Maya Wiley’s parents, both activists, raised her and her brother, Dan, to be resilient. In 1973, when Maya was 9 and her brother 10, their father, George Wiley, bought a small boat. On their first day out on the Chesapeake Bay, he insisted that his children learn how to drive it and drop the anchor in case they ever encountered an emergency.
The next day, Maya and Dan went out with him again. As their father, a big and exuberant man, traversed a narrow wooden walkway on his new boat, the rusted screws holding the walkway in place gave way and he fell backward into the water. His life preserver ripped, and Wiley remembers seeing it float away. She and her brother tried to circle the boat around him to no avail, and they watched him drown.
The siblings managed to drive the boat close enough to shore to drop anchor and swam into a white beach community, where they ran screaming from house to house and were rebuffed by the first family they tried before someone finally took them in and called the police.
Maya Wiley’s mother, Wretha, insisted that her kids talk about their father’s death, actively encouraging the adults in their lives not to treat it as a taboo topic.
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