As I run endlessly forwards and backwards  on the cramped space of our deck, with the sea sounding  below, my body  remembers when half a century ago I was running round and round  in a tiny exercise yard during  endless days of solitary confinement, dreaming I was running to the sea… Then I was in hell, now I’m in paradise… But there is hell in this paradise… In the sea below, lie the relics of a Portuguese ship wrecked with a cargo of 400 enslaved Mozambicans, half of whom drowned and half of whom got  to shore, only to be sold  as if human flotsam and become part of our city’s enslaved working community.

And now I, the struggle veteran who has worked with the African American Museum in Washington to find the words to tell their story, can build up my immune system by breathing in the sea air, while more than a few of their descendants, many of whom have been my comrades, find themselves confined to the often unwholesome and tiny spaces of the working poor.

How sad that the moment of our greatest equality should also be the moment of our greatest inequality. And yet how good it is that each act of isolation by each one of us in our own separate world becomes an act of binding and transcendent human interdependence and solidarity.

— Judge Albie Sachs