There was no telling what had been transpiring on the mainland since our absence from it. I had to believe though that there were still slaves alive as I had been cast to free them like some sort of a proverbial Moses.
The symbolism of that last thought hit me abruptly and I groaned aloud. I had been tasked with the leadership oriented task to lead people out of the bondage of dark self-imposed generational curses and the bondage that drew blood at the bite of the whip. It was alarmingly parallel with the task appointed to Moses and his second wife had been named Keturah. She'd been black too.
Some might say that the coincidence stopped there because Moses was brown and I was black, but they would be wrong. My great ancestors from Africa hadn't been taken captive and turned into slaves in West Africa like most in the American South and the Caribbean had been.
Instead they had been captured and enslaved along the east coast of Africa just off the shore of Ethiopia. My ancestors had been partly Jewish by heritage. One from the tribe of Naphtali and the other from the tribe of Levi.
On the voyage over to America they bore a son who they named Levi after the father's Jewish ancestry in an attempt to hold onto their heritage and they had. My father had died five years ago, but he had ever been the historian. So much so that to reaffirm history he had named me, his only son, Levi, after the boy who had been born into captivity on the journey to America, in his attempt to assert that the captivity of the past was over.
I went by Eli, because I'd been embarrassed by my real name. I'd never wanted to be seen as someone special or unique because of my Jewish ancestry that could trace its lineage back to the likes of Moses' own tribe of Levi.
Moses had been on the back side of the desert in the land of Midian for forty years without a true purpose in life before he'd been called and pressed into duty by God. I'd been lost in a desert at sea for seven years, which was the number of completion.
The day we'd come through the hole in the ocean had been the seventh year anniversary of my families passing, which had been partly to blame for my supremely bad mood leading up to that event. My mood always took a nose dive southward that time of the year.
There were just too many coincidences to be ignored. God had been setting this one up in symbology for a long time and I felt humbled to know that I was part of an overall process that went well beyond the years of my life and experiences.