The hour or two we slept, we dreamed. We dreamed a collective dream. Each of us was there, along with so many others, standing in the center of a land, surrounded by hundreds, no, thousands who appeared to resemble us completely. There were the young, the old, and the in-between. Food sat piled high on tables stretched in every direction. Children laughed and played in the distance. Adults screeched about bygone days. Elders wondered what our future held. Ancestors hovered, just above us, smiling with glee. We couldn’t see faces clearly, but we saw every shade of brown and black conceivable. And every size: tall, short, round, thin, husky, hefty, muscular, slender, fat, stocky. These were our people. And they were beautiful. The land looked like our land, but different. It felt like our land, but changed. There were a few pale people in revelry with our people, and we didn’t understand, but ancestors nodded approval so we held our peace. Every face lost along the journey was found on a young person’s face. It soothed our hearts. It excited our souls. God had kept God’s promise.

Then we woke. Everyone saw the vision. Some remembered one part, some another, but it was the same dream. Had it come to tease our wounded consciousness? Or had it come to affirm our decision to live? Either way, it left us confident that this was not the end. There would be a day after today, and in it, we would be multiplied. Yet for now, we had to survive.

When pale men came for us, they were alarmed. We were already standing, lined in a row. Usually they jerked and grabbed us until we were upright and ordered for movement, but not today. When they unlocked and opened the door, we stared straight forward and walked with confidence. Pale men scowled. They did not understand. At the block, we did not shiver. We did not search faces to see if they wanted us. We did not gather into a tremulous, human cluster as we had done days before. We stood, shoulder to shoulder, wrist to chained wrist, and waited. Voices grumbled about the strange, peculiar nature of our posture, but we didn’t care. We didn’t even look at them. A few approached and studied our eyes, but they did not gain our attention. They were startled and disturbed. Yet that was irrelevant. We’d simply decided to reserve something for ourselves. They could buy our bodies, but not our resolve.