i
- Achille hears the griot—a poet who keeps the tribe's history—singing about their captivity as if it were in the past.
- The narrator tells us that they crossed and survived, but that the tribes were broken apart. Every person became a tribe unto themselves.
ii
- The narrator describes in greater detail the ordeal of the captives during the Middle Passage.
- They imagine the work their hands used to do, and some scratch their names into the wood of the ship so they can remember their identities.
- By the time they reach the New World, though, they are shadows of their former selves and nameless.
iii
- The slaves find themselves forming a new "nation" of suffering.
- They each grieve for one thing: the lives they left behind, represented by the objects from their working lives they left back in the settlement.
- They talk to their gods, but soon find that they are losing bits and pieces of their tribal languages.