On certain summer evenings, the elders would point out identifying features among the stars: the tip of a trunk, or the triangular ends of an ear spread out in preparation for a charge – the same shape as the continent of Africa. They would tell us the story of one of these hallowed forebears looking down on us. My sister and I liked to re-enact what we had heard, living out an ancestor’s great moments on earth and imagining what it might feel like to be transmuted into a soul that sparkles forever, wheeling about on an invisible axis. It was clear to us from early on that only the ancestors who had died a noteworthy death made it into the stars. This fostered in us both a secret longing for a death deserving of a small legend that could be told and retold as the years and generations and eons passed. We decided that a dramatic individual death would be best, such as our ancient ancestor who was killed by a dragon wanting to drink her blood. But mass historical death would be grand – to die along with hundreds of thousands of beasts of burden sacrificed to Yahweh at Solomon’s Temple, to be one of the five thousand animals ordered slaughtered by Roman Emperor Titus at the opening of the Colosseum, to be among the fifteen thousand killed in a single day’s hunt by the Moghul Emperor of India!
