Carry Me Home

After a slave dies, mourners hold an all-night vigil in a practice recalling Africa, chanting loudly and praying. When the next day's work is done, friends from surrounding farms gather and a long procession moves out with songs and shouts, drums and torches in the dusk. Owners often see the pageantry as raucous, pagan, and dangerous, even as a chance for slave conspiracy, but the human need to confront death usually prevails on them to allow mourning in this way. Friends carry the rough coffin into the forest, a place of secret meetings, sanctuary, and paths known only to slaves. There a respected slave preaches briefly, mourners throw dirt on the grave, and a hymn rises with hope of reaching in death, if not in life, the place "where bondage is never known."

Westlake Corner, Virginia · United States