Felipe Dana/AP Photo
When the news broke that a boat with the bodies of more than a dozen African refugees washed up on the shores of Tobago, only miles away from my home, my family believed it was an ominous sign. It was May 2021, only two years after we had left America to escape the racism that made our lives there unlivable. We settled in Tobago, the sister island of Trinidad, a tiny island in the southernmost Caribbean with white sand and aquamarine oceans.
“We are refugees,” I declared when the 2020 George Floyd protests gripped the nation and we watched from afar as the country went up in flames.
I knew that we had only narrowly escaped something frightening back in the U.S. Mom, a retired nurse, got to our island safe haven only a couple months before its borders were shut down. When the pandemic hit, her former co-workers complained there was no PPE and many of them got sick. We breathed a sigh of relief that mom avoided that fate. But when the bodies washed up on Tobago’s sandy shores, she worried about what it meant for our future in our new found home. The discovery felt foreboding.