Wakes and Wails
Caroline Giles Banks
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
She knows how to swim. She does not want to swim.
Her hesitation is more than about wet hair. Her gut
feels the diasporic trauma of her African ancestors’
relationship to water.
time-space conundrum
Before 2015 the watery graveyard of hundreds of
slave ships in the Middle Passage was a murky void.
Maritime archaeologists with the Slave Wrecks Project
now explore the ships. Divers—many of them Black
women and men new to scuba diving— touch the wrecks,
bring up mud, wood, iron objects (kettles to cannons) for study.
the past before
Linking these finds to historic records, the teams name
the ships, map their points of origin in Africa, and locate
the slave owners’ plantations. They find and interview
descendants of the formerly enslaved. The Slave Wrecks Project
is more than the history of the slave trade and its material artifacts
It memorializes slavery’s contemporary legacy.
a future behind
Drifting Sands Haibun #32 (June 2025)