Africa, Love
Even so, the Great Swamp remained a place so full of shadow and magic that once the water wet a man's feet and he heard the spirit hawk sing never would he choose to leave. In the time between the land-taking and the new people going to war among themselves, an uprooted white swarm rushed in to exploit this land, to plunder its force of life to make a new one for themselves.
For those snatched from Africa and abused into slavery, as minds cleared and hearts opened full tide with freedom, the swamp offered many a take-what-you-need life as an alternative to turning their fresh lives over to another. Tasting freedom, they rejoiced too madly to allow a frontier economy of exploit and prosper to again make them victim. Nor did the taking of wealth out of another's life seem right, memory of slavery being so close. So, into a wild new world they moved, claimed sanctuary to live apart.
Recall of these who picked up pieces of their lives and lived ad lib is fragmentary, but that is the chronicle being pieced together. In their shadowy new home of meandering water, communities traded with each other, but a prevailing fear of strangers kept them isolated. Even so, like so many grains of sand sharing the slope of a bayou, individuals dislodged by life-giving rain would sooner or later be observed to rub up against and nudge his/her neighbor to tumble into some more intimate connection.
As the seasons changed, an infinite green morphed in a thousand leaf and spore colors in fall, much like the trials and errors of a people imposing passed-down shards of Africa memory onto each and every day.
