It is near midnight. I think on those who are chained. John clipped to a Loyalist and forced to march.

The ancient tyrant Mezentius of Etruria, punishing his enemies, bound each living prisoner to a corpse and left them thus, shackled face to face, until the corruption of the dead involved the living. Saint Augustine hath writ that this is the very type and emblem of us mortal beings: the shining soul that must drag around the corpse of the body and its vile decadencies.

I am sure that many of the gentlemen Loyalists imagined themselves in this way as they toiled upon the road to Williamsburg, paired disgracefully with Negroes: the civilized mind chained to the brute brawn of the flesh; the quick, living spirit tripping at the drag of those already headed for a distant Hell.

But is it not also thus: the living man, black and desperate to run, cursed by his connection to the white, devouring ghost?