All those years, locked up in the workhouse, I prayed for some miracle to take place. That somehow me going to be set free. But as I sat slumped, chained in the grimy hold of the packet ship, beside boxes of cargo, the rats scurrying bout, the chickens squawking, the goats bleating, I knew there was going be no miracle, no charity for me.

Not many memories of that long ocean voyage, chained up in the hold, with me head over a bucket vomiting. The guards letting me out only late at night, so the paying passengers couldn’t set eyes pon me.

And after a journey that seem like it never going end, come a big surprise! Before backra send me to this colony place, him keep me a prisoner in the Mother Country. The place Massa always used to boast bout. The place, never in all me dreams, I thought I ever going see.

What kind of place I come to? Full up with things I never seen before. A world that cause me mind to buck and roll, trying to steady itself in the newness, the difference that I see. I close my eyes, open them again, hoping to see something familiar in a world that get so big I can no longer feel the edge of it. Is like Jamaica is lost inside a dream.

And somewhere between when I leave Jamaica and arrive in the Mother Country, backra no longer call me a slave. Now me called convict. But nothing change, except for them that own me. Now the Mother Country is the Massa, and it turn out she no different to the Massa back on the plantation.

The place I find meself in is a town backra call Woolwich, where me forced to sleep on a hulk, a big old boat that sit low in the water. Except that hulk don’t go nowhere, stay tied up to the wharf. Make a man feel queasy with all the rocking and rolling and swaying ways, surrounded by the stench of floating sewage.