The Age of Phillis. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
were there, because
it’s a facility that only has capacity
for a hundred and four.
And we were told
that they had recently
expanded the facility,
but they did not give
us a tour of it,
and we legally don’t have
the right to tour the facility.
We drove around afterward,
and we discovered that there
was a giant warehouse that
they had put on the site.
And it appears
that that one warehouse
has allegedly increased
their capacity by an additional
five hundred kids.
When we talked
to Border Patrol agents
later that week,
they confirmed
that is the alleged expansion,
and when we talked to children,
one of the children described
as many as three hundred
children being in that room,
in that warehouse,
basically, at one point
when he first arrived.
There were no windows.
And so
what we did then
was we looked at the ages
of the children,
and we were shocked
by just how many
young children there were.
There were over a hundred
young children when we first arrived.
And there were child-mothers
who were also there,
and so
we started to pull
the child-mothers and their babies,
we started to make sure
their needs were being met.
We started to pull
the youngest children
to see who was taking care of them.
And then we started
to pull the children who
had been there the longest
to find out just how long
children are being kept there.
Children described to us
that they’ve been there
for three weeks or longer.
And so,
immediately from that population
that we were trying to triage,
they were filthy dirty,
there was mucus
on their shirts,
the shirts were dirty.
We saw breast milk
on the shirts.
There was food on the shirts,
and the pants as well.
They told us
that they were hungry.
they told us
that some of them
had not showered
or had not showered
until the day or two days
before we arrived.
Many of them described
that they only brushed
their teeth once.
Book: Passage
You having the command of my Brigg Phillis your Orders
are to Imbrace the first favourable opportunity of Wind &
Weather to proceed to the Coast of Aff-ica—Touching first
at Sinagall … Now in Regard to your purchasing Slaves,
you’l Observe to get as few Girl Slaves as PoSsible &
as many Prime Boys as you Can …
— Letter from Timothy Fitch to Captain Peter Gwin, November 8, 1760
Middle Passage:
voyage through death
to life upon these shores.
— Robert Hayden, from “Middle Passage”
BLUES: ODYSSEUS
How many sat underwater,
entangled by myth’s past tense,
before Neptune first raised his
beard in the direction of Ethiopia,
and after, Odysseus—
always living—
was saved by Homer’s tablet?
Centuries after that story was written,
in the land of Not Make Believe,
a crew of slave-ship sailors
threw one hundred and thirty-two
Africans into the Atlantic Ocean.
Heave-ho to souls.
And people. And laws. And kin.
But Odysseus lives. He always will,
Our Great White Hope—
before whiteness was invented—
this hero who longs for the wood’s sway.
Despite his tendency to chase tail—
sirens and sundry other
poppycock-drinking girls—
I want to be happy that Homer imagined
a sea housing pretty, forgiving Nymphs—
while somewhere else, a wheel dances
and someone else drowns.
Sharks should pass Odysseus by,
never imagining his taste.
The gods shouldn’t pull at his fate—
now angry, now benevolent.
I try hard not to blame that man:
We all deserve our Maker’s love.
POINT OF NO RETURN
Somewhere on the Windward Coast, West Africa c. 1761
[keep the men from muttering among themselves]
parsing the air’s dying scent the water arms clutching
at mirthful spirit back to this bereft lexicon
dante’s castle on the rocky isle
captured