“What is the point, Marcus?”
She stopped walking. For all they knew, they were standing on top of what used to be a coal mine, a grave for all the black convicts who had been conscripted to work there. It was one thing to research something, another thing entirely to have lived it. To have felt it. How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it—not apart from it, but inside of it.
How could he explain to Marjorie that he wasn’t supposed to be here? Alive. Free. That the fact that he had been born, that he wasn’t in a jail cell somewhere, was not by dint of his pulling himself up by the bootstraps, not by hard work or belief in the American Dream, but by mere chance. He had only heard tell of his great-grandpa H from Ma Willie, but those stories were enough to make him weep and to fill him with pride. Two-Shovel H they had called him. But what had they called his father or his father before him? What of the mothers? They had been products of their time, and walking in Birmingham now, Marcus was an accumulation of these times. That was the point.
Instead of saying any of this, he said, “You know why I’m scared of the ocean?”
She shook her head.
“It’s not just because I’m scared of drowning. Though I guess I am. It’s because of all that space. It’s because everywhere I look, I see blue, and I have no idea where it begins. When I’m out there, I stay as close as I can to the sand, because at least then I know where it ends.”
She didn’t speak for a while, just continued walking a little bit ahead of him. Maybe she was thinking about fire, the thing she had told him she most feared. Marcus had never seen so much as a picture of her father, but he imagined that he had been a fearsome man with a scar covering one whole side of his face. He imagined that Marjorie feared fire for the same reasons he feared water.
She stopped beneath a broken lamppost that flickered an eerie light on and off and on and off. “I bet you would like the beach in Cape Coast,” she said. “It’s beautiful there. Not like anything you would see in America.”
Marcus laughed. “I don’t think anyone in my family’s ever left the country. I wouldn’t know what to do on a plane ride that long.”
“You mostly just sleep,” she said.
He couldn’t wait to get out of Birmingham. Pratt City was long gone, and he wasn’t going to find what he was looking for in the ruins of that place. He didn’t know if he would ever find it.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
*
“Ess-cuse me, sah! You want go see slave castle? I take you see Cape Coast Castle. Ten cedis, sah. Juss ten cedis. I take you see nice castle.”
Marjorie was rushing him through the tro-tro stop, hurrying them toward a cab that would take them to their beach resort. Days before, they had been in Edweso, paying respects to her father’s birthplace. Only hours before, they’d been in Takoradi, doing the same for her mother’s.
Everything was brilliant here, even the ground. Everywhere they went, Marcus would notice sparkling red dust. It coated his body by the end of every night. Now there would be sand to join it.
“Don’t mind them,” Marjorie said, moving Marcus past the group of young boys and girls who were trying to draw him toward them to buy this or that, take him here or there.
He stopped Marjorie. “You ever seen it? The Castle?”
They were in the middle of a busy street, and cars were blaring their horns, though it could have been at anyone—the many thin girls with buckets on their heads, the boys selling newspapers, the whole, entire country with skin like his, hustling about, making driving near impossible. Still, they found a way to pass.
Marjorie clutched at her backpack straps, pulled them away from her body. “No, actually. I’ve never been. That’s what the black tourists do when they come here.” He lifted an eyebrow at her. “You know what I mean,” she said.
“Well, I’m black. And I’m a tourist.”
Marjorie sighed and checked her watch, though they had nowhere they needed to go. They had come for the beach, and they had all week to see it. “Okay, fine. I’ll take you.”
They took a cab to their resort to set down their things. From the balcony, Marcus caught his first real glimpse of the beach. It seemed to stretch for miles and miles. Sunlight bounced off of the sand, making it shimmer. Sand like diamonds in the once gold coast.
There was almost no one milling around the Castle that day, save for a few women who were gathered around a very old tree, eating nuts and plaiting each other’s hair. They looked at Marcus and Marjorie as the two of them walked up, but they didn’t move. Marcus started to wonder if he was really seeing them in the flesh. If ever there was a place to believe was haunted, this was it. From the outside, the Castle was a glowing white. Powder white, like the entire thing had been scrubbed down to gleaming, cleansed of any stains. Marcus wondered who made it shine like that, and why. When they entered, things started to look dingier. The dirty skeleton of a long-past shame that held the place together began to show itself in blackening concrete, rusty-hinged doors. Soon a man so skinny and tall he looked like he was made from stretched rubber bands greeted them and the four others who had signed up for the tour.
He said something to Marjorie in Fante, and she spoke back in the halting, apologetic Twi she had been speaking all week.
As they walked toward the long row of cannons that looked out at the sea, Marcus stopped her. “What did he say?” he whispered.
“He knew my grandmother. He wished me akwaaba.”
It was one of the few words Marcus had learned in his time here. “Welcome.” Marjorie’s family, strangers on the street, even the man who had checked them in at the airport, had been saying it to her their entire stay. They had been saying it to him too.
“This is where the church was,” the rubber band man said, pointing. “It stands directly above the dungeons. You could walk around this upper level, go into that church, and never know what was going on underneath. In fact, many of the British soldiers married local women, and their children, along with other local children, would go to school right here in this upper level. Other children would be sent to England for school and they would come back to form an elite class.”
Next to him, Marjorie shifted her weight, and Marcus tried not to look at her. It was the way most people lived their lives, on upper levels, not stopping to peer underneath.
And soon they were headed down. Down into the belly of this large, beached beast. Here, there was grime that could not be washed away. Green and gray and black and brown and dark, so dark. There were no windows. There was no air.
“This is one of the female dungeons,” the guide said finally, leading them into a room that still smelled, faintly. “They kept as many as two hundred and fifty women here for about three months at a time. From here they would lead them out this door.” He walked further.
The group left the dungeon and moved together toward the door. It was a wooden door painted black. Above it, there was a sign that read Door of No Return.
“This door leads out to the beach, where ships waited to take them away.”
Them. Them. Always them. No one called them by name. No one in the group spoke. They all stood still, waiting. For what, Marcus didn’t know. Suddenly, he felt sick to his stomach. He wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else.