Allen Price

America’s Black Atlas

The definition of Americanness
(sadly) remains color for many people
~Toni Morrison

January 7, 2021 marked the 195th anniversary of eighty-year-old Occramer Marycoo, also known by his slave name Newport Gardner of Newport Rhode Island, sailing on the brig Vine from Boston to Liberia. Before his voyage to the continent of his birth, he said, “I go to set an example to the youth of my race. I go to encourage the young. They can never be elevated here. I have tried it sixty years—it is in vain. Could I by my example lead them to set sail, and I die the next day, I should be satisfied.” Almost 200 years later, us Blacks are still waiting to be accepted, and wondering will it ever happen?

Like Occarmar, I’ve spent my whole life feeling unwanted, unloved in my American country. My mother raised me in predominantly white Warwick, Rhode Island so I could get a good education, have a safe and upbringing, but in achieving that, I did everything I could to be less Black so that I fit into white caste America, while at the same time worrying, wondering if I go to certain places will I be stared at, or will someone call me a racist name, yearning, hoping, waiting for white caste America’s acceptance, to pass laws that recognize me as human, laws that white men have, that white men make. The absurd incremental steps white men have taken to give Blacks basic, natural rights that are natural in the sense that their source is human nature, and inherent, inalienable God-given rights by virtue of being a human being. From freely walking down the street to using public restrooms to dining in fancy restaurants I’ve struggled with belonging, feeling as if I’m not a whole man, as if I could be given parts of my body rights and denied others.

Having lived in little Rhody my whole life, my mother took me to Newport many times as a kid to see the mansions, walk the cliffs, and visit God’s Little Acre, a small corner of the Common Burying Ground comprised of three hundred markers of enslaved and free Africans—the largest and most intact African slave burial ground in the country. I hadn’t visited God’s Little Acre since my adolescence, but had this sudden sense of urgency to go—a ten minute drive from my home in Cranston. It was around seven in the evening when I pulled my car down the slim gravel road bordering the gray and heavily weathered tombstones. Leaves on the maple trees were starting their profusion of reds, rusts, oranges, browns, and yellows. Squirrels were scampering up and down trunks, and leaping from tree to tree high up in the canopy. Chipmunks were darting through the undergrowth with millions of other creatures doing their invisible work in the damp, black earth. The orange aurora was descending through streaks of thin clouds. The field grass around the cemetery was straw-colored and quietly trying not to die in this parched state. The salty ocean air was heavy and filled with the smell of summer’s end. Memories of a simpler time in my youth, they gave me, when happiness was easier to come by.

Looking out at the tombstones, I got out of my car, and walked over to where Occramer Marycoo’s wife, Limas, and three children are buried. In 1760, Occramer’s mother sent him with a ship captain who promised to get the fourteen year old an education in America, but instead sold Occramer into slavery to Rhode Island sea captain Caleb Gardner who changed Occramer’s name to Newport. Occramer wanted nothing more than to return to his West African birthplace. Before his voyage home he said, “I go to set an example to the youth of my race. I go to encourage the young. They can never be elevated here. I have tried it sixty years—it is in vain. Could I by my example lead them to set sail, and I die the next day, I should be satisfied.” On January 7, 1826, at the age of eighty, he and his retinue sailed on the brig Vine from Boston to Liberia. Landing in mid-February, they were struck down with “fever of the country” to which they had no immunity. Occramer, his son, and half of his colleagues died in two weeks. Occramer was buried, as he wished, in the soil of Africa.

Was Occramer right? I asked out loud. Should we Blacks leave America? My mind was bent. My spine prickled with unease. My spirit wrestled mightily. Blacks were being shackled and slaughtered as if we weren’t twenty years into the twenty-first century, as if more than four hundreds hadn’t passed since slavery. As if the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act were never enacted, as if they didn’t even exist. After Spike Lee and Los Angeles Clippers’ coach, Doc Rivers said, “We love America, but America doesn’t love us back,” after the killings of Jacob Blake, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and after the man in the White House called African countries “shitholes” then urged America to celebrate the genocidal maniac Cristóbal Colón who raped, enslaved, and murdered its Black and brown original occupiers, I needed an answer.

I didn’t know if I was endeavoring in vain to answer this question by asking my dead ancestors so I sat down to watch nature setting. Here and there stars began to flicker palely in the vaulted mauve sky as the black shape ate its way into the dimmed brightness of the aurora that was darting its dying rays on the shady groves I sat under. A gentle zephyr lent aid to a small blackbird waving at the glittering tides, breathing a serene melody on the bosom of the Bay. Every undulating and rippling autumn leaf on the trees was as harmonious as its feathered wings. The branches danced to the music. The lucid moon discoursed with the sun as it appeared on the horizon. The coat of the briny mixed the elements, and modulated the air with the most imperious magic.

The dying rays colored the water with bright tints of gold, which faded one into another, and when the sun had sunk below the horizon, the ocean turned a delicate purple, then a deep blue before becoming black. Over this dark abode the blackbird took flight to ethereal light safely landing in the trees billowing free. The bird flew high and might over the dead souls of my ancestors who always believed Blacks would one day take flight. Having sailed through life’s tempestuous sea I wondered, why did America have such contempt for my African ancestors? Why didn’t they want an affinity? Every day through crowds of white I winged my flight, scratching to stay alive in a state where my raven race is viewed as an inhuman disgrace, waiting for the day when Blacks could fly high in the white American sky.

I looked up at the moonlight shining with silvery brightness out of the starless black sky onto the curling waves—the stars deader than a defoliated cotton field. The moon forsook the coastline where gentler and gentler purl the rolling ocean. Misty vapors appeared as the bird’s mingled music floated into the light and shades of night—the air unbroken by the brightness of the bird’s blackness. It preened its feathers, and when finished spread its dusky pinions to the heavens. In its sockets black meteorites glowed bright with the intensity of a thousand beautiful destinies. This bird felt more like a sibling than stranger.

Night’s leaden scepter sealed my thoughts and my drowsy eyelids. But like tongues in trees out of the grove came a harmonious whisper. My heart hummed the notes like a seashell with the trouble of a fearful child. The flowing syllables rolled through the vale, through the tunnels of my despair. At the peak of its ascent, joy bursts like the aurora. My mind drifted off and thought about my years as a black man shackled in whiteness. How I roamed this country land in fear of its slave history, its racist terrorism, its privileged European settlers who define Blacks inalterable flesh, bone, inner makeup, which can only be ascribed by nature, as subhuman, and deem it acceptable, forgivable by God to chain a Black man to a pickup truck and drag his body for four and a half miles along an asphalt road before dumping the torso severed of its head in front of a Black cemetery. But always feeling nature embracing me with the warmest of welcomes. This unearthly whisper soothed this Black man’s sorrows in that hour, and reminded me that my voice is the freedom of my African ancestors who were jailed down to build up the American landscape, who found solace in the voice of nature, which is never silent in the heart of its mother.

I laid down on the grass thinking—what was it in the contemplation of this whisper that gave me such solace? I could have fancied it to have been the murmur of one who in his mortal state had lived, but now haunted the place he once reveled, or suffered. As I pondered in silence, lingering long, I looked out with a kindling glance upon the liquid plain, and saw the bird with a delighted mien flying towards me. The augury bird sat on the gravestone of Occramer’s wife. A midnight daydream I must’ve been having because as I stared at it I saw my slaved ancestor’s victory deferred and wavering. I saw us fighting on the battlefield of humanity for the souls of Black folk, our cause advancing. The stillness of the air stirred with rapture, vanished joy of years in bondage recaptured, and our victory the triumph of the spirit over matter.

When this vista ended, the feathered warbler flying off in the distance, I felt an intense feeling of aliveness—my black consciousness connecting, merging with nature’s. This soul-shaking moment taught me to look through the lens of my negritude, my African ancestors, and see white America’s knee on the neck of Black consciousness, taught me that my negritude is nature, the land on which America was founded, impossible from to be separated.

My negritude reaches deep down into the brown flesh of the ground, deep into the flesh of the black sky. America’s atlas is colored with the spilled blood of my African ancestors. In the trees of our hands lay bare the wounds cut in the trunks. Our fear still crouched in the ravines, in the tall meads, on the zephyr’s wings, perched high up in the trees, adrift in the atmosphere of this celestial sphere. My negritude spouts from fumaroles, swims in the ocean’s pools. In its highest boughs it rustles, and in the soil where my ancestors are buried, its roots nestle. My negritude is the earthiest of the earth, the lifeblood of this part of the planet for without it the world would not be the world because it is us who built it. For centuries nature witnessed it. In its memory are Negro Spirituals sung in its cotton fields, runaway slaves trekking through its streams, Negro blood running in its rivers, Black corpses on its shores, hanging in its trees, floating in its seas, and forever are the screams in its silent currents of Africans thrown off of slave ships. Even its riverbeds are covered with death’s-heads. For there isn’t a corner of America’s atlas where the grass, trees, water lilies grow without a piece of my Black race growing inside of it.

Allen M. Price’s essay, ‘Black Landscapes Matter‘ is a 2023 Pushcart Prize nominee by upstreet, as his essay ‘This is my American Country‘ in Zone 3.  His essay ‘The Jailed Down Negro’ was a finalist in Blue Mesa Review’s 2021 Nonfiction Summer Contest. His essay ‘Antebellum Redux‘ was a finalist in the 2022 Dogwood Literary Prize in nonfiction. His fiction and nonfiction work appears or is forthcoming in North American Review, Post Road, The Masters Review, Terrain.org, Shenandoah, Hobart, Transition Magazine, Entropy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Juked, River Teeth, The Fourth River (chosen by guest editor Ira Sukrungruang), Jellyfish Review, Bayou, Sou’wester, Cosmonauts Avenue, Gertrude Press, The Saturday Evening Post, among others. An excerpt of his screenplay appears in The Louisville Review. His chapbook ‘The Unintended Consequences of Haitian Reparation‘ appears in Hawai’i Review. He has an MA in journalism from Emerson College. His favorite sweet is white chocolate macadamia nut cookies.