Somewhere, stored in a box in the back of a Suburban Maryland warehouse, there is a picture of me standing at the entrance of the Elmina Slave Castle, on Ghana's Cape Coast.
It was taken on the last day of my first journey to Africa, back in April of 2003. I had just finished leading my first journalism workshop for African reporters in Accra, and had a bit of extra time for exploring. I was determined to get to the Cape Coast, because at the time, I wasn't considering making a career out of this type of training. I was just hell bent on getting the most out of that introduction to "The Motherland," in case I never came back.
I remember wearing all white that day, a thin, long-sleeved linen shirt and cotton pants. I wasn't trying to make some poetic statement by donning ethereal garb to visit the place where one of my enslaved ancestors probably began a harrowing journey to America. A sistuh was just trying to stay cool, and ward off any pesky malarial mosquitoes.
The picture was taken at the end of my castle tour, and I remember thinking I looked very ashen and drawn, even haggard in that shot. No "cheesin' for the cameras" after what I'd just seen. In fact, whenever I looked at that photo, it was like I was seeing a ghost who'd just seen ghosts.
There was just soooo much that was hard to wrap my mind around during that tour of Elmina Castle. The tiny, dark stone "rooms" where human beings were stacked like cordwood, wallowing in their own waste, often chained to corpses, waiting to be transferred to the hold of a ship where they'd spend several months enduring the same conditions before reaching America. As a woman, what I remember most was the open court yard, where female slaves were chained, on display for the ship captains and crew who'd come out on their balconies, point to a woman, and then have her sent up to their quarters. If the female slave resisted, she'd be severely beaten and locked in one of those dank cells.
I've probably blocked out most of what I saw because it was just too agonizing to imagine what it must have been like. Before heading to Cape Coast, I'd vowed to hold myself together, no matter how hard it might be. But by the time the guide led me to the Door of No Return, I was sobbing, and I didn't care who saw me.
So I wonder what it will be like for President and Mrs. Obama and the girls when they visit Elmina sometime this weekend? Through the years, for some baffling reason, he has been accused of not being able to truly relate to "The African American Experience." After all, nobody in his family had ever been a slave. His mother was white, and his father's Kenyan family had never been enslaved.
But people, I'm telling you, if you have even 1/100th of an ounce of humanity in your soul, you could be a blue-eyed blonde from from Uzbekistan and still be deeply affected by a tour of Elmina. You just can't figure out how anybody survived such a horrific experience.
So while Ghanaian "Obamania" is spreading throughout the African continent, I can't stop imagining one of my ancestors passing through that hellish "castle" and somehow, deciding to hold on, some kinda way, so that all these centuries later, I could wind up living in my own faux Moroccan castle, on African soil, living my life like it's golden.
In a way, it's like I came back through the Door of No Return, representin' for the ancestors, and I'm giving thanks for their astounding strength and my myriad blessings.
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