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From The Other Side of Ourselves, © 2011 Rob Taylor, published by Cormorant Books Inc., Toronto. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
We were led into the Condemned Men’s Cell and as the guide moved to seal the door a woman in the group screamed and ran out into the light of the courtyard shouting that she’d felt something in there flying back and forth between the stone walls and sure enough when we quieted down we could hear its faint cries and sense its frantic little bird heart rattling in its cage of bones so we all stood still in the musty darkness as the guide described the last days of rebellious slaves—how the soldiers would put five or six of them in and not open the door again until they were all dead and I thought for a moment of that last man waiting there with the bodies of his friends (or, more terribly, strangers) arranged in a row beside him—waiting— but soon the guide reopened the door and we stepped out carefully, checking the soles of our shoes for feathers, except one man who waited motionlessly until he could hear the bird well enough to find it and cup it in his hands, carry it out into the courtyard and send it scrambling into the sky and the next night over Chinese food a friend asked me what I thought of The Slave Castle of Elmina and I shudder now because all I could describe (before returning to egg noodles and the clinking of silverware on porcelain plates) was the bird, the man’s soft hands, the woman screaming out into the sun. —Elmina, Central Region, Ghana