The African Lightning

I think I learned this from it: it didn’t matter what it was. All that mattered was that it was ours and it was on the African Lightning.

Seventy years ago this year the 7,974 tonne cargo ship African Lightning was launched at Kearny Point, New Jersey, by the Federal Shipbuilding & Drydock Company. She was a cargo ship that looked like a cargo ship, back before mega-ships, before containers, back when, for all I know, a piano could have been hoisted into her like a haul of crab in a net. A ship on whose bridge Humphrey Bogart would have passed unnoticed, a ship with a low-slung black hull and an upright beige funnel like an aerosol can that pinned a clutch of white decks between cranes. She evoked manatees and low creeping waters with pirogues alongside peddling catfish. Mighty African Lightning.

She was a stuff carrier. She carried stuff between Africa, Oceania, and the States.’