Status Updates From The Book Of Negroes

“It’s not about whether it will do me good. It’s that I want to go home.”
“You’ll be sold back into slavery,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
“Because men are wicked.”

He repeated my name over and over, and then added, “I must hear you say it. Please. Say it. Say my name.”
“Chekura,” I said.
“Someone knows my name. Seeing you makes me want to live.”

One man asked, “Who is the sister who visits us?”
“Aminata. I am from Bayo, near Segu on the Joliba.”
In the darkness, men repeated my name and called out their own as I passed. They wanted me to know them. Who they were. Their names. That they were alive, and would go on living.

gliding over the unburied.



[3/3]

And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of

[2/3]

Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary.


[1/2]

Thankfully, the public visits are only so often and leave me time for reading, to which I am addicted like some are to drink or to tobacco.

In the earliest days, when I was free and knew nothing other, I used to sneak outside our walled compound, climb straight up the acacia tree while balancing Father’s Qur’an on my head, sit way out on a branch and wonder how I might one day unlock all the mysteries contained in the book.

Currently feeling devastated 😓