Linguistist

The Low Wall

10 October 2026

The land they gave us sat between Percival Street and Liverpool, with the front of it on Westmoreland where the carts go. It was a good piece of ground. They knew it was good. They gave it to us because of a thing we had done for them, and they wanted us to remember the favour and not the thing.

We came off the Asia on the last day of September, 1800. Five hundred and fifty of us, out of Nova Scotia, out of Jamaica before that. In the first two months twenty-two died and more than a hundred and fifty took ill. Then the Company put us to work.

The work was the Nova Scotians. They had settled here first, in 1792, and they had learned to read and to pray and to be angry at the Company that governed them. They rose up. And we were the ones brought in to put it down, because we had fought the King's soldiers in the mountains of Trelawny and had made a good account of ourselves. Three of the Nova Scotians were hanged and thirty-three more were sent away. We were given the best land and the best houses. That is how we came to hold Percival Street, and to stand across a wall from the people we had helped to break.

I will say it plainly, because it is the truth and it does not flatter us. We did not ask for that quarrel. They put us down in the middle of it, and we came out on the side that won, and winning did not make us loved. But we were Maroons. We had governed ourselves since before any of them drew breath, and we knew exactly what it is to be told where to stand.

And the chapels told us where to stand.

The Nova Scotians were proper Christians by then. They had the letters and the hymn-books and the pews, and the pews were theirs. Sit here. Sing this. Say it that way. We went a while and then we stopped, because a man who has answered to no master does not take instruction from a preacher either.

In 1822 we built our own. Charles Shaw led it. We had among us some of the finest stonemasons and metal-workers to come back to this coast, men who had cut stone in Jamaica and in Halifax and had cut none since, and they were hungry to work. So they worked.

And they built the wall low.

People ask about the wall. A wall that short is not a wall. A child steps over it. A goat steps over it. We built it low on purpose, and the reason is this. Every high wall I have ever stood behind, I stood behind from the inside. The mountains we hid in. The barracks at Halifax where they set us to labour and quarrelled over us. The palisade around our houses there, raised so we could not leave. So ours would not be high. Ours would hold nobody. Ours would only say, kneeling-height, white stones, no taller than it needs to be: this far is ours.

The church is still standing. They have painted it white again and again. The street has changed its name from Westmoreland to Siaka Stevens. And the wall is still low, and I would like to think that somewhere in the low stones is the one thing we ever built that no one could take up and carry us away from.