The Coffin They Buried at Midnight

On the night of July 31, 1838, thousands of formerly enslaved men and women packed into churches across Jamaica. For four years they had endured a cruel half-freedom called "apprenticeship," still bound to the plantations that had broken their bodies. But word had come from London — Parliament had ended the system. At midnight, full emancipation would arrive. In a Baptist chapel in Spanish Town, the congregation had built a coffin.…