Black Cake(85)
Marble says nothing. She picks up the coins and comb from the table, puts them back into the wooden box, and closes the lid.
Shipwreck
In 1715, a hurricane plowing through the Caribbean sank two Spanish ships and smashed eight others into the shallows off the coast of Florida. Later that year, a pair of pirate ships set out from the island and returned home loaded with treasures, most of which the Spanish had already pulled up from the shipwrecks. Back in Port Royal, the raiders unloaded bullion, dyestuffs, tobacco, and other valuable items, some of which were not listed anywhere on the manifests of the ruined fleet and which promised to fetch a good sum on the black market.
Twenty years later, a runaway slave emerged from the bush in the interior of the island and sneaked onto the plantation from which he had fled four months earlier. Under the cover of night, he ran off with his woman, whose stomach had grown thick with child. She left with only the clothes on her back, two guavas in her apron pocket, and a large hair comb belonging to the mistress of the house. The mistress, on the occasion of her marriage to the master of the estate years before, had received the comb along with a case of gold medallions and other gifts from a high official who, it was said, had sent his men to Florida to loot goods recovered from the shipwrecked Spanish fleet. It was an assertion that he had always denied.
The enslaved woman had been waiting to reclaim her freedom. She had been listening for a signal every night for four moons but, as in all such things, she repeatedly steeled herself for disappointment. She knew that her man might never make it back. When the time finally came, she had only minutes to escape. She was already running across a rain-soaked field, holding fast to her man’s hand, when she realized that the comb was still wedged into the waist of her skirt. She would have washed the comb and put it on the mistress’s dressing table that evening, had she had the time, had she not been slipping in the mud and stumbling over tree roots in her quest for freedom.
The mistress had usually treated her kindly. For a slave. The master, not so kindly. More than once, in fact, he had treated the young woman not so kindly. But the child inside her would be hers, not his. This child would grow up free in the hills with the others who had escaped and who were teaching their children the old ways. She threw the comb into the field as she ran. It sank into the mud, where it would be washed clear to the bottom of the garden by a heavy rain, then tucked farther into the earth by one of the men’s shovels. She thought of the coins that she had taken from the master’s house, one at a time, and buried in the dirt down the way. There was no time to retrieve them. There was only time to survive.
More than two hundred years would pass before an orphan girl named Elly, raised at a children’s home on the site of the former sugar cane plantation, found a dirt-encrusted hair comb in the garden, along with cockle shells from a prehistoric era and one well-fed garden snake, the latter of which she quickly tossed aside. She washed the comb in the tub where she was given her afternoon bath and later squirreled it away in her personal tin of treasures. Inside the tin were four gold coins which she’d found near the potato plants the year before.
Mapping the Ocean
Scientists have come up with new ways to map the deepest parts of the ocean. At one time, many imagined that the seafloor was a dark, sandy plain dotted with unseeing fish or cartilaginous giants and, perhaps, a few clumps of coral that could survive without light. But technology has come to confirm what Etta Pringle had always sensed, that the seafloor is a universe of underwater crests and valleys and rivers, of mineral deposits and jewels, of entire continents of life. The blues, the greens, the yellows, the blacks.
When Etta learned that the most remote corners of the seafloor were going to be unveiled, she had confirmation of why she had been put on this earth to swim. She was meant to spend the rest of her life doing her part to remind people that Earth was not so much land as water, that this planet was a living thing to be cared for and protected and used with care, not to be drained and littered to the point of extinction.
Machines are sophisticated but they cannot read love. They cannot tell researchers what it feels like to be part of the sea, to be a blip of arms and legs, a small cavern of a mouth, skimming the briny surfaces of the world. Some people wonder what it would be like to fly. Etta already knows. So she keeps flying through the water and she will keep on fighting to protect it.
Etta travels around the world to speak in public and meet with politicians and plead the case of the world’s oceans and seas, the last remaining barrier between life on Earth and oblivion. She reminds intergovernmental assemblies that even creatures from ten thousand meters below the marine surface have been found with plastic fibers in their insides. What, she asks, does that tell us about what can happen to our own children?
And now this mapping business.
Etta knows that only a small fraction of the seafloor has been mapped. She knows that this can be dangerous. Look at the submarine that ran into an underwater mountain some years back. She knows that people need more information and more resources. But not only. People have always wanted more, period. This is one of the laws of human nature. What’s to stop those maps from becoming a mere tool for exploitation?
And so, Etta fights then swims then grieves then trudges back onshore to fight. She speaks out for the seas that grew her, that gave her friendship, that taught her to love. She doesn’t do the distances she used to, but she still holds a couple of world records. People come to see her presentations, they want autographs, they want selfies, but she wonders, how many of them are listening to what she has to say? Some people call her ugly names in public, rather than engage in real dialogue. This, too, is one of the laws of human nature. If you are visible, you become a target.