Page 162 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

ocean, devoured the sea-snails as they fed on their mothers' milk.

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Her great-great-grandmother learned to dive from her mother, who learned from her

foremothers. She taught her daughters, and her daughters taught their daughters. She

was a migrant following awabi along the southern coast. As the Edo period waned, she

and her daughters slipped between fiefdoms in a wooden boat.

Her husband steadied the boat while they submerged. He looked into the clear water,

watching over them, sometimes used a rope or bamboo pole to whisk them through the

final sun-splashed meters of their ascent.

They obeyed him in all things but one. His wife told him where to steer the boat. The

household moved with her sense of the ocean. Her earnings were sizable, for there

were fewer funado ama deep-diving from boats than there were kachido ama swimming

out from shore to work the shallower waters.