I dreamed the nineteenth not as a date, but as a state of mind—a century that never quite ended, only changed uniforms. In the dream, history didn't live behind glass; it breathed, trained, ate, disciplined, and forgot itself on purpose.
If I had been a slave, I tell myself, I wouldn't have been a bum. That thought arrives uninvited, arrogant, dangerous. It pretends strength alone could redeem captivity. But the dream pushes it further: I'd be strong as hell in those fields, body forged by necessity, endurance mistaken for dignity. Strength becomes survival, and survival gets confused with consent.
Martin had a dream. Mine is rougher, more uncomfortable. In it, slavery wears the logic of opportunity. We live in little cots inside big white houses. We eat the food no one wants and call it provision. We train all day—workouts disguised as labor, discipline disguised as purpose. Someone whispers, Your slave family might live in a mansion one day, and suddenly the chains feel like ladders.
This is how the dream lies.
The boat house and the auction block are renamed boot camp. Trauma becomes training. Choice is rewritten as contract. "Remember," the voice says, "you signed up for this when you left the village." History loves to rewrite itself as consent when enough time passes. Oppression is most stable when it convinces you that you opted in.
Then something changes. The caretaking disappears. No more illusions of guardianship. No more pretending the system owes you anything beyond survival. And suddenly we're all kids again—grown bodies with childlike expectations—asking for allowances, for keys to the car, for new clothes, for proof that obedience leads somewhere other than exhaustion.
We hold meetings, not to free ourselves, but to ask a more dangerous question: How do we make the master richer? Because maybe, just maybe, wealth will trickle down as mercy. Rewards become the theology. If we produce enough, behave enough, break ourselves enough, we might be seen.
And when we aren't seen, when the rewards don't come, the dream fractures. Anger surfaces. Someone says riot. Someone else says patience. Both are born from the same wound.
In another scene, the master sits at a bar, laughing it off. "They rioted again," he says, as if it's weather. As if it's not grief with nowhere to go. As if control lost for a moment isn't the same as humanity asserting itself. He calls them out of control, forgets they were taught to want what they were never meant to have.
The dream forces a question I don't want to answer: What does it really mean to be a kid again? Is it innocence—or dependency? Is it curiosity—or learned helplessness? Childhood, when weaponized by systems of power, becomes a way to deny adulthood, agency, responsibility, and ownership of self.
Then the dream turns darker, more honest. Hatred appears stripped of excuses. Groups that don't even want labor, only erasure. Violence without profit. Dehumanization without economy. The lie that racism is rational collapses here—because hate isn't about efficiency, it's about fear dressed as tradition.
Others want the labor but not the people. They want the work without the worker's future. They want bodies that produce and never arrive. And so a simple, devastating truth echoes through the dream: if you want labor, give dignity. If you want loyalty, give freedom. If you want peace, stop building systems that depend on someone else's silence.
"I dreamed the 19th" is not nostalgia. It's a warning. It's the realization that history doesn't repeat itself—it evolves. Chains become contracts. Whips become policies. Masters become markets. And children grow old waiting for rewards that were never promised honestly.
The dream ends, but the question stays awake:
At what point does survival stop being mistaken for success?
And when do we finally wake up and call freedom by its real name?