The Marks
11 October 2026
The Marks
He went door to door with one sheet of paper and an inkhorn, and it was the inkhorn that embarrassed him. He had been a sergeant. He had been shot at twice and carried the wounds. He could write his own name at the bottom in a hand that had come to him late and never got proud, and now he was walking the cold road between the black settlements with a quill, asking other people for a mark.
Birchtown, Shelburne, Annapolis Royal, up into New Brunswick. He knew what the marks cost. A woman named Peggy made hers with a cross she had to be shown twice. A man who had fought beside him put down a shaky X and then stood there as if he had signed away something he could not name. It took a certain kind of nerve to hand a page to people who had spent their lives being written about by other men, and ask them to write themselves.
The paper said: we were promised land. It said: we got less of it, worse of it, on rock and far from water. It said the wages were short and the winter was long. None of that was news. The news was the marks. Two hundred and more of them, in ink, in a hand that could be carried across an ocean and set down on a desk in London where no one had ever seen a person like him except in a ledger.
He crossed in a bad season. In London he found his old commander, who introduced him around because the general had nothing better to do, and an abolitionist or two, and men in offices who listened the way men in offices listen. He got what he came for. Not the land. The other thing, the door: permission to leave. Fifteen ships left Halifax on the fifteenth of January. Eleven hundred and ninety-two of them. Sixty-five died in the crossing and went into the sea in a straight line between two cold places.
He came home to Africa. He had been taken from it as a young man, sold in New Orleans, sold again on the Cape Fear River, escaped a flour mill by Wilmington and run to the British lines. He came back to the continent he was born on, and stood on the shore of St. George Bay, and the story says the people sang a hymn as they came in. It probably wasn't him who started it.
Then it soured. He called himself Speaker General of the Annapolis settlers, and he was, until the new governor was named and the people who had put their marks on his page chose the governor over him. He lost the room. He died in June, four months in, of the fever that took most of them that first year. Fifty-four years old, seven children, a wife named Sally who had crossed an ocean twice to stay next to him.
There is a statue now, put up in 2011. In 2001 somebody suggested the street his people settled on should carry his name. It hasn't. The statue stands and the street is still Percival, and the page with the marks on it is a page in a book about him now, not a thing he was holding.