The militia even rode up and down hillsides burning the Baptist churches they believed lead us astray. Convinced ‘the church was the whirlpool from which the Rebellion frothed up, to decimate the land’. And backra showed no mercy. A gang of them set upon a group of slaves, tore them apart limb from limb, till the whiteness of them skin no longer white but red, from the covering of blood. Is like the hatred of our black skins, all the fear they been storing up season after season, burst out, turn into avenging acts. And I know backra pouring retribution down on us because we dared to believe we is equal, have the right to freedom.

After a while I stop listening. All the witnesses they call say the same thing: me guilty. And don’t take long before the judge read out him sentence.

‘After a very deliberate and impartial hearing, the jury has found you guilty of the offences with which you stand charged. It is now my painful duty to pass on you the awful sentence of the law, which is that you be taken from hence to the gaol of this parish and from thence to the place of execution, to be hanged by the neck until you are dead, at such time and place as His Excellency the Governor shall think proper to appoint. May the Lord have mercy upon your soul.’

The hammer come down with a bang. It sound like gunfire.

After the courthouse, they take me straight back to the workhouse gaol. Many other slaves housed there, waiting for the sentence of death to be carried out. Too many of us. There is no space to lay down, must stand, sit, our backs against the wall, even when we sleep. One by one, the other slaves disappear. Many of them get hanged just outside, in the back of the courthouse yard. Backra let the bodies pile up, leave them rotting in the hot sun. We, the slaves what left in the cell, can hear the victory wail of death, smell the stench of it as it come sneaking through the bars of the window, to hover over us. Make us know we is next. Is like hell come down to earth. And in this hell I sit, day after day. Night after night, praying for fate to make it me turn. Begging death to release me gently to the Ancestors.

Part Three

Jamaica to the Colony of New South Wales, 1835

New Worlds

All I want to do is howl. Howl long, hard into the night. Scream into the hard stone floor, where I lay me head down. Scratch at the stone walls, make me fingers bleed. Smash at the wall again and again with me fists, till the pain of it knock me out into a deathlike sleep.