The Water Spirits Will Carry Us

Kerra Bolton on ancestors, epigenetics, and swimming while Black.

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I dunk my face into a pot of cooking water. Three months ago, I had visions that my ancestors, the ones at the bottom of the Atlantic, told me I should find them. I envisioned their faces mangled with cuttlefish tentacles and tangled in sunken ship hulls. 

With my head in a pot, I can feel the ancestors—I call them water spirits—peel the skin off my face like a ripe orange dangling from a tree in the spring sunlight. The water spirits shuck layers off my skin. 

“Now, blow your bubbles,” Natalie, my swim instructor, says from the screen of the iPhone propped on the salt shaker. 

A Canada native, Natalie is a professional diver and singer. She and her Mexican husband Ivan are among the snowbirds, musicians, chefs, and yoga enthusiasts who travel to Akumal, Mexico, from November to April to escape the northern chill. 

Until 65 years ago, no one was “from” Akumal. Pablo Bush Romero, a Mexican businessman, historian, writer, and archeologist, founded the town in 1958 as an enclave for diving enthusiasts. Mexicans migrated to the small town between Cancun and Tulum to work at the resorts, restaurants, and tourist attractions popping up along the Caribbean coastline in subsequent decades. 

“People run to or away from something when they come to Mexico,” my friend Jen explained. 

In my case, it was both. I moved here less than a week after my mom died from stomach cancer. I had no immediate family except for Grandma Lula, who lived in a nursing home in Philadelphia. The rag-doll girl in me who mourned the loss of my family needed a way to remain connected to my lineage. Little did I realize I’d have to put my face in a pot to do it. 

Natalie graciously agreed to join the first leg of my journey to the ocean-bound ancestors as my swim and dive instructor. But then the pandemic hit. Natalie and Ivan joined her elderly parents in Canada to care for them. I remained in Mexico, with my head bobbing in and out of a kitchen pot I bought at Wal-Mart. 

“Are you blowing?” she asks. 

I remained in Mexico, with my head bobbing in and out of a kitchen pot I bought at Wal-Mart. 

I barely stick my nose in the pot when the water spirits return. This time they scale my sinews and muscles. Holding my legs firmly to the linoleum floor, the spirits scrape my body from my hair extensions to the heels of my feet, which could use a pedicure. In the pandemic, human touch is deadly. Shedding is survival. The spirits say shedding is essential if I want to reach them. They say diving to them requires me to forget the land’s lessons and remember my place among the water spirits. I inhale and blow bubbles until there’s almost no air left. 

*** 

Water wants me on its own terms, and I don’t want to surrender. Other Black women say their experience with swimming and open water is emotionally violent. Unlike some of our white friends, we don’t grow up with a patient YMCA instructor leading us through the paces with seven other squirmy, suburban children. 

Instead, an older brother, father, uncle, or neighborhood boy initiates us by throwing us in. Their guffaws are a laugh track to our terror, compounding our physical shock. We flail until the water spirits push us back to the surface. Our freshly permed and curled hair is now tightly coiled, springing out of our heads like haloes. 

A silence persists among many Black women when I talk to them about swimming and open water. My friend Regina boasts about her sexual conquests, but audibly curls into a ball when I ask her if she swims. Her booming voice grows soft and trails, “I can swim. I just don’t like the water.”

“Why?” I ask. 

Regina stares, says nothing. I know I went too far. We can brag to our friends about snagging tickets to Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour, but some of us are emotionally stunted when sharing our deep fear of swimming and open water. 

A silence persists among many Black women when I talk to them about swimming and open water.

Other friends are more forthcoming about their fear of water. Like oyster shells, their stories pry open with only a few questions. Margaritas also help loosen the tongue. Dripping from their subconscious, my friends’ stories begin, “I never told anyone this before, but…” Their stories unravel their fears or tumble out as an offering, prayer, or request for forgiveness. I want to know why we are ashamed of being afraid of something that comes so naturally to white people but never, it seems, to some of us.

It isn’t our fault. Our grandmothers hushed us into shame and silence. 

“Who told that boy to go near the water?” Grandma Lula says when gossiping with Aunt Miriam about the latest drowning. 

“And what was his mother doing?” Aunt Miriam asks while stirring the ham hock into the collard greens to perfect its saltiness—as if there wasn’t enough saltiness in the room.

“The devil snatched him up,” grandma says. “Never go near the water, gal,” she says in her South Carolina drawl, despite living in Philadelphia for 30 years. “You hear me?”

*** 

“I can’t do this,” I say to Natalie after three dunks into the cooking pot during our next lesson. 

“You’re doing great.”

“I feel stupid.”

“This isn’t the most ideal situation,” Natalie says. “But this is the best we can do for now.”

I nod and stick my face back into the pot. The water spirits return. This time, they click in my ears like whales. The water spirits never use language because a simple “yes” or “no” could lead to rape or torture. Many enslaved Africans aboard the ships didn’t even speak the same language. Some historical accounts say they rocked their bodies in tandem, like Morse code and whale clicks, to communicate messages to other Africans on deck.

Fragmented images appear at the bottom of the cooking pot water. Crumpled white corpses in the corner of a slave ship. The white sailors’ muscles begin the march of decay. Black skin splinters open like a ripe mango. Its juice is my ancestors’ blood. A mother holds her infant. Her ashen, cracked feet step near the ship’s edge. 

I am not strong enough to remember their pain while facing my fear of submerging my head underwater. I pull my face out of the pot. Reassuring my central nervous system that my ancestors and I don’t share the same fate, I take in as much air as possible. 

“Are you okay?” Natalie’s voice cracks through the iPhone. “Remember, you’re not going to drown.”

My toes clutch the tiled kitchen floor. 

The water spirits will catch me I think to myself. 

I recall the story of the Igbo Landing. In 1803, a group of captured Nigerians from the Igbo tribe revolted during their voyage to the United States. The Igbo killed most of their white captors, threw them overboard, and seized the ship’s control. During their escape and anticipated trip home, the vessel was grounded at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, off the Georgia coast. No one knows what happened next. But generations of Black grandparents said the Igbo decided to drown rather than endure the slavery waiting for them onshore. The Igbo leaders decided everyone would walk into the water and wait for the water spirits to catch them. 

As the story was passed on, the Igbo sang in unison, “The Water Spirit brought us here; the Water Spirit will take us home.” 

The Igbo’s mass suicide was canonized in Black oral tradition, folklore, and literature as the first major act of resistance by captured Africans. In some stories, the Igbo walked on water and flew home. 

Salvation by suicide. Black bodies floating in water. Our bodies were always cargo, on land and in the sea. From the 16th-century Portuguese traders who extracted us as cheap labor to work the fields of the Americas to a Black man on the ground calling for his mama as a white police officer suffocated him with his knee, the Black body has always been perceived as disposable.

“I can’t do this,” I say, panting and coming up for air. “I don’t want to do this anymore.” I start crying.

“We can stop now if you want,” Natalie says. Her voice crackles through the WiFi waves floating from Canada across the United States to Mexico. I take it as a sign. But now that the water spirits have ripped me raw, there’s no turning back. 

“Give me a minute,” I say. “I’ll try again.” 

*** 

We didn’t start out fearing swimming and open water. History and epigenetics transformed faith into fear. 

Historical evidence suggests that as far back as the 15^th century, coastal West Africans (those from Senegal, Gambia, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Benin, Cameroon, and Nigeria), including women, knew how to swim as much as the Europeans of the same era. Members of West African communities even developed a breaststroke prototype that Europeans didn’t use until 1899.

We didn’t start out fearing swimming and open water. History and epigenetics transformed faith into fear.

If our ancestors were expert swimmers, why were some of their descendants afraid of swimming and open water? I think the answer must have something to do with what happened on the slave ships, passed down in oral histories like the Igbo landing and the gossip in grandma’s kitchen, and scientifically bolstered through epigenetics. 

By studying Holocaust survivors, Dr. Rachel Yehuda, a veterans affairs neuroscientist in the Bronx, and her colleagues were the first to demonstrate that human trauma could be passed through DNA. Epigenetics, as it’s known, changes the expression of the gene without altering the DNA sequence. 

Epigenetics may explain why the descendants of expert swimmers, like me, are terrified of swimming and open water. An estimated 12.5 million Africans were taken and transported across the Atlantic Ocean from 1526 to 1867 (known as the Transatlantic Slave Trade). But only 10.7 million survived. 

Abolitionist William Hamilton described the treatment of captive Africans in his 1815 oration delivered in the Episcopal Asbury African Church in New York “O! Africa” as:

On shipboard in their passage from Africa, they were treated with the most horrible cruelty that the imagination can conceive of…An infant of 10 months old, had taken sulk on board of a slave ship, that is refused to eat; the savage captain with his knotted cat whipped it until its body and legs had much swollen…

Water was a co-conspirator in the terror of captured Africans. Hamilton continued in his oration: 

In a few hours after it (the infant) expired, he (the captain) then ordered the mother to throw her murdered infant overboard. She refused. He beat her until she took it up, turned her head aside, and dropped it into the sea.

This was only one of the daily atrocities recorded during the treacherous passage across the Atlantic. Greater terrors awaited once my ancestors from Sierra Leone landed on the shore, where they were bought, traded, bred, and enslaved. 

Once in the Americas, swimming was a form of labor, punishment, or a grim path to salvation for enslaved Africans. Excellent enslaved swimmers, for example, were deployed as pearl divers in the Caribbean. A few enslaved Africans were heralded for their bravery in saving their white “masters” from drowning. 

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) documented anecdotal stories in the 1930s saying that enslaved Blacks were forbidden to swim or used suicide by drowning to evade beatings, torture, capture, and rape. Ida Blackshear Hutchinson, enslaved in Alabama, told the WPA about Lucy, a fellow slave who “drowned herself rather than let them beat her and mark her up.”

Closer to our time, Black audiences nodded along as Michael B. Jordan, playing Erik Kilmonger in the 2018 movie Black Panther, said, “Nah, bury me in the ocean with my ancestors that jumped from the ships. Because they knew death was better than bondage.”

I’m not sure dunking my head into a cooking pot could heal the overwhelming complexity I and other Black people have with swimming and open water. I feel their collective shame as I blow bubbles into the pot. I can’t hear the birds chirping or the soft whirring of cars outside. Fear races up and down my neurons like a roller coaster. 

“You will eventually become one of us because you cannot stay away from us,” the water spirits say. “Your water spirit ripples in your research and frequent walks to the wild beach near your house. We watch you whisper your secret hopes to the ocean and beg us for answers.”

The water spirits continue, “This is our answer: We choose you as one of our descendants to map the ships where we died and return to the surface to share our stories. You understand that this sacred journey isn’t about achieving a goal. It’s about who you become in the process.”

Gasping for air, I stand up. The fear remains, but a tiny flicker of resurrection sparkles and crackles like the new day sun dancing on the water. 

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This essay was guest-edited by Katie Kosma. Previously an editor with Sari at Longreads, she now edits for The Rumpus, The Assembly, and UNC-Chapel Hill.