He sat in that dark shack for hours. He saw the darkness turn in upon itself, churn, and spasm. He watched it reach out for him, felt it first caress, then clutch and fondle him. When Essie finally returned—eyes bruised, hair awry, limbs weary, bleeding, and missing something—he wanted to handle her like he would a newborn. Instead he whispered to her viciously against his better judgment. He couldn’t help it. She had become a looking glass for his incompetence and he had no courage to place the blame where it actually belonged.

There was no scorn on his face; his lips, however, were bent in sorrow. But even when toubab smiled, they had a streak of despair at the edge of whatever joy they thought they had found. Not regret, no, not that. More like they were waiting for something that they knew was coming but wished it wasn’t—even if they called it down themselves. Sarah didn’t look at James, but she did make a face that arched her eyebrows and shifted her lips to the side. Curious things, these yovo. She meant toubab.

Whether men had seen battle or not, each of them, to one degree or another, came home from wherever it is men go to be with themselves or to do the things they would never admit to out loud, with the same intent to inflict whatever harms they endured from the world onto the women and children closest to them. Relation didn’t matter. Mother, wife, sister, and daughter were all equally targeted for the same rage. Father, husband, brother, and son all had the same blank disregard in their eyes—there, behind the glistening fury, was the thing that shook them so thoroughly that they felt the need to destroy anything and anyone who they believed could see it: nothing.

Feigning ignorance hurt as much as the lash. It was the pretending that all he was good at was toil, and not the chains, that threatened to break him. The jangling of the metal loops that connected his and Samuel’s hands and their feet like the letter I; a spike holding each shackle in place, making the walk more difficult because the legs had to be spread to avoid piercing one’s own ankle with the other.

See? That was where Isaiah had faltered. To survive in this place, you had to want to die. That was the way of the world as remade by toubab, and Samuel’s list of grievances was long: They pushed people into the mud and then called them filthy. They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage. They stepped on people’s throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn’t breathe. And then, when people made an attempt to break the foot, or cut it off one, they screamed “CHAOS!” and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order.