An excerpt from The Lifting - by Ominira Mars

A few years before my grandmother became an ancestor, there was an unbelievable conspiracy theory floating around about a group of Black people building a ship. It was rumored that there was a “crazy” leader of the group who received divine ordinance after a prayer to their ancestors to begin building a ship that could house all of the Black people on earth. Apparently the ship was being built way before my grandmother was even born. The leader claimed that there would be a “lifting up of the souls of Black people” and we would be housed in this ship. The leader named the ship LG, Little George, after a slave ship that was taken over by Africans captured during the slave trade. The story of the ship is told as the Africans revolting, taking the sailors captive, and navigating their way back to Sierra Leone, escaping slavery. I’ve had the chance to look back on these memories using The Wire but am too afraid to. I am still grieving the memories of my grandmother. Anyways, It turned out that this “crazy” leader was not so crazy. In 2062, a few months after I was born, my mom says she was outside sitting in the trunk of a pick-up truck after tending to a sick elder named Patrice when the sky slowly started to become brighter. An odd happening as it was the hour the sun was supposed to set. She describes looking up to find the sun and seeing nothing but light; as if the sky was being engulfed by the sun. She stood up on the back of the pick-up and as people began walking outside of their make-shift homes, they were, one by one, being absorbed into the light like particles floating towards the sky. My mom quickly jumped off the back of the pick-up as people began screaming and frantically running back to their homes. She ran back to where elder Patrice slept, grabbed me and wrapped me up in a torn blanket, closed the small wooden door to the home, and placed the latch on it.

As she closed her eyes, she explained that the elder began speaking in a calm voice, telling her to be unafraid; that everything would be okay. That we were being liberated. My mom tried composing herself by sitting in a corner near the feet of the floor-bed Patrice lay in; rocking me back and forth. As she became more and more nauseous, she says that all she remembered was blacking out. Here in LG, growing up listening to elders describe the stories of the day of The Lifting, they all describe similar feelings of nausea and blacking out. One elder who spoke in the Giving Circles I attended as a kid describes The Lifting of Black people that day as a slow and painful evaporation of us from the earth. Little by little, Black people around the globe were disappearing into the sky as other races were initially blacked out before The Lifting commenced. My mom didn’t know this detail until waking up on the ship because the community my grandmother found refuge in was all Black, like many of the exiled communities. My mother described the day she awoke on the ship. Lying next to me in an open field full of grass and purple lilies. She turned from her side onto her back next to Patrice, who was still blacked out. She quickly grabbed me into her arms and held me so tight I began crying. Standing to her feet, she looked out into the distance. Everyone from the exiled village in Namibia was there with her, dawning the same expression of confusion on their face, and examining their bodies and the purple cloth they were all clothed in. 

Patrice, who was bed ridden before The Lifting and could now walk, stood to her feet and slowly walked towards a tree in the middle of the field. The tree was enormous with long branches extending past the edges of the field and as tall as the sky. Patrice reached her hand up to one of the low hanging branches, grabbed an apple, with her eyes closed; took a slow and long bite of it, and burst into extreme laughter. Everyone from the village began walking towards the tree and was soon surrounding it; wondering why Patrice was consumed with laughter. The elder lifted herself up to face the crowd. And With an apple in her hand and tears streaming down her cheeks, she lifted her arms to the sky and proclaimed with laughing joy “This is what freedom tastes like! Come taste it! We’ve been liberated! We’ve been lifted!”