The day grew intolerably hot. The air was thick as syrup. In the long rows of tobacco mounds, children stood in the sun and watched the turkeys eat the hornworm and the devouring beetle off leaves.

We passed a manse where two white women, dressed in brilliant sacques, walked arm-in-arm among the blooms, commenting upon the excellence of the sweet peas. Their silken shoes scraped and rattled on paths of oyster shell: handsome women of forty years, speaking of the world as gardeners stooped around them, and, in the distant fields, their bonded farmhands shouted out ragged calls across the furrows.

We marched through village and forest.

We passed farms and mills; we passed slave quarters where goats wandered among the huts, and corn was laid to dry; and there was a spreading oak tree hung with jugs, which spake softly in the summer’s breeze.

Women walked by us with baskets of corn upon their heads; men mowed wheat with scythes, followed closely by teams of gatherers. A boy, all but naked, squatted upon the ground, sooting fruit trees to protect them from some scourge.

We passed a great house of some Loyalist where a crowd stood gathered, and all the house’s things were arranged upon the pebbles of the street, and animals were tied in the yard, ready for vendue or lottery.

We made our way through the crush, our visages cast down, little liking the press of people.

Farther along the road, we saw a black man sitting in an odd attitude by the side of the road, and smellt an awful smell; and when we reached him, we discovered him dead.

My eyes could not be drawn from this terrible spectacle; they sought it again and again for confirmation, that the body might be so rent, the face thus disassembled; reason would not countenance it, and nature rebelled against it.

It was but a quarter of a body torn from the rest: unseeing, gaping head and lolling arm with shoulder and ribs to join them, impaled upon a stake, and much busied with flies. The stench made breath difficult.

We proceeded past it retching, Olakunde muttering prayers.

’Twas not merely the violence of the death which caused our hearts to quail; not merely the disgust at decay; but the horror that he was set there as a sign to such as us.

We walked on for some time after this without speaking a word.

’Twas Bono, eventually, broke our silence, speaking low. He said, “We shall reach Gwynn’s Island. No way we ain’t. I am going to meet Nsia again. I am going to press her to my bosom. You mark me, few years along, war over, we is going to have some sturdy little children. And Prince O. is going to sit by our fireside, reading Homer. I vow it. I do vow it.”

He said it with such firmness, we knew his words were laid plank on plank to obscure the marker we had seen. He built a barricade as best he could.

We marched.