“To freedom", jumping ship, and following rivers: Water as a site of freedom
This retelling of the Anthropocene understands how water can be site of freedom, triumph, and liberation, not solely oppression.
As it is mentioned in the song, the amount of Black people who jumped into the ocean changed the migratory patterns of sharks. This models the impact that Black lives have on the world, despite the way they were treated by their white enslavers. Rediker explores this concept in History from below the water line: Sharks and the Atlantic slave trade where he finds that white slavers attempted to generate fear of sharks in the enslaved people on the ship to dissuade them from jumping. Unfortunately, many Black people were also pushed overboard for a slew of reasons that often weren't their own liberation: such as illness, death, or on the whim of the slavers.
As Black people began to escape to freedom through the Underground Railroad, water (in the form of creeks and rivers became essential to their escape and subsequent freedom. Black people crossed creeks and rivers to throw dogs off of their scent and often followed rivers north. One of the strongest examples of this is the Ohio River. This river was used by conductors of the Underground Railroad to guide them north and ensure that they were going in the correct direction.
Further explored in Matthew Salafia's Slavery's Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River, the Ohio River not only acted as a compass to freedom, but it often marked the boundary between freedom and bondage.
At the final barrier between freedom and bondage, was the Niagara River.
On the vase, one of the largest images is that of a Black woman leading other Black people along the path of a river. This image not only nods to the underground railroad, but it also suggests the way forward. In any successful liberatory struggle, the people most oppressed should be centered and their knowledge should be listened to and used as the compass. In this image, the woman leads the group, but she follows the river, which nods to the idea of everything in our environment having memory, agency, and wisdom (perhaps greater than ours).
Also, this image evokes the Combahee River Collective, a seminal group of radical Black feminists whose collective statement laid the groundwork for Black feminist thought. The group was named after Harriet Tubman's raid at the Combahee River in South Carolina which freed hundreds of enslaved people.