The Fiddler on Pantico Run

The African Kingdom of Kom included a narrow gorge which opened into a smoky blue chasm in the distance, the Valley of Too Many Bends, which rested at a terrible crossroads, with no forest to hide in, when the marauders arrived. The kings may have been safe in their fortified isolation, but their people were not. They were taken first by Arab invaders in the Sudan in the north, and then by the southern peoples who found that humans were the commodity Europeans most desired. Those who survived had been handed from tribe to tribe, through too many hostile foreign territories to dream of escaping and returning home. As the author sat high on a ridge, three hundred miles from the Atlantic, he imagined his ancestor flowing away like the rivers below, across the ocean, into the swampy, malarial settlement called Jamestown, where he would be sold to a planter in 1644.