Page 111 of Good Dirt

A Sailor’s Story

A mong Willis’s sketches is a portrait of an old sailor whom he met during his first voyage on a ship, after his attempt to stow away had been discovered. His grandchildren told their own children that Afam had managed to purchase his freedom from enslavement but had been known to weep at the thought of all that he had lost. A speaker near the sketch emits the sound of Ebby’s voice as she reads from a story based on the anecdotes handed down by each generation of the Freemans.

For most of his life, Ebby explains, Afam had been referred to by another name, the name the oyibo had given him. He remembers being a boy and watching his father and older brothers digging a boat out of the trunk of a sacred silk-cotton tree. The vessel they produced was as wide as their house. They would push off in their long wooden boat, staying away for many days. Going as far south as the coast of Angola, though Angola, his mother told him, was very far away, and teeming with people hunters.

Afam knew he was destined to join his father and brothers someday. He had the sea in his blood. But during one of his father’s long trips, everything changed. The boy was on his way to market with baskets made by his mother when he heard a commotion up ahead. Moving in closer to see what was happening, he saw people being cut and hit and grabbed. He ran back home to look for his mother. He found her outside their hut, bleeding and trying to pull away from a man with a cutlass. She shouted to him. Run! But someone threw a cloth over his head and picked him up. He never saw his mother or father or brothers again.

It was not safe for Afam to go back to his homeland. There were too many perils along the way. He might be sequestered and enslaved again. Still, he could not forget. At night, he dreamed of the people who lived on the far side of the Atlantic, who still traveled up and down the coast as free men. In his slumber, he watched as they rowed their cotton-tree vessels from one port to another, fishing and trading and gliding among the spirits of their ancestors. They were not bound by ropes or chains. They were not stacked, one upon the other, like pieces of wood. They were living as men were meant to live.

After being called by another name for years, Afam reclaimed his original appellation. The ship’s manifest listed him as Afam Efuna, a broken-up version of the name he had been given at birth. Each time someone had called him Paul over the years, he had repeated his original name in his head, and every night he had whispered it to himself and promised his ancestors that, one day, he would insist people call him Afam again. And he would live out the full meaning of his Igbo name.

Afamefuna. My name will not be lost.