Summary

Epilogue: "Boarding the Voyage" begins with an epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke, which goes: "I know that nothing has ever been real/ without my beholding it./ All becoming has needed me./ My looking ripens things/ and they come toward me, to meet and be met" (139). Lewis then describes her last day searching through museums. She had learned by now that to find the Black women in an exhibit on Colonial furniture, she needed to crawl along the floor to see the carved feet of the chairs and couches. She has seen black bodies used as ornamentation and decoration in her studies. A description of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus follows, and Lewis shares an old rumor, that the painting was modeled after a mistress of Alexander the Great, and a Greek courtesan named Phryne. Lewis discovered The Voyage of the Sable Venus, and...