A slave has died.
As in Africa, mourners keep all-night vigil, chanting loudly and praying. When the next day's work is done, friends of the dead slave gather from surrounding farms. Then the long procession marches out—songs and shouts, drums and torches in the dusk.
The pageantry strikes owners as raucous, pagan, and dangerous—a chance slave conspiracy. But the human need to deal with death prevails most owners to let slaves mourn as they wish.
Friends bear the rough coffin into the forest, long a place of secret meetings, of sanctuary, of paths only known to slaves. A respected slave preaches briefly and mourners throw dirt on the grave. A hymn rises to the hope of reaching in death, if not life, the place "where bondage is never known."
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