Screaming for Freedom
I’ve been to SeaWorld, though my memories are murky. Blue walls and hot metal benches and shrimp-smelling water evaporating on asphalt. I’m sure there’s a photo somewhere in which I’m leaning against the turquoise tank, my little-girl arm pointing to the smooth black-and-white mass in constant turn of the pool’s walls. I wonder if I flinched when I first saw the size of the Killer Whale in comparison to my own — over 200 times my weight. Did I wave and beckon her closer? I’m sure I whispered to the whale because that was my nature. It was my theory that every human had a telepathic link to an animal and it was only a matter of trial and error to find the species with whom you shared a secret language. So I know I furrowed my brow in wishful telepathy at the “Shamu” I saw at the marine park. Except “Shamu” was only a stage name worn by a series of different Killer Whales over the decades. The “Shamus” jumped, “waved,” and “smiled” when ordered. The performance was convincing.
It would not be until four decades later that I learned the full story of one of those Killer Whales from ecologist Carl Safina’s book, Beyond Words. Corky was only four years old and barely finished nursing when she was hunted off the coast of British Columbia in 1969. Her family was encircled and chased to the docks, where she was separated from her mother. The sequence of abduction, isolation, and incarceration forced upon that small whale by her captors was unbearable. But it was another incident — involving a cry by Corky that actually shattered glass — that made me put down the book and weep. Emotions leaked, also, from some unnamed reservoir of my own body.
Sound is energy in acoustic form. It travels in undulating shapes and vibrates at a frequency measured in waves per second, or hertz. A bass guitar’s natural frequency is 40 to 150 hertz, a woman’s scream ranges from 30 to 150, and — according to the San Diego Opera — wineglass-shattering waves pass at 556 hertz. Orca vocals can reach 40,000 hertz, and the tank’s glass that Corky shattered was an inch thick.
I found a YouTube video to play a sound clip of a 40,000 hertz frequency tone. I tapped the volume down, anticipating an excruciating noise. Mid-video, unable to hear anything, I tapped the volume all the way up. My dog lifted her head from her bed. A Google search confirmed my suspicion: Dogs, cats, rabbits, sea lions, and opossums can hear 40,000 hertz. Humans can’t. But that didn’t muffle the vibration of Corky’s story under my skin. Safina’s book was published in 2015; I’d picked the book up amidst my own investigation into the inheritance of a toxic burden in my body that I share with wild Killer Whales. As soon as I turned the last page, I searched online for an update on Corky. I knew the average age of death for a female Orca living at SeaWorld was 12 years old and I could not stop myself from hoping for the worst. Let her be dead. Let her be dead. Let her suffering have stopped.
To my horror, under the hashtag #emptythetanks was a recent photo of Corky, age 58. Her 8,000 pounds of wild muscle perched on the edge of a cement tank, flukes poised in the air, back arched, chin up, frozen in pose for a stadium seating 5,500 humans with fingers and cameras pointing at Corky’s forced “smile” of broken and missing teeth. Corky’s teeth are long gone or fractured from chewing the gates and concrete walls that enclose her — she is the single Orca who has lived longer than any Killer Whale in captivity. The “amusement” park where Corky works is open 365 days a year.
I slapped down my laptop. I didn’t want to know more and also needed to return to my own amusement park of modern motherhood: the merry-go-round of laundry, the roller coaster of screams from sibling strikes, the emotional drop tower of a wet-footed slip downstairs and a near-miss concussion. But not long after I collapsed into bed that night, I shuddered awake as Corky’s scream boomeranged from my subconscious. It wasn’t a sound per se. But I remembered how my babies’ low whimpers of night fever on the other side of the house could startle me upright. Motherhood sharpened my senses. It so overtuned my body that I still often find myself wandering into our dark cul-de-sac to break up cat brawls, or out on the deck, under stars, looking for the mother fox barking to her cubs. The cries from my children and the haunt of Corky’s voice shared resonance. Except I could reach for my babies. Pick them up, nuzzle, and quiet them in my arms. Corky lived a thousand miles away, under constant monitor of high-security cameras, circling a cement tank not twice as deep as her body is long.
The next day my hands massaged the silken head of my 6-year-old daughter as she floated — eyes closed, cheeks puffed — on her back in the bathtub. I have taught her how to lengthen her inhale, how to fill her lungs with air, how to allow herself to rise, that her body is made for elevation. But trust is not my daughter’s inclination. That she let me cradle her head — it’s no small act. She will not let her father push her on the pedal bike. She will not let her big brother touch her wiggly bottom tooth. She will not high-five the man who greets her dad on the sidewalk. She has watched most of her life from my hip, except she has watched carefully, or felt carefully, because something has transferred. In the bathtub, I sense this caution and what she must let go of to starfish her body and close her eyes. To let me thumb the shampoo suds from her soft temples. She lets down her guard because I am her mother and because there is a special agreement about trust between two people who are inclined otherwise.
In 1980, Corky was eleven months pregnant. She was not new to pregnancy. She had already carried a calf to full term in 1977. When that calf was born, Corky tried to teach him how to swim in the circles the tank demanded. But the babe slammed into the walls, opening a wound on his tiny jaw. Corky buffered the babe from hitting the walls, but in doing so, kept nudging the baby into a position where the calf could not sort where to suckle from his mother’s mammary glands full of waiting milk. Unable to nurse, the calf withered. Humans removed the baby, winched in a sling by crane, from the pool to a place where they could force-feed him. A young scientist named Alexandra Morton, who was studying the communications of Killer Whales, was present that day. Morton, in her book Not on My Watch, recalled Corky’s response after the babe was removed from her tank: “She flung her body again and again against the spot where humans stood to command her to perform jumps, wave her fin, give them a ride. Then, each time, she sank to the bottom and made the same call over and over for days, stopping only to grab a breath at the surface and then return to the bottom of the tank, where she lay on the drain.”
I searched the newspapers in California that year. They used vague language like: “The first killer whale born in captivity … died soon after its birth” and “The calf, which weighed 300 pounds at birth, began losing weight” and “There was concern about the calf bumping into walls of the tank.” Six more of Corky’s babies died in cement pools after the first. Not one calf lived longer than 46 days.
Orcas are pregnant for about 17 months. Corky today is no longer ovulating; over the course of her captivity, she was pregnant more than 137 months. That’s 11.42 years. I did the math three times: once to break the number into allotments of time that felt relatable, once to overcome my denial of the math, once to decide that 11.42 years of failed pregnancy is unfathomable — even, or maybe especially, as a woman who has experienced seven months of failed pregnancy herself. I don’t like to remember those months. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve lost memories. Memories that sat on the surface of my life while I lay upon the drain.
Morton does not have a recording of the sound Corky made that broke glass. But she will never forget the day. According to the account in her book, she arrived at work and saw water pouring out of the park. She ran to the whale tank and found Corky “with a deep crease on the point of her face.” Corky was more than halfway into another pregnancy. Morton had noticed that Corky liked to linger near the window of her tank that had a view of a gift shop where hundreds of miniature stuffed Orcas were stacked on display. This was the glass Corky shattered. The significance was not lost on Morton. She dropped to the floor amidst the wet mini Orcas and broken glass—and cried.
A few weeks later, the baby Corky had in her womb was born dead.
In October 2021, a woman was raped, repeatedly, on the El train in Philadelphia as it was traveling westbound. According to video footage, ten or more witnesses shuffled in and out of the train car as a man assaulted her through more than two dozen train stops. No one stopped the rape. Doors opened. Doors closed. Doors opened. Doors closed.
Commenting on the case, criminologist Alexis Piquero said, “The onus is really on us as a collective … we need a world where people are doing the right thing when you see someone assaulted.” The onus is also on men to stop raping people, but it’s the shadows of the witnesses on that train that stand, unmoving, for me as a reminder of our hardened arteries. Would I have stepped forward? I hope so, but who’s to know which would have won: my spark of indignation and right action or my trauma response of paralysis built by a lifetime of force-fed violence against my gender?
Last summer, I pulled over in the Nevada desert to help my son with his seat belt. Bending into the car, I heard wheels spinning on the gravel behind me. I stiffened and told my son to “look away” as a man leaned out the window of a gray van and hissed, “Hey, Mama. You got a pop for me?” Last summer, I curled around my sleeping child in a tent, eyes wide open with the escalating voices of men drinking down the dirt road, tremoring in memory of another remote location where I was held up, but not physically hurt, by two men with guns. Last summer, a pickup tipped its headlights down the dirt road I was hiking with two girlfriends. One of the women flinched. I touched her shoulder. She froze. My eyes welled. In my own tank, the violence is so normalized I’m barely aware of my constant small turns.
In 2023, the Supreme Court sentenced countless bodies to the unwanted captivity and imprisonment of forced reproduction. Did I fight when Roe was overturned? No. I sank to the bottom of my tank and cried. How many cried with me? And how many didn’t cry but witnessed and did nothing? When I was in high school, a classmate told his friends, who told all the school, that the bloody white sock in the back of his black Jeep was the trophy of taking my virginity. When I found him at a house party that Friday night, I pushed him with two hands against a wall. I yelled, “Take it back. Tell the truth, you fucking liar.” And with the eyes of the entire party on him, he looked around and then he looked at me. He looked me right in the eye and said, “It happened.” This is how I learned that crowds believe men and men believe themselves. And that nothing has changed between a ’90s high-school keg party and the 2018 Senate Judiciary Committee.
Nothing has changed. Except the pitch of my scream.
Those analyzing the Philadelphia case have referenced the “bystander effect,” the phenomenon in which the more witnesses there are to a crime, the less likely any individual is to feel the responsibility to step in. We look around, see no reaction, assume it’s “normal,” and stay passive. Which makes sense of Corky’s stadium seating 5,500 people. Which makes sense of the millions of bystanders living in the United States who neglect the screaming fact that the tank into which women — and all marginalized people in America — are born is violent.
December 11, 2024, marks Corky’s 55th year in captivity. If SeaWorld would permit it, the Double Bay Sanctuary Foundation has plans for a sea-pen “retirement home” for her. In a section of ocean her family, the A5 Pod, still frequents, Corky could live and still receive the care that captivity has made her survival dependent on. Remember, her teeth are worn or missing from 50 years of captivity. She has forgotten how to hunt for food. She’s now reliant on the systems that built her dependency.
In 2018, SeaWorld communications director David Koontz, speaking of the Orcas held there, told CBC Radio Canada, “To take them out of this environment would be inhumane and irresponsible, and we will never take such a risk.” Because it was not a risk for the “captive whale industry” to hunt a child-whale, separate her from her mother, and transfer her by flatbed truck and plane to California? Because it was not irresponsible to impregnate her repeatedly? Because it was not inhumane to hold her in a chlorinated cement chamber for more than 50 years? Yes, I have opinions on who gets to define what a risk is: the captor or the captive. On what’s a risk to a life versus a risk to a bottom line versus a risk to the foundation of a hierarchy that serves captors.
Patriarchy is not just a few “men in charge.” It’s an inundating network of social institutions and relationships that values the lives of straight, cisgender, male humans (ranked by wealth and whiteness) and confers to them power, privilege, and domination not only over women but over all other people and species. Dozens of male Killer Whales have been subjected to torturous lives of abduction, isolation, and captivity. Women passengers, undoubtedly, stepped in and out of that Philadelphia train. But as Terry Tempest Williams once said, “To bear witness is not a passive act.” Audiences are accountable.
I reached out to Howard Garrett, co-founder of the Orca Network, for an opinion on Corky’s ability to safely travel to, and retire in, a sanctuary in the ocean. He said, “If William Shatner can be an astronaut at age 90, Corky could theoretically be transported to her home waters and be cared for in every way she is now but in a natural setting with more room to move and dive. Transport is not as stressful or risky as many make it out to be, with proper care and companionship.” Corky’s return to the ocean would also be symbolic. “A sanctuary is not just a place to live,” Dr. Lori Marino, founder and president of the Whale Sanctuary Project, explains. “A sanctuary changes the cultural conversation from objectifying animals to respecting them.”
Does Corky feel the inheritance of the oceans she was denied in her whale bones? My father, like Corky, was 4 years old when he lost his mother. She died in a hospital at 38. My father was the youngest of her nine children. On her death certificate, the wobbly typewriter letters float in the form’s boxes: “CAUSE OF DEATH: Cardiovascular Collapse. DUE TO: Surgery (Hysterectomy). DUE TO: Carcinoma of Cervix.” There’s a rumor that what’s written on this death certificate is not the whole truth. There’s a whispered version of events in which my grandmother died from blood poisoning from the dirty tools used in the botched abortion of her tenth pregnancy. The hospital secretary typed “Hysterectomy” into my grandmother’s death certificate, but abortion, in 1943, was illegal. And maybe a legal explanation was needed for the damage to my grandmother’s female parts. The stories of botched abortions are likely often buried in shame and illegalities and inaccurate death certificates. But a few weeks ago, in the process of fact-checking my forthcoming book, I reviewed my paternal grandmother’s death certificate and noticed, for the first time, that under the smaller form question “Other Conditions: (Include Pregnancy within three months of death),” the document is annotated, in light cursive handwriting, with “93d.”
How would the story have shifted if my father’s mother had received the safe abortion of her tenth pregnancy she might have needed? Would my father not have lost his mother then? Would I have once sat on my grandmother’s lap? Corky’s plight woke me and shook forth the scream that is my own. A scream in the face of the fact that I am forced to teach my daughter to swim in the circles of sexism our culture normalizes. A tank of chlorinated misogyny normalized by Supreme Court justices, by elected presidents, and by communications directors. Hierarchies by which everything wombed is seen as a target for extraction, reproduction, amusement, and exploitation. I’m sure my parents were pleased, all those years ago, when they treated their four children to a family vacation in California. They packed up the red Suburban with checked sleeping bags, a blue cooler, tents, and cans of chili, and drove us a thousand miles south to San Diego. To SeaWorld, a thinly sliced piece of frosted American dream.
Today, Corky is about 59 years old, 55 of those years lived captive and performative, and she is only one of the more than 3,500 whales, dolphins, and porpoises held captive around the world today. But once upon a time, Corky shattered glass. To shatter glass, the vibration of sound must match the resonation of what it shatters. What can our shared resonance with Corky’s story tell us about breaking the glass of our own cages?
John Crowe was a professional diver who assisted with the capture of Corky’s family off the coast of British Columbia. In the 2013 documentary Blackfish, he sits in a darkened living room. His burly beard and long gray hair mirror the image centered on his red T-shirt: Neptune, god of the sea, thrusting a three-pronged spear in a battle-ready pose. Crowe folds his heavily tattooed arms as he recounts of that day, “They were trying to get the young Orca in the stretcher and the whole fam-damn-ly is out there, 25 yards away, maybe, in a big line, and they’re communicating back and forth.” Crowe’s big shoulders slump. He looks down at the floor. “Well, you understand then, what you’re doing.” He glances up at the camera under his tinted glasses, looks down again, shakes his head and exhales. “I lost it. I mean, I just started crying. I didn’t stop working, but I just couldn’t handle it.” He lifts his hands to touch the creases at his forehead, covering his face, and continues, “Just like kidnapping a little kid away from their mother.”
At the end of his account, Crowe shakes his head again and crosses his arms: “I’ve seen some things that it’s hard to believe. But the worst thing that I’ve ever done is hunt that whale.”
Note from the author: Following a growing consensus among many British organizations and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, I’ve capitalized the common names of species in English. This conveys the respect of proper nouns to genetically distinct populations.
Adapted from the book My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women (Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books, March 2025), by Christina Rivera.
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