All knowing and understanding, we seek and retrieve counsel from you, you, benevolent ancestors. Before you, we are only but flesh housing novice souls, still learning to know, still learning to understand, we plead and pledge to learn from your cradle of wisdom. Knot a shielding web over us, dear ancestors, through guided counsel, we will carry out judgment on wrongdoings. Our dreams lie awake for enlightenment; kindly invoke dream guardians, only through them can we learn what must be done to correct the wrongdoing.
The pearls dangled around her neck, crystal balls carrying the shriek-filled faces of comrades, spike collars reinforced. Pearls swelling, swathing, stretching unto the body, constantly reminding her of the exchange value; trinkets for flesh. The jewels symbolic of their wrongdoing. She prayed to the spirit of the compound trees, offering shade to their tea party, yearned that they too would strike them out of this world and spitting their souls at the border of stray souls; sunk souls offering no return. She wished upon them blacklisting, from earth and the ancestors. For such evil need not return. She mourned as their shoulders broadened; watching their egregious violations. executioner remembers. She prayed unto the executioner's spirit. The invocation honoured memory of wreathed-wheels nursing eternal rivers.
To companions she relaid her vision, collectively they petitioned. Summoning adjudication of the ancestors and divine entities. An oath, they took proclaiming each one's ntam. They offered rum, yielded from their palms, pouring libation for the ancestors. Medial to the gathering stands a drum, filled with rum and gunpowder; sips of strength. Resolute prayers, pledges of a fight to the death, refill the drum mined of rum.
blood, to plague any deserters; purely violent death awaits
water suffocates those deserters perishing in liquid filled lungs
millet for the divine council will deny any traitors the joys of the fertile grounds of the earth
With a sip of this drink, we invite you, lend us the authority to punish wrongdoers.
~Protocol~
deadly root …………... Justice executioner
poisonous syrup………….……. the remedy
underground network ….……. the executioner
dried salamanders……………the punishment
chemical control………addressing your wrongdoing
In close reading with:
Porter, Angi, ‘POISON! An Africana Legal Studies Investigation into Enslaved Africans and Their Deadly Roots’, 43 MINN. J.L. & INEQ. 1 (2025).
<https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_lawrev/2295> [accessed 08 May 2025]
[1] Porter, Angi, ‘POISON! An Africana Legal Studies Investigation into Enslaved Africans and Their Deadly Roots’, 43 MINN. J.L. & INEQ. 1 (2025).
<https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_lawrev/2295> [accessed 08 May 2025]