A Name that’s Writ on Water: Walter Tull’s Grandmother

Walter, you were born one year after the Jubilee,

Queen Victoria’s that is, in 1887,

Not the biblical Jubilee,

With its trumpet of freedom for enslaved people;

Your mother, daughter of a Kentish farmer,

Your father, a carpenter from Barbados,

Finding work in maritime Folkestone,

Telling you tales of his mother,

Your grandmother,

Enslaved on sugar plantations in Barbados

(Until emancipation when Victoria came to the throne);

Your father singing enslaved songs of bondage and Jubilee,

While you gazed out to sea and kicked pebbles for comfort,

Assuaging the despair you felt at hearing the tales,

Of your ancestors once manacled and chained,

Standing in despair at The Door of No Return;

The tales of slave cargo thrown overboard to lighten the load,

And feed the sharks following in the wake,

In the wake of the Middle Passage,

While you kicked stones into the sea,

As the Wind Rushes past,

Ruffling the wake,

Of a woman’s name, writ on water.