"But we know that she was young-"una joven"-and that her master deemed it a "moderate punishment," a corrective measure for an alleged infraction. And so her master dragged her to the patio, tied up "her feet and hands," and placed "an iron bar between her thighs," a torture technique universally employed and perfected by the horrifying perpetrators of Atlantic slavery. After repeated floggings, Magdalena was left alone overnight in the mildewed stocks, accompanied only by the steady rain, constellations of stars, and animals that roamed the village of Noanamá, a remote indigenous settlement tucked away in the secluded rainforest of Colombia's tropical Pacific lowlands in the late 1840s. Perhaps one or more of the five witnesses who later testified to Magdalena's torture that evening tried to comfort her. Perhaps she was tended to by the indigenous woman whom the judge eventually dismissed because she did not know her own age. It is this endless "perhaps" and "perhaps" and "perhaps" that collapse into my failure to tell what Saidiya Hartman calls "an impossible story," "to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.""--.