Returning

When I was 16,my mother and I spent a month in Senegal. During our trip, we visited Goree Island, home to a fortress that held tens of thousands of captives before they were shipped across the Atlantic to become slaves. I had never been to a slave castle before. I knew about them, that there were fortresses all up and down the west coast of Africa, the major ports of the slave trade, where my ancestors were imprisoned until shipped to the Caribbean and traded for rum or to the US for field work.

I remember the chill in the air. Senegal in July is sticky hot and most of the places we went didn't have any air conditioning, so you would think I would have felt relieved to be inside the cool concrete walls, but I wasn't. It was haunted. I could feel the sadness steeped in every wall of the fortress, with every breath of wind from the sea, I could hear someone crying, but there was no one there. I held the chains and shackles, I stared out at the ocean through the Door of No Return and I mentally decided not to return to another slave castle.

So there I was in lobby of the Alisa Hotel on my third day in Ghana deciding whether or not to visit Cape Coast. We had just missed Panafest (or the Pan African Festival), which is a biennial celebration where people from all parts of the African Diaspora return to Ghana to celebrate survival and to be freed through a ritual cleansing of all the psychological wounds of losing our roots. In the end, I decided to go, mostly because I didn't know when I'd have the chance to go back. The bus ride was close to 3 hours from Accra, though it didn't feel that long. I spent my time catching up on my journal when it wasn't too bumpy or just looking out the window.

Ghana is so beautiful and green with it's rich red soil. The day was overcast and the gray reminded me of Seattle in that it only served to highlight how lush and green the land was. As we passed through the city out towards the country there were rows and rows of stores selling everything from shoes to wicker furniture, all outside on the side of the road. We passed bed frames and kebab vendors and hair salons and laughed at the business names that seemed so long. Christianity is very popular so there were signs like "God, my strength and my redeemer shoe store" or "He is able Barber shop". I had chosen to embark on the journey with several other conference participants, four professors and a librarian, all of us Black and from North America (there was one Canadian and the rest of us were from the US). We chatted along the way. Some of us took naps, but I noticed that as we got closer, the energy began to shift. People were getting nervous. I remembered how much I really didn't want to do this and wondered why I had chosen to go.

We pulled up to Elmina and were instantly bombarded with high pressure sales. Buy this bracelet. Come to my shop. Here, don't you like Ghanaian kente cloth. It's handmade. We squeezed past the throngs and crossed the narrow wooden drawbridge and suddenly I felt like I was in that movie Sankofa, where the main character goes back in time. The walls are so white, eerily freshly painted. I had to use the restroom, which was down a long walkway, when I came back everyone was gone and I had this momentary panic of not wanting to be caught alone. I crossed over through the castle gates and bought a ticket, which seemed strange...like paying at the beginning and the end of a 400 year bus ride. Inside the walls, but away from the main castle was a restaurant...which really brought home the commercialism to me. Even when we're not being sold, we are still a commodity. The fortresses that were the last point of contact between our ancestors and their homes are now still places of business and somehow that makes me queasy.

We did not eat at the restaurant...all of us finding the idea abhorrent...but we paused there for a moment before going on the tour. The first thing I noticed was that our tour guide was sporting a red Coca Cola t-shirt with his name and UNESCO on it...as those are the two major sponsors of the tour. We worked from the bottom to the top passing through each room as our guide told us about the psychological warfare tactics employed on the prisoners of Elmina.

Elmina was first built by the Portuguese in 1482 as a trading post. The Dutch took over the fort in 1637 (and subsequently the gold coast in 1642), followed by the British in 1871. In the 1990s it was turned into a "World Heritage" site by UNESCO and refurbished.

Inside the Castle, where a chapel used to be, there is a small museum depicting the history of the people who have lived near the castle for years, as well as those who were caught and held captive until pushed through the "Door of No Return" and onto the ships that were the primary agents of creating the Diaspora.

Many of the people who were captured were from the interior regions and had never even seen the ocean let alone heard it's roar. They were imprisoned in dark cells with very little light or space and no bathrooms, meaning they were literally sitting in one another's refuse, listening to the sound of the ocean for days and nights. There was no bathing...except for when the governor chose a woman to rape, then she was stripped and bathed in the courtyard in front of everyone and led to his room. If she fought or refused, she was chained to a post and left outside, naked for days as punishment. As we ascended to the higher rooms of the castle...the places where slave traffickers stayed, there were windows and open space, large rooms and separate bathrooms. These people did not live like their captives. There were no bars on their windows. It's deplorable. I can't think of words strong enough to express how evil and soulless those people had to be to do that to other people. Slaves were treated worse than criminals, worse than animals.






During our time at Elmina, a few White tourists came in to tour. None of us wanted to look at them or talk to them at all. Some of the professors I was with remarked on how it seemed somehow unfair that we should even have to share space with them during such an emotional journey...but surprisingly, I was more upset by our Ghanaian guide. He took us to the Door of No Return, which we each passed through without discussing...as though this was the entire purpose of the trip. To return. Then our guide talked about re-christening the room that we were in "the room of Return". And in that moment I felt such a disconnect with him and with Ghana and with all the people around me. From the windows of the castle you could see the sea on one side and then rows and rows of boats and a thriving market place. All I could think of is that someone...some African person sold my ancestors into slavery. And I felt so hurt and so betrayed. I wasn't prepared to feel this way.

After growing up in America, I've (unfortunately) gained a certain amount of comfort with the low level animosity I feel towards White people in general (not so much on an individual level, but as a group)....this tends to spike when I experience racism...which is (also unfortunately) not all that uncommon. On my trip to Goree, I remember hating White people for what they had done, but I didn't think much about the Africans that had been left behind, other than that they too had lost so much, how their families and lives had been forever altered.

This was my first time coming to grips with the fact that my people had been sold by my people. There are arguments that slavery was so radically different and much more humane in African societies that the slave traders didn't know how brutal and soul crushing American slavery would be...but then there were those who knew, those who smelled the stench of the fortresses and saw people being brutally mistreated and still took the money, and still sold out. And here I was feeling like all these Africans just got to go on with their lives. Their families were torn apart, but they got to keep their land, their traditions, their identities. They continued on, whereas we were destroyed and recreated... phoenixes with nothing more than vague history and genetic predispositions to tell us who we were. I had never really thought about it like that before. It hurt.

Up until this point in the trip, I had felt such a unity among the diaspora. I felt more comfortable in Ghana than in Senegal...which could have been partly because we were at the VIP hotel, plus there were less language barriers and also I've had a whole decade of travel experiences since then and really learned how to travel. I remember my first impressions of Africa. I felt so excited to be in a nation of Black people, and yet I had never felt so foreign, so American in my life. I had a good trip, but I wouldn't say that I felt particularly unified or even particularly African, whereas in Ghana, I was surprised to feel at home. It was for me, as my mother had described it 20 years earlier, a place where I saw myself around every corner.

But Elmina was painful. We took a long time on the tour. There were tears and prayers. We hadn't brought any offerings, though there were wreaths and flowers from many groups who had visited during Panafest, including a plaque that was unveiled while the Obamas were visiting. We made our way to Cape Coast, the other big castle. This one had many more cannons and a much more intense museum. It was even bigger. There were more people visiting and none of us could bring ourselves to go on another group tour, so we split up and wandered on our own, thinking our own thoughts, grieving in private, save for those annoying people trying to sell us stuff. Sister, come to the gift shop. Do you need a tour guide? No. I don't want to buy anything. No I don't want to sell anything. I don't want to be bought or sold, I don't want to barter, I don't want to be here, I don't want to remember, I don't want any of this to have been true. But it is.

I didn't sleep well that night. The following day, I managed to get up and attend the conference. I went to a session of North Africa that was really cool and then I settled down to watch a film by a young African American film maker named Juanita Brown, called Traces of the Trade. If I had known what it was about, I never would have watched it, especially not when I was still raw from Cape Coast, but I'm glad I did.

The film Chronicles the journey of the DeWolf family. Katrina Browne had always known that she had come from a family that owned slaves, but no one had ever really talked about it. During her investigation into her family history, she discovers that her ancestors were not simply slave owners, but that she came from a family of the "largest slave trading dynasty in US history". After 1808 when the slave trade became illegal in the US, the DeWolfs continued by shipping slaves to Cuba. Katrina (who is White) and 9 of her White relatives embark on a journey to Rhode Island then to Cape Coast, Ghana then to Santiago, Cuba, retracing their routes and learning more about their families role in the slave trade. Juanita Brown accompanied them on their journey.

I can honestly say that I would not have had it in me to voluntarily accompany 10 ultra-privileged, ivy league educated (but in many ways very ignorant),White people on a trip to discover their roots as slave traffickers. And then to be responsible for helping them process their feelings around it?! I haven't reached that state of zen, and I commend Juanita, knowing it took her several years before Katrina could convince her to join her on the trip. Yet in watching this very powerful film, I found myself feeling really kind of excited. Here were White people really doing some work and trying to understand their place in the world. Yes, they went through that annoying guilty stage...which oh so many of my hippie, granola, grad school colleagues seemed to be stuck in....but then they really moved through to grapple with the now what question. At the time the film was made, Katrina was in seminary, studying to be an Episcopal church...which brought up an entire other discussion about the ways in which Christianity and churches were complicit in the slave trade and in general in preserving and protecting the White supremacist patriarchy.

I come from a family of Episcopalians, and while I am now a member of the Center for Spiritual Living, there is a part of me that will always see the Episcopal church as my home. This film reminded me of why. Katrina and a few of her other Episcopalian family members decided that for their part of making amends they would petition the church for reparations. They went to the Episcopal National Convention (an annual affair that many of my family members have attended) and spoke about what they had learned and why the felt the church had a duty to do what they could to make it right. Katrina also went back to Rhode Island, to the Episcopal church one of the DeWolfs had built (with slave trade money), to talk about her trip and about going to Ghana during Panafest and being a witness to many Africans of the diaspora returning to blessed and healed of their scars. Some of her family had asked if they could be blessed and the African American priest had agreed to do it, but also suggested that maybe they ask their own elders for blessings. Well, not only did the Episcopal Church pass the resolutions for reparations, but after Katrina gave her sermon, the priest at that church offered a special blessing for any who were willing to accept it...and everyone did.

I cried so hard. I cried because I felt hopeful that if these people could made amends are really do some hard work on understanding what happened and how the past has created the future, that maybe there weren't so many differences between us...or that maybe we could find some common ground. It is a strange juxtaposition to be a Black woman in White America, especially to have grown up in predominantly White middle class spaces. When DuBois wrote about double consciousness in the Souls of Black Folk, I understood immediately what he was talking about, though I would argue that there are more than two consciousnesses at work in my daily life as an African American, a woman, a feminist, a straight queer activist, and all the other ways in which I identify and am identified. And there are times, even within my most intimate friendships where I feel a sense of separation, as though the pieces of my past and present that come together to make up who I am, are still in conflict with those same parts and pieces of other people. I have felt this with my friends who happen to be White and also sometimes with my friends who are Black, but who had a different upbringing than me.

Watching this film and taking the trip to Cape Coast accomplished two major things: one is that my trip showed me an area of forgiveness that I need to do a lot of work on and two, the film gave me the gift of watching someone else's journey of making amends. I want reparations. I don't need 40 acres and mule, but an apology and acknowledgment from the government wouldn't hurt....considering that it's standard protocol. After the internment, the US government apologized and made amends with Japanese Americans. After the trail of tears and the systematic genocide of Native Americans across tribes, there was an admission of wrong doing and several tribes received land and casinos.

But more than reparations on the big scale, I would like to make amends on a personal level. At this point in my life I am not at all interested in educating White people about privilege and power. I do think it should be done...just that I don't have to be responsible for it. What I would like to do is work with other people of color, specifically people within the African diaspora to bring unity among our very separate communities. As the DeWolf family had their own conversations and helped one another to process how their history has impacted their present, I would like to have conversations with not just my family, but other Black people about our identities and where we can go from here. There is no way to go back in history, but there must be a way to return to peace and to compassion so that these types on inhumane atrocities don't take place again.