From Harvey River by Lorna Goodison

conscious of music being played. A music which took its rhythm from the waves on which the ship of darkness rode, a rhythm which rocked out and returned to its centre, conducting in its wake and movements the peace that passeth understanding. And for what seemed like an eternity, but was in fact only a few minutes, silence settled over the slaver. In later years, Jamaicans would call this beat Rocksteady.
    Leanna had started to see the man who would become the love of her life just about the time that she entered puberty, and in her visions he was always walking towards her. Sometimes she would not see him for months and then she would be doing her domestic work up at the Irish penkeeper’s house, polishing a mahogany table, and she would see an image of a young man, not too tall, but with strong legs and big hands, appear up through the wood grain of the table. For years she saw his image. Sometimes he would be walking across high blue mountains with people who looked like his mother and father, another time he would be making his way through canefields, and sometimes he was walking by the sea. Once, he was lying down on the cold ground, looking up at the stars, gazing up at the constellation which looked like a big gourd in the sky, wishing for a drink of star water. Sometimes the young man was crouched down with the people who looked like his parents, hiding from someone or something in the bushes. But one thing was certain, he was coming towards her. And because Leanna knew this man was coming, she kept her heart tightly closed whenever George Wilson was near, so that he eventually grew tired of trying to make her yield up her essence to him.

    After the trouble,
    some with the name Bogle
    catch fraid like sickness
    and take panic for the cure.
    John Bogle’s people had found their way to the parish of Westmoreland after the Morant Bay Uprising, in 1865, when John’s relative Paul Bogle–to whom he bore a remarkable resemblance–was hanged. Paul Bogle preached and he walked to petition the representatives of the British Colonial government on behalf of the starving people who were turned loose after emancipation and given nothing. No land, no money, no forty acres, not even one mule. The planters were compensated for loss of human property, but the men and women who had worked to build the great wealth of the British ruling class received not one farthing. On August 1, 1838, their first morning of full freedom, many of them had walked away from the estates carrying not even a simple hoe with which to till the ground. The ones who chose to stay worked for the lowestpossible wages, out of which they then had to pay the estate owners for their keep. Then the sugar industry collapsed. Money was scarce and taxes high. Disease and famine, cholera and smallpox, claimed more than fifty thousand lives and then, like an additional Biblical plague, came drought. Domestic food crops began to fail year after year. Add to that a justice system that as a rule dispensed no justice to the majority of Jamaicans, a system administered by the estate owners and managers who were full of vengeance and wrath over the loss of their human property.
    Paul Bogle, a child of enslaved parents, was a prosperous small farmer from Stony Gut in the parish of St. Thomas. Deacon Paul could speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but he was also a man of deeds. He led a delegation on a forty-five-mile walk from Stony Gut to Spanish Town to see Governor John Eyre, and draw his attention to the suffering, but the Governor refused to meet with them. George William Gordon was among the men of property who sympathized with the people’s suffering. The son of a slave woman and a Scottish planter, he had worked hard to educate himself and had been elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1844. Bogle and Gordon, Baptists both, tried to petition the Colonial government on behalf of the beleaguered people. They tried and tried the peaceful