Rudy and I continued on to the Botanical Garden following a path that led from the university. We started up the slope along a dirt road and reached the reception within ten minutes. A group of ten teenage students were waiting for us to set out. We spent the first hour of the tour on a slight descent through the foliage. Many of the trees were missing their labels, so unfortunately I still don’t know what to call countless species I’ve seen my whole life and have never been able to name. Ah, and there was an orchid, high above the ground with its stalk rooted in a tree trunk. The natives call it ‘scared of the earth’, because that’s what it looks like: frightened, aloft, straining away from all the other plants. An endemic orchid, according to Rudy. White, beautiful, with petals like a thin and slightly darker fringe. We pressed on. Rudy kept asking me questions about Josephine, about Lynton. I told him what little I knew: that he was an Irish immigrant who came before the Intendancy and had married one Rebecca Bowie.

‘Oh, that’s your other family name? So you’re one of the Bowies, huh? The slave owners!’ Rudy joked.

‘The slave owners?’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, what else? If that’s what it is, that’s what it is…’

‘Yep, your grandparents owned practically the entire island,’ he said as we drifted away from the student group.

He stopped to one side of the path, its old cobblestones cracked and grass-invaded. He pointed to a tree with leaves both fat and small, so small they were easy to overlook. Its branches were relatively thin and covered with sharp thorns.

‘See the ants?’ Huge and red, they swarmed up the tree bark by the tens, by the hundreds, circumventing the spikes. ‘This is the kind of tree they tied slaves to as punishment. It’s ironic that this is the exact tree…’

I pictured the scene that Rudy was trying to conjure. This part of the past confounds me. Maybe it’s due in part to my own generational normalisation: the way I’ve absorbed the subjugation of the enslaved, the superiority of the master. I’ve observed myself: what did they feel, those who were able to buy other humans and dispose of them at will? What could they have told their children and grandchildren? I stood facing the twisted, irregular boughs Rudy was showing me and told myself I hadn’t bought anyone, I’ve never made anyone spend all night tied to a trunk as punishment for defying me, I haven’t…

‘Why ironic? It’s awful that a tree like this exists here and was used for something like that,’ I said. I saw blood oozing from the bark, heard moans.

‘Well, because the Raizals use this tree to make ointments for healing wounds.’