Energy
by planes and trains by locomotives
by automobiles by way of Georgia
by way of land now called Mississippi
called Alabama Tennessee via roads
and train tracks via newly made
paths that weaved through fields of
cotton and poppies by foot by gallop
by quiet of nighttime by promise
of dawn by shadowed runways with
the company of runaways beneath the shapes
of hawks and swallows and blackbirds
and warblers and bunting and starlings
and geese with empty pockets empty
hands with nary a piece of luggage
with the bed of a pickup packed tight
with everything or nearly everything or
a paltry fraction of nearly everything with
no ids no food with just a name a meeting place
a foggy guarantee by few by hundred
by few hundred thousand and by water
of course by water by schooner
by dinghy by canoe by schiff by sailboat
by freighter by way of Trinidad
Barbados St Lucia by way of Bahamas
and Jamaica and Haiti by countless
departures and fewer arrivals by
way of danger by way of courage by
way of mettle across many a lake
and manners of ponds by seas and
by way of the ocean by way of
the Atlantic and its gateway between what
the world was and what it’s come to now
by misfortune by bad intentions by
trust and luck and by no other option
we fled places named by violence and made it
to other places named by violence made it
to Minneapolis Detroit and Indianapolis
Chicago and Pittsburgh and Brooklyn
by way of the Hudson by way of the East
River inside which, upon a time, the Dutch
and English dropped their anchors
and forced their cargo to disembark
Listen to Bernard Ferguson’s oral history interview, conducted by UNY founding editor Nicki Pombier on February 11, 2022. Read an edited excerpt below.
ON BEGINNINGS
I begin in the Bahamas. That’s where I am from, and that’s where is home. That’s the place that shaped most of my psyche. I grew up in the Bahamas until I was 18, and then I came to the U.S. for undergrad. I’ve been here ever since. I’ve been here for like 11 years. So I start in the Caribbean, in the Bahamas. I’ve been thinking about the beginning a lot lately, or just thinking about all of the different ways I’ve had to change my life. How I’ve become so different from where I came from. I think that the most clear image of the beginning, and the beginning that I’m from specifically, is back home in the house I grew up in, my grandmother’s house. We have a big family, and we get together mostly every Sunday to hang out and talk and kind of love up on one another. And inside those gatherings is where I grew up. On the island, I had a slower moving life, a more precarious life, but I was loved and well-fed and surrounded by a beautiful, abundant family. That’s the image I think of when I think of a beginning. That’s where I start, and then my journey toward being whatever I am now begins when I leave. I had to separate myself from home, had to migrate for resources, safety, medical care, and numerous different things. So when I think of beginning, I think of that setting, gathering as a family, and what that provided my spirit.
ON THE SOUNDS OF A SUNDAY
I can hear the sound of fish frying in a pan. I can hear the sound of a pot of peas and rice bubbling. I can hear my grandmother shouting someone’s name, either my aunts’ or cousins’ or my own, either to say the food is ready or to ask one of us to find out when someone else is going to arrive, because we’re waiting for everybody to get here. I hear the voices of my family and I hear laughter, like cackling laughter. A game of dominoes. We play dominoes a lot in the Bahamas. I hear the hum of a television, it’s too loud and nobody’s watching it, and we’re talking over it, so maybe we should turn it down but we don’t. Maybe a bird or two in a tree nearby, if it’s early in the morning. And the cars passing by the house. The street was nearby the house, so there were cars passing in the corner every once in a while. This question is useful to me. There’s a wide doorway in my head to walk through if I think about sounds.
ON THE WELL OF FAMILY STORIES
We’re a family rich with stories. We have so many stories of my grandmother and my grandfather and so many stories of all the aunts and their siblings and how they grew up. They’re these core stories that everybody tells frequently, especially now as my aunts get older. All of them are sixty and older, and their memory is kind of getting to the point where they repeat the same stories, and they can’t remember if they told you that story before. I think that’s a little bit of a fraught location to be in, but it’s kind of a sweet location to be on the outside of and to witness, because there are these stories of their parents and their life that standout specifically, and the stories tell a lot about the qualities of people that they love who are gone. They have a practice of passing on these stories and talking about one another and talking about these core narratives that have happened in their lives, most of them funny, most of them hilarious, but all of them having this important thing that expresses something about them or something about someone that they love. And so to me, that’s writing. The way they craft those stories and tell those stories, that’s writing. And the way that we as a family, when somebody is telling a story, we’re ears in, that’s reading. So my relationship with language begins there with the sharing of stories and keeping stories and repeating them and re-enjoying the story even though it was told once a week. That’s the well. I’m so far away from it now and I need to replenish it, but that’s the well.
ON STORYTELLING AS PERFORMANCE
We tell stories as if they’re legends. This might be me dramatically painting the memories a little bit, because of how I hold them, because of how I value them, because of how I know that they’ve shaped me, but when I think about these stories, or even when I hear the stories now, there’s this kind of quality of, like, you’ve gathered, you have a ton of people in a place that’s maybe loud and rowdy, and then someone shouts over the crowd, calls people to a table or calls people to a place where everybody can sit and then somebody is standing up and like, reciting, performing a story. And everybody’s quiet. And watching. And everybody knows, everybody knows the story. And some people are repeating some of the words when their favorite parts come up or when the punch line hits, or they’re chattering amongst themselves. So it has this reverence of, like, someone repeating some prophecy or legend, or even like a biblical quality to it. That’s how grand they are. It’s almost as if they’ve been codified collectively in our minds, without us saying so, just through the practice. So the quality I’m trying to speak to is how they come off as legend. Like pitched really high, as if there’s some Bible that everybody studies with all these stories in it, but there isn’t. I mean, that’s not a quality of the stories themselves, just the way they’re shared.
ON WRITING “ENERGY”
I will say it was difficult. I’ve been having a hard time writing about climate change or writing about the water or writing about movement because they’re so tender. And my excitement [about writing this poem] was separated from my sense of tenderness around the topic. So when I’m sitting down to write about it, it ends up really difficult. And so I relied a lot on just, like, the literal. There wasn’t that much figurative in there. I kind of just said I’ll depend on the things that actually happened. I’ll just say them and put them side by side and trace them, and maybe have the reader migrate themselves as they go through, have them move through some of the paths. And that was a useful way to say, Okay, this is painful. But if I do it this way, I don’t have to necessarily think or feel the pain. Because I’m looking at numerous different kinds of pathways that Black people have taken and doing some research on those paths. What are the stops? And what are the names of the places? And what’s around? And what kind of landscapes did people have to move through and figure out? How did they do it? By what means? Are we the only ones migrating? So that gave me a scaffolding I can hold, where it became easier to work with, instead of specifically relying on expression, and uttering a thing from the hurt place or the tender place.
I’m grateful for all the documentation, even though it’s not a lot, but what we do have about these paths and patterns of migration. It helped me wrap my own mind around it. I can look at a pathway on a map, or I can look at a map and imagine a pathway, knowing that Black people have gone from one place and arrived to the other. Working on the poem, it helped me more vividly engage with what that might have looked like. I feel like I have a more granular imagination of that movement. Maybe in the past, I’d think of a map and I think of this line on the map, or this arc on the map from one place to the next, or I think about these lines moving. But after working on this poem, and also the more I do work on understanding Black migration, the migration of Black people, I get more of a granular imagination of what that might have looked like and the implications of it and what it connects with. I’ve worked on other poems that deal with the migration of Black people, but this ended up helping with that expansion of my imagination.
Body of Water
Atlantic Ocean, Hudson River, East River
About the Artist
Bernard Ferguson (they/them) is a Bahamian poet, essayist and educator whose work has been featured in The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas and elsewhere. Bernard is currently working on a book of nonfiction, The Climate Sirens (Graywolf, 2024), about Hurricane Dorian and the effects of climate change on Small-Island Developing States across the world.