TY - JOUR
AU - Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene
AB - “14. brilliant, shadow hued coral” Danez Smith, “alternate names for black boys” “Where the ocean never slumbers   Works the coral ‘neath the spray, By and by a reef or island   Rears its head to greet the day”     F.E.W. Harper “The Little Builders” (1871) “Living Coral” was Pantone’s 2019 color of the year (fig. 1): PANTONE 16-1546 Living Coral emits the desired, familiar and energising aspects of colour found in nature. In its glorious, yet unfortunately more elusive, display beneath the sea, this vivifying and effervescent colour mesmerises the eye and mind. Lying at the center of our naturally vivid and chromatic ecosystem, PANTONE Living Coral is evocative of how coral reefs provide shelter to a diverse kaleidoscope of colour.1 Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide https://store.pantone.com/uk/en/color-of-the-year-2019/ Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide https://store.pantone.com/uk/en/color-of-the-year-2019/ In Pantone’s explanation for their selection, the modifier “living” insists upon vitality, despite coral’s endangered status and susceptibility to bleaching. A lack of color is an indicator of nonviability. We perceive coral’s vibrancy through contrast. The rose-pink-sunset shade needs the turquoise background to pop, to be living, as opposed to bleached, coral. Damselfish similarly rely on color for camouflage: against a sharp white background they are vulnerable to predators. De-pigmentation has decimated the once plentiful species. Pantone’s panel features a fish the exact shade of the coral. Blurred, almost ghostly, its standout feature is a single, sunflower eye; its subtle presence confirms how vital the camouflage of color is to coral’s vibrancy. Living coral is a “vivifying and effervescent” part of the chromatic ecosystem. Pantone updates taxonomic lithographs, like James Dwight Dana’s Zoophyte Atlas (1846) (fig. 2), which also features as its central object a pink coral with multiple branches and gestures towards other aspects of its composition. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide James Dwight Dana, Zoophyte Atlas (1846) Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide James Dwight Dana, Zoophyte Atlas (1846) What is coral when it’s not synecdoche or allegory? Each individual coral is made up of polyps: a type of mouth. Inside are millions of microalgae; they photosynthesize growing over a skeletal structure. Coral is a foundation species, a consortium of organisms engaged in building their own environment; a Zoophyte corps of engineers crafting underwater cities with complete neighborhoods; an evolutionary habitat tailored to schools of fish. Prior to its accurate classification, artists, scientists and the public-at-large found the coral ecosystem to be an incredibly flexible metaphor and image system. In the 1859 issue of The Anglo-African Magazine, Dr. James McCune Smith, the first African American to earn a medical degree, wrote passionately about the labor of what he called the “coral insect” (16): Away down in the depths of the ocean, scarcely reached by the light of the sun, the coral insect toils on through years and years; the insect perishes, but its labors live, and pile on pile its tiny successors continually lay, whilst the years roll on. At length, uncounted ages having glided by, the tiny laborers reach the surface of the sea; the waves joyfully caress the visitant, and the birds of the air rest their weary wings in the same, and air and ocean bring their offerings to the successful laborer; at length, the ships of the sea come, and find a refuge from the tempest men erect their dwellings, society is organized, and the Great Father of all is glorified; --and all this has come from the noiseless persevering toil of the little laborer, only gifted with instinct, in the depths of the ocean. (17) McCune Smith was a brilliant, scientific philosopher. He published extensively, intervening in debates about phrenology, evolution, and racial taxonomy; his complex arguments upheld imperialist notions of civilization on one hand, while refuting white supremacist assertions on the other. Smith’s “misclassification” of coral as part of the insect world results from the nineteenth-century fascination with coral’s seemingly instinctual building. Like bees in a hive, tunnel ants, or badger architects, underwater reefs epitomized the wonder of collective labor. Labor that Smith imagined as silent, imperceptible to humans, and enduring. What color is coral? How does it feel or taste? What frequencies or aromas does it emit? In five sections organized by sight, scent, sound, touch, and taste, I position Black coral in contrast to the white coral that has become emblematic of the reef’s endangered status in a warming world. I explore how the diverse beings that inhabit, examine, worship, and lament coral’s imminent demise manifest affects that must be understood through the senses. Through a submersive practice involving reverie, reading, and visual inquiry, I sense coral’s reparative potential beyond the reef and into communities of color, illuminating coral networks connecting the US to the Caribbean basin and beyond. I delve transhistorically into the art and stories of island and coastal communities that abut or depend on the vitality of coral reefs, such as maroon societies where women traveled imperceptibly between markets and mountains, or Bermuda’s Sargasso Sea. Rachel Carson observed the Sargassum contains a “weird assemblage of animals” not found anywhere else; its plant life possesses an immortality that mirrors coral’s structural longevity—coral expands indefinitely unless acted upon by changes in its environment (35). The accumulative quality of coral’s formation, replication, and reproduction resembles properties that sustain Black and Indigenous cultures against settler colonialism. Frank Wilderson’s poignant observation—“Only Black people migrate from one place to the next while staying on the same plantation”—underscores the need for supple and mobile understandings of Black communion and kinship (140). I offer Black coral, a concept of relation informed by marine geological features, as an alternative to prevailing dichotomies of Black death/white life. Poets and prose writers found coral to be a generative object whose flexible properties made it a useful metaphor for a range of concepts and topics. Submerged networks of coral “cities” first appeared in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture, and continue to manifest in twenty-first century media. Nineteenth-century taxonomists classified sea life as plant, animal, mineral, or an entirely new category of being. Twenty-first century scientists have used underwater recordings to measure the health of coral. How might listening to images or touching samples of coral that appear in the lithographs of natural history tell us something new about coral’s relationality? Thinking with coral is also an environmental call that requires artists to work together with scientists on coral’s behalf. The publication of works like Ann Elias’ Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics and Visual Modernity (2019) and Irus Braverman’s Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink (2018) are just two examples of urgent collaborations between humanists and scientists who care passionately about this complex, beautiful entity. Reefs are not isolated satellites. They are archipelagically linked through aqueous, interactive circuits. By paying attention to coral’s persistent appearance in the writing and visual culture of the Black diaspora, I imagine a Black coral ecosystem as a fugitive network, using an expansive understanding of sensory perception to advocate for blackness as a regenerative intensification. 1. What’s color got to do with coral? Chasing Coral (2017), a Netflix film documenting bleaching events in the Bahamas and Great Barrier Reef, positions coral as a rallying mascot for marine salvation, the twenty-first century’s polar bear. “The coral reef” has become, as Elias writes, an “active agent in threat of planetary demise” (219). Bleaching is a stress response. Pale, translucent coral is still alive, but whitening is the first indication of imminent demise. Coral scientists describe what happens when the water temperature warms beyond that which is tolerable for coral as a “bleaching event.” Bleached coral can rejuvenate; however, given the ongoing circumstances precipitating the event, restoration is unlikely without drastic intervention. Bleached white coral is a key feature in Senegalese artist Fabrice Monteiro’s The Prophecy. Although the series focuses on environmental destruction resulting from oil spills, slaughterhouse runoff, and plastics in Senegal, coral figures prominently in one image. The piercing whiteness of the coral provides the background for the vivifying effervescence of the swimmer who floats in colors that match precisely Pantone’s vision of Living Coral. Each of Monteiro’s photographs contains a djinn: a humanoid spirit assembled from waste materials. Some rise phoenix-like from mountains of landfill. In Untitled #10 (fig. 3), which depicts the Great Barrier Reef after a bleaching event, the luminous veils of color encircling the whitened spirit illustrate the final extraction of life from the reef. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Fabrice Monteiro, The Prophecy, #10, 2020. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Fabrice Monteiro, The Prophecy, #10, 2020. To accentuate its appeal to humans, in coral photography the reef is always juxtaposed with marine blue of the sea. Advancements in underwater photography fashioned the coral reefs as a modern spectacle in twentieth-century media. Highlighting the reef’s color and contrast creates a feeling of pleasure that induces a state of enchantment in the humans who interact with them. Elias notes that: Over the centuries, the stories that were told about coral reefs by explorers and sailors depicted them as sublime and destructive. Tourism, however, portrayed coral reefs as beautiful apparitions shimmering beneath the sea’s surface and “sparkling [with] rubies, sapphires, amethyst, and emeralds.” The preciousness of color has always been essential for communicating the allure of the tropics; the more exotic and turquoise the better. . . .(207) Advertisements for undersea tourism transformed coral’s rough architecture into pirate’s treasure. Other “tropicalization” scenes depict black and brown divers as background, their humanity overshadowed or occluded within coral-centric compositions.2 The above passage is a reminder of how the sensoria of seeking underwater knowledge can seduce and obfuscate the trappings of racial capitalism. The color of coral, then, is of paramount importance, whether as camouflage for the Damselfish, or as a lure for tourists anticipating brilliant blues and sea-life that resembles precious gemstones. If bleached color is a marker of decreased vitality, Black coral resists tourist’s appetite for color. In contrast to the bleached white coral, Black coral is an attempt to sustain an ecosystem of connectivity amid the deep isolation engendered by state violence. If white coral works as a metaphor for the nihilism and destructive impulses embedded in white supremacy, Black coral counters by reflecting inter-cultural alliances formed by far-flung maroon settlements and enduring native presence. It’s an acknowledgement that we can thrive on a shallow roots system like the mangroves fringing what Tiffany Lethabo King calls the Black shoals, an “offshore formation” where Black and native studies coalesce (9). Like coral, mangroves abate severe weather; these are structures to model and mimic. Faced with bleak prognostications and facts—in the Florida keys, 80–90% of the corals are already gone—most coral scientists sound like Afro-Pessimists; their appeals riddled with what Wilderson calls “the grammar of planetary suffering.” I am invested in a poetics of salvage that is sustaining. Expanding sensory perception beyond sight is part of the reparative reading sensing Black Coral offers. Rather than continuing to fixate on the death-dealing policies of racial capitalism and white supremacy, I’m convinced we can learn something from how we continue inhabit haunted habitats. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), when Sethe asks her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, why they don’t move, she tells her “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief.” (5) She stoically refuses to abandon 124 Bluestone road, a house she didn’t build, patently unsafe, but nevertheless hers. In locating a maroon epistemology in Black coral, I swim towards a submerged, diasporic network linked by history, culture, and commitment to ethical forms of survival. In Aimé Césaire’s poem “The Verb Maronner, A Reply to Rene Depestre, Haitian Poet,” the writer/politician transforms maroon into a verb: marronner, meaning to flee, to seize freedom for oneself, and to become through that action the noun, one who has fled, a fugitive. The multifaceted, hard-to-pin down aspects of maroonage resonate with my sensorial imagining of Black coral as a thriving ecosystem, as opposed to one on the brink of extinction. 2. Breathing Coral’s Perfume Bermuda is home to one of the oldest perfumeries in the new world: Lili Bermuda. In between my visits to historic sites on the African Diaspora History Trail, I stopped into the Hamilton store on Front Street. They develop every one of their bespoke scents on the island. “Art reflects environment,” says Isabelle Ramsay-Blackstone, the head perfumer. The scents capture the “history of Bermuda.” Though initially seduced by the rarity and unique top notes of their bestselling Oleander, the scent I decided on was Coral. After almost going nose blind from the aromatic array, I purchased a bottle. The name of the fragrance is engraved on the silver tag affixed to the bottle. On its opposite side, there is a coat of arms featuring the ship Sea Venture, the shipwrecked vessel bearing English colonists to the island. Coral was the first perfume created by the Canadian-born Ramsay-Blackstone. It combines wild freesia, clementine, ginger, and rose. The aerated eau de parfum bears no resemblance to the actual scent of a piece of coral in or out of water. It’s an accretion of the perfume artist’s daydreams: “Coral is Bermuda in the spring, a rebirth. It represents my own beginning in creation—soft flowers, lingering freshness of the creation of the wind, modern but also elegant.”3 Predictably, this description resonates with how I see myself. Choosing Coral only seemed like a choice. In fact, it was a match engineered before I stepped into the store. Lili Bermuda has a quiz you can take to determine which aromas you have an affinity for. Whatever scented mist floats in the air transforms once the droplets land on your skin and the unique ph of your epidermis settles the fragrance. When a tester sprayed me with Coral at the airport, its beguiling odor would not let me go. As I waited for my flight, I kept sniffing my left wrist—the aquatic residue lingered. Even after take off. This affirmed the correctness of my choice. I could wear Coral every day without exhausting its appeal. Oceanic navigators apprehended an island’s presence by smelling it long before they could see it, and this ancient olfactory technique reminds us how modernity has privileged sight over other senses in ascertaining truth. Vicente Diaz’s “ No Island is An Island” draws upon native understandings of diaspora and belonging, including traveling and navigation. Rather than merely dispersal, diaspora can mean uprooting and reseeding somewhere else. I cleave to this take on diaspora, which comes from Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Islands, out of a desire to learn how others resisted settler colonialism’s perception of islands and the people, plants, and animals living there, as fungible commodities to be reshaped or eradicated. Gruesome odors heralded a slave ship’s arrival. To the settlers, it smelled like money, the perfume of the plantation, as sickly sweet as boiled sugar cane. To the enslaved, it would have been the damp of graveyard rot. Or maybe, in the humid, saltine air, everything smelled the same. A piece of fossilized coral has no odor. It’s a preserved specimen of a once-thriving organism. Outside of its medium, it atrophies, becoming ornamental. In the visual culture of the Atlantic world, coral beads and branches appear in iconography associated with African women. Natural history and folklore informed a racialized classification system that “joined black people and coral in antebellum visual, material, and literary imaginings” as Michele Navakas demonstrates in her investigations of coral’s material value as a unit of exchange and iconic racial signifier (271). When adorning the necks of wives of chieftains in Benin, coral beads simultaneously amplified and circumscribed their status, which could be free, enslaved, fugitive, or fungible. In visual representations of coral as an ornament, it transfers its liveness to the human subject it encircles, at the same time, marking her as a commodity. Torn from their underwater environment and merged and equated with black women, “barrel-shape coral beads” became, as Saidiya Hartman observes a “mercantile unit of human flesh” worn by merchants’ daughters from Denmark to Amsterdam (68). 3. Underwater Music If coral smells like a perfume with top notes of citrus and seaweed, then it’s not a stretch to imagine coral’s aural emissions as crackling bacon sizzling in a pan over a campfire. That is the metaphor bioacoustic scientists use to describe the sound of coral. Of course, they aren’t really talking about a noise made by the coral itself, the crackling is actually produced by the bodies of thousands of shrimps present in a healthy coral structure.4 One potential remedy to get fish and other coral denizens to return after a bleaching event—because remember bleached coral isn’t dead coral, not yet—is to play this sound. No kidding. My family doesn’t eat pork, but the sound of sizzling bacon will definitely cause me to salivate. Turns out the sound of frying bacon is also a breakfast bulletin for the undersea world. Plantation owners feared that their slaves had some otherworldly method of communication. For this reason, they outlawed drums. But still, messages were conveyed, plans were made, attacks coordinated. Communication was vital to coordinating slave revolts. Historians have documented networks of communication between maroons and slaves still on the plantations: “These networks were not confined discretely to single islands or areas but stretched to encompass entire regions” (37). Seditious whispers between “masterless types” gave rise to one uprising after another via marine exchange (29). Castaways and fugitives trafficked in rumors. In his 2009 novel, The Book of Night Women, Marlon James documents the spread of slave revolts through Jamaica: By now, the negroes take to fleeing to the hills and joining the Maroons. Maroon take residence and beat the British so much they turn fool. 1734: Rebellion. The backra sack Nanny Town. 1738: Rebellion. 1739: Rebellion. 1740: Rebellion. 1745: The plot to kill all the whites. 1746: Rebellion. 1758: Rebellion. 1760: The worsest rebellion under Tacky___sixty whites and four hundred blacks get killed. 1765: Rebellion. 1766: Rebellion. 1771: Militia discovers a new slave plot and find there be five hundred negroes plotting. 1777: Rebellion. 1783: Rebellion. (261) James is known for his expert rendering of dialect and an acute sensory awareness beyond visual perception. His rhythmic listing of years and the repetition of the word rebellion is evocative of a drumbeat or chant. Each interval escalates. Derived from the Spanish Cimarron, a maroon is an escaped slave who joined a community of fugitives and continued to live in a liberated state outside and/or adjacent to the plantation. Maroon communities were often named after and included female fugitives. In Frances E.W. Harper’s 1871 poem “Death of Zombi, the Chief of a Negro Kingdom in South America” she mentions “maidens” whose “brows” “grew gloomy and sad” as their “young men stood ready” to follow their chieftain’s resolve to live free or die (172). In James’ novel, the group of “Night” women, enslaved women who practice obeah and plan a revolt, view the maroons as uncertain, unreliable, and potentially dangerous allies. They are as likely to ransom or hunt down fugitive slaves as they are to welcome them into their encampments. The decision to honor treaties made in the wake of the rebellions is a matter for adjudication. Those seeking refuge were often vulgarly assessed. Was the man able-bodied? The woman attractive? The harsh reality of life in maroon settlements complicates the celebration and circulation of a term like maroonage, or its alternative spelling, marronage, in critical circles, or the heroic representation of maroon leaders, such as in Harper’s poem. Harper could have picked a leader from the many communities found in South Carolina, Virginia, or Florida. Instead, her epic commemorates “Zumbi,” the leader of Palmares in Brazil, the largest and most enduring quilombo—a Portuguese word for maroon community—in the Americas. Similarly, some US historians have downplayed or refused to use the term maroon to describe groups of fugitives, instead referring to them as outliers or bandits in order to, as Sylviane Diouf argues in Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of American Maroons (2014), negate their very existence. Despite this semantic reticence, Africans enslaved across national boundaries have always seen their fates as linked. Stories of valiant revolutions and resistances from Haiti to Brazil peppered the pages of The Anglo African. According to literary historian Carla L. Peterson: In the history of the African diaspora, maroonage occurred whenever African-descended peoples in the Americas banded together under conditions of enslavement and oppression to carve out an existence separate and independent from their hostile environment. Maroonage points to the precarious position and fundamental home-lessness of blacks in the New World. Yet the communities thus constituted often functioned as temporary havens by limiting contact with the dominant society, negotiating with it on favorable terms, establishing their own core values, and creating their own forms of government and cadre of leaders. (197) In theorizing Black coral, I’m thinking about the spread and sedimentation of revolutionary ideas that took subterranean root and erupted in song, like the carisco of the Virgin Islands, which commemorates the burning of Fredericksted to protest post-emancipation labor conditions. A similar pattern emerges from Marlon James’ novelized litany of revolt. The philosophical treatise on the Rights of Man galvanized Black Jacobins to join in the cries of Liberté/Egalité/Fraternité, but the illiterate cane cutters of the field relied on whispers from the marketplace, the watery susurations of Black coral. Bioacoustics scientists study the soundscapes of the underwater ecosystem. It seems as though listening underwater would distort sound to the point of indecipherability, but in fact, sounds travels faster through water. Rather than slowing transmission, water swiftly conducts reverberations throughout Black coral soundscapes on a lower frequency. In sound studies, timbre is often indexed with color, via analogies that evoke or infer racialized designations. Resistance, revolt, sedition—these words rippled through a sophisticated network, emitting a Black resonance that could galvanize disparate, far-flung communities into action. Historians of the Haitian Revolution have written of the “common wind”: how the ideas of freedom and independence percolating throughout Europe and the Americas incited the enslaved to follow suit. Black coralline networks augment the messages carried by mariners, renegades, castaways, and market women through means subtle and submarine—the sound waves of rebellion emitted a transhistorical echo, an aural aura captured by frantic videographers hoping to translate their message of conservation. 4. Delicate, Deadly Encounters The reality of a coral encounter is much less ethereal than its sounds. When snorkeling or diving in any reef system, it is prohibited to touch the coral. But as humans interact with the undersea environment, their very presence is a danger. The residue of sunscreen, foreign bacteria, the impact of a sideswiping flipper, or worse: those who perch, using coral as footstool while they adjust their mask or go pro. Despite my best efforts to contort my torso and splay my legs while snorkeling in Oahu’s Hanauma Bay, an errant wave pushes me against the fossilized reef at low tide. I instinctively reach out my hand to prevent collision, but the slightest pressure breaks the skin between thumb and forefinger. Following the directives of the stunning safety video all visitors must watch before entering the preserve, I present my injury at the information kiosk on the beach. A conservationist douses my finger with iodine, while the oceanographer, a small brunette with blue-frame classes wearing a khaki jumpsuit with a colorful patch over her heart, gleefully tells me of the ancient life forms sporing into my blood as she swabs. “It’s just a surface wound,” I say. I’m sure I have left more of myself on the coral than I have taken away. Maritime lore is full of dangerous reef encounters. Bermuda is a colony founded by shipwreck. In the Virgin Islands it’s well known that the atoll of Anegada is one of the deadliest passages in the Caribbean. In The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson writes. “Wherever two currents meet . . there are zones of turbulence and unrest” (31). This observation especially applies to those areas in which the Caribbean Sea comes up against the Atlantic Ocean, producing rough vertical sheets of water and swift, unpredictable currents. One such zone can be found in the Grenadines, the crossing between the small island of Grenada and then even smaller Carriacou. Both poet Audre Lorde and novelist Paule Marshall have accurately personified this infamous site as “kick’em Jenny.” Lorde implores: “Listen to the sea drum up on “kick ‘em Jenny” the reef whose loud voice split the night, when the sea waves beat upon her sides.” (13). Over time, sunken vessels become part of the reef that brought them down. Coral polyps expand as wood decays. Aquatic denizens recycle it into undersea chambers. As Carson notes: in these zones of unrest “the richness and abundance of marine life reveals itself most strikingly” (31). “Jenny” is the “channel with the two currents!” Lebert Joseph tells Avatara, the protagonist of Praisesong for the Widow (207). This depiction turned out to be painfully accurate, as I discovered while making the crossing myself on an “excursion” organized by the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars Conference. Held on Grenada in 1998, just as the island was beginning to open to tourism, but still smarting from the US invasion in 1983, in hindsight I’m convinced the local organizers suggested this excursion as a bit of payback against the US contingent of scholars. All of us knew the scene of Avey’s “cleansing” sea journey well and should have been prepared. We weren’t. As an embarkation treat, the young, all-male crew solicitously offered us petit fours and rum punch. A half hour into the “cruise,” all conversation ceased. The inside of the ship quickly turned into a vomitorium. Only then did details from Marshall’s novel crystallize: “She vomited in long loud agonizing gushes” while the women on the ship “held her. Hedging her around with their bodies” they tried “cushioning her as much as possible from the repeated shocks of the turbulence” (205). To escape the thickness below deck, I climbed the precariously pitching ladder to the upper-deck. I preferred to lash myself to the railing, despite the repeated dousing of white spray every time the small vessel angled ninety degrees. Upon arrival in Carriacou, several colleagues made arrangements to fly back on a charter flight, despite assurances that the return crossing would be across “a sea smooth as silk” (195). If the coral reef is a model of cooperative labor and ingenuity, we might consider a maroon village a type of “Coral City” hidden in an archipelago. News, supplies, and people circulated through maroon communities via Black coralline networks. Imagine encountering a fugitive city of refuge on an uncharted island by serendipity or stealth. One such collision erupts in dramatic fashion in the televised series Black Sails on the Starz Network. Black Sails begins as a swashbuckling, mature audience-oriented retelling of Treasure Island, but in its third season, the show makes a sharp but fascinating pivot that culminates in a slave rebellion engineered through interracial, interclass collaborations. While certain elements are grounded in fact—Nassau did once slip its colonial noose and exist as an independent mercantile consortium of pirates, freed slaves, and shopkeepers, until it was recaptured by the British—the series plays fast and loose with history. An encounter between a self-governing quilombo and the pirate colony of Nassau shapes the show’s final season as each community seeks to advance their anti-imperialist agenda through collective interdependence. Several characters abhor or have escaped slavery. Nevertheless they seek to prosper within a mercantile system that devalues human life and labor. Unsurprisingly, these affinities cannot hold. The potential of these Black coralline networks disintegrate between the pressure of an intensifying climate of anti-blackness and capitalist, anti-democratic accumulation. In two sequential episodes of season three, the alternative community of pirates collides, after a suspension in the Sargasso Sea, with maroons. Strikingly, the first of these two episodes juxtaposes the pirates’ encounter with the maroons with the storyline of Max (a biracial, polyamorous, formerly-enslaved, sex worker who transforms herself into a powerful business woman) as a corollary to the matrilineal leadership of the hidden maroon village. Episode 3.3 opens at night on the beach in Nassau. The well-dressed “Max” stands with her lover, the red-haired pirate Anne Bonny. They are overseeing an exchange. Max trades “pieces of eight” “ill-gotten plunder” for 316 black pearls. The tradesman conducts the transaction while she directs women in her employ to provide sexual services. When she asks to review the bill of sale, the surprised trader offers her a place in his employ, tickled to find “a literate negress.” The exchange is prelude to the end of the polyamorous trio that also includes the pirate Jack Rackham. The episode goes back and forth between Max and Bonny’s tearful split and the colony prepares for its last stand against the English navy. Meanwhile, Captain Flint and his outlaw crew are “becalmed” in the doldrums following the previous episode, in which he steered his crew into a ginormous storm to evade capture, like Ahab after his white whale. As dangerous as it was to crash into an expanse of reef, it was equally deadly to find one’s ship adrift in the doldrums. The “Doldrums” refer to an equatorial region of the Atlantic Ocean characterized by calms, sudden storms, and light unpredictable winds. The Sargasso Sea overlaps with the area known for years as the Bermuda triangle. Surrounded by a whirlpool of Atlantic Currents, it is home to a uniquely adapted form of seaweed. According to Carson, it takes approximately six months for plants from Caribbean shores to arrive at the “calm of the Sargasso” thereby achieving “virtual immortality” (37). Fans of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’ brutal retelling of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre from the perspective of Bertha, the mad woman in the attic, would readily recognize the genus of brown seaweed known as Sargassum. Rhys’s title works as a metaphor for stasis and separation, but scholar Aaron Pinnix advocates for sargassum, a “migrating holopelagic microalgae” as an alternative to rhizomatic theories pioneered by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Edouard Glissant, noting “rhizomes connect, sargassum entangles” (425). A ship can be held indefinitely in the doldrums, or be turned far off course. Flint tells his crew: “Since we’ve been becalmed our rate of drift suggest we have a good chance of making landfall on one of these islands.” In Freedom as Marronage, Neil Roberts writes that maroons cultivate “freedom on their own terms within a demarcated social space that allows for the enactment of subversive speech acts, gestures and social practice antithetical to the ideals of enslaving agents” (5). Like coral polyps, these settlements are dependent on inter-cultural alliances to grow, to maintain community in a transitory setting that is resistant and dynamic. Though seemingly disparate, English pirates and African maroons become “entangled” in Sargassum and encounter the evolving, Black coral infrastructures created by maroonage. Similar to James’s novel, Black Sails imagines maroon villages alternately as safe harbors, brutal strongholds, or staging grounds for revolution. Shortly after the pirates disembark, maroons capture them; the first shot of the fugitive enclave reveals a series of huts encircling a half-moon bay. In the next scene, as “marooned” pirates are marched through what resembles a reconstituted African village, they notice maritime spoils: evidence of successful raids. A woman inquires: “which is your captain and quartermaster?” demonstrating her knowledge of pirate hierarchy. She prefers to engage the elected quartermaster, who speaks for the collective, before imprisoning them in a cell with the last surviving crewman from a slaveship. He warns them “death awaits any man who lays eyes on this [secret encampment]” and that the maroons are not above torture via “whatever methods visited were upon their own kind” during their enslavement. The fear that freed men and women might treat their oppressors as they were once injured is one of the reasons US maroon history has been suppressed. The specter of Jamaica’s maroon wars and Haiti’s independence cast a long shadow, especially upon Florida, where the liquid landscape of swamp and mangroves sheltered maroon settlements similar to the one imagined in Black Sails. As the episode concludes, it’s unclear whether this encounter will be an opportunity or a reckoning. The maroon queen and her daughter value the welfare of the collective above that of any individual. The potentially violent outcome of this encounter between pirates and maroons is very much like a ship wrecked on an unseen reef. Rather than mutual destruction, an alliance is formed to gain political and military advantage over the British. Romance between the quartermaster and the queen’s daughter/heir apparent thickens the ties between the two fugitive communities, even as the outside threat intensifies. Although the show’s final plot trajectory predictably devolves into melodrama, as revisionary fan fiction, Black Sails’ halting attempts to portray sexual fluidity, polyamory, and Black radical separatism is compellingly progressive, if unavoidably messy. “Black Sails” refer to the Jolly Roger, the skull and cross-bone standard that rivals the Union Jack; Black coral is the result of hybrid encounters and uneasy kinships with those who build temporary havens with the potential, if not the guarantee, of longevity. Whether by design or happenstance, haptic meetings, a coral scrape, or a castaway washing ashore on a piece of driftwood, invite reciprocal damage, but a single touch can also create ripples of change. 5. Consuming Coral Parrotfish ingest coral, which breaks down through their alimentary system into sand. Strolling on any beach, gazing through a pane of glass in your car, you are benefitting from the waste products of Parrotfish. Humans don’t eat coral, but many depend on its inhabitants for their livelihood. If 80–90 percent of the coral along the Florida Keys are demolished beyond repair, the gulf coast fishing industry, already decimated by erosion, invasive nibbling of the nutria, and unforgiving pounding of super-storms, faces further collapse. I want Black coral to have a reparative potential, but it has a sinister beauty. It remembers the Middle Passage by absorbing “a patchwork of negro bones that reach from Africa to the West Indies” (264). Jason deCaires Taylor makes this patchwork visible through his underwater sculptures, which begin as manmade material and become part of the ocean ecosystem. The largest collection is located in a protected area in Grenada. The sculptures are not carved from coral. One of the park’s intended purposes is to draw divers away from protected reefs and ancient shipwrecks. I imagine salvage cuisine would like to find a way to replicate coral’s chameleon facility on a plate. Afro-Caribbean food culture is already a diverse potpourri of African, Indigenous, and European elements. International fare has always been a colonial by-product, the art of refining raw materials and exporting small pleasures to global consumers. Like the rum in a banana daiquiri or the spoonful of sugar that sweetens Darjeeling tea. In Night Women, Marlon James provides a litany of gastronomical atrocities: They derby-dose you, stuff you mouth with nigger shit and wire it shut until you swallow it… They step on you after the whipping and rub salt pickle, lime juice and bird pepper in the wound until you cry blood. They make one negro piss in another negro eye or mouth. They rub molasses on a naked negro so that fly set’pon in in the day and mosquito take over in the night. (261) James drew sections in this passage from the plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood’s eighteenth-century rape almanac. What I can’t forget from this nightmare glossary is the recipe: “salt pickle, lime juice, and bird pepper.” Salt pickle is brine. The brackish water left standing in Salinas later harvested as salt. Working in the salt flats pickles the flesh. Bird peppers are tiny, red capsicum, commonly known in the US as cayenne. If my comparison of coral’s demise to the onslaught visited by settler colonialism and racial capitalism is troubling, I invite you to imbibe this cocktail: it wreaks havoc on the digestive tract, but it starts the signal fire of rebellion. Through his loose and scientifically inexact description of coral polyps, Dr. James McCune Smith captured the generative aspects of Black coral. He urged African Americans: “toil on, then, and with hope” (17). In his joyous exhortation of hope in a bleak political landscape about to be upended by civil war, Smith offers a submerged, oceanic vision that is strikingly prophetic. In concert with Smith’s sentiments that patience, steadiness, and sustained labor is what’s needed to materialize the Black freedom dreams, Frances E.W. Harper evokes coral’s oceanic activity in her poem “The Little Builders” (1871). Both sense what can be achieved by emulating a submarine network of beings engaged in plotting, planning, growing, and “building man a home.” Harper’s “Little Builders” concludes with the lines “Thus you’ll build the throne of freedom,/On a pedestal of light.” Sensing Black coral is ultimately about faith that despite humanity’s pitfalls there is potential for salvage, and we can learn valuable strategies for coexistence from other species. We have to do more than ogle coral’s chromatic spectrum. We have to emulate its cooperative structure, or mimic the parrotfish by using our appetite to produce something wondrous. If the carcass of a shipwreck can become an undersea condominium for sea anemones, then maybe we can reverse engineer microplastics absorbed into an arthropod’s exoskeleton, and imagine how debris can be broken down by degrees. Black “brilliant, shadow hued coral” can become a vibrant, evolving alternative to white coral’s expiring ethos. 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TI - Sensing Black Coral
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isab050
DA - 2021-07-27
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/sensing-black-coral-VEnqji25pJ
SP - 219
EP - 236
VL - 30
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -