Sky Full of Elephants

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, rape, death by suicide, and suicidal ideation.

In the garage, Charlie senses that Herald doesn’t have an internal conflict. Herald thinks of Black consciousness as a sky of elephants. All along, the knowledge, sadness, and memories have been in the sky. Their weight is great, so if they fell down, they’d crush everyone. At the same time, people should confront them, and they must see them on their own.

Hosea enters and tells Charlie about the Ishango bone in the Congo. The bone is a mathematical tool, meaning that Africans in the Congo knew about arithmetic thousands of years before the Greeks. Hosea uses the bone to remind Charlie that Black history didn’t start with slavery. Hosea then claims that Africans knew how to access wireless transmissions before the American electrical engineer Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). Hosea believes there are waves other than radio waves. Each Black person creates their own waves, sending them to their community, creating a Black consciousness.

In a dreamlike sequence, Sidney sees her mother, but her mother turns into a Black woman who’s picking cotton. A cattle bell clangs, and the woman walks toward the sound.