It took the babies drowning for the rest to say, Enough.

It took the babies drowning for the rest to say, Enough. They hadn’t been the first to go; many others had killed themselves, hoping for deliverance. Often it was the young girls newly come. Warned of the fate awaiting them, they took to the river rather than face the shame of what their futures held. Each time, those who’d stayed behind hoped that they had escaped, until their bloated bodies rose to the surface and they knew what had happened instead. Over the years, both men and women alike had disappeared into the river, but never had it been children, and never by those who’d borne them.

These mothers gave their children a baptism of death before deciding they would follow too. They let the water wash their spirits to their promised land, that’s what they’d forced themselves to believe, yet the others knew they lived in a world where the only promise was this life meant to break. They broke bread together in the morning and their spirits were broken by evening, hunkering down on the floor, cloistered together, their sweat-stunk bodies from the heat, hoping by night the air would cool but it never did, off to sleep for another day and another. Can see to can’t, morning to evening, every day until they could do no more.

It was the murder of the children that finally made them join together in their struggle. Not when they all were taken, bound in chains and forced in ships across the water. Not when they were made to stoop and bend, naked, while checked for wounds, their skin pinched for the muscle underneath, their mouths pulled on to show their teeth. Not when their mothers and daughters and sisters and wives were groped as they danced and curtsied on the block before being separated forever. Nor was it when they were brought to the fields, many collapsing to their deaths from the work as the high-noon sun basted their rotting backs. The bullwhip crack hadn’t been enough. All the blood that soaked these fields hadn’t been enough. Even after death, when their desecrated remains were stolen from the graveyards meant to be their final place of rest, it had not been enough to make the others see. What it took was the murdering of a mother’s most loved—of finding them facedown in the murky river, bodies limp and floating, with their outstretched arms forever reaching for the other—before they finally understood.