I gave in. When I told Lamin he was happy, not about visiting the island itself, I suspected, but because of the opportunity to escape the classroom and spend an afternoon negotiating with his friend Lolu, a cab driver, over the round-trip price. Lolu’s Afro had been cut into a Mohican, tinged orange, and he wore a thick belt with a big silver buckle that read BOY TOY. They appeared to negotiate all the way there, a two-hour journey filled with laughter and debate in the front seat, Lolu’s deafening reggae music, many phone calls. I sat in the back, with little more Wolof than I’d had before, watching the bush go by, spotting the odd silver-gray monkey and ever more isolated settlements of people, you couldn’t even call them villages, just two or three huts together, and then nothing again for another ten miles. I remember in particular two barefoot girl children walking by the road, hand in hand, they looked like best friends. They waved at me and I waved back. There was nothing and no one around them, they were out on the edge of the world, or of the world I knew, and watching them I realized it was very hard, almost impossible, for me to imagine what time felt like for them, out here. I could remember being their age, of course, holding hands with Tracey, and how we had considered ourselves “eighties kids,” more savvy than our parents, far more modern. We thought we were products of a particular moment, because as well as our old musicals we liked things like Ghostbusters and Dallas and lollipop flutes. We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn’t feel this way? Yet when I waved at those two girls I noticed I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that they were timeless symbols of girlhood, or of childish friendship. I knew it couldn’t possibly be the case but I had no other way to think of them.
The road ended finally at the river. We got out and walked up to a thirty-foot concrete statue of a stick man who stood facing the river. He had the whole of planet Earth for a head and was yanking his stick arms free from slavery’s chains. A lone nineteenth-century cannon, the red-brick shell of an original trading post, a small “slavery museum built in 1992” and a desolate café completed what a desperate guide with few teeth described as “the Welcome Center.” Behind us a village of broken-down shacks, poorer by many orders of magnitude than the one we had come from, stubbornly faced the old trading post, as if hoping it might reopen. A crowd of children sat watching our arrival but when I waved to them our guide told me off: “They are not allowed to come any closer. They beg for money. They bother you tourists. The government has chosen us as official guides so that you are not bothered by them.” About a mile across the river I could see the island itself, a small, rocky outcrop with the picturesque ruins of barracks upon it. All I wanted was a minute’s quiet to contemplate where I was and what, if anything, it meant. Here and there, between the triangle of café, slave statue and watching children, I could see and hear groups of tourists—a solemn Black-British family, some enthusiastic African-American teenagers, a couple of white Dutch women, both already freely weeping—who were all trying to do the same, and likewise enduring a recited lecture from one of the official government guides in their ragged blue T-shirts, or having menus thrust into their hands from the café, or haggling with boatmen eager to take them across to see the prison cells of their ancestors. I saw I was lucky to have Lamin: while he engaged in his favorite activity—intense, whispered financial negotiation, with several parties at once—I was free to wander over to the cannon, to sit astride it and look out over the water. I tried to put myself in a meditative frame of mind. To picture the ships in the water, the human property walking up the gangplanks, the brave few who took their chances and leaped into the water, in a doomed attempt to swim to shore. But every image had a cartoon thinness to it, and felt no closer to reality than the mural on the side of the museum that showed a strapping, naked Mandinka family in neck chains being chased out of the bush by an evil Dutchman, as if they’d been trapped like prey by a hunter rather than sold like grain by their chief. All paths lead back there, my mother had always told me, but now that I was here, in this storied corner of the continent, I experienced it not as an exceptional place but as an example of a general rule. Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power—local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic—on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But power does that everywhere. The world is saturated in blood. Every tribe has their blood-soaked legacy: here was mine. I waited for whatever cathartic feeling people hope to experience in such places, but I couldn’t make myself believe the pain of my tribe was uniquely gathered here, in this place, the pain was too obviously everywhere, this just happened to be where they’d placed the monument. I gave up and went in search of Lamin. He was leaning against the statue, on his new phone, a fancy-looking BlackBerry, with a dozy look on his face, a big, foolish smile, and when he saw me coming he shut it off without saying good-bye.
“Who was that?”
“And so if you are ready,” whispered Lamin, wedging the huge thing into his back pocket, “this man will now take us across.”
We shared a narrowboat with the Black-British family. They tried to strike up a conversation with the guide concerning how far it was from the island to the mainland and whether any man, never mind one in chains, could conceivably swim through these fast-moving currents. The guide listened to them talk but looked so tired, the whites of his eyes obscured by the sheer number of broken blood vessels, and did not seem overly interested in hypotheticals. He repeated his mantra: “If a man reached the shore, he was given his freedom.” On the island we shuffled around the ruin and then queued to enter the “last resort,” a small underground room, ten by four, where “the most rebellious men, like Kunta, were held.” Imagine! Everybody kept saying this to each other, and I did try to imagine being brought down here but knew instinctively I was not the rebellious type, not likely to be one of Kunta’s tribe. Few people are. My mother I could certainly imagine down here, and Tracey, too. And Aimee—she was in her way another of the breed. But not me. Unsure what to do with myself I reached out to grasp an iron hoop in the wall to which these “most rebellious” had been chained at the neck. “Makes you want to cry, dunnit?” said the mother of the British family, and I felt it really should, but when I looked away from her in preparation, upward to the tiny window, I found the government guide laid out on his belly, his three-toothed mouth blocking almost all of the available light.
“You will now feel the pain,” he explained through the bars, “and you will need a minute alone. I will meet you outside after you have felt the pain.”
? ? ?
On the boat back I asked Lamin what it was he and Aimee had to talk about so often. He was sitting on the thwart of the boat and straightened his back, lifted his chin.
“She thinks I am a good dancer.”
“Does she?”
“I have taught her many moves she didn’t know. On the computer. I demonstrate our local steps. She says she will use them in her performances.”
“I see. And does she ever talk about you coming to America? Or England?”
“It is all in the hands of God,” he said, casting an anxious eye over the other passengers.
“Yes. And the Foreign Office.”
? ? ?
Lolu, who had been waiting patiently in his cab, drove up to the shoreline as we approached, and opened the car door, apparently intending to take me straight from the water to the car, another two-hour ride, without lunch.
“But Lamin, I have to eat!”
I noticed he’d been clutching the café’s laminated menu throughout our visit to the island and now he showed it to me, the vital, clinching piece of evidence in a courtroom drama.
“This is too much money for lunch! Hawa will make us lunch back home.”
“I’ll pay for lunch. It’s, like, three pounds a head. I promise you, Lamin, it’s not too much for me.”
An argument ensued between Lamin and Lolu which, I was pleased to see, Lamin appeared to lose. Lolu put his hands on his buckle like a triumphant cowboy, closed the door of his car and rolled it back up the hill.
“It’s too much,” said Lamin again, sighing hugely, but I followed Lolu and Lamin followed me.
We sat at one of the picnic tables and ate fish in foil with rice. I listened to the talk at the neighboring tables, strange, uneven conversations that could not decide what they were: the heavy reflections of visitors to a historical trauma or the light cocktail chatter of people on their beach holiday. A tall, sun-ravaged white woman, in her seventies at least, sat alone at a table at the back, surrounded by piles of folded printed cloth, drums and statues, T-shirts that said NEVER AGAIN, other local merchandise. No one came near her stall or looked likely to buy anything, and after a while she stood up and began passing from table to table, welcoming guests, asking them where they were staying, where they were from. I was hoping we would have finished eating before she reached our table, but Lamin was a painfully slow eater and she caught us, and when she heard that I was not from any hotel, and not an aid worker and not a missionary, she took a special interest and sat down with us, too close to Lolu, who hunched over his fish and wouldn’t look at her.