When Gwendolyn Midlo Hall published Africans in Colonial Louisiana, her meticulous archival work performed the miracle of retrieving the lost voices of the enslaved Africans who built Louisiana from the ground up, paving the way for slavery historians elsewhere to do the same.

I can smell it already. I have yet to go aboard, but it’s in the air: pungent, nectarous, rotting bread fruit, ripening papaya. I don’t know it yet, but it is a scent that will linger, in various degrees of intensity, for months; an olfactory tissue, the city sinewed with the islands. I walk up the gangplank and look out across the inlet. There, spewing sweet smoke, through ancient brick stacks, is the Domino Sugar refinery. I am young and green, and the ship old and weatherbeaten, but we get along quite well, especially after I figure out things like bow, stern, port, starboard, mess. The Sam G. is no QE2: the decks are decrepit, the hallways malodorous dungeons, the johns putrid cubicles. It’s all grime, rust, peeling paint, cold steel. But this is no time for first impressions. I’ve come to get lost. I climb aboard.