I tell a rebel to lock him up in one of the slave huts, leave someone to keep watch, make sure him don’t escape. Then I turn to the rest of the rebels.

‘Mek haste. Take everything out the slave huts and carry dem away. Hide dem in the caves nearby and when you finish, we going clear out Massa house. Make sure it empty before we burn the place down.’

Everybody follow orders and get plenty busy. Leave me to make me way up the path to the Great House, open the front gate, walk right up the steps of the verandah to the front door. Is a strange feeling, because I always enter through the back. Now me standing at the front door with a gun in me hand. Some of the other rebels try to follow me, but I tell them to go help empty the slave huts first, take a rest, wait outside. Them not happy, but what they going do? Sam Sharpe put me in charge, so them must obey me.

I long ago decided I going be the first to cross the threshold, the first to enter the Great House. To smash the windows, to trample cross the polished floors in dirt-covered feet. Floors polished week after week, month after month, year after year by the hands and bent backs of our women. Is something I been brooding over, since Sam Sharpe told me to lead a group of rebels onto Ginger Hill plantation.

‘You know the lay of the land,’ him told me. ‘If we can take Ginger Hill, it opens the way towards taking the other plantations in the south. All the way down to Black River.’

I bowed me head and said yes, I would be happy to lead. To take Ginger Hill and burn it down. It mean nothing to me anymore, it never really did, was not me home. It not even the Massa’s home, him don’t live there. And as the years built up, I started to despise the place with its white window shades, lime-washed walls, pretty gardens, kitchens full up with food. All made good by slave labour. The harder we worked, the more money Massa made and the prettier the place got. Made me detest it more and more. But standing at the front door, bout to open it, I get afraid. Is then I remember the questions Sam Sharpe asked me.

‘What gives one man the right to own so much? What gives this same man the right to withhold so much? And what gives any man the power over another? The right to say whether you or I can live in peace or die in agony?’

He asked a truth I needed to hear.