Message in a Bottle

Maybe it was just a bit of trash. The waves crashed on to the shore more gently now, receding further with each new cycle as the tide went out, leaving behind dead jellyfish, abandoned seashells, and discarded rubbish strewn across the sandy beach. Dora focused on the small object glinting in the sunlight, grains of sand clinging gently to its sides. As she got closer, her eyes widened in excitement. An old sheet of paper rolled inwards laid dry and pristine on the inside of a corked bottle.

She looked around nervously. Not many people came to this part of the beach. She loved it for its solitude and quiet - the perfect setting for a prank? Picking it up gingerly she thought many times about throwing it back into the ocean, but something compelled her to keep it. Who knows? Perhaps God or the Universe had decided to give her the answer she had been searching for.

Dora hurried home and opened the door to the sound of her phone vibrating on the table where she had left it, next to the two letters. It was her girlfriend, Janice.

Dora: “Hello”

Janice: “So….?”

Dora: So what?

Janice: Girl! Don’t keep me in suspense. Which one did you decide?

Dora looks closely at the two letters while she thinks aloud. The first read:

Congratulations! You are a recipient of the George Owens International Law Scholarship Fund for $20,000 for the academic year August 2021 to May 2022.

Dora: “I really don’t know. I mean I have been wanting to study law for years, but now…”

The second letter from the Grace Bright Trust read:

We are delighted to inform you that your application for a grant to restart the Crush Racism Challenge has been successful. Your grant of $20,000 is conditional on your new non-profit organization being set up by June 1st 2021 and on the project running from August 2021 to May 2022.

Her voice trails off as she looks around her room. There is a photo of her with her arm lifted high in the black power salute in an old newspaper. On her wall she looks up in adoration at a prominent black activist. Opposite is a poster of Mr George Floyd.

Janice: People out here would give their right arm to get $20,000 to do anything and here you have two offers! Two!!

Dora: Yes. But I can’t do both!

Dora’s eyes fall on the wine bottle opener and she remembers her find on the beach.

“I’ll call you back”. She hangs up without waiting for an answer.

The wine bottle opener removed the cork easily, although it disintegrated slightly as she pulled up. The piece of paper was too unrolled now to slide through the small opening and one of the edges appeared to be slightly burnt. It took a tweezer and more than 15 minutes to gently remove it without tearing it apart on the way out. The handwriting was childlike but, somehow, elegant.

100 years earlier in 1921 a young girl, Dorothy, searches among the rubble of a burnt bedroom and picks up a little black book. It was once the repository of her dreams and imaginations with a pretty picture on the cover of another little girl just like her. Now the outside had become charred and blackened. But on the inside, some of the pages could still be salvaged. Dorothy carefully picks it up and puts it in a brown paper bag.

They were the lucky ones. They had survived. As Dorothy walked hand in hand with her mother through the now devastated Greenwood district, she had flashbacks of Mr Mann, normally the friendly grocer, putting up a courageous fight against the fire. They hurried past what used to be the Tulsa Star newspaper, now flattened. They stopped outside the Dreamland Theater. It had become as much of an attraction to her as their confectionery. Now all that remained was a scarred frame and a blackened sign hanging precariously off one of the timbers.

The last film she had seen at Dreamland Theater was Within Our Gates. Her parents had a number of arguments about whether she should be allowed to see it. Eventually they compromised. She could go but her father would block her eyes for any of the parts that he deemed to be unsuitable. Despite her father’s efforts, she still managed to catch a glimpse of what was happening on the silent screen in the censored scenes.

Now in the aftermath of the fire in their town, Dorothy wondered what hope was there now for the beautiful Greenwood district.

Her family decided to move away as quickly as possible. They bundled up what little of their belongings they had left and boarded a bus on a long journey to goodness knows where. Her mother tried to encourage her to get some rest, but like the heroine of the film she had seen, she could not sleep. Left with her own thoughts, Dorothy remembered that at the end of the film at the Dreamland Theater, a lone voice had started a familiar song, first weakly and then with more gusto. She recognized it as the one they called the Negro National Anthem. Soon everyone was on their feet and joining in. It was a strong reminder that there is always hope, that victory lay just up ahead.

And now it was all gone. She wondered if anyone would ever dare to build a Greenwood District again. The bus conductor interrupted her reverie to announce that they would be stopping for a short break near the ocean before moving on. Suddenly Dorothy realized what she needed to do. She borrowed a pen from her mother, tore out one of the least burnt pages from her notebook and began to write. Her father had given her a bottle of sweets from the confectionery store that he had managed to rescue. She emptied them in her bag and put the note inside, sealing it as tightly as she could with the cork. Her mother, observing her, mustered a smile of encouragement and helped her to seal it more perfectly. Soon they would be at the ocean and she could send her message.

Back in 2021, Dora sits stunned by the note, her eyes welling up with mixed emotions of gratitude and confusion. When she asked the question about what she should do, this was not the way she thought the answer would come. How long had that message been sitting in that bottle? Who had sent it? How is it possible that it spoke so directly to her heart and so perfectly to her situation:

" Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,

Let us march on ’til victory is won.

Build Again. "