‘When we get to the island the slavers put us in a camp. Seasoning camp they called it. One big settlement beside a river. Come night-time, the mosquito dem bite us. Backra don’t let us use no balm to protect the skin, the way we do back home. Then some of us get sick with the fever, with the shakes. Dem separate you from you family so nobody to care for you. And everywhere me look, all me see is bodies that is dead, dying, crying out in pain.’

Calla stopped talking for a while, poured more tea, took a few sips trying to calm herself.

‘The slave dem that survived, like me, backra started to train as to how to work all day, all night. Teach us how to bow down and obey. I lucky,’ Calla tell me. ‘Lucky, because me ugly and no man look pon me. Lucky, because me know the healing ways. Learn it from the spirits, from the Ancestors. Me heal the slave dem, as well as backra. It help me to keep me dignity. Keep meself safe. Stop me from ending me life, like some did, throwing themself in the river, praying to get eaten by a crocodile.’

I felt a big sorrow for Calla rise up inside, and I reached out, held her hand. Now that she had finally revealed her past, I think the storytelling was at an end, but then she started on a second story and it was that story that reached deep into me heart that night.

‘The power of the earth is in the blood,’ she said, picking up some dirt, crumbling it in her fingers. ‘The blood you born into. Before that, you is a free spirit. Tied to nothing. But when the spirit enter the body, it come to live inside the earth. Inside the blood. And this blood, it come from a long way off.’

‘What you mean, Calla? Where this blood come from?’

‘All the way from the first man and the first woman. This line of blood don’t belong to one person, but to a group of people. A gathering of families. And the stories that belong to them families get stored in the blood. So, when the spirit enter the body, it take up the blood stories and is bound to play them out.’

‘Dem is a lot of stories for the spirit to follow.’

‘Yes, is true. Plenty stories. Except, every time the spirit enter a new body, it travel along new bloodlines. Take up new stories, and new learning from dem stories, until spirit come to understand it is bigger, much bigger than all dem stories and bloodlines put together.’