Eleutheria by Allegra Hyde

Author:Allegra Hyde [Hyde, Allegra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

Another body: sun-bloated, salt-streaked, left to rot upon the rocks. It may have been an accident, the first time the settlers burned a fire near a jagged stretch of reef—the light luring a passing ship toward an illusionary harbor, the wooden hull soon lacerated, sailors crying for salvation—but it was not an accident the next time, or the next.

It was no accident when a shipwrecked survivor crawled onto the island’s fine white sand, spitting blood and seawater, begging for assistance, only to receive, instead, a boot to the temple: a swift death the closest thing to a hospitable reception.

There were no laws on Eleutheria—no officials to enforce them. There were no magistrates, no courts. There were no taxes. No banking systems. No tutors and no seminaries to seed enlightenment. There were no decent blacksmiths. No dentists, even bad ones. There were no churches at which to prostrate, unless one counted the cave—a dim dent in a cliff, with only a boulder for a pulpit—and even then, there were no clergy.

Those living on Eleutheria were luckless, wayward. Too stubborn to leave. Too stubborn to live elsewhere. Their numbers grew in fits and starts. From other colonies were sent unrepentant Quakers, adulterers, pickpockets, misfits—all those the New World did not want among its numbers. To Eleutheria were sent the free Black people who made white colonists uneasy; the enslaved Black people who made white colonists afraid—plots of rebellion enflaming paranoia in so-called masters’ rotted souls.

The island: an unofficial penitentiary—though not particularly penitent—could be a site of freedom if one could survive. Poison spiders in the foliage; sharks cruising through the shallows; stingrays laid out like stepping stones to the bottom of the sea. The island was an otherworld. The doomed thrived and the blessed expired. The island was an afterlife: a heaven or a hell, no one was sure. A woman, once shamed and banished, could pick her way along the shoreline, search ropes of seaweed for shipwrecked treasures or lumps of ambergris to make a wealthy person’s perfume reek. When the day grew long and endless, boredom her cruelest warden, she could look for other items too. Pretty shells and smooth stones. The heart-shaped beans that floated across the Atlantic like missives from a lover.

The sea washed up what it chose—for all its unknowns, that much was certain—what crashed ashore, crawled out, stuck or did not.

Lived or did not.

At night, the settlers held lanterns against the darkness, the light a winking eye—a diamond nestled against velvet, a grain of salt on the tongue—the brightness beckoning, come closer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.