Near the mouth of Dunbar Creek on Georgia’s St Simons Island, there’s a section of swampy marshland known as “Ibo Landing” where some fishermen refuse to cast their lines. In the daytime, it doesn’t look any different from the other vast marshes stretching across Georgia’s coastal islands. Elongated white herons call to one another over the endless plain of reeds and mosquito infested marsh grasses. Fiddler crabs scurry across the sands. Unseen creatures plop into the black waters.
But when night falls, it is said that one can hear a different sound entirely. Swamps are known to make strange sounds at night. But if you listen closely, you may hear what sounds like the faint rattling of chains drifting across the marsh, followed by an eerie chant: “The water brought us the water will take us away.”
If you think your ears are deceiving you, think again. For the old timers in the area will tell you what you’re hearing is the brave warrior Oba, leading his people on their final march home.
Oba, as you may have guessed, is an African name. So our story begins in early nineteenth century Africa – the coast of West Africa to be exact, in the country now known as Nigeria. It is in the southeastern part of this country that the Igbo tribe lives, and has lived for hundreds of years (also known as the Ibo or Ebo tribe) . Early European explorers once called them “savages,” but the Igbo people were anything but. They were spiritual, highly intelligent people well trained in the arts of agriculture, education and war. They tamed miles of tropical rain forests and coastal swampland into cultivable fields and wealthy cities. In fact, the Europeans found that there was little they could trade with the Igbo tribe that they couldn’t produce themselves.
Oba lived deep within the interior of Iboland in a village founded years before by his great-grandfather. Oba was the proud father of two sons, with a third child on the way. He was tremendously excited about the new arrival, and even talked to the unborn child in his beautiful wife’s womb. For the Igbo people believed that the dead and the unborn were always present in their daily lives, and that their homeland was holy ground that they could never leave.
As a hunter and a warrior, Oba was one of the most respected and relied upon members of his village. For it was his job to protect the village from enemies, both human and animal. Oba wore his responsibilities proudly, adorning his body with beautiful emblems that reflected his power and status.
Early one morning, Oba prepared to leave on a hunt with some other men from the village. As he sharpened his arrows, he suddenly heard the voice of his unborn child, whispering cryptically…
“The waters will bring you back to us.”
Startled, Oba looked back at his wife, still sleeping on their bed. “What does that mean?” he quietly replied in her direction.
Again, the unborn child whispered, “The waters will bring you back to us.”
Oba thought about this strange message for a moment, then shook it off. Maybe my unborn child thinks I’m traveling by canoe on this hunt, he thought. But he wasn’t – he was traveling on foot.
Oba told his two sons to help their mother with the daily chores, then tenderly kissed his wife goodbye. “I’ll be home soon,” he said with a smile. Then he confidently walked away.
Hours later, Oba found himself alone in the vast grasslands. In the distance, he spotted a herd of antelopes grazing peacefully, oblivious to his presence. Oba crept closer to the herd, stealthily removed his bow and arrow, and aimed.
In a flash, the antelope suddenly scattered. Oba watched them run away in disbelief. He had been as quiet as the wind, just as he always was. What caused the antelope to run?
Without warning, something hard struck him on the back of the head. He crashed to the ground, his head throbbing with pain. As he tried to get up, he was struck again across the face, this time by something that felt like a fist. He could hear excited voices swarming around him. Then two strong men lifted him to his feet, holding his arms behind his back. Too delirious to fight, Oba offered little resistance as the men tied him up tightly in a grass rope and shackled his ankles and neck.
As his eyes clouded with blood from the deep gash on his head, Oba could see that his captors were rival tribesmen, gleeful at their fine catch. One of them yanked on a chain attached to his neck shackle, dragging Oba through the grasslands like a dog.
Oba’s captors dragged him miles away from his village. The rope and shackles dug into his skin, and the neck shackle made it difficult to swallow or breathe. But the most intense pain came from the helplessness he felt. For Oba knew that other invaders must be close to his family, and there was nothing he could do to protect them. The thought of his wife and children in shackles made his blood run cold. He shook it off, thinking desperately about escape.
Hours later, they reached the wide banks of the monstrous Niger River. Other enemy tribesman had gathered there with similar “catches” of all ages, many weak and malnourished. Oba’s spirits lifted briefly, until he realized that his family wasn’t among the captured. Some captives he knew by sight, others he had never seen before.
The captives were thrown into waiting canoes and paddled down the mighty Niger. Oba writhed in pain on the dirty, water-soaked floor, covered in sores, intense pain shooting up his back. He watched the wispy clouds drifting through the hot African skies above him, and prayed silently to the spirits of his ancestors to watch over his family.
Oba had drifted off to sleep before he was suddenly awakened by a tremendous commotion. Night had fallen, and the canoes were docked in what Oba guessed was a large river village. His captors suddenly yanked him to his feet and ordered him and his fellow captives onto the dock.
As he stood upright, Oba’s jaw dropped. They had landed in a bustling coastal town on the banks of a vast ocean. Tall masted merchant ships, bigger than anything Oba had ever seen, were lined up on the dock.
From out of nowhere, a group of white skinned beings suddenly surrounded Oba, inspecting him carefully. Oba had heard about these white beings before, but this was the first time he had seen them in the flesh. With their cold eyes, angry mannerisms and colorful, otherworldly garments, they didn’t look like human beings at all, but white monsters that had come to terrify him. What were they doing here?
One of these white monsters suddenly nodded, and Oba was dragged to an area near the ships. He was humiliatingly held down, stripped of his clothes and proud adornments, and shaved from head to toe. Oba screamed with pain as a white monster stuck him with a red-hot iron, branding a strange symbol into his skin. He was then lead down into the dark bowels of a waiting ship, where he was chained to a rack and left.
Oba squinted through the darkness. He could make out hundreds of other eyes staring back at him, filled with the same unspeakable fear. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the hold was filled with other Ibos from across Iboland – men, women and children of all ages, shackled together in pairs onto racks. No one spoke, afraid of what the white monsters might do next.
The large boat suddenly lurched into the water, its massive wood frame moaning and creaking. The captives were tossed back and forth, some screaming and crying. But Oba could only stare into the darkness, a horrifying thought chilling him to the core. For he felt in his heart that he might never see his family, his ancestors or his homeland again.
Weeks went by, and the massive boat lurched across the storm swept seas. Fearful of the boat collecting water, the white sailors closed off nearly all of the air openings below, turning the hold into a hellish world of disease, bodily waste and death. The stale air below was so rank that the candles wouldn’t remain lit. Food and water were scarce. Many Ibos died quietly in the foul darkness.
The sick and the dying were thrown overboard. The others were occasionally taken up to the deck to dance for the amusement of the sailors, who played strange musical instruments with strings and a stick. As they danced, the Ibos could see swarms of sharks in the waters below, eagerly waiting for the next captive to be tossed over the side.
Some Ibos attempted suicide by rubbing their wrists against their shackles until they bled to death. Others thought of mutiny, but were terrified of being severely beaten.
But Oba somehow kept his head, for he had become something of a leader while on the boat. For the Ibo children who had been torn from their families, Oba provided a smile, a knowing wink and, when the white sailors weren’t looking, words of comfort when needed. When rival tribesmen turned on each other, Oba was the mediator. When desperate captives thought about suicide, Oba reminded them of the inner strength that all Ibos shared.
But Oba’s thoughts were always with his family. He wondered if his wife and child were crossing the water on similar boats, destination unknown. No matter how hard he tried to shake these thoughts off, they nagged him day and night. Sometimes, under cover of darkness, Oba would cry silently to himself.
But then he would hear a faint whisper – the same cryptic whisper he heard as he was sharpening his arrows that morning before the hunt. It was his unborn child telling him:
“The waters will bring you back to us.”
As the weeks passed, his unborn child’s voice was the only comfort Oba had. Oba still wasn’t sure what this message meant. But he felt that it wouldn’t be long before he found out.
One evening, the Ibo captives were suddenly awakened by an explosion of activity on deck. Though they could not understand what the white sailors were saying, they noticed that the boat had slowed, and some sort of landing preparations were underway. After three torturous months, they would finally be able to disembark. But where would they be?
The white men gruffly unchained the captives from the racks and shoved them up on deck. In the bright moonlight, Oba could see that they were drifting down what looked to be a creek of some sort. He also noticed that the white men’s voices had suddenly become hushed and anxious.
The boat finally came to rest on a bluff near the end of the creek. The plank was gently lowered and, one by one, the terrified Ibos were marched into the black night, their ankles shackled together. They shivered as the cold, muddy soil of this alien land squished under their bare feet.
Oba could now see that they had landed in some sort of salt marsh ribboned with tidal creeks. Rustling palm tree fronds and Spanish moss filtered soft streams of moonlight down onto the black waters. In the stillness, Oba could hear the eerie sounds of night birds calling one another, crickets and frogs chirping in the grass, unseen creatures splashing into the water. The air was thick with the salty smells of the sea.
This new world, in fact, felt like the Niger Delta marshland back home. Oba suddenly had a glimmer of hope. After all that time, had they turned around and returned to Africa?
Then the glow of pine torches emerged from the black forest, and Oba could see that they belonged to more white people, their garments as strange as those on the white merchants back home. In hushed tones, they closely inspected the Ibo captives – pinching them, prodding them, stripping them of their clothes. Liking what they saw, these new white people produced wads of money and bartered with the sailors.
Now Oba realized the horrible truth: he and his people were being sold into slavery. This wasn’t a strange idea to him – his village back home had used prisoners of war as slaves before. But what lay in wait for them deep within this black, alien swamp?
Oba looked into the eyes of his fellow captives. Some were vacant and weary, others wide with terror. Some captives even flashed sparks of humiliation and anger. They all seemed to know that their fate had been sealed – that they would spend the rest of their lives enslaved to these brutal white monsters, in a world they could never hope to understand.
Again, Oba thought of his family back home, both above and below the earth. He took some comfort in knowing that, as all Ibos believed, his soul would one day return to Iboland upon his death. But his soul could not return while his living body remained in the white man’s world. Besides, he thought, the white man does not deserve to reap the fruits of my labor.
It was then that Oba again heard the voice of his unborn child, this time booming through his ears:
“The water will bring you back to us! The water will bring you back to us!”
Oba suddenly understood what his unborn child was trying to say. As the white people hastily negotiated with one another, Oba leaned over and whispered something into the ear of the captive next to him, who in turn passed it down the line. All looked back in agreement with Oba – men, women and children, some with tears in their eyes. And as they slowly turned together and walked away from their captors, they began to softly chant the words that Oba had whispered to them:
“The water brought us the water will take us away.”
Up on the ship, a white sailor suddenly noticed what was going on. He rushed to the side and looked down upon the Ibos, walking hand in hand into the black water, their shackles clanking around their ankles.
“They’re walking into the water!” he screamed.
The other sailors snapped to attention and ran after the Ibos, sloshing blindly through the dark marsh. They pointed guns in their direction and ordered them to stop. But the Ibos kept walking deeper and deeper into the water, their eerie refrain growing louder and louder:
“The water brought us the water will take us away.”
Oba placed his hand down the head of a young boy about his son’s age who had been ripped away from his parents. There was no fear in the boy’s eyes, only a defiant certainty. The two smiled at one another as the waters rose to swallow them, their loud voices trailing off behind them:
“The water brought us the water will take us away.”
Within seconds, the rattling of the chains stopped, and the voices were silenced. The white sailors watched with horror as men, women and children sank together into the murky depths, never to return.
This act of defiance did not stop the slave trade in coastal Georgia. For over sixty more years, slaves from Africa continued to toil on the vast cotton plantations that blossomed throughout the area.
But when work was done, the slaves would sometimes gather around the fire and tell the story of the Ibos. For to them, the Ibos’ defiance gave them hope that one day they, too, would return to the motherland – if not in body, then in spirit.
And to this day, they say that if you sit near Ibo Landing on St Simons Island, at the mouth of Dunbar Creek, on certain nights – listen closely. You may hear the sound of the Ibos’ rattling chains, along with the sounds of bare feet slapping against the dark waters. And, if you’re not too frightened already, you may also want to keep an ear out for their solemn, defiant refrain as it drifts like a whisper through the marsh:
“The water brought us the water will take us away.”
-THE END-
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