent listening to these stories at the feet of Nana Belle, great aunts and great uncles, this part (my part) became both easy and hard. Easy when you grow up to become a writer. Hard knowing the oral traditions steeped in a history vast enough to eclipse the oldest mariner’s voyage are in danger of being lost simply because no one sits still to listen anymore.

I’ve shared the clearest of my memories. May the Ancestors, I pray, be pleased with me…

May 17, 1803: - Laughter died at the hands of the lecherous and lash in a long-ago time. You would do well to remember that la isla de las Bermudas (the island of Bermuda) garnered omnipotence from the sea in ways varied and inexplicable.

The unseen. Ever present and iron-weighty in salted heaviness. It shipwrecked countless sailors, drove men to mistresses, thwarted best-laid plans for stock inventory making mockery of the slave masters though we dared not let mirth alight our faces.

Sweat-soaked humid summer days and frigid dampness ‘through to your bones’ winter nights spent in repair for a stronger house, better crop yields, or larger sea catch would be welcome if it benefitted us and brought security to our families.

It was not. And it did not.

Between the Smith and Butterfield Estates in Devonshire and Paget parishes, we gathered firewood away from brackish marshes, slow-smoked red snapper over low fires, and tended tobacco, banana, onion, and arrowroot crops. In between, we mended clothes and fishing nets alongside endless other chores in utter silence through countless phases of moon and seasons.

It remains unknown exactly who started it. But start it did.

A simple signal for “drink,” and “come.” Words like “hurt” and “sleep” grew a complex language of hand signs from the desperation of necessity to speak to one another. Because after the near-successful slave rebellion of 1689, the “massas” took to cutting out our tongues.

Other-worldly gurgled screeches behind the chicken coop on a crude table unfit for purpose were by design.

To petrify the rest of us.

To abolish such notions as “escape” or “freedom.” But you can bet, in secrecy, we developed sign language for those words too.

After 250 years plus, in conditions a dog would die in, our vocal cords dried up from disuse. The ‘cutting practice’ became less widespread with concern over infection rates, labor days lost, or death by choking. Accrued costs the English colonists were loathe to absorb. But the damage had long been done. Upon never hearing spoken language and being sequestered from the white world until of age to work, children emitted guttural sounds at best. Soon after, they picked up hand gestures as right as rain.

No official record exists, yet the reasons are clear. More slaves perished from heat at summer solstice than any other time of year. Thus, two "rest days" protected white colonial “investments” since a sick or dead slave couldn’t work well enough.

Lengthened “fiyah heat days” birthed the Gombey dancers, a spirit tradition that drew mystic ocean magic starting hours before sunrise. Safe in anonymity, they re-enacted the horrors forced upon the enslaved by brutal taskmasters with kaleidoscope leaps and footwork to drums and whistles in sporadic locations infusing terror across the isles. Not a soul could comprehend how they danced all day long without collapse beneath the oppressive and relentless sun.

Circa 1805: - A distant family relation known only as “Tan” crept away for a swim underneath night’s cloak one solstice eve and chanced upon them. Camouflaged amid spice trees, he later returned to “tell” of Gombey preparations at Devonshire Bay near the water’s edge, his hands a lightning flurry...

“Gallons of seawater collected and stored in doubled bladders of fish and fowl, calabash and crude tar-lined sacks…stored inside drums, under dress garments, headdress the height of a man…covered bodies head to foot...low incessant splashes to summon spirits of the dead and the unborn…glints of sharpened axes and arrows against reefs.”

Silent skyward pleas made pre-dawn air thick with yearning over injustice and every other indignity human beings can suffer when enduring relentless tragedy.

Turtles, crabs, stingrays, cahows, and terns alongside assorted marine creatures would encircle and weave through the Gombeys, mirrors on dark capes reflecting moonlight, at various depths of the shore. Surely a fisherman’s dream catch, but no harm befell any creature. Perhaps each life knew instinctively of sanctuary, an energy lending spirit to rituals that freedom cried for…soundless. All bore witness until time eclipsed to crescendo. A haunted silence breathed from seagrass beds until at last, the first faded pink dots appeared on the horizon and the energetic display ebbed to thwart discovery. A practice seldom witnessed and subsequently never held in the same location.

No one knew what to say to Tan.

But two things happened after that curious rite. Our people learned well to keep secrets. And on summer solstice day and the next, miraculous events unfolded that shook the white population to its hardhearted core.

Mothers cuddled and cooed before the surprised eyes of children enrapt by blissful sound.

Brothers shouted news and greetings to siblings across the onion fields, embracing in teary-cheeked rapture. Words, a broken mix of Bantu, Wolof, Creole, Portuguese, Spanish, or English, provided a living testament to the countless exchange of hands and the brutality of chattel slavery.

Widowed ones in headscarves and wide-brimmed straw hats would rail nigh the entire day with packets of smelling salts in segregated slave church cemeteries. The scent of smothered grief for husband fishermen lost at sea without a body to bury drenched nostrils for miles. Broken-hearted shrieks caused even the starlings to cease their customary song. It seemed as if they too honored such sorrow.

A shadowy pallor cast wary over otherwise mouthy captors. During this exuberant freedom of speech when every enslaved African could pray, hum, or sing around bewildered white households whose occupants remained unable to extinguish a voice without killing the body that bore it.

Above the multitude of conversations that moved everyone but slave masters to compassion, arose other pursuits. Primal urges that cruel punishment of neither stockade nor whip could deter.

Husbands loved wives in ardent fervor whispering assured longings with a tenderness that permeated day into night, embracing toiled ebony limbs sinewy and sore.

Secret crushes discovered anonymous sunshine dandelion bouquets left. Lemongrass sachets. Sometimes fragrant multi-colored hibiscus or rose in the hope that shyness could pierce through filtering back to its senders. Romance warmed the coolest hearts to action at the one opportunity for relationship redemption.

Love, a flame unfurled, drove some to voice their dedication to this or that young beauty without relent—songs of raw emotive request. Metaphor-laden entreaties promising solace. Heaven. A love that should seek eternity on the longest day of the year saw recipients bask in conversations suggesting cherry blossoms and turtle dove softness against the realities of laborious birth-to-death captivity.

Love unrequited panged a mournful rhythm as morn droned to eve and desperation crept into words for life’s one chance at bliss, uncertain as it was. Potential lovers cast monologued persuasion extolling the virtues of themselves and their Beloveds even after their throats surrendered to hoarseness brought on by sheer exhaustion.

Yet still they spoke.

Entreated.

With everything left inside them over days, nights, weeks, and parish borders. As one by one, the enchantments wore thin. As silences crept into completeness on cooler autumn winds and a distant promise of the following year, holding all the words they could not yet say.

Author’s Note:

Although this is a work of fiction, Bermuda did become the first English colony to bring enslaved Blacks to its shores to dive for pearls in 1616. Due to its geographical isolation, punishments and restrictions for the enslaved were severe.

Gombey is a Bantu word meaning “rhythm” or “drum” and to this day, the Gombeys reenact the stories of horrendous treatment by slave masters of a bygone era through dance.