And now, we wait. Wait for the soldiers as they march closer and closer to us like the calm before the start of a hurricane. Wait in the darkness, like shadows. Still. Silent. A stillness and silence like you find only in the dead of night. A listening silence, ready to act. Our ears and noses like eyes as we sniff the wind, to smell the English soldiers trudging up the hill. Soldiers backra bring from the Mother Country to track us down. They have plenty guns and rockets, but them and the militia don’t know the land like we do. Don’t find out its secrets like how we had to, when the first of us got dragged in chains to the island. Every slave that ran away stored up the memory of the hidden, winding paths them came cross. Kept the memory alive. Passed it down to generation after generation of slaves, until it become the only home we know.

Something bout the darkness of this night making me nervous. Many a time I used to walk through darkness, to be back at the plantation in time for early morning muster, specially after attending a church service with Daddy Sharpe. I liked the feel of it, the cool breeze against me skin as it soothed me weary body. Helped me to rest, blend into the shadows, become invisible like I used to when I was a pickney. Gave me a feeling of what freedom must be like. But tonight, this darkness have a weight to it, as if all of nature brooding, waiting for the ambush of gunshot, to rip through its earthen bowels.

Feeling restless, I move further along, check if I can see, hear anything. As I creep through the woods me insides start to churn and a big fear rise up about the future. What going happen when the fighting finish? What going happen to me?

Will I be captured? Wounded? Dead? Better dead, I think.

I try not to dwell on thoughts of death, the words of backra buzzing in me head, and replace them with the last words I heard from our leader, me friend, and let them flow into me heart to stoke up whatever little courage I have left.