The baby Weddell seal has not grown into her flippers. She is awkward. She does not want to swim. She does not know she can breathe underwater. No one has told her about the great oxygenating capacity of her blood. She doesn’t know that the milk her mother gives her is some of the fat-richest milk in the world. Southernmost mammal on the planet, she doesn’t know the depths of which she is capable. But her mother does.    

             The mother Weddell seal will push her baby into the water against her will. She will force her child’s head into the water while the baby coughs and sputters and struggles and squirms. She is new here. She does not know that she can breathe underwater. Until she does. And then everything changes. By the time weaning is over she will be able to dive 2,500 feet below the water. Stay there for an hour if she wants to. Find a tiny hole she made for air after swimming twelve kilometers away. Move gracefully between frozen and liquid worlds. But she doesn’t know.

            Am I the only one here in a lesson, a coughing sputtering thrash, a struggle to stay who I thought I was, ignorant to what evolution has already written inside me? I feel out of my depth, but really, how would I know?

            - Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals