The First Object Which Saluted My Eyes Was

the Sea (And the Slave Ship)

Hannah Siegel

The first object which saluted my eyes was the sea

. They are dining in front of me, every evening with those queer industrial lights and iron chairs a raucous circus of delights

PART I: THE FALL

and a slave ship

I have never understood these new people.

And their obsession with light even over water.

(lights over the water)

But they tell me I am bronze, now.

It is a warm summer day the kind my Sarah loves

My brow seethes radiating iron-hot rays one of them held me fast by the hands and laid me across I think the windlass, and tied my feet

I’d burn these new revelers to the touch.

Perhaps the growing crowd is here to feast as well but on what I am not sure they look unlike revelers unlike a summer stroll much more like the waves to my right.

There are so many of them. I am being grabbed.

I am being bound.

I had never experienced anything of this kind before; and although, not being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time

I am being struck from my plinth.

I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me.

The sea glistens below me and I— I am falling into the open mouth of it.

The first object which saluted my eyes was the sea (and the slave ship).

PART II: THE DROWNING

somehow made through the nettings and jumped into the sea such noise and confusion light is eating through my forehead

. I am far from Bristol now. I do not know how long I have been here I have been drifting a long while now.

I’m turning blue

I things have embedded themselves inside me upon me in my clothes and hair last week a shell crawled out of my nose spindly legs and phosphorescence the salt is bleeding me of my eyes it’s eating me somehow I can feel it I can but my mass is still solid. my body is unbroken here.

It is very cold, here and I can feel the currents mixing nitrogen rich oxygen from the east warm and calcifying spirals from the west I feel I— feel as if I’m at the center of the world

There has not been light for a very long time.

I saw the bronze man when he arrived in our waters // It was summertime then / we were swarming // as we always do / some into the mouths of the great beasts /// below us / as some of us /// always are /

I rested with my brothers and sisters / for a time / in the tragus of his ear // blue antlers feeling, feeling /// for what may rest inside / we found nothing terribly interesting /// not there nor on his left knee / nor his iris /// so terribly different from ours / we found nothing interesting there either1

PART III: THE SURFACING

1.. I saw the bronze man when he arrived in our waters // It was summertime then / we were swarming // as we always do / some into the mouths of the great beasts /// below us / as some of us /// always are /

I rested with my brothers and sisters / for a time / in the tragus of his ear // blue antlers feeling, feeling /// for what may rest inside / we found nothing terribly interesting /// not there nor on his left knee / nor his iris /// so terribly different from ours / we found nothing interesting there either.

“HELLO!” chimes a voice, slightly garbled by the water, bubbles emerging from nowhere.

“Hello?” I scream, mouth half full of refuse and mercury.

“Where am I?” I beg.

“GOWANUS,” pierces the waves, in that same voice: booming and sickly-sweet.

“What?”

“GOWANUS CANAL. IN BROOKLYN. NEW YORK?” she prods, lifting an eyebrow.

“New York? I’ve—I’ve crossed the sea?”

“YES.”

“The colonies?”

“NO. THERE ARE NO COLONIES ANYMORE.” There is nothing anymore, I think. I’m still drowning. I’m hardly a part of this world.

“I’m standing up,” I cry, disbelieving. It’s bizarre, a strange orientation that’s been making me dizzy for days. I don’t remember it. This isn’t like the deep. Not like before, when the pressure sank into my bones and popped the rings on my fingers like carnations, flesh turned inside out.

“YES,” she answers. “THERE IS ONLY 6.37 FEET OF SEDIMENT BELOW YOU.”

“The ground?” I ask.

“NOT QUITE. YOU ARE STILL IN THE SEA.”

“Why—why are you here? What are you?” She appears to me, then, standing on a concrete ledge. What’s left of my right eye can see acres and acres of cardboard, stacked like children’s toys. Red. Yellow. Blue. I had forgotten those.

“I THOUGHT WE MIGHT SPEAK HERE.” The boxes’ squareness frightens me. “I AM A BARRISTER.” She is dressed in that strange new fashion. The one I remember from the plinth. She is tall, brown-skinned, wearing, yes I see it now—wearing a barrister’s wig. Tucked beneath it are curtains of long, brown braids. They seem to fall everywhere.

“YOU’VE BEEN SERVED,” she voices. Her arm is outstretched. Papers, I remember. Papers

“I can’t read them,” I gasp, the tide spilling into my nose again. Everything dissolves here.

“I KNOW,” she responds, my world becoming dishwater gray. “THAT’S WHY I’M HERE.”

“What’s—“ the tide washes into my mouth again. “What’s the case?” Her eyebrows knit together.

“THE LARGEST LONG-DISTANCE FORCED MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE IN RECORDED HISTORY.” Hope scrabbles up my neck.

“Am I—” I ask desperately, the crown of my head emerging from the water, “—part of it?”

“YES.”

“Am I—” the tide oscillates, “—to be saved?”

“NO.” Gravity beats on me. “YOU ARE BEING CHARGED.”

“What, what movement then?”

“THE FIFTEEN MILLION.” I cannot even conceive of a number so high. Are there so many people on this Earth? In New London, perhaps?

“Who moved them?”

“YOU DID.”

“Wha—“ I am cut off by the barrister’s echoing voice, vibrating each drop of brackish water with its sound. She does not wait for me to answer.

“EDWARD COLSTON, BORN SECOND NOVEMBER 1636, SEA MERCHANT TRADING IN TEXTILES. SENIOR EXECUTIVE OF THE ROYAL AFRICAN COMPANY, MONOPOLY OF ENGLISH SLAVES.”

None of it is a question.

“CHARGE: ESTIMATED 187,133 ENSLAVED PEOPLE.”

Yes but of course I did what e—“ my mouth is full of water again. I believe the barrister is smiling. It is a long time before the sediment reshuffles, and I can breathe again. A ship is coming in.

“YOU HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY. A DEFENSE.”

“Yes!” I scream. “Whatever it is, I—I plead, I assent!” The barrister stands tall, her velvet robes unmoving in the shadows.

“A PERSON, she begins, “IS TO BE TREATED AS HAVING A LAWFUL EXCUSE IF THEY HONESTLY BELIEVED, AT THE TIME OF THE ACTS, THAT THOSE WHO THE PERSON HONESTLY BELIEVED WERE ENTITLED TO CONSENT TO THE DAMAGE, WOULD HAVE CONSENTED TO IT.

“IF,” she warns, “THEY HAD KNOWN OF THE DAMAGE. AND ITS CIRCUMSTANCES.”

“What people?” I beg.

The barrister’s papers burst from her hands, falling on the water’s surface like a dusting of snow. No, I think cruelly. Like ash. Like flakes of led from a train platform, dissolving on impact.

“THE DEFENSE,” she speaks plainly, “DOES NOT APPLY.” She repeats it, as if she has repeated it many times.

“No!” I can feel the tide shifting again.

“Wait! Wait, I beg of you!” I cannot now tell what is refuse and what is my tears.

“Why am I still here? Why—why am I alive?” She pauses, head tilted slightly. I can see her large tortoiseshell glasses glisten in the dying afternoon sun. Her lips purse. The voice that spills from them is entirely different.

“BRONZE, UNLIKE BRASS, CONTAINS LITTLE OR NO ZINC AND IS THEREFORE IDEALLY SUITED TO SEAWATER APPLICATIONS.”

She is gone before I can breathe again, and I can hear a horn blow in the distance, tickling the strands of rope still tied around me.

PART IV: SUBMERSION

coral glistening network of reeds a mangrove tree’s minnow a dead man’s float brackish all my eyelashes fell out big storm bigger pink now lightning rods oak and maple alive in the water so many strings puppeteering sugarcane stalks of rhubarb no more feet torso. substrate several oysters bad water again this time leaking this time rotting the water isn’t safe anymore half of me in the Antilles new breeding ground small insects swarming smaller than me all spelling death they taste like fishing rods head bobbing against porous rock last bit of my noble head scratch in it.

I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me hardships which are inseparable from this accursed trade.

Notes:

1. Each of the italicized lines in Part I, II, and IV are edited excerpts from the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, an enslaved African person and survivor of the TransAtlantic slave trade. I selected these lines from the passage provided—interestingly—by the UK website PortCITIES, dedicated to the history of Bristol and other ports in Britain. All of the text I selected pertains to Equiano’s capture into slavery and his experiences during the Middle Passage (“Personal Account”).

2. The ‘queer’ dining establishment that Colston sees in Bristol is Pitcher & the Piano, a real restaurant in Bristol which can be seen in the viral videos of protestors toppling the Colston statue and throwing it into the water (“Pitcher & Piano”).

3. Information about Colston’s life is drawn from the African American Registry’s Biography (“Edward Colston”).

4. The place where Colston drowns in Part II, where he “feel[s] as if I’m at the center of the world” is meant to be Beringia, as termed by Bathseba Demuth in Floating Coast (9, 14, and 25).

5. The “flakes of led” Colston imagines in Part III are in fact, the real “refuse” entering his mouth. They are flakes of led which continue to fall from the MTA 7 train in Brooklyn (O’Hara).

6. Gowanus Canal is infamously polluted. It contains, at best estimate, between one and twenty feet of contaminated sediment at any given time, with an average of 10 feet (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 15). My estimate of “6.77” feet comes from these figures.

7. The phrase “The largest long-distance forced movement of people in recorded history” is appropriated from the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative’s summary article on the TransAtlantic slave trade (“The Trans-Atlantic”).

8. Colston’s “charge” of the transportation of “187, 333” enslaved people is derived from the Slave Voyages historical database. This is the total “captives embarked” with “Royal African

Company” populated as the owner of the ship (“Summary Statistics”). It represents a strong estimate of how many enslaved persons were kidnapped by the Royal African Company during its tenure.

9. The ‘defense’ the Barrister offers Colston is appropriated, with small edits, from the legal directions given to the jury by the Recorder of Bristol, HHJ Peter Blair QC in the legal case R v Milo Ponsford, Sage Willoughby, Rhian Graham, and Jake Skuse. These four, also dubbed “The Colston Four” are the protestors charged with and found not guilty of property damage when they removed, defaced, and overthrew Bristol’s statue of Edward Colston (Matthew).

10. The Barrister’s explanation for why Colston is still “alive” is appropriated from Steve D’Antonio’s Marine Consulting Inc.’s article on underwater alloys (D’Antonio).

11. The references to Colston turning “blue” and “pink” as well as being eaten away are all allusions to bronze disease (“Archaeologies of Greek Past”).

12. The second, third, and fourth stanzas of Part IV depict Colston in a post-hurricane Puerto Rico and a post-climate apocalypse ocean.

13. The final resting place which Edward Colston stumbles upon in Part IV is in fact the interior chamber of the Runit Dome. The “small insects” are radioactive particles.

Bibliography

“Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Bronze Disease.” Joukowsy Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World. Web.

“British Protesters Topple Edward Colston.” YouTube, uploaded by Washington Post, 7 June 2020. Web.

Demuth, Bathsheba. Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. W.W. Norton, 2019.

“Edward Colston, Slave Trader Born.” African American Registry. Web.

Matthew. “Colston Summing Up: Those Legal Directions in Full.” BarristerBlogger, 9 January 2022. Web.

O’Hara, Andres. “MTA Plans to Clear Dangerous Lead Paint From 7 Line After Years of Neglect.” Gothamist, 20 June 2018. Web.

“Personal Account of an Enslaved African.” PORTCITIES Bristol. Web.

“Pitcher & Piano.” Web.

Steve D’Antonio. “Brass v. Bronze; Know Your Underwater Alloys—Editorial: Boat Show Season is Upon Us Once More.” Steve D’Antonio Marine Consulting, Inc., 7 October 2015. Web.

“Summary Statistics.” Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: Database, Slave Voyages. Web.

“The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.” Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, African Passages, Lowcountry Adaptations. Web.

United States Environmental Protection Agency Region II, New York, New York. “Record of Decision: Gowanus Canal Superfund Site Brooklyn Kings County, New York.”

September 2013. Web.