Later, just before lighting, the wick will be re-pinched into the triangular shape. As the kerosene secretly soaks into the newspaper, the men wait for darkness. It is during this time of waiting, the dusk darkening fast, that these blue, green, orange, and red Coca-Cola and 7-Up and Pepsi and Fanta bottles begin to glisten dimly like the flux of a burnished river. But one among them happens to catch a glimpse of these faint colors moving in the dark and is suddenly filled with a nameless sadness.
For somehow, the looker sees enslaved ancestors in the glimmer. Centuries ago, these ancestors lived and died on this same plot of land, whichβexcept for the house, the big rock, and the ackee treeβremains the same, full of sugarcane fields and swamps. They dreamed of escape. They set ablaze the sugarcane fields, then fled to the swamps. Yet they would later return to the land, the land synonymous with sugarcane.
For most, there was no escaping the sugarcane. In between recurrences of this dreamβthe dream that was the perpetual fight for freedom, the setting ablaze of plantations, the fleeing to the swampsβthe living and dying continued to live and die where the sugarcane grew.
Somehowβthe word has a shiver of terror in itβas dusk becomes night, the looker sees in the bottle torches the unfinished dream of freedom. Then, with a near-divine rage, the looker grabs a bottle from the big rock. The action is like a signal. The waiting is over. The bottles are taken up and shaken vigorously. The wicks on top are squeezed again into triangular shapes.
A lit match is put to one, then another, and another, and another. After brief sputters, wavery flames dance steadily on the torches. Being that he was a city kid, a Kingstonian, before emigrating to Harlem at age twelve, it might not be so familiar to him.
