Shark Fishing

Abstract

Shark Fishing Allegra Hyde (bio) There was a storm, a shipwreck. There were Puritans looking for a place to pray. A reef—serrated and rising from the sea—named the Devil’s Backbone by those who out-swam the drowning tug of hosiery and buckled boots, the swift darkness in a throatful of brine, who felt the soft footing of a sandy shore. The island they named Eleuthera, a Greek word for freedom. Then there was a cave like a yawning mouth: a home, high-ceilinged, acoustics of the finest church. A rocky pulpit—too perfect for coincidence—a sign to the Eleutherans: a gift from God. The island knelt before them, a blank surface of sea and sky, waiting to be given a past and a future. This is that future: the locals call the island “Lutra,” as if sun and salt could erode letters too. They fish from docks staggering rotten-legged into the sea, their bodies black against the horizon—like human hieroglyphics—and yet, how hard it is to read the meaning in their poses. To separate defiance from defeat. These children of children of children of slaves, shackled and shipped to an island named Freedom. The locals, they speak too quick for me to understand sometimes, their voices like chiming bells. “Dats da ting,” they tell me, dark arms lifting slack fishing lines. “Groupa gettin smalla an smalla.” Before long, the Eleutherans feared they’d failed their maker. The rye they’d planted hadn’t come. Their few spades cracked and split. They sweated, starved, dug graves for their companions. Gripped scripture with cracked and bleeding hands. AFFLICTION IS A BITTER ROOT, BUT IT BEARS THE SWEETEST FRUIT. “Got ’em,” says Nehemiah, reeling in a dripping fish, scales silver. He knifes the belly open, shows me a final rubied pulse. He looks relieved. Remorseful. “Only da old men do da dirty work now,” he says, tossing fish guts off the dock. “Da kids, dey all gone.” The sun hangs low, hammocked by the afternoon. The sea swallows a little more of the coast. [End Page 83] BUT IT BEARS THE SWEETEST FRUIT The Eleutherans begged for help from northern churches, praised God when it arrived—bundled and blessed—on a charitably chartered vessel. They unpacked crates of sugar and salted pork; axes, hoes, and saws; they unpacked munitions and pewter spoons; beeswax candles, starched white linens, and silver sewing needles; they unpacked the makings, or so it seemed, of a bold new civilization. To proffer thanks? The Eleutherans shipped ten tons of Braziletto timber back to Boston. The wood became precious anywhere but on the island. Red-grained, good for dyes and violin bows, its sale endowed Harvard University. I am at the same university hundreds of years later, in a room packed tight with students. I am here to speak of Eleuthera—an island fragment in the spill of the Bahamas—to speak of Camp Hope, our work there, a new era of environmental innovation. I have become like Braziletto: valuable elsewhere. The students shift in their seats. Stare with cautious piety. I shift too, hands braced against the podium, waiting for my words to settle into order, the ones that have ballooned and thickened, made me a new kind of evangelist. “Thank you, I—” But my words, I feel them crowded out. “I—” The Eleutherans. They wander through my mind as if they’d colonized that too. Things disappeared on the island. The Eleutherans never met the Lucayans, a boat-building people who walked its beaches before them, who canoed between coves, gold-cheeked and sable-haired. Who disappeared, some years earlier, when the Spanish dropped anchor and enslaved them all. The Lucayans: the goldest thing Cristóbal Colón could find. The Eleutherans roamed their new home, discovering mounds of picked-out mussel shells, shards of palmetto ware. They found Lucayan axe heads, arrowheads, skulls—eye sockets spilling sand—in the place they’d come to call Preacher’s Cave. The Eleutherans discarded these scraps of the past. Seated in front of my podium, a bone pale girl peers into me as if through water. You’re imagining it...