North Country: an Anthology of Landscape and Nature

North Country: an Anthology of Landscape and Nature celebrates the rich diversity of voices and landscapes from the North of England. From Lemm Sissay to Simon Armitage and from Charlotte Bronte to Sarah Hall, this collection brings together an exciting range of voices for the first time. We are pleased to present the introduction by editor Karen Lloyd and her essay about the grave of a Black person at Sunderland Point on the edge of Morecambe Bay, 'White on Black: the Ongoing Problematic Narrative of S****'s Grave.'

The North is ‘the backbone of Britain’, writes poet Lemn Sissay in ‘Anthem of the North,’ the brilliantly assertive poem that opens North Country. This anthology came into being because we believe that Northern writers deserve specific attention; that they are indeed worthy of anthems. And attention is long overdue. North Country is therefore both a survey and a celebration of the North’s landscapes and nature – and the writers whose work is collected here – a set of voices that provides a much-needed addition to our literary and place-specific culture.

As Paul Morley writes in The North, ‘north’ is a word ‘that says so much and leaves plenty to the imagination.’ Part of the anthology’s job, therefore, was to explode preconceived notions of what the North is – or isn’t. We needed to locate writers whose specific approaches take the reader into the heart of a new North; somewhere we’re invited to look closer, or to look again; to encounter landscapes and nature in new and reinvigorated ways.

Through North Country we are witness to the ways in which literature has flowed through place and time, scoping a field from Wordsworth to Harriet Martineau and from Ted Hughes to Jenn Ashworth and Andrew Michael Hurley. Poets like Jason Allen-Paisant bring us bang up to date, his ‘Those Who Can Afford Time’ questioning exactly whose literature our education system represents and how that reflects the way we experience the world around us. Our aim was to assemble a diverse cohort of writers, which is necessary not only in the light of the Black Lives Matter movement but also through issues of access and mobility. North Country is therefore not only inclusive and representative of a broad geographic spread, but also reflects how society, politics, culture and personal experience change and develop over time. Some are household names – the Brontë sisters, Thomas Bewick, Sarah Hall and Ted Hughes, but we also wanted to include new and emerging voices, a number of whom are published for the first time. Most writers are native to the region, though not all; we have also given a truly Northern welcome to a small number of writers from other part of the country, including Ghanaian-born Maxwell Ayamba, because of how their writing reframes, or reinterprets, significant aspects of northern experience.

North Country is made up of four sections, beginning with Inflorescence, in which we’re delighted to bring some of the region’s most exciting new and emerging literary voices to the page. There’s no doubt that they will be the subject of much further attention. Secondly, Retrospection, in which we have gathered some of the most iconic literary voices – those whose movements and legacies continue to influence new generations, but others whose involvement in Northern landscapes is more surprising. Thirdly, in Resistance we bring together work that refuses – either through its subject matter or literary approach (or sometimes both) – more outmoded ways of looking at landscape and nature and instead makes new arguments or explorations; the kinds that resist ecocide, social stereotyping or pejorative ways of thinking about our natural and urban environments. Restoration brings together the kinds of celebratory work that shows how literature is a potent force for engagement with the world around us. Here are extraordinary examples of the written word that allow us to see exactly what can be achieved when the demands of humans are balanced against the simple prerequisites of nature and land.

Bringing new and emerging voices to a wide readership has been a joy and a privilege. Inflorescence celebrates their work. Take Stephen Dunstan, who is exemplary of the sort of new writing we set out to find. In ‘Rezzarection,’ Dunstan takes us on a journey into the ex-industrial outskirts of Barrow in Furness, a place frequently (not to say, lazily) characterised in the press as just another ‘crap’ town. But forget all that. Look at how the worlds of football and birding are spliced together in a lockdown Barrow FC game watched on-screen at home, where Dunstan simultaneously reflects on the birds that have made their home on an adjacent reservoir. When an away fan comments online that the area surrounding the football ground was ‘a dump,’ Dunstan retorts, ‘to quote Basil Fawlty, what were they expecting to see on the outskirts of a Cumbrian shipbuilding town? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain?’ In contrast, Anne Taylor’s essay (or cultural ramble) titled ‘Wild Greens and Golden Lads’ unravels the life and uses of the humble dandelion. Who’d have thought that a roadside weed had this much to offer? Taylor’s insights are a joy to behold. In Walking to Spurn: A Line Between Sea and River, Alison Armstrong walks the restless shore of Spurn Point, unravelling layers of human histories in this loneliest northern outpost. Jules Carter’s experimental essay ‘A Place of Highest Honour’ explores the Lake District’s highest mountain, Scafell Pike, and what it means to this time-served fell-runner and climber, a writer whose sustaining narrative pursues a series of unexpected twists and diversions.

Amongst the usual suspects in Retrospection (William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Southey, Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell) we also include some literary surprises. For example, the joint 1857 expedition of Charles Dickens and his co-conspirator, Wilkie Collins. From Dicken’s initial letter to his friend: ‘I am open to any proposal to go anywhere any day or days this week….If I could only find an idle man (this is a general observation), he would find the warmest recognition in this direction,’ and the resulting journey north from which Dickens produced The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, a humorous interpretation of the pair’s adventures in deepest Cumberland, and which must be one of the greatest instances of self-effacing and gently rollicking storytelling in the English language. ‘Thomas Idle’ is Collins, and ‘Francis Goodchild,’ Dickens. After a series of misadventures, Thomas concludes that activity is the root of all evil; that the only way forward, therefore, is to do absolutely nothing. But then, there’s a mountain to climb, and it’s raining. As the terrain steepens, Collins, aka Thomas Idle, asks, ‘Was it for this that Thomas had left London? London, where there are nice short walks in level public gardens, with benches of repose set up at convenient distances for weary travellers…’

Poet Kathleen Raine’s intense and formative experiences as a child growing up in the village of Great Bavington in rural Northumberland provides a deeply affecting set of images and reflections. Taken from her memoir of 1973, Farewell Happy Fields, Raine memorialises those early years with great facility, recording what existed and what was soon lost in this place of deep ‘ancestral continuity.’ Raine’s world view however, offers no pastoral idyll; the village is a centre of hard living, a place where brutality and joy exist together with lives lived ‘inwoven with the land.’

The North was also home to that disciple of nature and language, the Jesuit priest, poet and diarist Gerard Manley Hopkins, who taught for some years at Lancashire’s Stonyhurst College. In one diary entry Hopkins notes, ‘What you look hard at seems to look hard at you,’ and nowhere is this more clear than in his observations of the Northern Lights seen from deepest rural Lancashire, a place where dark skies would then have been taken for granted. Dorothy Wordsworth reflected in her journals the daily joys she took in her surroundings near her Grasmere home: ‘Walked to Ambleside in the evening round the lake, the prospect exceeding beautiful from Loughrigg Fell. It was so green that no eye could weary of reposing upon it.’ And through our increasingly urbanised culture most of us have become what is called ‘plant blind;’ no longer able to identify common species of wildflower. It’s rewarding then, not to say sobering, to read from the diaries of John Gough of Kendal, the ‘blind botanist,’ who, having lost his sight at the age of three from smallpox, went on to identify every single plant species in the Lake District through touch and scent.

In Resistance, we bring together writers whose work refuses conventional sentiments about place and nature, or that invite us to reconsider aspects of our cultural heritage. Maxwell Ayamba investigates notions of culture and race in our cultural institutions in the post-Colston landscape, and in ‘The Rose Experts’ Kate Davis explores identity, belonging and perceptions of wealth and poverty in her home town of Barrow. William Atkins takes a walk through Northumberland’s Otterburn military training territories, the bogs and hills holding memories of occupation from Roman times. It was also important to locate writing that addresses our urban landscapes, and nowhere is this more successfully accomplished than in David Cooper’s essay on Manchester’s street trees, in particular the Manchester poplar, and in Michael Symmons Roberts circuitry and ‘motherboard’ of ‘Great Northern Diver,’ which in one momentous sentence observes the city at night from high above.

Sarah Hall’s novel The Electric Michelangelo opens in the seaside town of Morecambe. In the selected passage, a fire engulfs the town pier in ‘an almost biblical vision.’ Caroline Gilfillan’s ‘Eagle Owl’ considers a captive owl through the expedient of rural ‘wildlife’ entertainment. Norman Nicholson’s ‘Windscale’ scrutinises the UK’s major nuclear waste storage through the infamous 1957 fire and subsequent poisoning of adjacent land and water courses and beyond.

Much contemporary nature writing seems to be preoccupied with nature as the background to stories of personal recovery. At this juncture in the history of the planet, though, our aim was to navigate towards writing that brings urgent news from the environmental frontline. We know only too well that humans continue to destroy habitats and ecosystems, but we are also the only species capable of attaching meaning to experience. This is the theme at work in Restoration.

Lee Schofield’s ‘Northern Hay Meadows’ is an eloquent reminder of the disaster of industrialised farming, but then moves forwards through the changes taking place on the farms Schofield manages in the eastern Lake District. Hay meadows were once everywhere, places where invertebrates pollinated, where bees harvested the bounty of wildflowers and ground-nesting birds bred and thrived. And they can thrive again; even here in the harsh landscapes of the Lakes, Schofield shows that regeneration of plants and pollinators is entirely achievable. Here too are poems from Simon Armitage’s Stanza Stones project, reimagining rain and puddles as visions of transformation, and Dani Cole explores the history and ecology of an urban woodland between Wigan and Bolton.

Linda France writes with great care and attention about a Newcastle city-centre walled garden in a piece that allows us to question the kinds of value placed on such hidden civic gems, and Mark Carson’s ‘think-poem’ on the osprey has this assiduous fisher-bird manoeuvre its latest catch as ‘a heavy bastard and I need the lift.’ We travel deep underground with Peter Davidson on the miners’ tradition of fashioning spar boxes – ‘glass-fronted cases filled with assemblages of … minerals … sometimes an abstract arrangement, sometimes representations of street scenes or fantastical parks or caverns of crystals and shards of coloured minerals’ in the high villages of the Wear and Tyne valleys.

Think of North Country not as just another nature anthology, but as a place to be at home with old friends and to make new acquaintances. Stay for a while or for the duration. Tune in as these distinctive voices from across and beyond the North invite us all to look more closely, more imaginatively, at some of the landscapes that we think of as home or our refuge, that give us hope, and that we think we know.

Karen Lloyd

Cumbria, 2022

White on Black: The Ongoing
Problematic Narrative of *****’s Grave

Karen Lloyd

On the southern edge of Morecambe Bay in North-west England, Sunderland Point is one of those places within striking distance of society – housing estates, caravan parks and a nuclear power station – that still feels far from the centre of things. I’d first written about the grave of the African who was buried here in 2013 in my book The Gathering Tide. I’d set off to find it one January morning. The tide was far out, rendering the sands a purplish red under heavy grey clouds. Walking towards the point where the River Lune meets the waters of the tidal estuary, redshanks had lifted from the saltmarsh uttering unnerving, tremulous calls. In those days the grave was indicated by a weather-beaten signpost, accessed by a low stile and situated in a small enclosure bounded by barbed wire and drystone walls. In the corner of the site was a hawthorn, gorse bushes, a robin singing.

Dating to the year 1736, the grave is an unostentatious affair; a grey flagstone set flat into the grass with a poem inscribed in a brass plate and at its head, a simple wooden cross. I’d written how the grave has a life of its own, noting the kinds of twenty-first-century grave goods that people leave in an ever-renewing cycle of objects. Then, there’d been a doggy key ring, a bangle, a wooden antelope, a tiny angel, a rusted metal Christmas tree and scattered around the grave various decorated beach pebbles painted with the words ‘We love you Sambo,’ along with other messages of love. Through these diverse objects there arises a movement towards atonement – not only for the death of this Black individual – but for nearby Lancaster city’s wider involvement in the slave trade.

After the burial the grave remained unmarked for some sixty years, until a local priest commemorated it in verse and paid for the poem’s installation to be appended to the slab.

Here lies poor Samboo

a faithful Negro

Who

(Attending his master from the West Indies)

Died on his Arrival at Sunderland

Full sixty Years the angry Winter’s Wave

Has thundering dashed this bleak and barren Shore

Since Sambo’s head laid in this lonely Grave

Lie still and ne’er will hear their turmoil more.

Full many a Sand-bird chirps up on the Sod,

And many Moonlight Elfin round him trips

Full many of Summer’s Sunbeam warms the Clod

And many a teeming Cloud upon him drips.

But still he sleeps – till the awakening Sounds,

Of the Archangels Trump new Life impart,

Then the GREAT JUDGE his Approbation founds,

Not on Man’s COLOR but his WORTH OF HEART

Mawkish doggerel it may be, but here at least an individual appears to be grappling with the injustices of trafficking in the later part of the eighteenth century, a time when the anti-slavery movement was growing. It marks the first attempt to disrupt the grave’s troubling history.

From the seventeenth century, Lancaster’s entrepreneurs developed a particular model of slave ship, one whose shallow draught enabled slave traders to journey far into Africa’s interior, navigating rivers such as the Gambia into modern-day Liberia and the Ivory Coast. The kinds of gewgaws traded for human lives included bracelets, beads, brass bells, mirrors, clothing, hats and pans. Lancaster became the fourth most prolific slaving city in the UK,1 trafficking around 30,000 individuals. Half a mile from the grave the village of Sunderland was built as an ‘outport’ for the loading and offloading of cargo in the decades before wharfs were constructed upriver in the city itself.

Around 1736 a ship arrived at Sunderland. As the cargo was offloaded (likely to have included mahogany, sugar, dyes, rice, spices, coffee, rum and cotton from the Caribbean and the Americas), the story goes that a Black male was put, or, as was reported in the Lonsdale Magazine a century later, ‘ran’ ashore.2

The article asserts that this person was housed at the inn on full wages, but then, after some time, supposing himself deserted by his master and being unable to speak English, he had fallen ‘into a complete state of stupefaction.’ Such was this strength of feeling that the man took himself into the loft of the village brewhouse where, stretching out on the bare boards, he refused all sustenance. He continued in this state only a few days, when death terminated the sufferings of poor Samboo.

The account follows the removal of the body to a dell in a rabbit warren across the fields and close to the edge of the bay where the body was interred without coffin or bier. Thus begins the appropriation of a story whose ramifications endure to this day.

Perhaps we can excuse, or at least begin to understand, this kind of representation of events. But who knows; the Lonsdale Magazine account could very possibly be just a made-up story. Whatever the case, its effect is to imply that the individual had been responsible for their own death, or even, that they had chosen to die.

Re-reading my earlier representation of events, I was troubled by the certainty with which I’d written that this person had been a servant, a cabin boy or a personal assistant. Here I was, stamping my own authority on the grave. Now my own sense of culpability has inspired the need to metaphorically revisit the grave and its surroundings, and to consider what they communicate to me in 2022.

I try to imagine him as a person, this mother’s son, this boy, this beloved, this husband, this father. This body of so much economic value. Where had he been born? What kind of community had he come from? Had he cried much as a baby? Had he and his whole family endured the ordeal of being trafficked together? Or ripped apart. What height? What build? Had he the ability to stand upright in the face of abuse? What kinds of horrors had he been witness or subjected to? Indeed, what age was he? The term ‘boy’ of course, was just another weapon in the slavery’s arsenal of de-individuation.

Then again, there was also the nagging doubt, aided by a woman I once met in the village of Sunderland who questioned whether indeed a body had been buried. And short of a full-blown archaeological dig, we can never know for sure. So, yes, the story could be apocryphal, something concocted by sailors and villagers to keep themselves amused on long winter nights. There’s a big part of me who wants to subscribe to this version, this lack of a body; story-making as a method way of trying to understand something taking place far away and out of sight. If a man or a youth had existed, he may well have been powerless to disrupt the narrative of his own destiny. And we should not forget that it is the same powerlessness which pertains amongst trafficked people today; even those who pay to be trafficked, like the twenty-four Chinese whose families borrowed significant sums to send them to the UK, and who had drowned on the bay in the cockling disaster in 2004.

I revisited the grave in the summer of 2014. A piece of slate had been secured to it, obscuring most of the small cross itself. The slate had been inscribed with the words to ‘Amazing Grace’ in meticulous white lettering. Below this the writer continued, ‘I come to this peaceful and beautiful place to give thanks and enjoy this charming and delightful special burial ground.’

Now, the writer no doubt made and fastened the sign to the cross with the best of intentions, yet it was deeply troubling. The slate dominated the view of the grave, an emplacement that resonated with the systematic imposition of chapels and oratories on Pagan sites, or the sites of alternate religions, under the rise of Christianity. Then there’s the issue of the imposition of a Christian prayer when nothing can be known of the religious inclinations or practices of the deceased. Most troubling of all was the use of that word, ‘charming.’ The dictionary tells me that charming pertains to ‘something very pleasant or attractive, such as a charming country cottage.’ I don’t understand in what kinds of ways such a word can be applied to the grave of an individual who may or may not have existed, but if he had, may have been trafficked, beaten, raped (the ‘cabin boy’; the personal assistant) and who had almost definitely been put ashore because of suffering some horrible contagious disease.

By now I’m on the horns of a dilemma. Do I remove the slate and place it to the side along with the rest of the offerings, which would be respectful (perhaps) to the writer but also show greater respect to the deceased? There was no one in sight, so why not? In the event, I did not. To this day I don’t know why. At the time of writing, some seven years later, the slate, the prayer, along with that troubling word, remain firmly in place.

In Lancaster Maritime Museum a poem expresses the dilemma of the Quakers who, amongst the city’s merchant class, perpetuated the invidious trade in human lives.

I own I am saddened by the purchase of slaves

And fear those who buy them and sell them as knaves

What I hear of their hardship, their torture and groans

Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.

I pity them greatly but I must be mum,

For how could we do without sugar and rum?

There are many ways we can talk about how best to honour and represent the grave. We can tell ourselves that this unknown individual’s death was inevitable because he could not speak our language/was abandoned/died of a broken heart/died of stupefaction/of refusing sustenance/of being stretched out on wooden floorboards. Anything; anything at all, as long as we don’t also tell ourselves that he died because of the project of Colonialism.

A few years ago I took friends of mine from the south for a walk at Sunderland Point. We’d taken the binoculars to see what birds might be about, but after rounding the point from the river and finding nothing much doing, I suggested we walk the short distance to the grave. Chatting away, eventually I realised we’d walked past the place where the grave should have been. I was puzzled, and not a little embarrassed by my inability (me, the local!) to locate it. Where was the signpost? The stile? Something was being constructed, though I couldn’t tell what, and so eventually we turned and walked back the way we’d come.

Shortly afterwards a local television item alerted me to a commission by a local tourism development agency at Sunderland Point. My sensitivity radar went into hyperdrive. There’d been no mention of Sambo’s grave in the news item. Was it possible the installation had been built adjacent to the grave?

I went to investigate. A new sea-defence wall had been constructed. No doubt this was necessary to protect the grave from storm damage under climate chaos, but the wall felt like an ugly, if practical, intrusion. And there was something else. A new gate at the side led into a new enclosure just north of the grave. A broad wheelchair-accessible path had been constructed, which was strange, as there’s no wheelchair access along the headland or to and from the village. Between the path and the new wall, dozens of saplings had been planted inside those plastic tree protectors, but these incipient trees had given up the ghost and if not already dead, then dying, the plastic tubes spilling nettles and desiccated twigs. Dominating the new space was the sculpture Horizon Line Chamber, by artist Chris Drury, commissioned by the development company Morecambe Bay Partnership.

The chamber is a replica of an oratory, such as the Gallarus Oratory I’d visited several times on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula. Inside the chamber the eye takes time to adjust to the dark, and when it has, a faint inverted projection is cast onto the far wall in which the sea (or the sand) is the sky and the sky is the sea. And it’s an interesting piece – one that might invite us to see things differently, at least whenever the lens is not smeared with salt – or from a different perspective. But, once again, the way the piece has been placed infers that this in itself is the main event, the destination, the point of the journey.

Beyond the chamber a small gate leads into the original grave site. There’s a new interpretation board, but regrettably the term ‘Sambo’s Grave’ remains, with no attempt to make sense of the relevance of the sculpture to the site or the grave to the sculpture. Indeed, no attempt at all to rationalise our deeply troubled past against our new assemblages.

As I turned to leave, in the corner I found a stash of bags of rubbish dumped behind the wall. As I attempted to make sense of it all, what I felt most of all was anger.

Once again, we white people had failed to understand or acknowledge the uncomfortable truth of the grave. We had simply appropriated it as a means of directing tourists to the site (and thence into the local economy) without any attempt or reference to meaning. Indeed, a piece in the Lancashire Post about the granting of permission for the installation to remain permanently makes no mention of its relevance to the grave, stating simply that ‘The installation is part of wider work to regenerate the area and to celebrate arts in the local area.’ Quite how such an isolated place should be regenerated is not made apparent. And that it was thought appropriate to simply ignore the grave means that the development is an appropriation, or worse – an embarrassment. Now, far from being remote, strange but strangely compelling, the grave is just an appendage to our white narratives; the installation an object superimposed on our refusal to engage with uncomfortable truths.

During my processing of the developments at the grave I needed to include something at least from a Black perspective. I spoke with academic and writer Maxwell Ayamba, whose work addresses access for Black and other minority groups to the British countryside. I’d recently read Maxwell’s piece about the kneeling Black slave sundial at The National Trust’s Dunham Massey in Cheshire, and about how the Trust had failed to engage with that highly visible underlying narrative of oppression. Here on the shores of Morecambe Bay, the ‘boy Sambo’ continues to kneel under the weight of our refusal to deal with the issues the site raises, but we continually cast aside.

Maxwell and I wondered how such inarticulacy had come about. Specifically, I asked him what could be done to with the use of the term ‘Sambo.’

‘Instead of being avoided,’ he said, ‘these kinds of uncomfortable truths have to be recognised – dealt with. In this case, the uncomfortable truth is that the term ‘Sambo’ is offensive; it’s a non-name, right? It was part of the system of the Colonial project, used with the intention of dehumanising the individual. To continue the use of the term is a desecration, or more – an abomination.’

Maxwell continued, ‘We can’t rewrite the past, but we can initiate recovery, and do this by challenging and changing these problematic narratives. Stopping the use of the term ‘Sambo’ is an urgent part of that reparation.’

I recall how, when dictating this essay into my computer from earlier hand-written notes, the software had been programmed to exclude the term ‘Sambo,’ substituting it with a series of asterisk. However many times I typed the word, the computer refused. This is what we need to do; to refuse a term that confronts us with all that has been staring us in the face, but that we have repeatedly chosen to turn away from. Much, I suppose, in the same way I’d fallen into the trap of using the term ‘Sambo’ and ‘boy’ and chosen to leave the slate with the prayer and the word ‘charming’ attached to the cross – which is in itself another imposition. But lasting reparation can only be made through conversation and agreement, rather than through division.

‘It’s about social justice,’ Maxwell explained, ‘about the lives people are leading now and about lived experience. If we don’t do it, the divisions between us will be perpetuated. Imagine a Black person visiting the grave today, being confronted by the term ‘Sambo,’ and seeing that the problems with that are not being articulated. Imagine; how would that person feel? Being able to empathise with others is a necessary part of the process.’

In other words, without direct and meaningful conversation and without action, we are stuck in a horrible stasis. ‘Inarticulacy is that stasis,’ Maxwell said.

‘So tell me,’ I said, ‘What do we call him?’

‘We call him ‘The Unknown African.’

The African-American writer James Baldwin states that ‘the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.’ The use of ‘Sambo’ must no longer be normalised – either here on the shores of Morecambe Bay, or anywhere. As long as this Black body (or even this imagined Black body) remains ‘Sambo’; as long as we are unable and unwilling to scrutinise our white selves in relation to the story and its unceasing Colonial aftermath, century after century, decade after decade in the stasis of an unengaged present; if we continue to unsee the problem of the body interred beneath the weight of the word ‘charming,’ then we have also failed utterly to come to terms with our part in the legacy of Black history and the lives of Black people today. Most essentially, we have chosen to unsee the expression of our own history, how it pervades, how it poisons, in the light of all this, absolutely. Baldwin again: ‘As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating silence.’

Queen Elizabeth ll is dead. King Charles III is the tenth monarch to reign over the UK since the unknown African died at Sunderland at the beginning of the Georgian period. Throughout those three hundred years, white narratives prevailed.

Marilynne Robinson states, ‘The willingness to indulge in ideological thinking – that is … thinking that by definition is not one’s own, which is blind to experience under the contradictions that arise when broader fields of knowledge are consulted – is a capitulation no one should ever make. It is a betrayal of our magnificent minds and of all the splendid resources our culture has prepared for their use.’

There is another way of thinking about the grave at the edge of the bay, one that I’d previously missed altogether, though its evidence is all around us in books, paintings, television programmes and more. As Maxwell reminded me, we should not assume that the unknown African at Sunderland was, in fact, enslaved. Africans and Black people have been part of our culture as individuals within, rather than apart from, society, for centuries. They had self-determination. They had acceptance – even of a sort. Think of those who lived and worked alongside Romans on Hadrian’s Wall; in the Tudor court; in the paintings of the Dutch masters where they are seen to have been equals to their white compatriots; the Black citizens who, together with many other minority groups, enlisted to fight for our country in the causes of peace and freedom and self-determination in two World Wars. When we think like this – when finally, we get it – that to be African and Black is not always to have been enslaved – then it establishes a more open, more engaged view of Black lives and the principles of social justice and equality.

By admitting my previous assumptions, by us all admitting our previous assumptions and our mistakes, by making these urgent and necessary reparations at the grave on Morecambe Bay, we will have shown ourselves capable of at least reaching for those principles. Until then, we white people are shackled to the memory of this Black individual, buried under the weight of our collective amnesia.

In 2003 Lancaster’s Litfest commissioned a sequence of poems titled Lancaster Keys, by the London-born, Barbadian-descended poet Dorothea Smartt, subsequently distributing 24,950 copies – one for each person shipped into slavery by Lancaster traders between the years 1750 and 1800 – to secondary school pupils across the city. The poems spoke to a city grown rich from the trade in misery, but that continues to suffer from what historian Alan Rice of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research calls the ‘traditional amnesia’ of its slaving past.3 Smartt’s poems then, provide a radical counter-memory.

Here I lie. A hollow

Sambo. Filled with your tears

and regrets. The tick in the eye

of Lancaster pride; the stutter,

the pause, the dry cough, shifting

eyes, that cannot meet a Black man’s

1. gaze.4

In her poems, Smartt renames the person Bilal, which is a contemplative and imaginative act of the restoration of identity. At the outset of the collection Smartt provides ‘a few words on samboo’s grave;’ definitions, actually, including ‘Sambo: a pet name given to anyone of the negro race’ from the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable of 1898 and ‘Sambo; a colloquial or humorous appellation for a negro’ from Websters Dictionary, 1913. Twenty years have lapsed since Litfest’s commission of Smartt’s poems, yet the pejorative use of the term ‘Sambo’ persists. Some historians call for the term to remain because it represents a moment in time; one that we need to be reminded of, and that in the common parlance of the past the significance – the word’s aura, if you like - was very different to what it is now.

Smartt’s sequence includes a poem titled ‘99 names for samboo,’ which is a list of words, some of which speak to his having a family and relationships. Others are the kinds of offensive words now relegated to history, and some speak to the physical and economic properties of slave bodies. Smartt also renames him Bilal, which, following that comprehensive list, is an act of restoration of an individual identity.

The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol instigated the swift removal of other slavery-related objects from public display around the country. In the grounds of Lancaster Priory Church, a grave monument to the Rawlinson family – city traders who had acquired significant wealth through slavery – was graffitied in red with the words ‘Slave Trader.’ I went to take a look. The monument sits behind iron railings, but there the words remain, sprayed in red paint. I was glad that they have survived; a chink in the city’s armoury against coming to terms with its slaving past.

Recently, I took another walk to the grave. The door to the chamber was off its hinges, lying on the floor of the interior. With daylight admitted, the lens and its peculiar way of showing the world was redundant. Perhaps worse, the new trees that had survived were now growing contorted from the plastic tubes that were still here a number of years on. Poor unknown African. Whilst the world stumbles incrementally towards equality, you remain ‘Sambo’; you remain ‘boy’. What would I say to you now? What can I do other than to apologise? To say I am sorry?