Ukrainian Svitlana Klimenko, whose family has lived in the same house here for seven generations, leads the way down a narrow courtyard trail and past a tiny, snow-covered urban garden.

“This is the secret path,” she says.

She steps through a gap in the fence and into the nondescript entryway of an aged apartment block. Unlocking a heavy steel door, and wielding her flashlight like it’s her only weapon, she descends dark stairs deep underground, to yet another steel door.

Inside is a Soviet-era bunker, a relic of the last world war, and recently unsealed for the first time in 70 years.

Soon after Russian forces invaded Ukraine in late February, fearful neighbors quickly resurrected the bunker’s electrical, ventilation, and water systems and brought down pallets and mattresses, old furniture and plastic chairs, to shield 150 people.

When air raid sirens sound in Mykolaiv, dozens of Ukrainian citizens shelter here.

The thick-walled bunker is just one impregnable symbol of resistance and survival, shown with pride in this frigid city, which has already withstood two weeks of Russian ground attacks and sporadic rocket fire.

But among residents there is foreboding, too, that denying Russian President Vladimir Putin victory over this strategic port city – effectively blocking the Russian advance west along the Black Sea coast – will trigger a far greater, vengeful onslaught.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A Ukrainian woman carries a baby down a stairwell pocked with shrapnel from an earlier rocket strike, on her way to a basement bomb shelter during an air raid siren sounding in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, March 9, 2022. The city has been under frequent bombardment by Russian forces.

“I was sure that Mykolaiv would be taken quickly, and it is unexpected that the Ukraine army held it all these days,” says Ms. Klimenko, whose job gilding furniture with gold leaf stopped when Russia invaded.

“The army has fought very bravely and strongly, so my hope is for the city to stand,” she says. “But I’m afraid it’s going to be like Kharkiv or Mariupol, and that because of our strong fight back, the Russians will destroy the city.

“I am afraid of total bombing and destruction of our architecture and heritage.”

“We are waiting constantly”

Ms. Klimenko says her knees shake with every air raid siren, but she finds solace by helping a virtually immobile older neighbor, who lives on a fourth floor.

And the mindset of her neighbors?

“They are angry with the Russians,” she says. “This city was very friendly to Russia before this.” But now, sympathy is gone.

“We have no choice,” interjects her son-in-law, Andriy. “They’re killing us.”

Residents of Mykolaiv say they are surprised about how their city – founded in 1789 at the confluence of wide, windswept rivers – has become a frontline fulcrum of the Russian advance toward Odessa.

“I feel worried, anxious inside,” says Ms. Klimenko. “We are waiting constantly for something to happen.”

For what, exactly, is increasingly becoming clear above ground and on television and social media channels, which show Russia expanding the scope of cities it is targeting.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A gaping hole in an apartment block from a Russian rocket strike is a sign of the price Ukrainians are paying for their defiance as they fend off multiple Russian assaults, in the strategic port city of Mykolaiv, Ukraine, March 9, 2022.

Officials said a heavy Russian bombardment of Mykolaiv Sunday morning included cluster bombs, damaged 40 buildings – among them a school – and left nine people dead.

The death toll was high, said the mayor, Oleksandr Senkevych, because, unlike previous Russian strikes, which mostly occurred at night during a curfew, the Sunday attack came at around 9 a.m.

Since the war began, up to one-third of the residents of Mykolaiv have left the city, based on the amount of garbage collected and services now provided, the mayor told the BBC.

Russian forces “don’t come close to the city with their troops, but their rocket bombardments are coming more and more,” said Mr. Senkevych. “People in this city are really motivated, they know what they stand for, and they are ready to meet the enemy and fight them back,” he said.

“You must tell the truth”

Days earlier, on a visit to the Ingulskii district in eastern Mykolaiv, one hears the distinctive sounds of clearing broken glass – sweeping shards into buckets, and dropping them into dumpsters. Two rockets had struck before dawn last Monday, and residents were still bewildered by the assault on their reality, their anger deepening for a war they did not choose.

“We did nothing to Putin – why ... did he come here?” asks Tetiana, a retired ballerina, using an expletive to punctuate her question. “He’s a moron, an animal.”

One rocket landing outside her Soviet-era apartment block cut off the gas supply, but electricity and water are still working. All the windows are broken, with plastic sheeting often in their place now to stop frigid winds that at times lower temperatures outside to just 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

A friend’s new car, parked outside, is a crumpled wreck, peppered by shrapnel.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A Ukrainian man passes a car damaged with shrapnel from a Russian rocket that hit near a residential apartment block, in the Ingulskii district in eastern Mykolaiv, Ukraine, March 9, 2022.

“This is the image of how Putin does not hit civilians,” says Tetiana’s neighbor, sarcastically dismissing the Russian leader’s denials that civilians are dying, despite indiscriminate Russian bombing in numerous Ukrainian cities. He is bundled up in a thick jacket against the cold, and carries food in plastic shopping bags.

Tetiana says she considers herself “lucky” compared with her sister, who lives under Russian occupation in Kherson, 45 miles to the southeast. The main military threat to Mykolaiv is from Russian troops advancing from Kherson.

“She cries, she cries. She is in a very bad mood,” Tetiana says of her sister.

President Putin said one reason for invading Ukraine was to wipe out “Nazis” and “nationalists” who threaten Russia – excuses that are laughed at in Mykolaiv.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

“We say, ‘Stop the war! Help us.’ There are no nationalists in Ukraine, only simple people with good souls,” says Tetiana, who gave only her first name. “Save us! You must tell the truth about Ukraine.”

Tetiana runs her gloved fingers through the snow on the wrecked car – the impact point of the rocket leaving a crater in the earth several yards away – and then reenters her building.

Passing shrapnel-scarred walls, she climbs the stairs, and her tough veneer cracks. She speaks again, her voice breaking this time, as emotion takes hold: “I don’t know how to live in war.”

Engaging in bunker talk

When an air raid siren sounds, other residents enter an underground bunker not far away. It is not as deep as the reinforced Soviet-era structures, but is a basement-turned-gym with comfortingly thick walls, nonetheless.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Ukrainian families shelter in a basement bomb shelter during an air raid, as Ukrainians fend off multiple Russian assaults on the strategic port city of Mykolaiv, Ukraine, March 9, 2022. Ukrainian officers and officials say they are optimistic that they can continue to stop the Russian advance along the Black Sea coast toward Odessa.

Ukrainian families and their children rest on one side, checking their phones for news and to reassure relatives. In the next room, on couches and chairs, an older set ponders what it has seen of Ukrainian resistance so far – and wonder if, and when, it can stop the Russian advance.

“We never invaded anyone,” says Margarita Andrieva, a Ukrainian of Belarusian descent, who wears a bright orange hat while she waits out the siren.

“We had our dreams. We had our jobs,” she says. Her relatives in Russia and Belarus “don’t believe this is happening. They say we are Nazis and need to be careful.”

Mr. Putin “is worse than Hitler,” she says. “He took Goebbels at his word: The more you lie, the more people believe,” says Ms. Andrieva, referring to the Nazi propaganda master, Joseph Goebbels.

Others nod in agreement; this is typical bunker talk. They nod, too, when the discussion turns to Russian tactics, and apparent disorganization on the battlefield.

The annual May 9 Victory Day parades across Red Square in Moscow – which project a gleaming, marching, powerful Russian military – have been proved by Ukrainians to be “fake,” says Ms. Andrieva.

“Ukraine is strong; people need to understand we can’t give up,” she says. “Putin is a coward. He’s afraid snipers will kill him. That’s why he’s hiding in a bunker.

“We don’t accept cowards.”

Janay Harris, who works at a credit card company in Dover, Delaware, enjoys the nightlife in nearby cities like Washington and Philadelphia. But starting two years ago, nights in those cities stopped feeling safe. 

Her local news kept reporting violent crimes – a carjacking here, an armed robbery there. Ms. Harris saw pictures of the victims and thought they looked like ordinary people. They looked, she thought, kind of like her. 

Ms. Harris decided that wouldn’t be her, but not because she’d stop going out. “I don’t want to have to be stuck in my house after a certain hour or avoid certain places because I’m fearful,” she says.

So a year and a half ago, Ms. Harris bought a gun and started visiting the shooting range. For now, it almost never leaves the house, she says, but since purchasing it she’s felt more confident and secure – even when it isn’t with her. 

Ms. Harris is one of millions of Americans who have settled on firearms for their own security in the last two years. Given the pandemic, rising homicide rates, social unrest, and political violence, they increasingly feel that risks are everywhere, and declining trust in institutions means people are less likely to rely on the government for protection. Many now view self-defense as their own responsibility.

That shift in thought has fueled an increase in first-time gun buyers and a more diverse group of firearm owners. That, in turn, has led to new expectations of gun culture, including a desire for community.

“You definitely see in the context of gun ownership among people of color that there’s much more of a community dynamic,” says Jennifer Carlson, a sociologist at the University of Arizona and expert on gun politics.

Seeking self-defense: A shift in gun culture

American gun sales regularly follow a boom and bust cycle, and a pandemic boom was predictable. The people buying were not. A December 2021 study found about half of the new gun owners were women and half were a racial minority. That’s a huge departure from predominant firearm owner demographics, which are still overwhelmingly older, white, conservative, and male. 

Jeff Roberson/AP/File

Kevin Dixie stands at a shooting range in Ballwin, Missouri, Feb. 9, 2020. Philip Smith, who founded the National African American Gun Association, says he's glad "Black people are now taking self-ownership of their own destiny, their own life."

As support for stricter gun laws hits its lowest point in five years, Second Amendment activists have welcomed the added diversity as an expansion of their cause. But guns mean different things to different people, says Dr. Carlson. People associate “gun culture” with small-government politics and individualism, she says, but some of these new owners are approaching firearms in an attempt to find, rather than reject, a sense of community. 

According to 2017 data from Pew Research Center, 36% of white Americans own a firearm, but only 24% and 15% of Black and Hispanic Americans do. The gap is even larger between men and women, at 39% to 22%. Among all Americans, those who lean Republican are twice as likely to have a gun as those who lean Democratic. 

The past several years have altered those numbers somewhat, but the average gun owner is still like “the characters from ‘Duck Dynasty’ – older, white, male, politically conservative, Southern, rural,” says David Yamane, a professor at Wake Forest University and founder of the blog “Gun Culture 2.0.”

SOURCE:

“Firearm Purchasing During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results From the 2021 National Firearms Survey”; Annals of Internal Medicine; Matthew Miller, Wilson Zhang, Deborah Azrael; 2022

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

There has been a decadeslong shift, however, in the reason people give for buying guns. No longer hunting, it’s now self-defense. 

“What’s interesting about self-defense, though, is that it can hold a lot of very different social anxieties – different experiences of precarity, of danger, of threat,” says Dr. Carlson. 

Women, for example, might buy a gun because they don’t feel like the police can show up in time to protect them, she says. Black Americans, on the other hand, might buy a gun because they don’t feel like the police will protect them. 

“When you have that sort of sentiment that you’re on your own, … well, then you go buy a gun,” says Dr. Carlson. 

Wanting to take control of her own safety led Carrie Lightfoot to buy a firearm for the first time more than 10 years ago. She came from a non-gun-owning family in New York, and never considered owning one herself. Then she exited an abusive relationship, and her former partner began stalking her and her four kids. She was scared.

But as she shopped around, Ms. Lightfoot noticed a problem: Everything was made for men. Accessories and holsters didn’t fit women’s bodies. The advertising was machismo. She couldn’t find female shooting groups.

So she started one. 

The Well Armed Woman, her group for female gun owners, has since grown to 300 chapters and around 20,000 members. They sell merchandise on their website from compression shorts with a built-in holster to bullet-themed jewelry. Ms. Lightfoot, a former National Rifle Association board member, has seen the group’s influence.

“Gun ownership isn’t a foreign planet to women any longer,” she says. 

Just ask Ms. Harris, of Dover, who likely wouldn’t have considered buying one if her best friend, a gun owner, hadn’t taken her to the shooting range two years ago and gone with her when she bought her first gun. 

“It was something for [us] to bond over,” says Ms. Harris. 

Carlos Osorio/AP/File

Firearms instructor Wayne Thomas shows Valerie Rupert the proper hand position on a firearm at the Recoil Firearms store in Taylor, Michigan, Aug. 21, 2021. A December 2021 study found about half of the new gun owners were women and half were a racial minority.

Finding community through gun ownership

An emphasis on community is typical of a group Ms. Harris plans to join this month: the National African American Gun Association (NAAGA). Its founder, Philip Smith, started the organization in 2015 to counter the stigma many Black Americans feel around firearms. 

“If you have a gun then you must be a bad guy,” he says of common stereotypes. “You must be a gangbanger. You must be a hood, must be a thug. You can’t be a good guy with a gun.”

Since the pandemic NAAGA’s membership has boomed, says Mr. Smith. In one four-day stretch, the group added almost 3,000 new members, and the total member body is now about 45,000. About two-thirds are men and one-third are women. Each new member learns about the history of African Americans and firearms – dating back to Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Then they learn about gun safety. 

“I think it’s one of the best things that has come out of all this – that Black people are now taking self-ownership of their own destiny, their own life, and saying, you know what, the Second Amendment is mine too,” says Mr. Smith. 

Taking ownership of the Second Amendment has its risks. Matthew Miller, professor of health sciences at Northeastern University and lead author of the 2021 study documenting more diverse gun owners, notes that a firearm in the house increases each inhabitant’s risk of injury or self-harm. Millions of new gun owners expose millions of adults and children to that danger. 

Many new gun owners are aware of those risks; some don’t even like guns. P.B. Gomez, a student at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, started the Latino Rifle Association two years ago in response to the mass shooting that targeted Hispanic Americans in El Paso, Texas. Guns have their limits, though. They won’t fix racism, he says, and in a confrontation firing a weapon is almost always a bad option.

“A lot of our members prior to the anxieties and realizations about American society wouldn’t have considered guns,” says Mr. Gomez. “They’ve come to it almost as ‘this is a necessity.’”

Still, he and other members of the group felt like Latinos needed a space to discuss self-defense, one that didn’t support Confederate flags in gun stores or AR-15’s styled with “Build the wall” messages – both things Mr. Gomez has seen. Their group, he says, mostly attracts people who lean left and preach social responsibility – people like Jackie Garcia. 

Ms. Garcia, an electrician in San Antonio, Texas, started researching gun ownership around the 2020 election. At that time, she lived in a small, heavily conservative and white town north of Dallas and saw racism toward Latino people like herself. At a gas station one day, she says a man leaned over to her and motioned to a Latino man paying for his drink. “This is why I voted for Trump, and that’s why he’s going to win in 2020,” he told her. “He’s going to get rid of all these people.”

The hate toward a total stranger didn’t make sense to her. But it was scary. “Who’s to say that that hate wouldn’t be turned on me?” she thought. If it ever was, she wanted to be prepared. 

So Ms. Garcia started taking classes at the gun range and signed up for a pilot course on handguns. Eventually, she bought a Smith & Wesson Shield 9 and got a concealed carry permit months later. Almost every time she leaves the home, her gun goes with her.

She felt safer, but also conflicted. She couldn’t reconcile owning something she associated so much with older, white, conservative men. Finding the Latino Rifle Association and becoming a moderator on its online discussion board helped. There, Ms. Garcia felt like she fit in. 

“It’s refreshing to see younger people, people from all types of backgrounds,” she says. “It’s not just a certain demographic that fits the gun culture.”

That doesn’t mean everyone needs to hear she’s a part of it. Only her wife and her parents know she’s a gun owner. It’s something she does, says Ms. Garcia, not as a part of her identity. She hopes to keep it that way.

Growing up in a big family in eastern India, Supriyo Chakraborty frequently attended relatives’ lavish weddings. So when it was his turn, the hotel management lecturer pulled out all the stops: spectacular fireworks, intricate floral decorations, beautifully coordinated outfits. The couple exchanged rings under the stars on a crisp winter night this past December in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. It looked like any of the thousands of weddings taking place all over the country at the time – except that Mr. Chakraborty was marrying a man.

Mr. Chakraborty and his husband, Abhay Dang, had lived together since 2013, and decided to get married last year. Same-sex marriage is not legally recognized in India, but since the Supreme Court decriminalized homosexuality in 2018, several LGBTQ couples have held weddings or wedding-like ceremonies to make their relationship “official,” unofficially.

These couples’ determination to get married, they say, is about breaking stereotypes, sharing their joy with friends and family, and insisting on access to a powerful cultural institution. 

Around the world, ideas about what constitutes a family are expanding, but marriage and children remain common elements that many people – though not all – strive toward. This is especially true in India, where marriage is a given, says Amita Nigam Sahaya, author of the book “The Shaadi Story: Behind the Scenes of the Big Fat Indian Wedding.” 

“We are weaned on the idea of getting married to somebody or the other,” she says. “All forms of culture – popular culture, traditional culture, familial culture, religiosity – all these talk about marriage as a part of an adult’s destiny.”

Married, but not on paper

Mr. Chakraborty and Mr. Dang’s nuptials had all the elements of a big fat Indian wedding and then some. Before the men exchanged vows, the officiant asked guests to stand up, raise their hand, and say “I do” to the couple as a way to express acceptance of their union. “There were a few people who raised both of their hands, and they were all shouting ‘I do,’” Mr. Chakraborty recalls. “Everybody was emotional.”

Mr. Chakraborty’s wedding made international headlines, but the couple hadn’t set out to make any statement, he says. They just wanted to celebrate their love openly. 

“I wanted to call Abhay my husband,” Mr. Chakraborty says. “I didn’t want to say that I live with my friend.” 

On paper, however, they might as well be just friends. Same-sex couples cannot register their marriage, meaning queer Indians are denied spousal rights that heterosexual couples enjoy and sometimes take for granted.

“I can’t make him a nominee to any of my property or vice versa,” says Mr. Chakraborty. “If I am hospitalized today, he is just a visitor for me because he can’t sign anything.” 

Several petitions in courts across the country are pushing to change that. Many argue that by refusing to recognize the same-sex marriage, the government is depriving couples of their right to equality enshrined in the constitution. 

In India, marriage is governed by a set of religious personal laws, which date back to the colonial era and vary among faiths, and a secular law called the Special Marriage Act. Both define marriage as a union of a man and a woman. “The law has that [gender] binary at the very heart of it,” says lawyer Akshat Agarwal. In fact, says Mr. Agarwal, all aspects of family law such as inheritance, guardianship, and protection from intimate partner violence imagine the family unit as a male-female pair. Recognizing same-sex couples would require an overhaul of that entire legal framework.

The government has squarely opposed such a change, arguing last year that recognizing same-sex marriages would cause “complete havoc with the delicate balance of personal laws in the country.”

Mr. Agarwal says marriage equality may take longer to achieve because of the country’s unique legal system. “While the argument for marriage is very clear, I think how you best do it is a little more complex in India,” he says.

In the meantime, couples are forging ahead, pursuing so-called social marriages until the courts recognize their nuptials.

The value of a social marriage

In India’s Silicon Valley of Bengaluru, Ankur Bhatnagar is scouting for a venue for his upcoming wedding. He wants to marry his longtime boyfriend in accordance with Hindu rituals, but he’s having trouble convincing priests to solemnize a gay marriage. One reason Mr. Bhatnagar wants to tie the knot is to smash stereotypes about queer relationships.  

Courtesy of Ankur Bhatnagar

Ankur Bhatnagar (left) poses for a selfie with his longtime boyfriend, Deepak Sharma. The couple is planning to get married later this year.

“There’s a perception that gay people are only interested in sex, but that’s not true,” says Mr. Bhatnagar. “We also have long, nurturing relationships like heterosexual couples.”

Marriage would also help validate his relationship in the eyes of society, he says. “In India, you feel incomplete if you’re not married.”

Same-sex social marriages are not a new phenomenon, says University of Montana Professor Ruth Vanita. In her book “Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriages in Modern India,” Professor Vanita documents stories of several lesbian couples who married in informal religious ceremonies across India since the 1980s. These couples were mainly working-class, non-English speakers who had no contact with the LGBTQ rights movement in the West.

“The desire to form long-term couples, for which marriage is one name, is found in all societies, going back to the ancient world,” she says via email, adding that marriage “is primarily a public statement about the importance of one’s union.”

In that sense, marriage can also be “a liberating act away from the secrecy, from the claustrophobia that is imposed on [LGBTQ people],” says Ms. Sahaya, who writes about India’s wedding culture.  

Winds of change

It might be years before the Indian government recognizes same-sex marriage, but some private institutions are already moving in that direction. The company where Mr. Chakraborty’s husband works has been offering COVID-19 shots to employees’ families, including same-sex partners. 

That acknowledgment turned a routine vaccination appointment into “a very, very proud moment for me,” says Mr. Chakraborty, “because somebody was recognizing that we are together.”

Last year, India’s Axis Bank announced a charter of LGBTQ-friendly policies for their employees and customers, such as allowing same-sex couples to open a joint bank account. One of India’s most popular matrimonial sites is reportedly looking to expand its services to the LGBTQ community. Movies featuring queer couples are also becoming more common in Bollywood.

Attitudes toward homosexuality are changing at the family level, too. Surabhi Mitra, a psychiatrist in central India, says her parents were “elated” when she told them about her girlfriend. The couple held a “commitment ring ceremony” last year and are now planning a beach wedding. In Mr. Bhatnagar’s case, it was his father, who comes from the conservative state of Haryana, who encouraged him and his boyfriend to get married. According to a Pew survey, acceptance of homosexuality in India increased by 22 percentage points between 2013 and 2019, among the largest shifts of the countries surveyed.

Mr. Agarwal, the lawyer, points out that the United States recognized same-sex marriage only after years of growing social acceptance, and he expects India will be the same.

Same-sex couples aren’t waiting though.

“We don’t need anyone’s permission to be happy,” says Mr. Chakraborty.

"The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning" by Ben Raines, Simon & Schuster, 304 pp.

The Atlantic slave trade was abolished in the United States in 1808, but in 1860, planter Timothy Meaher bankrolled a voyage that smuggled 110 West African captives into Alabama. His criminal operation was praised by a local newspaper. “Whoever conducted the affair has our congratulations,” the editorial read, reasoning that not only did planters require labor, but they were “civilizing and Christianizing a set of barbarians by the same course.” 

The Civil War erupted months later, so the ship that Meaher commissioned for the horrific task, the Clotilda, ended up being the last vessel to transport enslaved people to America. Meaher and Captain William Foster, who sailed the schooner on its four-month journey from Mobile to what is now the African nation of Benin and back, burned the ship and sank it in an Alabama swamp to destroy evidence of their crime. The Clotilda stayed hidden for 160 years, until journalist Ben Raines uncovered its remains in 2018. Now Raines has written “The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning.”

The gripping and affecting book tells several stories, and Raines deftly weaves them into a tight, propulsive narrative. He begins with Meaher and his brothers, who grew up in Maine but amassed their fortunes in the South. The Clotilda voyage grew out of a $1,000 bet that Meaher made after boasting that he could illegally import a ship of human cargo without being punished.

Aided by Foster’s written accounts, Raines reconstructs the ship’s journey. The Clotilda survived mutiny attempts by the crew, which had been hired without knowledge of the voyage’s purpose; the schooner also had to evade a British fleet patrolling the African coast to enforce international slave-trade bans. 

The Clotilda’s destination was Ouidah, in what was then the kingdom of Dahomey. The kingdom was notorious for attacking neighboring villages, executing the very old and very young, and selling the rest into slavery. Dahomey, Raines writes, “may have been responsible for capturing and deporting about 30 percent of all the Africans sold into bondage worldwide between 1600 and the 1880s.” In the late 1920s, author Zora Neale Hurston interviewed Clotilda survivor Cudjo Lewis, by then the last man alive who’d endured the Middle Passage. Raines relies on her work to re-create Lewis’ account of the brutal raid that led to his capture, imprisonment in Ouidah, and eventual sale to Foster.

The Clotilda captives were mostly divided between Foster, Meaher, and Meaher’s brothers; thus, they were able to remain in proximity upon arrival in the United States. Because the Civil War broke out months later, they were freed within five years.

After being unable to raise enough money to return to Africa, they created their own community, governed according to African customs, on the outskirts of Mobile. It came to be known as Africatown. “Unlike their newly emancipated American counterparts,” Raines observes, “the Africans already knew how to be free.” They began by renting land from their former enslavers, but eventually they saved enough to buy their own parcels. They chose leaders, established a church, and built a school. 

Africatown thrived for years. “By the 1950s,” Raines reports, “there were movie theaters, grocery stores, barbershops, restaurants, and twelve thousand residents.” But the Meaher descendants leased property to a paper mill and other heavy industries once the construction of roads and bridges made the area less isolated. The factories were initially hailed for bringing jobs, but before long Africatown was polluted and blighted. Those who could afford to leave did. 

Raines’ narrative shines as the story reaches the present day. As an environmental journalist (his first book, “Saving America’s Amazon: The Threat to Our Nation’s Most Biodiverse River System,” was a call to protect Alabama’s diverse aquatic ecosystem), he is well positioned to assess the devastating impact of industrial pollution on Africatown. The author is also a charter captain intimately familiar with Alabama’s waterways, and as such, he turned out to be uniquely qualified to find the Clotilda’s sunken remains. “The current was running hard and the river was so muddy it looked like chocolate milk,” he recalls of the cold April day when he dove beneath the surface and emerged with a plank of wood that belonged to the ship. 

The book feels especially timely when Raines assesses the controversies that continue to surround the Clotilda. The state of Alabama owns the wreck and has so far appeared reluctant to spend the millions required to excavate it. Raines speaks to descendants who hope to make the ship the centerpiece of a future Africatown museum. “Having the burnt, rotten hull of the last American slave ship on display would instantly make Africatown one of the most important sites in the burgeoning Civil Rights tourism industry,” he writes.

Raines visits Benin, where he writes, “Most everyone’s ancestors were either capturing or being captured as part of the slaving economy.” He finds the people there grappling with this history.

Not everyone is ready for such a reckoning. Descendants of Foster seem more interested in selling their Clotilda artifacts than donating them to a museum, and descendants of the Meahers have resisted overtures by the residents of Africatown. Raines manages to connect one distant descendant of Foster with members of the Clotilda Descendants Association, and in a moving chapter, he describes the friendships they form. Still, Raines’ use of the term “closure” feels premature. The story continues to be written.

Reuters/file

An ear of wheat is seen in a field in Ukraine, a major global producer of wheat.

Even amid the flames of war, Ukraine has issued a new postage stamp, one that honors 13 soldiers who defied the Russian navy on the first day of the invasion. The government has also opened investigations of Russian war crimes to be prosecuted after the war. And it has asked to join the European Union as soon as possible. Along with other forward-looking steps, Ukraine has discovered that not all wars are fought with weapons. Shaping the peace before a war ends can sometimes undercut the reasons for the war.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy justifies this confidence in Ukraine’s future based on his country’s strong defense of its democratic values. “Look,” he told his people March 8, the world is “preparing to support our reconstruction after war. Because everyone saw that for the people who defend themselves so heroically, this ‘after the war’ will surely come.”

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, for example, supports a “Marshall Plan” for postwar Ukraine. He is meeting with nine northern European countries this week to discuss the idea. Poland has asked the EU to establish a €100 billion fund to rebuild Ukraine, perhaps by using the confiscated assets of Russia.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has pledged €2 billion as a “resilience package” for Ukraine. The bank also promises to support a reconstruction effort that will “rebuild livelihoods and businesses; restore vital infrastructure; support good governance; and enable access to services.” In addition, President Zelenskyy has also opened talks with the International Monetary Fund on ways to rebuild the country.

If Ukrainians know the democratic world supports their economic future, it would strengthen their resolve to resist Russian forces, Ilya Timtchenko, a former editor at the Kyiv Post, writes for the Atlantic Council. “A global fund would be as important as tanks, javelins, and sanctions in the battle to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression,” he stated.

During World War II, the Western allies planned for a new postwar economic order that also helped bolster their war efforts. Now, with Europe experiencing its first full-scale military invasion since that war, the West is again planning for peace, this time in weighing how to rebuild a free Ukraine.

In war, hope is not a strategy, generals often say. Yet based on reports from the battlefield, morale among Russian foot soldiers is very low. Not so for Ukrainian fighters. Their expectancy for postwar Ukraine runs high.