Southern Passage

My grandmother on the beach in Capetown with a dog on her lap and Table Mountain behind her

Some knots are tied deliberately: deft movements and steady hands secure cords cut from identical fibers; make them one.  Some people get hitched that way too.  But not Joan.  As the passenger ship rounded Africa’s southern tip for New York, she accepted that her hitching fit no survival book’s nifty diagrams or parent’s lofty ideations.  Hers was the knot tied in frustration, the one worked with furious, exhausted fingers hellbent on making something in this world stick—more difficult to undo, impossible to mimic.  She gazed at the ring on her finger, then through it, to the fathomless depths where her capsized home was sinking over the horizon.  She had met Bill while working as a nurse in Capetown.  He snatched her off the Cape of Good Hope like a kitchen drawer will the button off a back pocket.  But Joan was no button, cute or otherwise—less holy, for one thing.  She was handsome, as that word extends to women.  She smoked cigarettes and anticipated spinsterdom with a cobalt gaze otherwise known only to Arctic explorers seeing their reflections in ice caps.  She never meant to fall in love; Bill was magnetic.  A merchant marine from Tennessee, his Southern sensibilities suited her own; in the eyes of the world, they bore synonymous stigmata.  Both had grown up on farms in worlds black and white and poor all over.  With no eye to a return, she had swallowed his hook, accepted his ring, and followed him across the Atlantic to the New World.

To Joan the ocean was no stranger.  It had embraced her father at Cape Agulhas, leaving a protean memory.  His ship’s disappearance in a storm was one of her earliest memories—the moment seared into permanence when her mother had.  She looked at her own ring again.  The sharks could have it.

The step-daughter of a farmer, Joan had grown up with black farmhands surrounding her; she preferred treating patients in the hospital’s colored wards rather than the white, because she felt more at home.  Still, she saw black and white, and she did not mince words.  Even then, the stirrings of Nelson Mandela and his fellow communists struck  When she and Bill tied their hasty knot and prepared to leave for the New World, a servant of her mother offered one of his children to accompany and take care of her.  She politely refused.

Some knots are tied deliberately: deft movements and steady hands secure cords cut from identical fibers; make them one.  Some people get hitched that way too.  Not Joan.  As her passenger ship rounded Africa’s southern tip, she accepted that her hitching fit no survival book’s nifty diagrams or parent’s lofty ideations.  Hers was the knot tied in frustration, the one worked with furious, exhausted fingers hellbent on making something in this world stick—more difficult to undo, impossible to mimic.  She gazed at the ring on her finger, then through it, to the fathomless depths where her capsized home was sinking over the horizon.  She had met Bill while working as a nurse in Cape Town.  He snatched her off the Cape of Good Hope like a kitchen drawer will the button off a back pocket.  But Joan was no button, cute or otherwise—less holy, for one thing.  She was handsome, as that word extends to women.  She smoked cigarettes and anticipated spinsterdom with a cobalt gaze otherwise known only to Arctic explorers seeing their reflections in ice caps.  She never meant to marry; Bill was magnetic.  A merchant marine from Tennessee, his Southern sensibilities suited her own; in the eyes of the world, they bore synonymous stigmata.  Both had grown up on farms in worlds black and white and poor all over.  With hopes of an eventual return, she had swallowed Bill's hook, accepted his ring, and followed him across the Atlantic to the New World.

Joan's friends had seen her off at the quay, none of them thinking it would be their final parting.  It was only her second time taking ship, but to her the ocean was no stranger: when she was four years old, it had dispatched her father's fishing vessel at Cape Agulhas and buoyed him for the sharks.  Little remained of him but a protean memory, though her mother had identified his semi-devoured leg by a Great War wound.  Joan looked at the ocean again and considered jumping in.  Great whites like jewelry; they might annul her marriage if she held out her finger.  Then she could swim to shore and return to her life.  With a chuckle, she imagined the note that she would leave with the captain to give Bill in New York:

Dearest Bill,

      I've jumped ship.

Best wishes,

     Joan

But her mirth soured and turned wistful.  No.  She was bound for America, where children smoked cigarettes and sold newspapers in the streets.  Where sincerity and civility were hardly found.  Where people had more money than sense.  Cape Town was an adoptive home, but her family had been respected there since the Huguenot diaspora brought them to its shores.  That was centuries ago.  Now she could not imagine calling another place home--even her ancestors' France.  The dinner bell rang.  She watched as the other passengers filed below deck.  Her mother would be setting supper and saying grace with the farmhands.  They would all rise before dawn.  For them, life would go on as normal.  Meanwhile, Joan faced two weeks of ocean voyage, then arrival on an unknown planet home to one familiar face, and finally a harrowing journey from New York to New Orleans.  No normal in between, and likely none afterward.  The thought turned her stomach.  She followed the tired, red sun as it raced the last vestiges of land over the horizon.  Although she could not imagine eating, she determined to retire below deck with the others.  There was nothing for it anyway.  The horizon was too far to swim.  It would be better to try to enjoy herself for now.  And she might have another chance as they passed Ascension Island.

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