But then the fundraising failed. Thanks to arguments among politicians and the wealthy, the project, like the chain, was dropped. By the time the world war came along, the following year, it was forgotten altogether. Even the chiefs’ names — Cetan Luta, Éše’he Ôhnéšesêstse — were remembered wrong, in the wrong language for the real story.
Stories get overwritten that way. In my home country, slavery was rewritten as discovery. When French colonials came to Saint-Domingue, they devoured the population as if we were the raw material for their own story of themselves.
Once I asked John Joseph what he thought about “discovery.”
“Be wary of travelers arriving during a storm,” he said. “The stories that come across water have teeth in them.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it stayed with me.
Sometimes, when we were drinking together at night after a day’s work, John Joseph, David, Endora, and I would talk about what might have been: if the woman we built had been allowed to represent emancipation — broken chains in her hand, the original story, her form standing on the bones of the Indigenous killed there, not as a monument to killing, but as a reminder that the birth of this place carried death with it in a way we’d need to reckon with. What if she had stood within that story, the Indian warrior her sentry and companion overlooking the Narrows? What if that had been told as the story of America? Instead of the story that came?
Endora was a former Dominican nun. We met aboard the Frisia, on the journey from Ireland. Our meeting is either a stain or a salvation in my memory, I’ve never been sure which. I was heading west because I needed work — factory work, I was hoping, in a steel mill. The steel mills were paying more than paper mills or cane fields or coal mines.
Late on the fifth night of the journey, a phenomenally drunk man was giving me grief on the lower deck. I couldn’t sleep at night, packed in so tightly among the hundreds of people and piled-up cargo, so I’d taken to venturing out after dark to stand by the railing nearest the stairs that led down to steerage. That night he came up to puke, and when he saw me, he whipped a knife from his jacket and came for me. He had me backed up to the edge of a railing, his arm swinging wildly back and forth with the blade, his head lolling with drink. I could hear the rush of water at my back. It was the middle of the night — almost morning. Dark enough not to matter to anyone. Plus, we both had among the least evident worth of any of the passengers on the ship; maybe, with his threadbare jacket and darkened teeth, he was looking for a way to feel bigger. The drunk man swiped at my arm and caught a lucky slice. Looks like we got a leper on board, he said — talking about my mottled face, my neck. Looks like you’re turning into a sea monster, best get you back where you belong. He said other words too, words I’d been called my entire life in four different countries. I don’t know where he was from, but his mouth was filled with bile, and as he sliced away at the air with the knife, closer and closer to my face, I couldn’t tell if he was looking to kill me or send me over. I lunged at his midsection, trying to knock him to the ground, but he clubbed his hand down on my back, hard, and I lost my bearings. He shouted down at me, drooling, then raised his arm for another attack. You diseased devil, he spat, his breath like rotting apples.
Just before the knife reached my head, I closed my eyes. That’s when I heard her.
“It’s got a name,” she bellowed. When I opened my eyes, I caught Endora in the moment before she smashed in his skull with a fireman’s axe. The man crumpled to the deck in a heap. “It’s called vitiligo,” she told the still mound of him at our feet.
We both stared at the dead man. Blood pooled on the deck around his head. “Help me get this louse overboard,” she said.
There was no noise at all around us in that moment, nothing but the sound of water. No lights but our faint navigation lights and the stars.
We pushed the man overboard; the splash barely registered as sound. She threw the axe over behind him. The ocean swallowed them both without comment. “Sad to see that go,” she said. “My father said he recovered it off a Dead Rabbit in that free-for-all at Five Points, years ago. I’ve kept it with me for comfort.” She looked up into the night sky. Thunder rolled up from the horizon. The air smelled of sky and sea. Then, out of nowhere it seemed, it started raining, so hard that we took shelter underneath a lifeboat.
The woman was wearing a gray nun’s habit and glasses. By her face, I made her to be in her teens, but what I remember was her physical strength — with the axe, with the business of hauling the man overboard. She reached into the arm of her frock and pulled out a flask. We drank. For a long time, we said nothing, until finally she spoke. “My name is Endora.” When she tipped the flask back, I caught a glimpse of a cross at her neck. Not on a golden necklace, but in the blue-black stain of a handmade tattoo under her jaw. I learned later that the same man who attacked me had ravaged her earlier in the trip. She saw me looking at her neck. She dropped her eyes to look at my neck, where the stains on my skin were most obvious. We stared at each other’s necks, stories forming from our two bodies. Then she reached up and removed her clothing — veil and coif and scapula, the whole habit — and threw them overboard. She stood up and removed her tunic too, hurling it into the sea; it wavered in the night wind like a flying dolphin, then dropped into the churning water.
Without the habit, Endora looked to be without gender, hair all which way. She ruffled it with a hand. She looked like a man, and not like a man.
“My name is Kem,” I said.
I don’t know if god was there or not.
—
David Chen came into our body, and our story, when the iron framework began to climb into the sky. The statue’s inner skeleton was a wrought-iron square, ninety-four feet high. David and John Joseph worked near each other on the iron rivets, the saddles and armature bars, and the double-helix metal staircase that ran straight up her middle. It looks like a vertical twisting railroad, David said. It looks like metal thatching, John Joseph said. It looks like a corset, Endora said. From the inside, the workings of her body became apparent — the webs of beams and posts and iron, not bones, that she was made from.
John Joseph said that he never saw anyone as good as David was at dangling himself between armature bars and iron. He’d rig the roping as gracefully as a dancer, tying off or untying and retying as he moved from place to place across her body. Sometimes he hung suspended from one arm with his leg wrapped around rope and his other arm just loose, his head tilted, staring at something or nothing. John Joseph said that no one was braver than his ancestors, but I believe no one was ever more beautiful in his bravery than David.
On one particularly hot day, David took off his shirt during a break in the labor and turned to look out at the harbor. He didn’t know anyone was near him, but we all saw what looked like hundreds of tiny white feathers all over his back. I opened my mouth to ask, but Endora shot me a look that shut it. Later, when I asked her about it, she said one word: “Scars.” Endora had seen all manner of bodies as a nurse during the war. I spent many nights dreaming about how David’s back might have become marked like that. As if some kind of blast had etched itself across the whole length and breadth of his back.