Written in the Waters: A Memoir of History, Home, and Belonging

by Tara Roberts

Overview

This searing memoir by a National Geographic scuba diver recounts one woman's epic journey to trace the global slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean—and find her place in the world.


For fans of adventurous women’s memoirs like Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love, Cheryl Strayed's Wild, and Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped.

When Tara Roberts first caught sight of a photograph at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History depicting the underwater archaeology group Diving With a Purpose, it called out to her. Here were Black women and men strapping on masks, fins, and tanks to explore Atlantic Ocean waters along the coastlines of Africa, North America, and Central America, seeking the wrecks of slave ships long lost in time. Inspired, Roberts joined them—and started on a path of discovery more challenging and personal than she could ever have imagined.

In this lush and lyrical memoir, she tells a story of exploration and reckoning that takes her from her home in Washington, D.C., to an exotic array of locales: Thailand and Sri Lanka, Mozambique, South Africa, Senegal, Benin, Costa Rica, and St. Croix. The journey connects her with other divers, scholars, and archaeologists, offering a unique way of understanding the 12.5 million souls carried away from their African homeland to enslavement on other continents. But for Roberts, the journey is also intensely personal. Inspired by the descendants of those who lost their lives during the Middle Passage, she decides to plumb her own family history and life as a Black woman to help make sense of her own identity.

Complex and unflinchingly authentic, this deeply moving narrative heralds an important new voice in literature that will open minds and hearts everywhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781426223754
Publisher:	Disney Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/11/2025
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Tara Roberts is a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence who documents shipwrecks that once carried captive Africans during the transatlantic slave trade. Their stories—and the stories of the divers, historians, archaeologists, and communities she meets along the way—became the podcast series Into the Depths, downloaded a million times and featured in more than 100 media outlets. In 2022, Roberts became the first Black female explorer to grace the cover of National Geographic magazine and was named the Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year. A former Fellow at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, she has worked as an editor for publications including Essence and CosmoGirl, published her own magazine, and edited several books for girls. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
 

I float face up in the calm water of a tucked-away beach in Kalpitiya.
It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun feels hot but delicious on my face and my toes, which are painted bright orange and peeking out of the water. The water slides off my bald head like a lover’s gentle caress, leaving it glistening in the rays. I am at least 330 feet from shore. But if I stand up, the water will only lap my waist, maybe my chest, in the deeper pockets.
No one else is around, except a few mangy dogs; even the fishermen with their blue-and-green-and-yellow-striped boats listing lazily in the sand have taken siestas. I worry a little about my stuff on the beach alone. But mainly I lay back in the water and let it tug me gently. I close my eyes and feel the sun drenching me, nuzzling me, claiming me. My arms are thrown out wide. I don’t think much. I just drift. I feel so safe and relaxed.
Finally.
I’ve been on the road now for two weeks—first, to the wedding festivities in India and now to this tiny town in the northwest of Sri Lanka. It has taken me days to get to this quiet beach and to float in this tranquil water.
Days of sitting in crowded-to-the-brim trains on my backpack in corridors almost 30 people deep, keeping my head down to stave off bouts of claustrophobia. Days of riding in broken-down local buses and holding on to the backs of seats breathlessly as the vehicles flew down streets at reckless speeds. Days of trekking with my overstuffed backpack from touristy beach to touristy beach along the southwestern stretch of the country. Even one day being thrilled by beautiful Sri Lankan surfer guys with long, curly hair, who laugh invitingly when they see me and call me over for a little smoke to pass the time as their idol Bob Marley wails in the background.
In the end, I schlepped to Colombo, the capital city, and hopped in a 12-passenger minivan stuffed with 25 people. I closed my eyes and visualized wide spaces for the five-hour ride to Puttalam, the biggest city in the northwest. Then I took an hour-long tuk-tuk ride—and grateful gasps of fresh sea air through its open sides—to Kalpitiya.
I arrived at night at an inn I’d booked online that was almost three miles from the beach.
Definitely not close enough.
So I woke up early that next morning, discovered the inn’s derelict bike, and set off, veering off the town’s one main street into the sandy back roads, past salt ponds and wind farms with their white, giant windmills revolving slowly overhead. I rode closer to the seashore, where hotels, inns, and Airbnbs hid behind gates and fences, and huffed upstairs, opened doors, and walked around spaces for hours, looking for the perfect place.
And then I found it: the Red Angels Beach Hotel[BS6] . Not a great name, but a gorgeous colonial-style hotel with handmade doors from locally scavenged wood, only about 50 feet from the perfect beach, and the perfect place for me to tackle the next major task—funding.
Before I had boarded the plane to India, I’d started searching for funding opportunities. I’d googled different terms … fellowships for writers, creative writing fellowships, travel writing fellowships, writing scholarships, writing grants, new media grants, journalism fellowships, creative writing residencies, even MFA programs. I’d followed so many links down so many rabbit holes, until finally, I came across a storytelling fellowship by National Geographic and the U.S. Fulbright Program. A Fulbright Fellowship sanctioned by the U.S. government and endorsed by a place that epitomized adventure to most of the world? For $80,000—way more than I needed to support my travels? It seemed perfect. Well, almost.
The only hiccup was that it required applicants to work in a country in which they were fluent in the local language and had local sponsorship. I had hoped to use the grant to travel to Senegal, Mozambique, and Costa Rica—places where DWP had missions but where I was not fluent in the language. Still, I figured I could base myself in South Africa, and find a way to travel to the other countries from there.
One other small issue: The application is due in two days.
I had been making notes while in India, corralling my thoughts. But now I need to hunker down and give it my all because this grant could be everything. It would justify quitting my job and shaving my head and create a clear way forward.
As I lay in the water and smile, I give thanks.

The next beautiful, sunny morning, I sit in the Red Angels’ homey little restaurant, which has wooden tables you can push together family style or separate on your own. Roshan, the owner, makes a breakfast of eggs, hoppers, curry, rice cakes, and fresh fruit—a huge meal that will surely last until dinner and keep me on target with my $10/day meal allowance.
Roshan is a brown man married to a brown woman, Aneka, with a seven-year-old brown son, Kasun. Our skin colors are almost the exact same shade of brown. Today, they all sit in the courtyard under the shade of an enormous oak tree. The son with his action toys. Roshan with ropes he throws over the tree for the son to swing on. And Aneka with her quiet watching.
Roshan would easily blend as a Black man in the United States. He is handsome—tall, bearded, scruffy. He reminds me of my cousin Troy when he was younger: the same kind of personable, distracted but charming energy.
Every time I see Roshan, he stops to chat, but he always seems harried. He tells me his dreams of this place—how he scoured the countryside for discarded wood, then transported it here and restored it himself in the workshop across from the restaurant to make all the doors. He wants this place, which has been open less than a year, to feel special and to be his love offering to guests.
Today, there are three of us in the restaurant: me plus an older German couple in their 70s—Anna and Gunter—who took me on a tour of their future rooms yesterday. They are also investors in the property and have known Roshan and his family for years, so they do not count as true guests. Their own apartment on the property is under construction and has taken much longer than they anticipated.
The space was lovely—high ceilings, granite countertops, big windows, Roshan’s exquisite handmade doors—but Anna’s not completely happy about some of the design choices and materials and is worried about the ever extending timeline for completion. Her dream is to have a place to retire in the warmth and sunshine. Life in Germany has been mostly hard work, mostly gray. She and Gunter are not rich, but they managed to save some money over the years; they met Roshan by chance and were taken by his charm. They had long dreamed of a home elsewhere, a place full of sun-filled days and laughter and windswept evenings at the beach, a place where they could secure their futures and sink their roots into the sand—past the sand crabs, the roly-polies, and the clams; past the basalt and granite; past the iron and nickel—to settle deep into the core of it all.
I hear the fondness in Anna’s voice when she talks about little Kasun. She and Gunter don’t have kids, don’t really have any family left in Germany. But she also voices a tentative doubt that maybe Roshan is taking advantage. She wants to believe in this dream. She wants to be Roshan’s partner and invest in even more properties with him. She wants to ground herself here and to make Roshan’s family a part of her own. But … she looks at me for validation, a question in her eyes. I am American. I understand about these people from developing countries, right?
Anna likely sees the wealth of our home countries as our bond. Our three plane tickets combined could cost almost a year’s worth of a typical Sri Lankan salary at $300 a month. But … she’s not absolutely sure of me. I am American, yes, it’s true, but I am the same complexion he is. She trails off, a bit of defeat rounding her shoulders.
Avoiding her eyes, I look down, and see Anna’s swimsuit perched to dry on the wooden railing. She and Gunter spend their early evenings at the beach once the sun has set so they don’t burn in the ever present sun. They go for walks until they come up against land barriers and can’t walk anymore.
I wonder if the four of them—if Anna and Gunter and Roshan and Aneka—ever walk that beach together and talk honestly about power. About the power discrepancy between their countries and the one that exists because of their skin colors. The British colonized Sri Lanka, which they called Ceylon then, between roughly 1800 and 1948; the Republic of Sri Lanka wasn’t established until 1972. Before the British, it was colonized by the Dutch, between 1658 and 1796. Before the Dutch, it was the Portuguese, between 1505 and 1658. Never the Germans—but European interference and exploitation have extracted wealth and resources from this place since the 16th century—well over 400 years. Europe, including Germany, has become powerful off the backs of all its colonies combined.
Can Anna and Gunter, Aneka and Roshan create roots together when the gulf between their differences is so wide?
 
Anna and Gunter sit with me at breakfast today with a double portion of the same meal I’m enjoying. So much food spread across the table; it’s a feast. Our dishes crowd each other and threaten to topple off the table if we are not careful. Gunter doesn’t speak much English, so he retreats into his own world. But Anna talks more about her hopes and life growing up in Germany while Roshan brings us seconds.
I listen and think again of dreams, destiny, chance meetings, and how the tiniest moments can alter our life’s direction. Of all the nudges we’re given in life and the choices we have to heed.
The roof calls to me. I make my way upstairs to lie on a hammock, gazing up at the clouds drifting across the blue sky, reflecting on my childhood, and our apartment in the SWATS, or the southwest part of Atlanta. It had shaggy green carpet that covered the living room floor and bumped up against a beige linoleum kitchen floor, which blended in perfectly with our green appliances.
My room sat between my mom’s room and the bathroom. A huge picture of Michael Jackson from his Thriller cover stretched along the wall over my bed, along with a picture of Shaun Cassidy from his Hardy Boys days. My room held sturdy white furniture with a white mirror framed by white-and-green candleholders on the wall. My aunt Sue had also sewn green flowered ruffled pillow shams and a coverlet to match for my bed. And my bike, with pink tassels hanging from the handlebars, stood propped against the wall. I used to spend hours in that room by myself, reading of course, but also making up skits, writing in my diary, organizing elaborate scenarios for my Barbies, singing songs in the mirror, and playing games by myself. I was a bit of solo person, even back then, mainly living in my imagination.
I gleaned early on, though, that the details of my life looked like a statistic on paper. My mom was Black and single and making do on a teacher’s low salary that kept us only a few steps above the Projects. I felt judged on paper, even at a young age. I felt the opinions and ideas of those looking from the outside in weighing down on me like an anchor around my neck.
Is this how Roshan feels sometimes with Anna? I imagine he feels the power dynamic even if he doesn’t talk about it with me. Maybe Anna’s expectations and fears weigh heavy around his neck too. Maybe his hands and the work of sanding and restoring the doors are his way back to his biggest self, his way of feeling connected to all of it.
I get up and lay my head on the balustrade on the roof, letting my fingers hang down the other side and dangle toward the sea. I reach for that feeling of freedom now. I close my eyes and reach out my senses to the universe just as I did when I was a child.
I let go.

And then I return to my room, and I write. Furiously. I jot down notes on napkins. I type pages of explanation. I walk on the beach and scribble in the sand. I wake up at five a.m. and go to bed at midnight with my iPad always open to catch phrases and ideas as they come.
I rationalize that by starting with the ships that brought so many Africans away from their homes—we can find clues to the rest. We can use these ships as a bridge between the past and the present—and as a waypost to the future.
Who are Africans in the Americas? Beyond a people who were enslaved in chains and sadness and sorrow. Beyond the horror and brutality performed by people as their worst selves. When were we full human beings? When were we whole?
And I don’t mean the romanticized version of our past when we were all kings and queens and royalty in our imaginations. I mean whole. All of it: the up and down, the right and left, the zig and zag. Full human beings filled with good and bad, light and dark, joy and fear.
I think about Doc Jones sharing the story of the Henrietta Marie when we were at the quarry. The story was sad, but I found it wasn’t so hard to face. I wanted to know more. I loved hearing about how the NABS divers had put a plaque down on the wreck site. It moved me so much to hear about such a healing gesture rather than more trauma.
As my pen flies across the page, I ask why I didn’t learn about the Henrietta Maria in school but yet could tell you all about the Titanic and the Mayflower. This is a clear example of how the history of Black folks becomes an unexamined footnote in our classrooms. A much too shameful, embarrassing, and painful stretch of history to revisit too closely. Even too painful sometimes for Black folks like me. But without exploring this history and these stories, we will always be stuck in this maze of racial trauma.
I end by saying that we have an opportunity to reverse this direction if we are brave, that these divers, by working to uncover this hidden past, are showing us a way out. Showing me a way out.
I feel alight with purpose and clarity as I finish. The morning the application is due, I proofread my words and am satisfied. It’s as much as I can do; I have laid out my case and done my best. I sit cross-legged on my bed and bring my hands together at my heart in a prayer position. I pull them up to my forehead, bend over my crossed knees, and touch them, along with my head, to the bed. I give thanks. Then I sit up and press submit.
That night, I take myself out for dinner at the fancy restaurant in town. I walk several miles, past the windmills and salt ponds, to the road, and then splurge on a whole fish and a glass of wine. And I walk back, skipping here and there.
I have such a good feeling.

I decide to stay in Sri Lanka and see more of the country while I wait for an answer.
Over the next week, I explore the town. I find a dive shop run by a tall, enthusiastic, and friendly man named Sanjeeva. I immediately sign up for a two-dive excursion to the Bar Reef Marine Sanctuary for later in the week.
Sanjeeva’s operation is part of his family’s compound and only a few yards from a small sandy beach. He lives with his parents and his wife and children. When I arrive, his mother invites me to sit and wait for him in the cozy house. He soon appears and regales me with stories of the Sri Lankan sea and the protected reef hidden beneath its surface. Bar Reef has the greatest biodiversity of any reef in the country, with more than 156 species of coral and 283 species of fish over 118 square miles.
Sanjeeva seems competent and fun. I know diving with him won’t be like my past trip in Mexico, which featured a boat and a captain, an assistant, a second level that you can sit on to watch the waves, and a lunch served between dives. But I figure it will be OK.
I have my own mask and a light, protective garment that covers my body called skins. So Sanjeeva only needs to outfit me with fins and a buoyancy control device or BCD—the vest you wear—plus a regulator and tank.
The day of the dive, there are five of us: me, Sanjeeva, an Austrian couple, and Mohammed, who drives the boat.
Sanjeeva sits us down in a gazebo outside the house and reviews hand signals and safety tips, along with our route and the sort of marine life we might encounter during our two planned dives. I haven’t been diving in six months, and I am worried that I’ve forgotten most of what I learned. I tune out his explanation of local fish and try to remember which way to turn the tank valve to get the air into my BCD. As we kit up, I am relieved that I remember more than I thought.
We leave in a small wooden boat, just big enough for the five of us, and head out into the blue expanse. The boat skips over swells and the engine thrums loudly. I love feeling the sea spray as it hits my face.
Eventually, we stop in what seems like the middle of nowhere. But below us is Bar Reef.
I roll backward off the boat into the water. Calm washes over me, and I start to breathe intentionally. Slowly. A meditative state arises; I feel contained and at home in the water. My inner chatter is lulled to sleep, though my attention remains sharp. This is what it must feel like for astronauts on the moon: The time it takes to move my head. The effort to raise my hands. I move in slow motion. Even my eyes seem to take long seconds to slide into focus.
The visibility is only about 10 feet, but I see a spectacular display of colors and activity:
bright yellow clown fish, giant barracuda, honeycomb moray eels, shrimp, crabs, mollusks, red and orange coral and sponges.
I’m in another world.