Kai Wright: I didn't grow up near a coastline, so I was an adult before I began to even think about the ocean, and maybe that's why I've got such a funny relationship to it. Or maybe this is common, I don't know, but I am so deeply drawn to the water and its enormity, the mysteries that lurk underneath it, while also terrified of those mysteries. Not just the sharks and jellyfish and undercurrents and all that. Those physical dangers do shake me, trust, but I'm talking about something spookier, there's so much history in that water, so much lost memory. A podcast and reporting project from National Geographic called Into the Depths invites us to rediscover some of those memories.

It's hosted by National Geographic storyteller and explorer, Tara Roberts. I spoke with Tara back in 2022 when the show first aired. Tara, welcome to the show.

Tara Roberts: Thank you for having me.

Kai Wright: This project was actually two years in the making and it all started at the National Museum of African-American History in D.C. when you saw an image on the wall of these Black scuba divers, mostly women, I believe. Tell us about that image and why it struck you so much.

Tara Roberts: It's a little crazy, Kai, because it's a great picture, but some kind of way that picture, it went up a level in my imagination and I actually thought I saw something that wasn't there. In my imagination when I saw that picture, it was like the women were standing up on the boat. They had capes on, their hair was flowing in the wind. For whatever reasons, it was literally like the capes were blowing in the wind and they were standing up there looking like superheroes. That's how I remembered the photo. Then a couple of years later I was like, oh, let me go look at that picture again. I was like, it looks nothing like what it did in my imagination.

It's still a great picture, but there was something about seeing these Black women participating in an activity that I'd never really seen a group of Black women do before. Then when I read the placard about who they are and what they were doing, I discovered that they were a part of this group called Diving With a Purpose. That part of their mission was to search for and help document slave shipwrecks around the world. That just blew me away. I think there was something about the story that felt really important to me. I thought the work itself was revolutionary, like Black divers searching for slave shipwrecks. Like what? That's crazy.

Kai Wright: You talk in the podcast about the power of stories, your belief in the power of stories. Can you talk a little bit about that, what you think is important about stories in the first place?

Tara Roberts: I think stories are the way we make sense of the world. I think they help us understand ourselves, understand each other better. There's this beautiful quote that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian writer says, and I'm going to butcher it but let me summarize what she said. She said that in essence, stories were the greatest vehicle for empathy because through a story you could really understand a person, you could understand any event in a way that maybe you couldn't before. There's a lot of truth in that and this story in particular feels really important and it feels really important to be told by different voices because it hasn't been told before.

There's a whole bit about the global slave trade about these wrecks that just doesn't exist in our history books. We're not taught it. To have these people who are out there trying to bring this history, these lost stories back into human memory just feels so powerful to me.

Kai Wright: These Black people out there trying to bring this Black story back into our memories, it seems really powerful in that specific way.

Tara Roberts: Definitely. One of the statistics that I learned early on that I always talk about because it really illustrates the power and the necessity of Black people telling this story. 1.8 million Africans died in the middle passage. 1.8 million Africans died in the middle passage. There's no one grieving those people, mourning those people. There are no memorials to that magnitude of loss of life, but then you have these Black scuba divers who are going down, who are finding stories, who are bringing that memory back up to the surface. That just feels so profound to me. There's a thing that's a historian from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Mary Elliot, said in one of the interviews that we did with her.

I love it. Essentially she says what she wants the ancestors to know, what she wants those lost souls to know is that we didn't forget about you. We actually came looking for you. When she says that, that is power. That is a healing circle that's in effect there. That's only something that we can do.

Kai Wright: Well, with that in mind, I know you say in the podcast that you are not into church. You don't do church, but the blessing from your mother's pastor and his advice to connect with the spiritual as you do this work moved me. Let's take a listen to that.

Bishop Jack Omar: As you are doing this work, you're doing it in the outer, that's your research. You're gathering information. That's great. Take it to the next level. Do that spiritual work. Meaning, get in tune. If you can get in tune with the essence, the spirit of those and of our ancestors who were lost during that middle passage, invite them, invite their blessing on the work. You can do so by your prayer meditation, you come across names, speak their names, speak the names, speak the names, and then ask them to bless you.

Kai Wright: Just take us a bit to that moment with the bishop. What did it bring up for you and how did it shape the journey you then embarked on?

Tara Roberts: It changed everything. It added a layer that quite honestly I had not been thinking about. When I started this journey, I was really thinking about these divers, the stories of just Black folks in the ocean that felt like it upended the ideas that exist about who Black people could be in the world. That felt enormous. That was my entree into this work, but it wasn't until Bishop Jack, his name is Bishop Jack Omar from Hillside International Chapel & Truth Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

Kai Wright: Name it.

Tara Roberts: Hello? He said, speak their names. We are speaking his names. He came to my mom's house to bring her an Easter basket, and I was there, and he said, "You were called to do this work." What it did for me was it really brought home the possibility of healing and for that healing to be a healing that travels in the past and exists in the present. It's like a healing that moves throughout time. When that happened, we had started working on the podcast and we were trying to figure out how do we tell this story, but Bishop Jack saying you have to speak their names just clicked so much for us.

We were like, yes, these are not faceless statistics in a cargo hole which is how most of that moment of time is thought of. It's like all the horror and the violence.

Kai Wright: That image that we all see -- well, at least Black people see growing up, the drawing of bodies packed into the bottom of a slave ship. That's what we think of.

Tara Roberts: Right. You don't see individuals inside of that. We decided to thread these names throughout the podcast and we also brought in our resident poet, this amazing National Geographic explorer, Aliyah Pierce, who's a spoken word artist to help us imagine their journeys.

Aliyah Pierce: Can you hear it? Are you really listening?

Tara Roberts: Not just their journeys in-depth, but journeys as souls, as spirits, as something more than again just these bodies in a hold.

Aliyah Pierce: This hollow theater made of iron and wood brought together an orchestra of people across the continent, instruments of human body and voice and ship crescendo into a song of strategy, sounds of revolt amplifying through the very fibers of the floor.

Kai Wright: As you're doing this diving, as they're doing this diving and searching, what does it actually look like? What does the work actually look like? I imagine I grew up watching Goonies.

Mikey: Wow. You guys realize what we could do?

Kai Wright: You find this whole intact ship and there's a pirate skeleton and gold and all the rest.

Mikey: You guys, just what if this map can lead to One-Eyed Willy's rich stuff?

Data: Maybe

Mikey: Then we wouldn't have to leave the Goondocks.

Kai Wright: That's not it, that's not the visual. What is the actual work look like?

Tara Roberts: Okay. I totally have to laugh. I was so expecting you to say the Titanic, but you went to The Goonies.

Kai Wright: No, I'm older than the Titanic, friend.

Tara Roberts: The Goonies is much stronger image. I feel you by that. No. These wrecks are usually not intact like that. Most of them were built in the 1600s and 1700s, so they were built primarily out of wood. That means that when they wrecked, they splintered, they wrecked in pieces, and so pieces are on the ocean floor. Over the centuries, coral retakes those pieces, marine life overtakes them. The sandy sea floor might cover them, so it's really hard to see, like it takes a trained eye to know what things to look for.

Kai Wright: What are those things? What are they looking for?

Tara Roberts: Well, first the search starts in the archives, and it's the archives that give you a sense of where wrecks happened. A lot of these ships were actually insured, and so when they wrecked the financial backers and the ship captains would file insurance claims. The insurance companies would come in and investigate, and that left a paper trail.

Sometimes there are even court testimonies, there might be crew logs, just a whole lot of paperwork.

Historians and archeologists go through the archives. They locate the area where the wrecking events might have happened. There are things like particular artifacts that are particular to a slave ship. For instance, you find a huge pile of bricks or ballast stones that could be indication of a slave ship because they would use that weight to counterbalance the weight of human beings that were in the cargo hole.

Kai Wright: It's Notes from America, we'll be right back.

We learn a lot about you in the course of this podcast, and you have a lot of emotional moments, and I'll go on a real journey here. I want to play one piece of this journey that really struck me. This is a conversation you had while you were in West Africa. Let's listen to this and then I'm going to ask you to provide a little context.

Anna: Breaks my heart that Black people in America have to go through so much, so much in a place where for hundreds of years, they have considered as home. Even though I don't understand what you go through, a huge part of me knows that you are also part of me. If I could, I would help, but just know that you are in my mind in a way, and I know your struggle, and I'm really sorry that you have to go through that. It's really unfair that you have to go through that.

Kai Wright: What happened for you in this moment, and in more broadly, how did this work change you?

Tara Roberts: It's still actually hard to listen to that without feeling a little emotional before this because of all the things that were happening in the United States around race and identity. I had this question throughout all of this work, like, where is home for me? Where is home for us as Black people? Can these slave ships help us feel a sense of belonging, a sense of home? That was one of the underlying questions that I had as I embarked on this journey. Then I went back to Africa, like, "Hi, I'm here. [laughter] I'm not like a naive traveler. I've lived in Zimbabwe before. I've traveled throughout the continent, but this was the first time that I went back with like," I'm searching for my roots, slave shipwrecks, ancestry, hi, I'm here."

I did not get the reception that I expected to get. Right before that clip, Anna is breaking down some other realities that I'm like, "Oh." [laughter]. Where she's like, "Okay, dude, it is not this one big happy Black family. That's not how we look at you guys." I was pretty devastated to hear that. I had to go talk to some friends to begin to put that into context. I realized just how much I don't know about Africa, how much I have not thought about it outside of the Western colonial way that we approach the continent. There was a lot of learning for me, and then Anna says this thing where I was like, she does feel connected. I just did not know how much I really needed to hear that. What's amazing to me is a number of other Black Americans who have listened to the podcast have sent me notes that that moment trips them up a little bit too. It tells me that there is a healing that is out there for us. It's still in process. [laughter]

I'm still digesting, interpreting, processing that, but it does feel like something has moved. There's more possibility in thinking of who we are and who we might be outside of these narratives that we've been given as Black folks.

Kai Wright: Tara Roberts is a National Geographic storyteller and explorer and host of the podcast, Into The Depths. You can check it out on nationalgeographic.com or wherever you get your podcast. Tara, thanks for joining us.

Tara Roberts: Thank you for having me.

Kai Wright: Notes from America is a production of WNYC Studios. Before we go, last week we kicked off our second annual Notes from America Summer Playlist. It's our effort to crowdsource with your help a soundtrack for the long, sunny days of summer and we want to hear from you. What's a song that represents your personal diaspora story? Go to notesfromamerica.org and leave us a voice message right there on the site with your song and your story. Theme music and mixing by Jared Paul. Reporting, producing, and editing by Billy Estrin, Karen Frillmann, Regina de Heer, Rahima Nasa, Kousha Navidar, and Lindsay Foster Thomas. André Robert Lee is our executive producer, and I am Kai Wright. Happy 4th of July.

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