In 2016, Tara Roberts was living in Washington D.C. and working at a nonprofit when she visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture and a photograph she saw there changed her life.
The image was of Black scuba divers from the group Diving With a Purpose which searches for and documents slave shipwrecks around the world. Roberts quit her job, learned to scuba dive and chronicled the work of these scuba divers.
Her book about that journey is “Written in the Waters: A Memoir of History, Home and Belonging.”
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In 2016, Tara Roberts was living in Washington D.C. and working at a nonprofit. One day she visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture. A photograph she saw there changed her life. The image was of Black scuba divers who were part of the group Diving With a Purpose. They search for and document slave shipwrecks around the world. Roberts quit her job, learned to scuba dive, and started chronicling the work of these divers. Her book about that journey is called “Written in the Waters: A Memoir of History, Home, and Belonging.” Roberts spoke to OPB’s Vice President of Community Connections, Shayna Schlosberg, in front of an audience at the 2025 Portland Book Festival.
Shayna Schlosberg: So I’m super excited to speak with you today, Tara. Can you tell us a little bit about “Written in the Waters?” What is your book about? What is this memoir about?
Tara Roberts: Yes, so “Written in the Waters,” it follows my journey over the last 7 years that I’ve been following, diving with, and telling stories about this group of Black scuba divers who dive for slave shipwrecks around the world. It has been an incredible journey, incredible in ways that I couldn’t have anticipated, incredible in ways that are still unfolding for me. It’s really changed my relationship to the past. I have to tell you that – and I always get a little embarrassed to admit this in public – but I wasn’t really that interested in history before I started this book. I am a bona fide sci-fi fantasy girl, yes.
So I live either in the future or in my imagination. I do not live in the past. I am from Atlanta, Georgia, which is landlocked. So I didn’t know anything about the ocean, either. I was not a scuba diver before I started this journey. It all sort of happened, happenstance. It happened because I went to a museum and I saw a picture there and it was a picture of a group of primarily Black women in wetsuits on a boat. I had never seen a picture of a group of primarily Black women in wetsuits on a boat before, and it sparked something for me.
It actually made me remember my dreams as a child. I was one of those nerdy kids who loved, again, that’s where my love of sci-fi and fantasy began, because I used to read books a lot when I was a kid and I love those stories and I love those stories of heroes and magic and adventure and quests, and I wanted to have that experience. But as I grew older, I started to realize that most of the books that I loved so much as a kid, they didn’t have characters that looked like me. So I began to think that I couldn’t have that kind of life.
So back to this picture in the museum. I see these Black women who are in wetsuits, living this adventurous life. I read about them and I discover that they’re part of this group called Diving With a Purpose and that what they do is to help search for and document these wrecks around the world and I just remember thinking, are you freaking kidding me? What? These people are doing what? I want to be a part of that!
Schlosberg: Tara, where did you see that photo? Where were you?
Roberts: Yeah, thank you for that.
Schlosberg: Yeah sure, sure.
Roberts: Because we have to represent, for museums, and specifically this one, it was the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. I’m taking it that some of you have been there, yes, yes. If you have not had a chance to visit that museum, I highly recommend that you go whenever you’re in Washington D.C. It’s an incredible place with an incredible store of stories. It really changed my life, like literally my life was not moving in this direction but because I saw that picture, it changed everything.
The book is about this whole journey, me deciding to quit my job without a backup plan, without funding, without an assignment, and I’m not a trust fund baby, so that was not an easy decision for me to make, but I felt called. The book is about that calling, but it’s also a book about the divers that I dive with. There’s some incredible human beings who are primarily volunteers and they have dedicated their time to helping to bring this history back into memory and they have some incredible stories.
Part of the book is about the divers, it’s also about the ships. I talked specifically about six of the ships that have been found, helping to bring those stories back into memory. And then the book is about my transformation. I go from a person who was a little bit scared of this history to a person who’s now all up in it. Like, yes, there’s so many incredible stories that are a part of this.
Schlosberg: So you see this picture in the National Museum of African American History and Culture and you decide to do what? Where does that take you?
Roberts: OK, I’m going to set the scene for you first. So the picture is on the second floor of the museum. And the second floor is this tiny floor that most people skip because it’s an archival floor. You go there to do research for the archives, but there are a couple of exhibits on the floor. I remember that day. I’m going slowly through the museum, trying to see as much as I could. Oh, I should also give you some context. This happened in 2016. If you can flash back to 2016, it’s a pretty big year. Some big things that were happening on the national stage.
Schlosberg: Yeah.
Roberts: Yeah. I had just moved to Washington D.C. to take a job, and it was a job with a nonprofit. I thought that that year was going to turn out a little bit differently than the way that it turned out, and I’ve been really excited to be in D.C. because of the way that I thought it was going to turn out, but it didn’t turn out that way. I was working for a nonprofit, which was a good job. But I felt like I wanted to be doing something else. That year I really got to see the fractures in our national consciousness and our national conversation around race and I wanted to do something to help heal the space but I didn’t know what to do. And my job had nothing to do with that. They had a different sort of mission and they weren’t interested in changing their mission to match what I wanted to do right then, so I was a little miserable in that moment. I felt like I was out of step. I felt like I wasn’t in my passion, I felt like I should be doing more, but again I didn’t know what to do.
So I go to this museum and I’m really going slowly because of this. I just want to be present to the history that’s told in that museum. So I get to the second floor and I tell you – OK, this is gonna sound, and it is, I’m making this up, but this is how it felt to me – I literally felt like the entire floor went stage dark. It felt like the clouds parted, the angels started to sing and there was like a spotlight on that picture. Like, it was just a normal picture. It wasn’t even a portrait. It was a snapshot of just Black women on a boat laughing, but there was something about them that just looked so beautiful to me. And they looked so free and so joyous that it touched me.
So I sat there probably for like an hour, just Googling them, trying to find out who they were, what they were doing, and that’s when I found out that they were part of this group, so I called them up. Eventually they invited me to come join them. But I wasn’t a scuba diver, so I had to go get scuba certified. And what’s funny, so the women are in this picture, but they are surrounding a gentleman, an older gentleman who I found out later his name was Ken Stewart, and Ken is the co-founder of Diving With a Purpose. So when I called them up, I ended up speaking to Ken. And Ken and I struck up a bit of a friendship because I wasn’t thinking that I could dive, because again I’m not, I wasn’t a diver, but I was thinking because I worked in the nonprofit space that maybe I could help them raise money.
That was my original like, I’m gonna reach out and I’m just gonna try to help them. That didn’t work out because I’m not a good fundraiser. But when he found out that I was living in Washington D.C., he said to me – and Ken is, at the time, he was 72 years young, and he likes to call me by my full name. Ken’s from New York but he’s living in Tennessee, but he’s got this New York energy and he’s like, “Tara Roberts?” And I’m like, “Yes.” He’s like, “Do you know that you live in the epicenter of Black scuba diving?”
Schlosberg: Yeah, everybody knows that, sure, yeah.
Roberts: I was like, “What are you talking about? I live in Washington D.C.” He’s like, “That’s what I’m talking about. All the cats, all the bad cats live in Washington D.C. You’re there with Doctor Albert José Jones.” Doctor Albert José Jones is a legend in the Black scuba diving world. He founded the very first Black dive club. It’s called the Underwater Adventure Seekers and it’s been around for over 60 years. He also founded the National Association of Black Scuba Divers which to date has about 3,000 divers that are members of it. That club was located in D.C. and a lot of the instructors for Diving With a Purpose also lived in D.C. So Ken said to me –
Schlosberg: It’s the epicenter.
Roberts: Yeah, it’s the epicenter for real. So he said to me, if you want to learn how to scuba dive, I will get you in the next class. And so I couldn’t say no to that. I was like, yes, and he got me in. As I got to know the divers, I got to hear their stories, because I was not thinking about storytelling in any way. I just wanted to be a part of the work. It felt like the work was going to do something that just helped to heal the space by bringing this history to light. But as I got to know the divers, and they were incredible human beings, like just generous, funny, crazy, so passionate. Yeah, they were great. I was like, people should know about them. They should know that these people are doing this work. And I was like, oh wait. I am a journalist by trade.
Schlosberg: Right, right.
Roberts: Maybe this is a way to help tell the story. It took me about 6 months, it took 3 months to get scuba certified and then another 4 months for me to have my first ocean dive. When I had my first ocean dive, that was it for me. It was such an incredible moment, and by that time I’d also begun to learn a little more history about the transatlantic slave trade.
And it made me realize that I wanted to do this full time. I wanted to go all in. So I gave notice, again, without a plan. Well, I did ask them first. I was like, “Can I help tell your story?” And they said, “Yeah, sure.” And I was like, OK, I told this to Ken. I was like, “Ken, great, I’m going to quit my job so I can do it.” And he was like, “No, do not quit your job.”
Schlosberg: But you did. I mean, yeah, that was an incredible commitment. And so you quit your job, you get the necessary amount of dives in to actually be a part of the training, or you come pretty close, yeah, I think you missed like one, right? And then what happens?
Roberts: In order to dive with Diving With a Purpose, and the work that they do is called underwater archaeology mapping, so we’re under the water with clipboards, measuring tape, pencils. We’re actually drawing and measuring the artifacts that are on the ocean floor. So you have to have skills that will allow you, you have to have really good – well, actually, how many scuba divers are in the room? Got some scuba divers in the room, alright. So you know about peak buoyancy, you’ve got to be able to stay in one place so that you can draw, because the currents are strong and they will push you around. And marine life likes to come up and say hi, so you’ve got to have some skills in being able to stay.
They require you to get 30 ocean dives under your belt. So when I quit my job, I had a friend who was getting married in India and I’d already been planning to go to the wedding so I was like, I’m in India. I’m going to stay in Southeast Asia and I’m going to get my 30 dives in. I got my 30 dives in there and I realized I don’t have any money. I need to apply for some stuff to get some money in to help fund this, so I started sending out applications and that’s when I saw that National Geographic gives out grants.
I did not know that National Geographic gives out grants, but I think sometimes when there’s something in you that is urging you to take a leap, I think the universe meets you and helps you with that leap. I found out that they gave out grants and I applied. I had no thought that I would get it, because I was a journalist in the past, I told stories before, but I’d not done this type of storytelling. So I didn’t really have reason to believe that I would get it, but I was like, why not try?
Then five months, four months later I found out that I got my first grant and that grant allowed me to travel. The divers were doing work all over the world in Mozambique, South Africa, Senegal, Costa Rica, Saint Croix, around the U.S. I knew I wanted to go all in, like I wanted to travel with them. I wanted to just be a part of all of it. So that first grant got me around the world and I had no thoughts that it would grow, that people would be interested in these stories to the extent that they have been interested, but that is what happened.
After I got the first grant, I was writing blog entries about my travels, but I realized really quickly trying to write 200 word blog posts about the transatlantic slave trade, just…
Schlosberg: Need a little more space.
Roberts: Yeah, just need a little more space. So I went back to Nat Geo and I was like, I hear something, I hear this story, I think it’s a podcast. And they agreed and so they gave me funding to do the podcast. Then we’ve done a couple of films and it still wasn’t enough. I was like, there’s still so many more stories to be told. So we decided, I think there’s a book in this.
Schlosberg: Let’s hear one of those stories. Can you tell us about one of the slave ships that you learned about and followed?
Roberts: Yeah, I will tell you a story about one of the ships, but before I do, I want to give you some context about the transatlantic slave trade, because when I started this, I actually don’t think I’d been thinking about the trade. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, but as I started to learn things, I was astonished at how much there was to know and how much I didn’t know. So I just want to give you a couple of stats, and they’re ones that I share all the time, but I think that they really contextualize the scope of this history, and what we don’t know about it.
The first thing that I learned was that there were approximately 12,000 ships that brought Africans to the Americas, and they brought 12.5 million Africans to the Americas. So 12,000 ships. What I realized is that as I was growing up, I couldn’t tell you the name of a single one of those ships. But yet I could tell you all about the Mayflower, I could tell you about the Titanic. I could tell you about all these other ships that were considered important, but not a single one of those ships. That didn’t feel right to me.
The second thing that I learned, and this is the stat that sits heaviest on my heart, I learned that there were approximately 1.8 million Africans who died in the crossing from Africa to the Americas. We’re not talking about the number of people who died on the march to the boats, or the number of people who died once the boats arrived and they were enslaved. Just in the crossing, 1.8 million people. I was like, who’s even acknowledged that it was that enormous loss of life and then who’s mourning those people? Where are the memorials that acknowledge that loss of life? So that didn’t feel right to me, and it solidified me wanting to do this work and to tell these stories. And then as I started to learn more about the stories of the ships, I realized that they were incredible stories, and they’re not just stories of death or stories of trauma and tragedy, they’re also inspirational stories. So one story – that was such a long preamble, I’m a bit of a rambler that goes around the boat.
Schlosberg: It’s needed, no.
Roberts: So one ship, it’s the most recent ship that was found, is called the Clotilda. Has anybody heard about the Clotilda? A couple of folks, yeah. The Clotilda was found in 2019 and it was found off the coast of Mobile, Alabama. So this is a U.S. ship, and it is a fascinating story and it’s fascinating on two levels. On a story level – well, it’s all story – but on a people level, I should say, and on an archaeological level, the Clotilda is the only ship that has been found so far intact. So it is intact.
Most of the ships that have wrecked, wrecked in the ocean, and when they wrecked, they splintered. And then the ocean reclaimed them over decades, over centuries, so they’re in pieces, they’re covered with coral, they’re very hard to find, hard to see. But the Clotilda sunk in the Mobile River, which is a muddy river and so the mud served to preserve the ship, so it is the only ship that literally tells you exactly what the dimensions were and you can see them – well you can’t really see them yet because it’s still underwater, but like, it’s the actual artifact. It’s undeniable. It’s an incredible piece of history, that’s one piece that makes it an incredible story. But the people part of Clotilda is also an incredible story.
Schlosberg: Brace yourselves.
Roberts: The ship set sail in 1860. And it set sail because a shipyard owner or shipbuilder in Mobile, Alabama, made a bet that he could build a ship, sail it to Africa, fill it with captive Africans, bring them back to enslave them. In 1860, the slave trade was illegal, so this would be an illegal voyage. It was still legal, slavery was still legal, but it was illegal to bring captive Africans to the Americas at this point. But he makes this bet. And he does it. He builds a ship. He chooses a captain. It sails to Benin in West Africa. The captain chooses 110, he chose more, but 110 people made it onto the boat. He sails it back to Mobile and he takes them off. They avoid detection by the forces that were patrolling the oceans. He gets it into the Mobile River. He takes the people off of the boat. They hide them in the swamp for about two weeks to avoid detection, and he burns the ship so that it will sink in the river, thinking that that is the way to get rid of the evidence.
Of the 110 people, the majority of them are distributed to the financial backers of the Clotilda, so they’re enslaved elsewhere, but 32 of them are kept in Mobile, Alabama by this shipbuilder. They are enslaved on his plantation. 1860. 1865 comes, it’s a Civil War, and so these 32 people are freed. Immediately those 32 people wanna go home, but they can’t go home, but they make a pact with each other and they decide that they’re gonna work as hard as they can. They’re going to save up their money collectively and they’re gonna buy land and they’re gonna bring Africa to the Americas. So they do this. It takes them nine years and they save up $300 and they buy 57 acres of land in Mobile, Alabama, and they christen this land Africatown.
The 32 people move onto this land, they marry, they have children, their children have children, their children’s children have children. They begin to build a thriving community and then more and more people from elsewhere start to move into the community as well. Soon the community has schools, it has churches, it has businesses, it has cemeteries, it is a full-fledged community. By the 1960s there are close to 20,000 people living in Africatown. The amazing thing about this story is that Africatown still exists today in Mobile, Alabama, and those descendants of the original 32, they know the stories of their ancestors. They’ve preserved those stories and they have nothing but pride in their ancestors’ stories.
Before this, I was a little afraid of this history because it felt hard and it felt painful. I didn’t want to know my own ancestors’ history because I just felt like it was too much. But after meeting the descendants of the Clotilda, and hearing them talk about their ancestors, it actually gave me courage to be able to search out my own ancestors’ stories. I remember one guy, this guy named Jeremy, whose ancestor, his name was Poli, and what he knew about Poli was that Poli loved to garden. So this is his great, great grandfather. And Poli was a big gardener in the town and had this huge, beautiful garden with vegetables and flowers and Jeremy loves to garden too. And so he’s like, I got that trait from my grandfather.
I don’t know if you know this, but most African Americans cannot trace our history back, and I know that that is the case for other groups as well. There are breaks in history that make those records hard to retrieve. For African Americans, the census did not keep identifying details of enslaved people until 1870, so anything before that is really hard to find. Most of us don’t know these kinds of stories of our ancestors. But to have a group that knows that, that is proud, they can say, my ancestor built this church. My ancestor did this thing, it’s incredible. So I think that Clotilda is a beautiful, beautiful story for African Americans who will never be able to trace back, but who can imagine that this is the kind of way that you can connect with your ancestors. So I just think Cotilda is a beautiful story.
Schlosberg: In the absence of that connection, that ancestral connection, you kind of seek that out for yourself, but I’d love if you could, what comes up for me is just the healing and healing throughout the book and the reclamation of history as critical to that healing. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Roberts: One thing that I try to do in the storytelling that I’ve been doing, from the podcast to the films to the book, is to not center the storytelling inside of the trauma. I mean, it’s important to acknowledge, the transatlantic slave trade was not a beautiful moment in human history. So that’s important to acknowledge, but there’s also an opportunity, I think, to approach it from an honoring lens, from a healing lens. What we try to do, or what I try to do throughout all of this storytelling is, and this comes up a lot in the podcast, is to speak their names.
Like those 1.8 million people were people. They were individuals. They were mothers, fathers, they were sons, daughters, maybe they were mathematicians, poets, farmers, they were people whose stories deserve to be heard. And while I’ll never know the names of all of them, what I try to do is to humanize, to reduce this to a human scale so that we can wrap our arms around it, and see that these stories again, they are not just about death and trauma and tragedy, they’re also about survival and resilience and creativity and ingenuity.
They’re about the complexity of being human in this world, but there’s a way in which we talk about the slave trade and it’s so flat. It’s a complex piece of history. We try to bring some complexity to it and I hope, like you’ve read the book, I hope it doesn’t, like you can tell them. Don’t take my word from it, but it doesn’t feel two dimensional.
Schlosberg: No, and I mean I think what’s so critical, too, is you’re the one telling the story and you’re collaborating with other Black archaeologists, other historians, and maybe you can talk about that a little bit too, the importance of who is telling the story. There’s a quote that you return to, from the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and she says, “Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter,” and that comes up a couple times, so who tells the story really colors that complexity, and I’d love if you could talk about that too. And just the start, like I was really struck too by how few Black archaeologists there are and like how just the ripple effect of that in our entire understanding of that history.
Roberts: The stat is that less than 1% of archaeologists are Black. I didn’t say this too, but of the 12,000 ships that traveled across the Atlantic, they estimate that approximately 1,000 of them wrecked and to date less than 20 have been found and properly documented. Part of that I think is because, well, I mean they’re hard to find, so that is one part of it. It literally takes a lot of effort to find these ships, but I also think that there hasn’t been as much interest in recovering that part of history. And that’s partly because I think there’s less representation in the field.
So to have Black archaeologists who are a part of this work I think helps and makes a difference. I actually posed that question to a number of the Black archaeologists to say, well, what difference does it make? What do you think, why do you think it makes a difference? And one said something to me that has stuck with me and it feels right. She said it’s because we ask different questions. And I think that feels fair. And she said something that really resonated with me as well. She was like, I’m not interested in how they died. I’m interested in how they lived.
And so we’re covering those stories. It’s a different emphasis. What I try to do in the book is to tell the stories from different perspectives because there’s also not one Black viewpoint of this. You know it’s not just Black and it’s not just white. It’s complex history, with a lot of different levels and perspectives. I even try to tell the story through the point of view of the ship. You think about what the ships held. They’ve got their own stories. You think about the coral reefs, the impact of all of these ships traveling across the Atlantic, the impact on landscapes, like there’s stories inside of that. The transatlantic slave trade is one of the most monumental events in human history. It literally shaped the world that we have before us today. Africa, Europe, South America, North America, and the Caribbean would not be what they are today if not for the trade. There are so many stories about that impact.
The book takes you a bit on a travel journey. So we go to Mozambique and there’s a way that a ship in Mozambique impacts the community there, so learning the stories from that community. There’s a Costa Rica story, like it’s all of these communities that have pieces of this history that haven’t been told, haven’t been prioritized, so I try to tell it from a lot of different lenses.
Audience member 1: I was curious. I had two questions. One was about how many of the ships, of the 12,000 ships, do you think that are now as ruins in the bottom of the ocean? And then also, is this information ending up in a museum somewhere or where is it that we could also, besides your book, go and find out more about it?
Roberts: I love that question. They estimate that there are approximately 1,000 that have wrecked. That hasn’t been proven, that’s just the estimate. To date, about 20 have been found, but not all properly documented. Some have been found by salvagers that weren’t interested in documenting them, but now I think there’s more of an effort to make sure that they’re documented properly. There’s a great, great website called SlaveVoyages.org, and the name of it is the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, and it literally tracks every single ship that traveled across the Atlantic.
It’s incredible that there are so many records about these ships. I was surprised to learn that, but then I realized the slave trade was big business, it created a lot of wealth, wealth that still dominates today, so most of the ships were insured. And when they would go down, the financial backers or the captains would file claims because they still wanted to get paid, so there are lots of records about exactly how many people boarded the ships and then how many people disembarked from the ships. So that’s how we know we can estimate the number of people who died in the Atlantic. There’s a lot of good information out there.
Audience member 2: I am curious, as I believe and I know that we are still living in the wake of the transatlantic trafficking that is happening. I am curious what your definition of healing is.
Roberts: That’s a good question. And I don’t know that I have a general answer to that, because maybe it’s different for every person. I know for me, this journey has brought me closer to my past. And again, I said this earlier, like I’d been avoiding that past. I don’t watch movies that deal with slavery. I don’t read books. It felt like too much. I remember that my mother had a picture of my great, great grandpa, Jack, on her wall. She had that picture on her wall for decades. I would pass by that picture and I was never curious about Jack, because I knew that Jack had been born enslaved and I just felt like it was just too much. It just felt too painful.
But when I interacted with the descendants of the Clotilda, and I saw just how much pride they had in their ancestors, it gave me the courage to hire a genealogist and to try to track back, because I was like, oh, well shoot, maybe my ancestor’s a gardener too. Let me, I want to find out something. So I hired the genealogist and we could not trace back to a slave ship because of that issue with the U.S. census. But the genealogist was able to find out information about Jack that has healed something for me that I didn’t even know needed to be healed.
Can I share a little bit about what I learned about Jack with y’all? Again, this is a man whose picture I’ve seen for decades but was not curious about. I found out that Jack – who was born in 1837 in North Carolina, enslaved – I found out that this man managed to buy over 174 acres of land in North Carolina in the 1800s. What? Then I found out, and my family did not know this, I found out that he actually fought in the Civil War. He was a part of the United States Colored Troops. What? Then I found out that this man actually was invited – no, he wasn’t invited – he was chosen to be a delegate to the Freedmen’s Convention. That was a convention that happened after the Civil War as they were trying to determine the constitutional rights of these newly freed people. And my ancestor was chosen to be a delegate for the state of North Carolina. What?
I also found out that Jack might have spent just a little bit of time in jail because he owned a juke joint. If you think of, I don’t know if anybody’s seen “The Color Purple”. Have you seen that movie? Do you know their juke joint in there where all kinds of stuff are happening at the juke joint. But that made me love him even more. I was like, this man is a human being whose story I reduced to just pain and refused to connect to it because it felt too painful for me, but now I have recovered him. I didn’t even know I was looking for him, but now he’s given me a connection that sits deeply in my heart and it warms me. And that feels like that has healed something for me.
So I say that, and I want to share one more story that illustrates healing on a bigger level, because I think this is also the possibility of this work, and I’ll make this story quick. It’s the story of the São José Paquete d’Africa, which was a ship that wrecked in Cape Town, South Africa, and it was found in 2015. When they found the wreck in 2015, they realized that the people who were in the cargo hold of the ship were of the Makua ethnic group, and the Makua people primarily live in Northern Mozambique. So when the team heard or realized that that’s who was in the ship, they decided to take word back to the Makua to tell them what happened to their ancestors.
When they did, the Makua people decided to hold a celebration because they finally knew. They chose a day and they had music and dance and food. And they had speeches at the end of the day. So the Makua chief at the end gives his speech and then he hands a gift to one of the members of the team and the gift is a cowrie shell encrusted basket, sacred vessel. But before he hands it to the team, he reaches down and he grabs a handful of earth and he puts it in the basket, and then he hands it to the team member, and he says to him, I charge you with a mission. I want you to go back to that wreck site in South Africa and I want you to pour this soil over the wreck site so that my people can touch home for the first time in over 200 years. Right?
And the story doesn’t end because they chose to do that. So the team honored the Makua chief’s wishes, and they took the basket back to Cape Town, South Africa, and they chose a Mozambican, a South African, and an African American, all divers, to do the job. And so the three of them, and I understand that the day that this happened, it was very rainy, dark, like it was a horrible day. And they had invited press out, so it was a big moment. They invited all these people to attend, horrible, horrible day. I understand – I wasn’t there, so this is all secondhand, but I believe it – I understand that the sea was rough that day. The swells were high.
The three of them had to lock arms to walk out into the water and not be knocked over by the waves, but they got as far as they could and they poured the soil over the wreck site and then they turned around and they walked out. Everyone says that when they got to shore, the sea calmed down and the sun came out. So it could be that, you know, the wind patterns were just destined to change at that exact moment, or it could be that the ancestors heard, and they were released that day. So it feels like there is unconscious healing that is possible here. There’s a way to face this history, not to ignore it, not to pretend it didn’t happen, but to face it and to move through it so that we can get to a new space. That feels like that is the promise of this work.
Miller: That was National Geographic scholar and author Tara Roberts in conversation with OPB’s Shayna Schlosberg in front of an audience at the 2025 Portland Book Festival.
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