The ocean is a graveyard, but also a mirror. The ocean does not forget. It moves with memory wave after wave, carrying the whispers of those who never reached shore. Between the Rice Coast and the Carolinas, it holds a history written not in ink, but in salt and sorrow. The Atlantic was once called a “Middle Passage,” but that phrase hides more than it reveals. This was no passage — it was a crossing of rupture and resilience. For millions, the ocean was both grave and genesis, ending one story and beginning another.
The Graveyard We Sail Over
Every mile of ocean between Sierra Leone and South Carolina is haunted by the names we cannot know. Ships like The Hare, The Andromache, and The Chance left from Bunce Island, carrying cargo they called “prime slaves.” Yet the manifests record how many “perished at sea,” reducing lives to loss counts. But what the ledgers call waste, the ocean calls witness. The waves still carry their echoes. On quiet days at Bunce Island, when the tide recedes, villagers say they hear faint voices — a murmur like song. Some call it superstition. Others call it sound memory. Either way, it is history refusing to drown.
Libation as Testimony
When we pour libation water to water we are not performing a ritual of mourning. We are reopening a courtroom. The act itself is declaration: We remember, and therefore you remain. In Port Royal, South Carolina, I have poured libation three times — not out of habit, but as conversation. Each time, I learned something new. The last time, I discovered that a ship named Chance landed there in 1800 with 58 captives from Sierra Leone. It was as if the water had been waiting to speak. That is how remembrance works. It waits for the living to ask the right question.
The Ocean as Mirror
If the land holds the bones, the ocean holds the breath. Its surface reflects us — descendants of those who survived, inheritors of both trauma and tenacity. To stare at that water is to meet one’s own reflection and realize how much of our DNA is salt. Across centuries, communities on both sides of the Atlantic have reclaimed that space as sacred ground. In Sierra Leone, the women of Senehun Ngola sing the Mende funeral song that once resurfaced in Georgia. In the Carolinas, Gullah elders sing spirituals whose rhythms recall the same West African cadences. Two continents, one call-and-response. The Atlantic isn’t dividing us. It’s rehearsing us teaching the next generation how to remember across distance.
The Science of Remembrance
Historians once said the ocean erased everything. But research and sonar now reveal traces — the outlines of wrecked ships, chains fused by salt, ballast stones from Bunce Island still lying on the seabed. Archaeologists call them artifacts. I call them ancestors. These submerged sites are more than relics of commerce. They are underwater archives of African genius — people who carried languages, technologies, and faith across terror and made something new in the New World. When we teach history, we must stop at the shoreline and look seaward too. The story does not end on land.
Libation, Not Lament We pour not only to grieve, but to give thanks — because those who didn’t survive gave us the gift of purpose. Their silence birthed our sound. Their crossing birthed a people who refused to vanish. So when the Gullah Geechee descendants stand at water’s edge and whisper, “We remember,” the Atlantic listens. It returns the echo. The libation ripples outward, carrying word to the other side — to Bensali, to Senehun, to every shore where ancestors wait to be acknowledged.