Even in torture, our souls had not withered. They were buried somewhere deep within, in a place where no person could go. They were as timeless as the sun. Elders had taught us that a person’s spirit permeates their flesh, interpreting the invisible and feeling the intangible. Yet the soul never moves. It rests at the center of the Self, as the piece of God that dwells in every living thing. Throughout the journey, our souls fed hope to our consciousness when all hope was gone. It whispered into our weary ears, “There shall come a day when the last shall be first.” We believed. We believed because we needed to believe. We cursed our Gods only because we believed in them. Even when they didn’t come, we still believed. We welcomed Death because we believed in another life. We ate mush and endured the stench of human waste because we believed we could survive. And we did survive. And in surviving we began to dream. We dreamed so many dreams, we dreamed so many years. We dreamed of our people coming together and building families filled with joy and overrunning with children. We dreamed of someone studying those ships and learning enough to take us home. We dreamed of continuing our initiations in this new land until we were sure we were men. We dreamed of healing rituals that would calm turbulent minds. We dreamed of the pale boy who had loved us from his heart, and we hoped for him a lifetime of blessings. And we dreamed that, one day, our children would know the cost of our coming. That would be enough. That would heal our souls. We had learned our lesson.

This was The Coming.

Part III

Part III

We would never see home again. We knew that now. The truth bore down on us like a heavy, massive weight. We didn’t know where we were, we didn’t know what to do, we didn’t know what might become of us. We were strangers in a new land, and we were here to stay.

Soon, we learned the name of the place: Charleston. It felt funny on our tongues, but we repeated it, over and over, that we might never forget. It had been the place of our arrival. Each night in the holding stall, we lay upon prickly hay, wondering who would buy us tomorrow, which of us would be taken away. Some days, after the parade of humiliation, pale men rejected us all, and we were returned to the stall. We then sat huddled together, like a mass of mourning, totally vulnerable to whatever they desired.