For Ebony Wilkerson, a black mother who drove herself and her children into the Atlantic Ocean, saying she was taking them all to a better place. One, how can I protect them, says the pregnant mother, three children behind her, brown as ever, minivan plastic, right handed lever, we will be okay as long as we're together She drives out of town and then drives to her sister to dodge all the demons that twist her and twist her. Ebo ungrounded, the people could fly, not in a Honda Odyssey, but she had to try. And as soon as the rubber sank into the surf, all the ghosts grabbed the wheels and said, yes, yes, that works, come home. And the sea floor scattered, the large and smaller bones of all those other mothers who didn't swim and their kin. Two, is the walk on water gene recessive, regressive, repressed by the stresses of modern minivan life, a past on secret activated by a serum in the heat of the blood of abused wives, and what is the crazy part to believe the weight of metal and plastic can float, to remember what it feels like to be shackled in a boat, or to think there is a better place underneath or across, some way to get back when we're lost. Three, mom is crazy, they tell the police. She's trying to kill us. Have you ever felt that? The most scared I've ever been in my life is in the backseat of an SUV driven by my mother in rage. I have known she could kill us all with the same thick wild determination she used to get us here. All this huge car metal and no way to escape, the hurricane cycles of abuse, the repeated betrayals, single mother broke breadcrumbs, breed real demons that are not us, and they don't stop screaming. It's just that most days something else is louder, call it love, or inertia, or luck. Have you ever seen a woman drive like capitalism is chasing her off the edge of herself? Kids in the back, purse in the front seat, I have, and I am a pretty strong swimmer, but still, I was in a car when I first heard your name, nowhere near the beach, and I had to pull over. Four, how many women have wanted to take their jewelry off? Dive back in, take their children with them to where everything is eventually warm enough, big enough, deep enough to save us. If you listen to everything the ocean has to say, how can you stand it? How can you stay? Heavy swimmer bodies remember wet dark places that held us when we were ready to transform, but brave enough to breathe a different way? Five, Ebony, you almost made it, but your body brought you back, and the tourists saved the children, and now you are just as black and wearing orange in grey rooms where they test your pee for the alcohol level of cough medicine. Is someone sending you books by Tony Morrison, by Kate Chopin? Ebony, you are not the only woman crazy enough to remember that some days we just cannot, we cannot live here, we cannot give our babies to this world that eats our bones like centuries of salt. And I am sending love to the South Carolina centuries that protected the part of you that hears the ocean and believes there has to be a better place, even if neither of us can see it from here right now. And to your babies who survived, they will one day understand.