I walk straight onto the upper deck of the only double-deck vertical lift bridge in the world:
dramatic, powerful, and impossible to ignore—the qualities I’d like for myself.
Spiky, beautiful,, tall towers with massive concrete weights hanging in the air. The steel girders
punctuated with holes create shapes in space and in the space around me. I fit to them, they fit
around me. I take photos every few steps, the constantly changing perspectives.
At 8:20am, the air is cool. It’s too early for much car traffic. A light rail train hoots as it passes a
bus with one passenger.
On the other side I find my way down to the lower deck. No arial river views of Broadway
Bridge or Morrison or Burnside but I find a girder arrangement that frames Union Station. All
across the lower deck, the pillars and walls pulse with the graffiti of yearning. Thick colors
hatched with slashes. 2am two-toe balance and passion.
What was the graffiti like fifty, seventy years ago? Who would die for love? Whose gang ruled?
What West Side story sobbed its aortic fissures over intercultural impassibility?
I climb the stairs to the upper deck and walk back with the breeze. That great iron structure, rust
tattooed, soaring towers, the arrested momentum of the permanently impermanent weights that
will roll down for
I am passing between the high steel towers, the densely packed girders and endless cables and
the brief colors of river and buildings trapped in the black framework, trapped between
landscape and portrait. What I see at each now morphs, disappears into memory.
I feel now disappearing over the event horizon of history. My mother’s past is somewhere in the
framework between landscape and portrait: Sri Lankan with a Portuguese grandmother and a
Dutch great grandfather.
History tosses off a sentence: The Portuguese “…were able to establish their power in many
areas of the Maritime Provinces of the island…” and “…the Dutch managed to capture most of
the coastal areas in Sri Lanka…” (Wikipedia). Both Dutch and Portuguese enslaved the Sri
Lankans, who remained enslaved even after the British abolished slavery in 1844. When England
was seen as the world’s largest slave-trading power, over 250,000 Sri Lankans were listed as
slaves.
I stare between the iron girder openings onto calm water and fertile land. I am walking between
my cultures of the oppressed and the oppressor. I am the Dutch overseer with the whip in my
hand, I’m the Portuguese captain with the gun at my belt, I am circling those terrified women,
my grandmothers and great-grandmothers, holding their kids close. I am those grandmothers and
mothers, those children, helpless as they are seized by my sweating, metal-soiled hands.
My feet are hot on the steel walk-way, the sky is the color of steel, my body feels steel-heavy.
What if the bridge towers release their weights, and buckle and capsize into the Willamette,
taking me down under the weight of it, under the crushing of it, buckling and capsizing as I
storm villages and herd screaming women into a circle of screaming soldiers.
In Kew, a tranquil part of London, the British National Archives hold the Slave Registers of
Ceylon that list names. Those jostling matrilineal lines, snagging and coiling and interweaving.
Were the children of those partnerships from consensual relationships, marriage, or rape?
In the brown and white photograph, my mother, aged six, sits on a rug, the sisters, mother, aunts
ranged behind her on chairs, and behind them a motley assortment of men wearing badly fitting
suits. The women look serious. The men look uncomfortable, waiting for the photograph to be
taken so they can get back to their lives, to working in factories, on railroads, sitting under trees,
drinking with friends. After the flashbulb, the women get up, carefully change out of their white
dresses, slip into thin cotton dresses, tie on aprons, turn back to washtubs and scrubbing brushes,
washing lines and baskets of wet clothes, buckets of soapy water and wet rags, flour and oil and
coconut and jaggery and semolina and jackfruit and make meals out of nothing, and talk about
nothing and watch each other: the high-collared shirt, the bruising glimpsed beneath the long-
sleeved blouse, the stiffened movements. They talk about those things or they don’t. They scold
the kids that wander in asking for food. They deal out hugs and smacks across the head. This one
is doing well at school. This one’s head is like a brick wall. Nothing goes in. This one is so well-
behaved. This one is talking back. The talking-back child gets a rumble of disapproval, aunties
offering slipper intervention. The auntie with the talking-back child says she’s tried all that.
What-to-do? Twelve years only. He does as he pleases. Just like the father. The women murmur.
The father should do something but they all know the father is drunk or off with some town-
woman in Kandy. Someone tells a naughty joke. The women scream with laughter. For now, the
talking-back child is forgotten by everyone except his mother.
Among them are the pale-skinned ones and the ones whose skin is dark as coffee-no-milk, and
ones between, copper, umber, cinnamon. Among the children, the pale-skinned ones have a
slight air of superiority. They sit on chairs, not the floor. They wear nice clothes. Their parents
don’t beat them. The other kids notice but they don’t say anything. If they are spoiled, it’s okay.
If they have extra or special treatment, it’s okay. The kids are already used to the rule of shade.
Light, dark, light, dark. My mother was fair-skinned. Her mother was dark and her grandmother
was light. My mother thought her fair skin would protect her in England. I am dark.
On the other side of the bridge, I lean against the wall and look back at the rearing truss frame,
blindblack against the smooth river. Some great-great-great-grandmother is calling me. “Who
will speak for us? Those men came from the sea, across water as grey and leached of color as
their faces. They took our flesh and ironed it into shapes they could wear. They took away our
ability to name ourselves and each other. We stood next to our destroyed houses, near-dead and
motionless with hunger, cold, terror, grief. Who will call us back? Who can return anything that
we recognize? What is the voice of hunger, cold, terror and grief? What can bring us back from being
ironed flesh?
I take a left turn and cross onto the path towards the bus stop. Green, dented beer can, orange
plastic bag split open, burger wrapper, blue straw, two nested coffee cups. A broken shopping
cart on its side, shards of red plastic poking up to the curdling sky. It’s already 80 degrees. I look
back and the far side of the bridge is hidden. The bridge only exists as I remember it. The heavy
weights and stark outline are brushed by warming milky light. The bridge is and isn’t passage.
The bridge does and doesn’t allow return. If you are standing below your concept of bridge is as
incomplete as that of Toyota travelers at 40 mph who barely register it as a point of crossing.
(Tamara Fernando. “The Forgotten History of Slavery in Sri Lanka.” The Sunday Observer. 5
Sept 2021. https://www.sundayobserver.lk/2021/09/05/forgotten-history-slavery-sri-lanka)
© 2023 Sandra Hunter
Bio: Sandra Hunter’s stories have won the 2018 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition,
2017 Leapfrog Press Fiction Award, 2016 Gold Line Press Chapbook Prize, and three Pushcart
nominations. She is a 2018 Hawthornden Fellow and the 2017 Charlotte Sheedy Fellow at the
MacDowell Colony. Books: story collection Trip Wires, chapbook Small Changes,
Losing Touch. She is a life coach and owns WILD WOMEN LEADERS OF COLOR that
supports women facing workplace racism and gender bias. www.wildwomenleadersofcolor.com
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