February 5th, 1776
Cries this morning in the darkness — a hideous heaving of bodies — something burst within a man — and he writhed in mortal throes — screams and shouts around him.
Within two minutes, he was without consciousness; and though some ministered to him, attempting to breathe life back within his encrusted lips, all assays were vain; and within three minutes, he had paid his debt to nature, and was gone.
Captain Mackay came below and inquired as to the source of the disruption; and finding it, demanded that the body be hurled off the ship in the dead of night, that we might obscure the sickly nature of our fleet from the enemy.
At this, there were great protests; but the Captain was firm; and some wrapped the body in a blanket and went above to drop it in the river.
Olakunde informs me that my people name smallpox Sonponna; and that this most fearsome god hath his own votaries; but that none call him by his name, rather naming him by indirection, as “Hot Ground,” “Cold Ground,” or “Sweetly, Softly”; hoping by refusing to call upon him that he might pass them by and spare them his attentions. Thus also do they place gifts of palm wine in gourds outside the houses and by the sides of the sick and the vulnerable, that he might be entertained and, sated, process onwards without prejudice to those who lie fearing his nailed caress.
My mother had a stoup of wine lain at her side in her last hours — I recall it now, though I did not understand it then. When she was dying, wracked with her irruptions, in the slave quarters of that house in Canaan, this libation sat by her, untouched. I knelt by it when I went to wait with her.
Thus did she lie, without speaking of this rite to me, even some four thousand miles from her home. At the last, she hoped that the gods of her childhood could be charmed as we all were, and delight in company with her, and then, as briskly as we all had, move on without touching her, without knowledge of her, and leave her unharmed.