Isaiah Jones vs the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)
chapter 4 Letters from Across the Ancient Sea
Isaiah Jones vs the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)
chapter 4: letters from across the ancient sea
The Dark Passage journey into Light. pt 1 of 3
“My name is Isaiah Leonardo Jones.”
[“The Itinerary Galveston to Ghana”;
Journey from Galveston, Texas, to Ghana, including stops in between:
Full Moon Departure: December 31st, 2020
Outward Journey:
Day 1: Depart from Galveston, Texas, to Key West, Florida
Approximate Distance: 1,000 nautical miles
Estimated Sailing Time: 6 to 8 days
Depart from the Port of Galveston shortly after sunset, taking advantage of the full moon for better visibility.
Plan for an overnight sail, arriving in Key West, Florida.
Days 7-15: Explore Key West, Florida
Enjoy your time exploring Key West.
First Quarter Moon: Occurs Day 8.
Day 16: Depart from Key West, Florida to San Juan, Puerto Rico
Approximate Distance: 800 nautical miles
Estimated Sailing Time: 4 to 6 days
Sail southeast from Key West to San Juan, Puerto Rico.
First Quarter Moon: Occurs Day 16.
Days 22-30: Explore San Juan, Puerto Rico
Explore the island of Puerto Rico.
Full Moon: Occurs Day 29.
Day 31: Depart from San Juan, Puerto Rico to Castries, St. Lucia
Approximate Distance: 1,000 nautical miles
Estimated Sailing Time: 6 to 8 days
Head southeast toward St. Lucia.
First Quarter Moon: Occurs around Day 36.
Days 39-45: Explore Castries, St. Lucia
Explore the island of St. Lucia.
Full Moon: Occurs Day 45.
Day 46: Depart from Castries, St. Lucia to Bridgetown, Barbados
Approximate Distance: 100 nautical miles
Estimated Sailing Time: 1 day
Sail southward to Barbados.
First Quarter Moon: Occurs Day 50.
Days 47-51: Explore Bridgetown, Barbados
explore Barbados.
Full Moon: Occurs Day 58.
Day 52: Depart from Bridgetown, Barbados to Cayenne, French Guiana
Approximate Distance: 600 nautical miles
Estimated Sailing Time: 3 to 4 days
Sail west to reach French Guiana.
First Quarter Moon: Occurs Day 56.
Days 56-60: Explore Cayenne, French Guiana
Explore French Guiana.
Full Moon: Occurs Day 58.
Day 61: Depart from Cayenne, French Guiana to Tema, Ghana
Approximate Distance: 3,000 nautical miles
Estimated Sailing Time: 15 to 20 days
Embark on the longest leg of journey, sailing east across the Atlantic Ocean to Ghana.
First Quarter Moon: Occurs Day 65.
Days 76-95: Arrival in Tema, Ghana
Approach the Ghanaian coast and arrive at destination in Tema.
Follow all local maritime regulations and customs procedures.
Complete all necessary paperwork and inspections.
Disembark in Ghana, explore the country.
Full Moon: Occurs Day 90.
Return Journey:
Day 96: Depart from Tema, Ghana to Cayenne, French Guiana
Approximate Distance: 3,000 nautical miles
Estimated Sailing Time: 15 to 20 days
Begin the return journey, sail west across the Atlantic Ocean to French Guiana.
First Quarter Moon: Occurs Day 100.
Days 111-125: Explore Cayenne, French Guiana
explore French Guiana.
Full Moon: Occurs Day 116.
Day 126: Depart from Cayenne, French Guiana to Bridgetown, Barbados
Approximate Distance: 600 nautical miles
Estimated Sailing Time: 3 to 4 days
Sail eastward to Barbados.
First Quarter Moon: Occurs Day 130.
Days 131-135: Explore Bridgetown, Barbados
explore Barbados.
Full Moon: Occurs Day 138.
Day 136: Depart from Bridgetown, Barbados to Castries, St. Lucia
Approximate Distance: 100 nautical miles
Estimated Sailing Time: 1 day
Sail northward to St. Lucia.
First Quarter Moon: Occurs Day 140.
Days 137-143: Explore Castries, St. Lucia
Explore St. Lucia once more.
Full Moon: Occurs Day 145.
Day 146: Depart from Castries, St. Lucia to San Juan, Puerto Rico
Approximate Distance: 1,000 nautical miles
Estimated Sailing Time: 6 to 8 days
Head northwest toward San Juan, Puerto Rico.
First Quarter Moon: Occurs Day 150.
Days 152-160: Explore San Juan, Puerto Rico
Spend some time exploring Puerto Rico.
Full Moon: Day 158.
Day 161: Depart from San Juan, Puerto Rico to Key West, Florida
Approximate Distance: 800 nautical miles
Estimated Sailing Time: 4 to 6 days
Sail northwest from Puerto Rico to Key West.
First Quarter Moon: Occurs Day 164.
Days 166-172: Explore Key West, Florida
Enjoy your final days in Key West.
Full Moon: Occurs Day 172.
Day 173: Depart from Key West, Florida to Galveston, Texas
Approximate Distance: 1,000 nautical miles
Estimated Sailing Time: 6 to 8 days
Sail westward, return to Galveston, Texas.
First Quarter Moon: Occurs around Day 177.
Days 179-187: Return to Galveston, Texas.]
End of Journey: April 5, 2021
This is all wrong of course, as it would be seven years before he returned to America.
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
-Rumi
The white puppy with a black spot circling her left eye gnawing at the kids’ heels is Starbuck. Isaiah named her after his dad’s favorite character on ‘Battle Star Galactica’. They found her in a cardboard box abandoned on the side of the road just outside of Austin. The Jones family’s original plan was to stop at Threadgill’s eat nostalgia-flavored cheeseburgers, and fries, and drink Coca-Cola, under the ghostly gaze of Janis Joplin posters hanging on wood panel walls covered with vintage 1960s pop art memorabilia like the gullible tourists that they were, before continuing to the port in Galveston. Isaiah and his parents were about to pull onto the I35 entrance ramp after getting gasoline and bottles of water in Round Rock when Helen shouted for Kennedy to stop the car.
Helena hopped out of the car and carefully reached into a cardboard box sitting on the median, then quickly returned, cradling a barely weaned pup in her arms. The white puppy with a black spot around her left eye had been abandoned on the side of the road in the middle of the 100-degree Texas summer heat. Neither Isaiah nor his parents were going to leave the discarded animal on the side of the road in a cardboard box with several other dead puppies, apparently her siblings, so they took the dog to the city pound in Austin.
When they discovered that they were going to put the dog down because her breed, the Pit Bull Terrier, was “too dangerous,” Isaiah decided to keep the puppy himself. Helena was glad he decided to rescue the dog. She would be good company for him on the boat, and Kennedy didn’t think they needed a third dog right now. The Joneses got the pup all of her shots, and Isaiah named the scrappy black and white mutt after his dad’s favorite character on the rebooted Battle Star Galactica sci-fi TV series, Starbuck.
Later that evening they finally made it to Threadgill’s in time for dinner instead of lunch as they had planned only to discover the Austin cultural institution eatery had gone out of business and been closed with no plans to reopen for the last 2 months due to the pandemic. After Helena finished sobbing, repeating “…it ain’t right, man, it just ain’t right.”
They climbed back into the family’s white 4-door 2016 Mercedes-Benz C-Class and headed over to ‘Sandys Burgers’ instead. Since they were still in Austin as sunset approached the family decided they even had time to get over to Congress Street Bridge and watch the bats fly out from under the bridge at dusk before they drove on for the next six hours the rest of the way south down through Houston on to the port of Galveston.
Six hours later they all marveled at their first sight of the black ship the SS Exodus, even sitting in dry dock the Monarch Ti-44 was a magnificent sight, even hauled out and suspended from davits in dry dock as a crew of a half-dozen masked workmen were finishing off applying the last coats of a ceramic polymer that bonded with the metal making it permanently waterproof. The stuff cost a small fortune and had been designed by a team at NASA.
Isaiah’s’ new job had him working part-time as a consultant for Tartarus Aerospace as a Principal Systems Engineer – Space Suit (Hybrid hazardous environment titanium suits for deep sea diving as well as space exploration and fire fighting.) while he lived on the boat for the next 6 months before setting sail on an eastern heading.
Until he hit the Florida Keys, then it was southeast down to the Bahamas, the Cay Islands, (skipping Haiti for obvious reasons), then a final stop on the island of Barbados to top off his provisions before the big push east 2618 nautical miles (about 4828.03 km) across the Atlantic to Afrika Coba Verde Islands then to the port of Dakar Senegal, doubling back on the dark passage, going through the middle passage into the light.
Chapter IV – Homecoming: Pre-departure inventory of supplies, gear, and provisions.
“Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground.”
-David Byrne
Isaiah always loved the water. He hung out at the Zavala’s heated pool year-round as a child and for several years he believed he would join the Navy and go to sea. But that never happened because on his 16th birthday when most kids got their first car, he got a boat instead. That may not sound like a radical idea if you grew up near a lake, a river, or an ocean. But this is Dallas, Texas, and there is nothing here to explain why Isaiah was drawn to the sea.
The story begins in Sicily when his parents, Lt Helena Culpepper and WO Kennedy Jones, met again after dating for the three years they had both been stationed in GITMO together previously. They were married the first weekend after they arrived at their new duty station in Sicily, where they would remain for the remainder of their time in the Marines and Navy for the next six years. Helena Elisabeth Culpepper, on her 32nd birthday, Lt. Helena Elisabeth Jones gave birth to their twin children Emily Elisabeth and Isaiah Leonardo Jones.
It was in the deep cerulean waters of the Mediterranean, sailing with his mother aboard rented catamarans, that he first fell in love with sailing and the sea. Even now, with his irrational fear of any large open body of water, sharks, and even pirates. Bad weather at sea, as well as big storms while on the water.
So, how did he end up here on this 44-foot-long prototype sailboat, serendipitously christened by the previous owner the SS Exodus? That summer after he graduated from SMU, the same university where his parents and his best friend and neighbors’ parents all taught, he moved onto the boat still in dry dock in the Port of Galveston.
Helena Culpepper had just been promoted to lieutenant in the Navy when she met his father, who had recently been promoted to Warrant officer after serving 13 years enlisted as an NCO in the Marine Corps; both were stationed at Guantanamo Bay, a naval base in Cuba. After they rotated out of Guantanamo, they met again in Sicily at the naval air base where they married and Helena gave birth to their two children, twins Emily and Isaiah.
It was during this time that Isaiah first learned to sail in the idyllic waters of the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Sicily near the naval air base where he and his sister Emily were born and raised until the age of 6, after his parents retired from the armed forces Helen would continue his nautical lessons on White Rock Lake in the tiny 10- to 15-foot sailboats and dinghies that skimmed across the tiny lake. All manner of watercraft were to be found on the lake: paddle boats, sailboards, rowboats, canoes, and kayaks; everything was allowed except powered vehicles.
Over the next ten years, Isaiah learned to read a compass, use a sextant, and read the stars to navigate by starlight. He had star charts and navigational charts from NOAA on every wall and shelf in his bedroom; there were charts and maps and compasses and sextants and chronometers and diving watches. The only thing in his room not related to his obsession with sailing was his ‘mu ren zhuang’ Also called Muk Yan Jong and Mu ren zhuang, the wooden man was the literal English translation besides being a part of his morning exercise and training ritual it was his favorite way to relax and blow off steam when he was in a mood.
The drive from Dallas to Galveston was fun for Isaiah as he counted down the miles to the port. The family stopped everywhere for food at local eateries, to take pictures next to tourist attractions, or to just take a moment to stretch their legs as they took in the scenery. This would be their last summer vacation together, although they didn’t know it at the time.
Isaiah had read his father’s copy of ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Chinua Achebe when he was six, and maybe that was what cemented the idea in his mind as they flew the transatlantic MAC flight from Sigonella Naval Air station across the Atlantic to Norfolk to the National Guard base in Grand Prairie western suburb of Dallas; over the course of the long flights the Pan-Africanist Franz Fanon, Muammar Gaddafi and Marcus Garvey was right and that it was time, time to go home.
The degree landed him a job as a part-time consultant with Tartarus Aerospace 3.8, consulting with Principal Systems Engineer – Space Suit (Hybrid). The corporate headhunter had originally approached Isaiah with an offer of a 100K signing bonus and 2ooK per year. Isaiah laughed and told him the Navy was offering that much, so they added a 50k bump, bringing the bonus to 150k when the company showed the contract to his parents, the Joneses negotiated an additional 25k and no more than 20 hours a week, remote to his annual Salary.
The company was eager to snap up the award-winning prodigious mathematician because he had sent the companys lead engineer an email with an idea for changing their prop design co-created by MIT engineers and AI that was quieter, lighter, and faster than standard propellers as well as some ideas he had for modifications of the design along with his latest work on ion thrusters. The toroidal propeller designs would save them billions of dollars once implemented throughout the company. He would later install the new ribbon-shaped prop on his own boat. As well as the ship’s drones, a modification, he later added to the prototype Ti-44 Monarch.
The lead engineer was a slight-built, bespectacled man with shoulder-length white hair, who was in his mid-70s, with ever-worsening glaucoma. In their weekly virtual meetings, Theodore McCabe, or Teddy as he preferred to be called, would often say to Isaiah that it was good to have young eyes on things. The old man still drove to the office every day and would sit in his office poring over massive tomes using his heavy reading glasses, occasionally a magnifying glass for detail or tiny fonts. He picked up the large magnifying glass while waiting for whatever the team of engineers in his employ would come in with that day.
Isaiah read the documents the old man had given him on his first day when they met at his office the day after Isaiah arrived in Galveston. It was an engineering manual of the Apollo lunar program (SP 287 What made Apollo a Success was a collection of the systems programs, the scientist playbook. Teddy thought along the same lines as Kennedy. He always told Isaiah there was no need to reinvent the wheel, but there was always room for improvement. His days were spent designing next-generation spacesuits for NASA, SpaceX, and the European space program. Careful not to work too many hours and risk violating Texas child labor laws, and the ire of Granny Culpepper.
Nights and weekends were devoted to prepping the ship, gathering provisions, and refining the details of his trip to Ghana from Galveston. Timing would be everything for the Atlantic crossing. He planned to depart during the winter to take advantage of the good weather and favorable winds. Over the years, he learned the best season for sailing in the Caribbean was late December until early May, after hurricane season and before the misty months at the beginning of summer. The Caribbean was a good place to sail year-round, except in hurricane season from August to September. He had sailed all over the Bahamas and sailed the Caribbean with his family several times during summer breaks, although the best time to sail the Eastern Caribbean from St. Thomas to Grenada was March to June.
The first night out of the docks on board the Exodus as he motored the Monarch Ti-44 foot sloop out of the harbor to begin her shakedown run to the Keys, he ran the ship aground on a sandbar, less than a half-mile away from the dock where she had been moored for the last 7 months, after misreading the buoy markers. It was dark, except for the light of the waning gibbous moon and distant lights of the harbor and the elevated highway above. He needed to inspect the boat below the waterline to be sure the hull and keel were not damaged.
He could easily pick up the phone or get on the radio and call a tugboat to pull him out of this jam, but this was too humiliating. Besides, there would be no tugs where he was going, so he rationalized and chalked the experience up to good practice. His soul-crushing fear of the dark water caused his heart rate to increase as he grabbed his snorkel gear, put on goggles, the flippers, and climbed carefully down into the cool, dark water. The sounds of the surf and the traffic passing over on the nearby bridge disappeared as his head submerged beneath the surface of the murky waters.
He hated the silence of submersion in the sea. Even though the water was only 30 feet deep at its deepest point in this part of the port, it averaged only 10 feet deep in the ICW. The way his ears popped, the loss of his sense of hearing, combined with limited vision and slowed movement, terrified him every time. Isaiah turned on the waterproof flashlight and then pointed it in the same direction as the speargun. He felt the weight of the diving knife strapped to his right thigh even through the wetsuit. He swam from the stern down to the keel now jammed firmly into the sand before he swam to the bow and surfaced tossed the speargun up onto the deck, took a deep breath, and then swam beneath the 44-foot length of the boat to surface at the bow, inspecting the hull for damage, relieved that there was none.
After he was confident of the boat’s condition and certain of her seaworthiness, accessing that the boat, while stuck in the sand was undamaged, he swam aft and climbed out of the water and returned to the ship’s deck, sitting on the bench exhaling a great sigh of relief as he removed the diving gear and stored it, all the while the puppy patrolled the deck following him on deck darting from one end of the deck to the other while Isaiah busied himself thinking about how stupid and lucky he had been.
Now he needs only to wait around for the next 11 hours for the tide to come in and then get back on course. That night he couldn’t sleep, so he pored over the maps and Mercator chart, plotting sheets, and NOAA charts, noting the longitude and latitude of the various Caribbean islands he would visit before he crossed the Atlantic.
Isaiah sat at the nav stations’ charts table and sipped a cup of Bigelow’s Constant Comment green tea as he perused the old maps and waited for the rising tide to lift the small boat. Starbuck had busied herself trotting fore and aft, patrolling the length of the deck while he was in the water. The pup, now 7 and a half months old, parked herself at his feet while he studied the maps, as he had so often spent his evenings for the last ten years. His thoughts meandered back to the first night they spent in Galveston, the conversation with Aeon.
Isaiah Jones vs the Sea: Same As It Ever Was pt 2 of 3
June 19th, 2021 Galveston Texas/Potters Field
“Like Decorations At A Nigger Cemetery”
-Wallace Stevens
‘Once In a Life Time’
“You may ask yourself, “What is that beautiful house?”
You may ask yourself, “Where does that highway go to?”
And you may ask yourself, “Am I right, am I wrong?”
And you may say to yourself, “My God, what have I done?”
-Talking Heads
But where are the graves? Penny asked as they explored the island looking for any evidence of the old slave quarters, auction blocks, or plantations’ existence here in the late 1860s after the end of the Civil War. Isaiah chose to start his voyage from here in Galveston, Texas, where Texas slavers continued to keep the fact that the slaves had been free for years after President Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation 3 years prior. The Texans continued the now-illegal practice of chattel slavery for another year after they lost the Civil War until the return of Union Troops to the island a year after the end of the Civil War. Had the United States military not traveled to the island, the Texans would still have their slaves today.
This place blows. Why the fuck would anyone choose to live here? Penny knew that the two of them were home-schooled by their parents, but she had no idea about the real history of this state. California textbooks only contain a few sentences mentioning Texas. If you live outside of the state, most of your information about the region comes from movies. Remember the Alamo, the Dallas Cowboys, and the populace being in an unofficial race to the bottom culturally, with Florida to produce the most ignorant citizens in the nation. She looked around as they spoke, thinking about the number of people who would have been trapped, imprisoned, and beaten to force them to labor for free.
Had the Indians not been essentially eradicated by disease after contact with the Europeans, there would have been no trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Europeans would have simply enslaved the indigenous population. Which they did with varying degrees of success since these people were at home. They escaped and simply returned to their tribes. The Africans could not do this in the New World. The more she listened to her two friends, who had never set foot in an American public school classroom, talk about the actual, unvarnished history of not just Texas but all of America, she came to realize that they were not taught history in this nation; they were taught white people’s fan fiction. “These people were here for one hundred? What two hundred years Penny asked Aeon and Isaiah. Where are all of their graves? You can’t just throw people away like that!
Under the city. Isaiah said coldly. Most of the black people here worked the docks and warehouses, loading and unloading the cargo from ships loading and unloading mostly the cotton and sugarcane grown by slaves working on the big plantations on the mainland near the Brazos River basin, which has been a center of shipping for centuries prior to the war. They know next to nothing about the Indigenous peoples of the isle that were here in 1528 when the first Europeans arrived here shipwrecked landed on the isle inhabited by the Auia tribe. [“Cabeza de Vaca and his crew called this place “Isla de Malhado” November 1528.”] Five years later, you get your first European permanent settlements on the island during the Mexican War of Independence from Spain. Its first European occupiers were the pirates who aided Mexico’s independence by attacking Spanish ships.
It’s all very Master and Commander meets Pirates of the Caribbean in real life. Remember that the overwhelming majority of Africans kidnapped, bound in iron shackles, branded like cattle, and sold into slavery in the New World were brought here by the Spanish. Back when the Spanish and Mexicans held the Tejas territory before it was annexed into the Union after the Texas-Mexico War. The whole remembers the Alamo fairy tale of the 1830s.
Aeon held Izzy’s hand, feeling his pulse increase as he explained the history to Penny as she video-recorded his talk while they toured the graveyard at Potter Fields. As she listened horrified and saddened by the brutality of the unvarnished history of the story leading up to the Juneteenth, black independence day in Texas that had in the last decade been shared the history of the holiday that had been quietly celebrated by black people in America for over a century and completely ignored whitewashed and covered up by the recorders of history meant for white consumption.
Aeon explained as they walked while she continued through the paupers’ graveyard. Even after they were free and buried in the segregated freeman’s cemeteries their graveyards were regularly desecrated whenever the powers that be needed their lands, to build anything from a new highway to a new high-rise building they just bulldozed the black American tombstones and built the new buildings on top of the old negro cemeteries.
They still do this sort of thing to this day; they find tombstones from old black freedmen’s cemeteries dumped in the woods far away from the construction sites where they were removed illegally. Penny looked at Aeon. I just never thought that anything like that still went on in the 20th century. Never mind the 21st century.
Did you know that Dallas Central Expressway constructed in the 1940s is built over one of the city’s oldest negro cemeteries? One of the City Place towers, as well as that golf ball driving range near University Park, were all built on top of the old freedmen’s cemetery illegally in the 1980s. The only reason they even put up the little brass placard was because the Mexican construction workers reported it to the local news, but they never moved the bodies.
It was the Catholic construction workers, Mexicans, who contacted the local news to report what their white American bosses were doing, and once the story aired, that stopped the construction long enough for them to move one grave ceremonially to a new location. They then finish building the Park Cities golfers driving range and eventually put a tiny engraved brass plaque at the entrance so all of those pasty cunts will know whose graves they are stomping over in their golf cleats.
We are home-schooled black people, so we grow up knowing the truth. Our parents never relied on the public schools to educate us; as a consequence, we do not have any of that American jingoism programmed into our worldview. Nor the self-hatred that comes with it. Even before the internet was a big deal, my momma and granny read black newspapers when she was at the salons in African American neighborhoods to get the real news, not the whitewashed news that omitted lynching’s and anything else that didn’t perpetuate the myth of American exceptionalism. Aeon added.
It’s not like the government or anyone in a position of authority is systematically erasing black cemeteries in the US. We are black people, and we understand that this sort of thing never actually stopped. The same people who are online right now erasing the word slavery from American history or printing grade school history books that lie, pretending that Africans came to the US as laborers, as if they joined a work program or enlisted in the Jobs Corps. Every generation in American history, whites would riot and destroy the local black towns and burn down their businesses, then steal their land and resources, preventing the accumulation of ancestral wealth after the blacks fled the area. The systemic harassment of black people never stopped; it simply morphed into a different form, and they just stopped bragging about it after Goldwater and the exodus of the Dixiecrats. Izzy said with a shrug as he sat down on the ground and began to sketch the gravesites at the Potter’s field in pen and ink as they talked.
Most bodies of enslaved dead blacks were simply wrapped in any spare burlap sack or extra cloth for an improvised burial shroud or makeshift coffins cobbled together from scraps of lumber, but most were simply buried in the sand dunes near the beach, anywhere out of the way. Their bodies buried in the shifting sands of the beach dunes would end up being uncovered and washed out to sea eventually. Aeon added as they traveled on foot around the oldest parts of the city. When the Union troops marched on Galveston with mounted cavalry rode the ferry over to the island and seized control of the island back from the Texas Confederate slavers. A year after the end of the Civil War, there were over 200k (two hundred thousand, approximately a quarter of a million) slaves living on the island.
Just like most of the country, there has been a centuries-long program of erasing any signs of their true abominable systematic rape, torture, starvation work to death laboring in chains on the island’s history. Texas history is not a noble history of revolution against Mexican oppression; it is the history of one European colony, the Mexicans recently independent of Spain, having their territory stolen by another former English colony, the Americans. It was always about slavery; the rest is a lie perpetuated to distract the ignorant and ill-informed from that truth. Aeon exhaled a sigh, her shoulders slumped. This is just the tip of the racist iceberg of the myth taught in public schools vs the reality of trans-Atlantic slave trade history.
Penelope Stockard Bedowitz did not like it here in Texas. California was not perfect but compared to these cunts she preferred the company of the crips and the bloods to these savage crackers here in Texas what a fucking cosmic joke of intellectual squalor these people lived in this was not a worthwhile place for thinking humans to live in this mockery of civilization. In fact, after living here for the last four years she now knew that she absolutely hated this shit box of a flyover state. She had only gone to school here to spite her parents by attending one of the most notorious party schools in the nation rather than enrolling at their alma mater, where she would have been a quadruple legacy. Penny smiled thinking about how pissed they were but unable to say no so long as she went to an accredited college she would get her trust. There was no situation that you had to attend Harvard, only that you graduate from a reputable university with a degree in anything other than the liberal arts.
It was a Z-list school, but she was a good student and would complete her master’s degree while she and Aeon were in San Diego. Now that Aeon was on her way to university, she was looking forward to leaving this shithole of a state, as soon as the summer was over, she and Aeon were ditching Izzy and flying to San Diego to live on the boat with Hector and his wife Aurielle while she and Aeon attended university. It would be great to finally get back to California after 4 years of Texas bullshit while she was attending SMU, she was looking forward to never seeing this hellhole of a backwater state with delusions of grandeur ever again.
Penny had already met Isaiah’s grandfather, Hector, and his wife Aurelia, last summer when they sailed to Long Beach to visit them. This time it would just be her and Aeon; she couldn’t wait to take her partying in TJ. Texas was an ass-backward, racist, sexist, redneck, hillbilly, pig-fucking drag. Penny shouted at the statue in the center of Old Potter’s Cemetery as they drove out of the front gate. “Fuck You Texas!” Aeon and Isaiah laughed as she headed back to the relative sanity of the marina. She felt as if she needed a shower after learning what she had today. Tonight, she was definitely getting white-girl drunk. Penelope screamed as loudly as she could as they drove. FUCK TEXAS!
Penelope stopped the car at the entrance to the pauper cemetery and looked at the gate through her tears. It ain’t right, man, it just ain’t right.” Izzy stepped out of the car and knelt on the ground in front of the gate that led into the cemetery filled with unmarked graves. When he returned to the car, they saw that he had drawn the Sankofa/the sign of the bird looking back, which Penny always thought resembled the Yin and Yang symbol.
Even though he had talked about sailing to Africa from the moment she first met him, only now was she beginning to comprehend the why; she was a white woman this would forever remain an enigma. Underneath the Sankofa symbol, he wrote two words. “Never Forget.”
[“Sankofa (pronounced SAHN-koh-fah) is a word in the Twi language of Ghana meaning “to retrieve” (literally “go back and get”; san – to return; ko – to go; fa – to fetch, to seek and take) and also refers to the Bono Adinkra symbol represented either with a stylized heart shape or by a bird with its head turned backwards”]
Isaiah Jones vs the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)
CHAPTER 4.3 Galveston to Key West pt 3 of 3
Isaiah Jones versus the Sea
Galveston to Key West, an unplanned trip to Cuba: pt 3 of 3
Chapter 5 Galveston to Key West: prelude; January 1st, 2022
“Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, look where my hand was
Time isn’t holding up, time isn’t after us
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was”
-Talking Heads
Isaiah kept the city lights of the Galveston skyline in sight portside as he sailed east into the deep, dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico towards Florida’s Key West under the light of the full moon. Originally, the first leg of his journey was going to begin with a stop in New Orleans. After years of studying maps of these waters, he knew that if he sailed east from Kemah, near Houston, to New Orleans, the trip would take six days in all (sailing the ICW ‘Inter Coastal Waterways’). At the last minute something in his gut told him to stay away from Louisiana so Isaiah decided to skip New Orleans as he continued to sail east towards the Florida Keys.
There would be few obstacles in the dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico, only the multitude of oil rigs and floating refineries, some rising over 2000 feet (about twice the height of the Empire State Building) above the surface of the sea between here and just east of Louisiana. He knew that many of the old rigs were abandoned and without power or lights, so he moved slowly at night, trusting the ship’s navigational systems to spot any towers he missed by the light of the full moon.
The freighters, supertankers, and luxury cruise ships would be further south out in the sea lanes proper, so he only worried about the metal behemoths rising out of the water like the skeletal remains of a long-extinct aquatic beast and local fishermen in small power boats he passed occasionally in the early morning hours whose tanned and leathered faces smiled and waved as the black sails of the Exodus glided by silently over the morning mist.
Isaiah continued the prep work, setting sail and beating into the wind on Galveston Bay, and then the trip east the next morning, passing beneath Sabine Pass. He continued to rebuild, refit, and prepare the prototype Monarch Ti-44 Sailboat for the eventual blue water Atlantic crossing from Barbados to Africa, the longest and final leg of the cruising journey.
With her solid-piece titanium hull and keel design, Zero Keel, OMEGA rudder, center cockpit, Solent rigged sloop, the prototype Monarch Ti-44, with her main unfurled Genoa slotted in a strong wind to beam, sailed a hundred and twenty-five nautical miles in a day.
Unlike the faster catamarans he grew up sailing around the Bahamas on summer vacations with his family the Exodus was far more stable and quieter while not as speedy as the cats her monohull was better going to headwinds and the 5ft fin keel and the weight of the prototype’s titanium hull meant she smashed through the waves and was less bouncy and less affected by chop, more stable, and quieter while moored in harbor.
Isaiah was still beating himself up for hitting the sandbar before he was even out of the port of Galveston that first night out. The fear of the deep, dark water still terrified him, just as it had all of his life, and always, he would jump into the water with the fear, let it surround, let it devour him whole.
Even when they were in the crystal-clear waters of the Caribbean during the summer breaks on his parents’ catamaran, he still felt vulnerable in the open water. He felt slow, defenseless. You could not hear danger coming, and you still moved too slowly; you were the bald monkey in the swirling, viscous maw of beast water. In the ocean, you were no longer at the top of the food chain; in the permanent dark of the sea, you were just another piece of swimming meat.
Still, even with the terror, he would climb into the water with a small rubber-covered baby sledgehammer and give the keel a few good taps to be sure the ceramic resin that protected the metal was intact and undamaged, not delaminating or flaking off at the part of the keel that impacted the sandbar. First, he plunged his hand into the dark water; he could feel the bones of the ancestors gathered on the muddy bottom of the sea, sitting in vigil.
The skulls looked up with hollow eyes from the deep-sea coral-encrusted skulls beneath tombstones made of cresting waves. Their names were written in white caps and salty spray of the sea; the Atlantic is a mass grave concealing the Negro Holocaust. A million skeletal arms rose in the mire to touch his hand, and the Hebrews have a saying: “Never Forget.” The sea holds the remains of millions cast into the abyss for centuries. We’re the keepers of the graves of the sacred memories, we guard the ancestors’ ivory bones like an elephant’s graveyard.
January 1st, 2122,
“Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean
Water dissolving and water removing”
-Talking Heads
The century since Isaiah’s arrival on the dark continent had been a time of monumental change. The population of black people in the US plummeted from 13% to just under 3% as people of African descent decolonized their minds. A paradigm shift occurred descent and societal unrest in the US soared as the African American population continued to migrate to Port Garvey in Ghana on the west coast of Africa. They, like Isaiah, all kept their American citizenship, voted, and paid taxes on their US properties and businesses, and acquired dual citizenship after living in Ghana for a year qualifying for the right of return.
Within Three generations and they were gone from the US population in the continent. The Latino populations followed suit and began to return to their Latin American home nations to the south. Yet the American prison system grew in the percentage of the nation’s population incarcerated. The poor, working-class, and even middle-class whites were now filling the corporate state’s demand for prisoners/slaves and their free labor in the nation’s ever-growing for-profit prisons.
Crime rates increased across the board as people of color disappeared from the American population, and the police shifted their attention to the poor and working-poor white population to fill their quotas for arrest and feed the prison-industrial complex with bodies. The American fantasy of a crime-free nation without people of color or immigrants exploded, and finally, they were forced to concede the evil inherent in their own culture without black folks to scapegoat.
After the black and brown population was reduced, the prison-industrial complex continued to grow and fill the empty cells with white bodies in the absence of colored ones. Americans subconsciously had lived in a fantasy world that blamed all their nation’s ills on people of color.
Without that scapegoat, the Republicans’ nationalistic policies collapsed as the middle-class, poor, and working-class whites filled the cells of what soon grew from number two to the world’s largest prison system. Middle-class and poor Whites continued to vote Republican until the population of black people dropped from 13% to 3% in less than 60 years.
The city of Port Garvey in Ghana was the first city built and designed using AI to house the population that grew around the community of African American expatriates along the west coast of the newly unified African continent. Their numbers in Ghana had grown from 3000 in 2020 to over 30 million in a mere century, doubling the population of the nation.
The returning people became a part of the diaspora zeitgeist, great look inward across as the use of modern techniques in farming were applied across Ghana and the west coast of the continent. The land was some of the richest and most fertile soil on the planet, and those who returned from the diaspora worked with the tribes and AI to grow crops and advance farming using robotics, unmanned AI-controlled farms. This increased yields and created surpluses for the international markets.
Moammar Gaddafi was proven right posthumously; the purging of colonial forces and expulsion of Europeans and all hostile foreign influence led to the unification of the continent’s nations under a single currency. An African Great Awakening occurred, heralding the Second Renaissance following the return of the lost tribes to the Motherland. The nations of the continent’s new wealth redirected into infrastructure freed the people from the exploitation of Europeans and the systemic racism of the EU tribes of world banks.
Isaiah’s father always said there is no need to reinvent the wheel; follow the example of the people who defeated your enemy in the past. It was obvious that the Arab oil states were organizing to form OPEC, and the schools shifted to the Hebrew system is a scriptural model of education, and the goal is for the student to BECOME what the teacher IS. Knowledge is acquired as a by-product, while the goal is to shape the character of the student.
The Prussian method was abandoned in favor of educational systems that reflected real science and neurology, with human child brain development and psychology. The abandonment of the antiquated, failing Western educational systems. In the Greek method, knowledge is separated and organized into subjects and implemented through curricula.
Abandoning the Greek method that had failed black folks for centuries the people embraced the proven successful tradition of deep learning and The Montessori method of education techniques English was fading as the primary Chinese language sweeping across the port cities as generations studied abroad in Hong Kong, increasing cultural and economic ties to the nations of the East while the Western empire continued its collapse into economic decline and stagnation.
[Once in a Life Time]
[And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
And you may ask yourself, “How do I work this?”
And you may ask yourself, “Where is that large automobile?”
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful house”
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful wife”
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean
Water dissolving and water removing
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
You may ask yourself, “What is that beautiful house?”
You may ask yourself, “Where does that highway go to?”
And you may ask yourself, “Am I right, am I wrong?”
And you may say to yourself, “My God, what have I done?”
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, look where my hand was
Time isn’t holding up, time isn’t after us
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was (I couldn’t get no rest)
Same as it ever was, hey let’s all twist our thumbs
Here comes the twister
Letting the days go by (same as it ever was, same as it ever was)
Letting the days go by (same as it ever was, same as it ever was)
Once in a lifetime, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
[“Indigenous inhabitants of Galveston Island called the island Auia.[8] Though there is no certainty regarding their route and their landings, Cabeza de Vaca and his crew were shipwrecked at a place he called “Isla de Malhado” in November 1528. This could have referred to Galveston Island or San Luis Island.[9] During his charting of the Gulf Coast in 1785, the Spanish explorer José de Evia labeled the water features surrounding the island “Bd. de Galvestown” and “Bahia de Galvestowm” [sic]. He was working under the orders of Bernardo de Gálvez. In his early chart, he calls the western end of the island “Isla de San Luis” and the eastern end “Pt. de Culebras”. Evia did not label the island itself on his map of 1799. Just five years later Alexander von Humboldt borrowed the place names Isla de San Luis, Pte. De Culebras, and Bahia de Galveston. Stephen F. Austin followed his predecessors in the use of “San Luis Island”, but introduced “Galveston” to refer to the little village at the east end of the island. Evidence of the name Galveston Island appears on the 1833 David H. Burr.[8]
The island first permanent European settlements were constructed around 1816 by the pirate Louis-Michel Aury to support Mexico’s rebellion against Spain. In 1817, Aury returned from an unsuccessful raid against Spain to find Galveston occupied by the pirate Jean Lafitte.[10] Lafitte organized Galveston into a pirate “kingdom” he called “Campeche”, anointing himself the island’s “head of government”.[11] Lafitte remained in Galveston until 1821, when the United States Navy forced him and his raiders off the island.[11][12]”]
-About the author:
JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals; Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, Tx.
Joey Cloudy online 
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