- Amazing Grace
Richard Oswald’s English respectability was sustained by trading in, among other things, human souls. Twenty miles from the Saw of Lion’s Teeth (old familiar Sierra Leonean landmark, majestic and haunting even to the Portuguese), twenty miles from Freetown, a lush green isle, furthest inland the trading ships could go without running aground; on its mysterious ramparts, cannons to keep the marauding French away: Bunce Island, with its lavish Georgian manor, imitation gentry, formal gardens, and Gullah-speaking rice farmers; where someone’s naked son, someone’s missing daughter, sat chained in circles around practical troughs of rice. Here, no one blew a horn. They slipped through the gate; filed down to the jetty.
How many times had he cast his net in nearby waters; how many times had she gone with her grandmother and mother to gather sweet grass for their baskets? Had never heard of South Carolina nor Charleston; neither, yet, John Newton’s soft refrain nor Henry Lawrence’s name.
Contracted with what grace might they have divined that one day, miles and two hundred years later, their lineage, obliged with Lawrence’s language, might find themselves free to account names and read bitter instruments?
Scott Hightower, originally from Texas, teaches at New York University in Gallatin. Recent poems of his have appeared in The Yale Review and Ploughshares. He is a contributing editor to The Journal.