Message in the Saharan Sky
Years later Roses would say she couldn’t tell you what happened in Port-of-Spain that evening except it was something to do with the Sahara dust.
In the vast Sahara desert that June, as a deathly virus blew across the globe, gale-force winds whipped up millions of tons of soil, vaulting billows of fine sandy dust to the North African skies and throughout the tropical Atlantic.
For ten days, satellites detected thick plumes passing over Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau as winds pushed pulse after pulse of stained Saharan dust to the west—before moving out over the Atlantic Ocean, across the middle passage, until it streamed over the Caribbean, flushing the skies a deeper coral red at dusk.
Some people said it gave them dry skin and cracked lips. Others said it could stop you from breathing, even send you blind. Not Roses.
There were some things you know in your bones. Dust-laden winds from the millions of miles of the vast Sahara desert were bringing her comfort from a place that nobody in these damn islands in this New World could give her anymore.
It brought Roses out of her house, into her car into the rush hour as if it had the answers to something. People said it made your lungs sick, but she knew it stopped storms. There was one in her heart.
That’s how Roses was trapped in the gridlock of the cars reflecting waves of metallic molten light into the air. A film of terracotta dust began to settle like the remains of fine old brocade on the cars and on the ground.
Roses was thinking things she usually blocked out. The gunned down children, youth boys, murdered women. The slavery legacy so decades of their own masters did to the poor what the colonials did, acting like overseers did.
In that glow she saw her ancestral grandfather on a cargo boat, naked, chained tightly to plank beds, to others, the ancestors of some of these boys, her blood, shackled together, on floorboards that would wear their elbows down to the bone.
Nobody knew where in Africa they came from. People said black people should just move past it, just act like 20 million Africans weren’t brutally shipped to the new world.
But her body bore the memory of brutality, yellow fever, malaria, being thrown overboard, dead, or sometimes just half-dead into watery graves.
The dust reminded her there was a time before slavery and emancipation. When they were in Africa with traditions, languages, brilliance thousands of years deep, with intact souls. Today she came to meet them.
Nothing moved. For half an hour, no vehicle even so much as inched forward. Weighed down like cement Roses noticed sparkles of dust Bougainvillea bright around her feet which drew her eyes upwards. Well, why not; why not try to be light, free of pain that pressed on her like stone. She wanted to fly up to that tawny rosy haze.
Roses thought vaguely of the tribe somewhere in Africa where women remove their clothes as a form of protest. Where their nudity is a way of shaming the people who hurt them. Who shot, choked, chopped, people they love. Who humiliate them. Who fail to protect them. Who eviscerated their hearts.
She took off her blouse. She unzipped her jeans. Took off her bra. She removed her panties. She stood there between the cars, her clothes on a heap on the road. Women in their cars, feeling their murdered boys, children, and sisters, like a slab of cement on their chests (reduced to an annual homicide statistic of 500) saw Roses looking like a bronze nude statue under the Sahara dust.
They too stepped out of their cars towards Roses, shedding clothes and shoes. They too stripped feeling shimmering glittering dust coat their skin. They too wanted to be weightless under that warm fire like a benediction. They ignored laughter, honks of cars, jibes, men’s voices.
They surrounded Roses protecting her, holding one another in a swirling concentric circle. “Shame”, shouted someone from a car. “Not on us”, another said, “on those who have trampled on us.”
The dust fell softly on the mothers of dead boys, children, daughters who married violent men, so it went from rose red to ruby to Vermillion to fire brick red so deep it was almost black. Shame, the women cried, to the Saharan sky, shame.
The raging Sahara dust flew at the perpetrators of violence, who saw with dimming sight the formation of a desert rose, blooming in the desert of perpetual lamentation.