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In my personal opinion, the greatest coming-of-age story on Earth does not take place in a Dickens novel or a Disney movie, but rather in a white fish at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
The fish in question, called a zoarcid, looks like a creature caught in an identity crisis, too long to be a fish but too short to be an eel, its lips permanently drooping in a sullen pout. Otherwise, the fish has no real reason to be grumpy. It lives in one of the cushiest parts of the deep sea, in the shimmering waters near a hydrothermal vent that warms the freezing seas to the temperature of a kiddie pool. It enjoys a spectacular view, at the bottom of a glittering black canyon 559 miles off the coast of Acapulco, Mexico. The site, called Nine North, is part of the East Pacific Rise, an underwater mountain range that stretches from the Gulf of California across the southeastern Pacific Ocean.
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The Northeast Atlantic mackerel is a small fish with grey or greenish-blue scales and tigerlike black stripes from mouth to tail. Lacking a swim bladder the gas-filled organ that helps most fish move up and down in the water the mackerel would sink and die if it ever stopped. So it is always on the move, looking for plankton, crustaceans, and other small fish. It travels in shoals that can be more than 100 feet deep and 600 feet wide, and sometimes, when this great nomadic army catches a glimmer of light, it can resemble an underwater version of the northern lights.
This article was published online on February 9, 2021.
On a rainy Thursday afternoon in November, I stepped inside the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C. On past visits, I’d always encountered crowds of tourists and school groups, a space bursting with movement and sound. But on this day, the museum was nearly empty. It seemed to echo with all the people who had been there but were no longer. For the few of us inside, social distancing was dictated by blue circles scattered on the floor.
I made my way down to the bottom level, which documents the history of slavery in America. Masks were mandatory, and something about the pieces of cloth covering everyone’s mouths seemed to amplify the silence and solemnity of what surrounded us.
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William Henry Dorsey was an information hoarder. An African American of means who lived in 19th-century Philadelphia, Dorsey suffered from a “malady” that afflicted others of his era: archive fever. He spent much of his long life he was born in 1837 and died in 1923 clipping newspaper articles and pasting them into one or another of nearly 400 scrapbooks, organized by topic.
Dorsey’s scrapbooks represent a bricolage of one man’s far-ranging interest in African American history and culture. He clipped articles mainly from northern newspapers, Black and white, including some extremely rare publications. The scrapbooks hold articles on Black emigration schemes, fraternal orders, actors, and centenarians who lived through slavery. Dorsey devoted one scrapbook to an 1881 North Carolina convention of Black Republicans, one of many such gatherings at which African Americans envisioned post-emancipation political futures. He devoted another scrapbook to lynchings,