Story by Liz Johnson
Graphic by Amelia Locklear
Every summer until she was about 16, Tara Roberts and her mom drove eight hours from the city energy of Atlanta to the muggy calm of rural Edenton, North Carolina.
During these visits, Roberts passed the time playing outside with her cousins on their grandmother’s large Edenton estate, but she longed to be back in Atlanta. Edenton was hot and mosquito-y, with too many cornfields and not enough people. Plus, there could be snakes.
“I never tapped into the magic of that area at all,” Roberts said.
But in 2021, a journey that had taken Roberts around the globe and deep into history brought her back to Edenton. This time, it felt more like home than she ever imagined possible.
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In March 2022, Tara Roberts became the first Black woman National Geographic Explorer to be featured on the cover of the magazine.
This cover story, along with a six-episode podcast called “Into the Depths,” is the culmination of about four years spent researching and scuba diving alongside members of a non-profit organization called Diving with a Purpose (DWP).
Founded in 2003 and composed primarily of Black scuba divers and archeologists, Diving with a Purpose’s primary mission is to train scuba divers to help maritime archeologists find and preserve underwater artifacts. In particular, the group aims to bring to the surface stories of the slave ships that wrecked on the way from Africa to the Americas.
“DWP’s mission is to tell the story of the African diaspora through our lens,” said Ken Stewart, founder and program director of DWP. “There are very few Black archeologists in this country.”
Roberts’ first glimpse of DWP came in 2017, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. The image of a crew of scuba divers, almost all of them Black women, caught her attention.
Dazzled by their presence in a field where Black women are historically underrepresented and moved by Diving with a Purpose’s mission, Roberts contacted Stewart. She wanted to join them. She wanted to tell their story.
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For Roberts, this journey was multifaceted. She wanted to celebrate the work of the DWP team and help shed light on a long-overlooked piece of history. But she also carried with her personal questions of heritage and belonging.
Roberts had always loved to travel, living in eight different cities worldwide in the last 15 years. But in all this traveling, she had never found a place where she felt like she truly belonged.
“I think I had settled into this feeling of being rootless, but I won’t say that I settled into that comfortably,” Roberts said. “There was a part of me that wanted to be rooted.”
When Roberts first saw the photo of the Black women divers, she was living in Washington and working as a communications director. Throughout her career, she’s held editor positions at CosmoGirl, Essence and Ebony magazines.
Stewart and lead instructor Kamau Sadiki were surprised when Roberts said she wanted to quit her job to dive and travel with them. They get calls from journalists pretty frequently, but none have matched Roberts’ determination and passion.
“She was committed. She was focused. And she was also sacrificial. She quit her job and said, ‘This is what I need to do,’” Sadiki said. “She felt some sort of connection to all these unanswered questions in her own personal quest.”
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This quest took Roberts from a training pool in Washington, D.C., to Mozambique Island, from South Africa to Costa Rica, from Togo and Benin to Alabama.
In the “Into the Depths” podcast, Roberts focuses on the stories of four shipwrecks: the São José Paquete d’Africa, the Fredericus Quartus, the Christianus Quintus and the Clotilda.
“Tara has visited those different spaces and documented the work that DWP is doing, but also local efforts that have been ongoing in those spaces for cultural preservation efforts,” said DWP diving instructor and board member Ayana Flewellen.
In each place she visited, Roberts talked to locals and archaeologists, asking them the questions she’d been turning over in her mind. Questions of identity, of closure, of remembering a difficult past and celebrating resilience.
In Togo and Benin, where her ancestors may have lived, Roberts reconsidered her assumptions about how her identity as a Black American and her uncertain ancestry influences her sense of self.
In South Africa, she danced under the stars to music new and old from around the world.
In Costa Rica, she worked with local archeologists and advocates who involve younger generations in the field of maritime archeology, working as a community to uncover the history that lies just off the shores.
A theme that emerged from all these places was the emphasis on communities taking part in the uncovering and sharing of their ancestors’ stories.
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The more time Roberts spent connecting with the history of the African diaspora and considering what it means to be rooted, the more she wondered about her own roots. How far back could she trace her family’s lineage in North Carolina? Could learning this history help her understand her own place in the world?
In 2021, Roberts made her way back to Edenton for the first time in years. With the help of a Virginia-based genealogist named Renate Yarborough Sanders, she discovered more about her great-great-grandfather Jack Roberts, her earliest known ancestor.
After he was freed from slavery, he became a landowner and influential member of his community. He was part of the United States Colored Troops and a participant in the 1865 Freedmen’s Convention after the Civil War.
For the first time, as she walked through her late grandmother’s property on the edge of town, Roberts understood this dilapidated house in the context of a moving family history, the extent of which she’d never known.
This appreciation only deepened as Roberts made her way to charming downtown Edenton. She was there for the first celebration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday, the streets full of life. Everywhere she turned, as she introduced herself to residents, people recognized her last name. She even met someone who is married to her uncle’s stepson.
Roberts felt known, surrounded by her family’s legacy.
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It wasn’t just family history that Roberts learned in Edenton. She also heard the story of Harriet Jacobs and the Maritime Underground Railroad.
Jacobs was enslaved in Edenton until the early 1840s, when she escaped through North Carolina’s coastal waterways. She later wrote a book about her experiences, called “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.”
Although Roberts’ family was from the same town as Jacobs, Roberts had never heard the story of her escape. She, and many other Americans, didn’t know the Maritime Underground Railroad existed.
In the final episode of “Into the Depths,” Roberts wonders if Jacobs could have been a role model for her as a young girl. Maybe knowing this history would have provided the sense of connection she wished she’d had growing up. Maybe then she wouldn’t have felt so distant from her family home on those summer visits.
Roberts hopes that younger generations won’t always have to feel this same way. That’s a big part of what “Into the Depths” is about, after all: educating people about a history they weren’t given the opportunity to learn in school.
“The more ships and the more stories that are found, the more people might find their way to these conversations of roots and ancestors and depth, and might find themselves feeling more settled into self in a way that they weren’t before,” Roberts said. “And I think that changes everything.”
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Through “Into the Depths,” Roberts has shared the story she set out to tell when she first saw that Diving with a Purpose photo, but her journey is far from over.
“There’s more to talk about and more to uncover,” Roberts said. “I think there’s a longer story about this.”
Roberts still considers herself a global citizen, and she hopes to continue traveling for the foreseeable future, but something is different now. She’s found the place she feels rooted, the place she calls home.
“I always thought that it would be somewhere outside of the United States,” Roberts said. “I was searching all over the world for something that I’ve had all along.”
No matter how far she travels, Edenton will be waiting for her. It changes everything.
To learn more about Tara Roberts and “Into the Depths,” visit NatGeo.com.
