Hudson and Americans

“Did you know Sophie, that technically there is no such thing as an American.”

   -Hudson

And so I ask him about the Native Americans, not to be mistaken with Indians. I had been recently re-reading The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and so the topic of Native Americans was on my mind. Hudson ignores my question for a little while.

The two of us are floating in a hot tub the temperature of two hour bathwater, overlooking the Caribbean Sea. We are spending spring break in Curacao with our mother, an island of cacti, Dutch food and a history of lucrative slave trade. We spend early mornings snorkeling, and tanning on man made resort beaches and our afternoons sightseeing. Yesterday it was the aquarium with suspiciously empty tanks, and shallow water in which wounded nurse sharks swim circles around each other. Today it was the Kura Hulanda Museum of Slavery. Hudson hated it.

Maybe it was the cages, or the neck braces with spikes protruding outward to prevent sleep. Maybe it was the basement constructed to simulate being in the bottom of a slave ship, shackled inches from other humans. But Hud did not want to partake in the learning. He didn't care that the only export on the island came from the Sint Marie salt ponds because the climate of the island was too dry to farm. He didn't care that the people of Curacao say that slavery ended in 1964 with Martin Luther King Jr. He sat on a bench outside the Voodoo Building, and pouted. Something was clearly bothering him. Maybe it was the fact that my mother had refused to buy him an overpriced souvenir a few hours earlier, but I doubt it. I saw something close to fear in his eyes as he looked at the KKK uniforms hung as casually as one would hang their jacket in a closet. The dirty white of the canvas contrasted with the black walls that made up the museum. Something about seeing the cloth in person and being close enough to touch it made my voice catch in my throat.

Back in the hot tub, Hudson formulates his response. He says, “Well, why did we take all their land then? It sucks.” This is probably the same thing he was thinking about when we were in Kura Hulanda. Why did we take these people’s lives? It sucks. These are questions I don’t have an answer for, leaving Hudson with the image of a black man hooked through the ribs and strung up on a tree like a slaughtered pig, or children his age shackled together by their necks. But I think it is my lack of answers for him that frustrates him the most. But for now, he lets the jets of the hot tub puff up his swimming trunks with air, and he floats away.