Women of the Flood

And God spoke unto Noah, saying, With thee I will establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee.

And the waters of heaven began to dance on the earth. The rivers became swollen with vengeance. I imagine the wives standing on the edge of the great vessel, crying for all their mothers, swallowed up with God’s rage. I envision Noah’s wife, lost in heartache, becoming trapped in the swell, and thousands of generations after her, longing with the sea.

I always feel so small standing in front of the ocean waves. I think of Noah’s wife, how her body must have convulsed with grief as the waters rose. She was the epitome of a consenting and gracious woman, full of quiet strength and hope. She had to have been. I dream of her and see her tears spilling over into the flood, her body wracked with a sobbing that heaven had never heard before. It is the same with me, just as it is with all the women who came after Noah’s wife.

Her body must have been cold, standing on the boundaries of the giant ark, dripping with raindrops that matched her agony. There are times when I have understood her horror and disbelief, my own coupled with an unwanted sorrow, stained with a devastation that leaves bitter marks on the flesh. It is the same kind of pain that women of Africa know. When the Armistead plowed through miles of ocean, bringing their chained bodies to another ungrateful shore, some of them chose to break from their captors, jump into the frigid waters and drown with their children. It is the water from which my grandmother drank, and my mother after her, and now I sip from a familiar cup.

My body accepts the fluid of the women who came before me and I honor them with forgiveness. My flesh carries their suffering. I feel submerged under some sacred kind of liquid, sometimes so overwhelmed with incredible grief that I shudder like Noah’s wife, standing in the cold and longing for her mother.

My arms ache so deeply to hold my son that they hang as limp as rain-drenched hair, as lifeless as the flood that ripped away earth. I can taste his salty skin with the throbbing of my blood. They say souls cannot be broken, that children will rise up from suffocation and breathe justified air, but my body only feels the churning of tide, the hunger of remembering, and a cold mountain stream that courses through veins of anguish.

I ask that Noah’s wife comfort me, that she open her arms wide over the drowning waves of lost children and find my son, bring him back to me, unharmed, swimming with eagerness, soothed under warm waters, and channeled towards home.