“I always heard people say, you know, from here to Timbuktu, but it’s not a real place, is it?...” When Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, Timbuktu, poised near the great northern turn in the Niger River, was, during the 1300’s, one of the worlds most advanced cities. Mansa Musa, king of the Mali empire, erected his royal residence, the Madugu, here. Gold and salt trade routes crossed here with caravans of heavily laden dromedaries that traveled from West Africa to Tripoli, Alexandria, Cairo and beyond...

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Adrift in the cold induced vacuum of the rich retired slaver’s missing ledger, can there be an event more compelling in a victim’s most private and troubled yearning than the long-awaited homecoming of a former African? Nameless. Homeless. Fifteen times removed. Unwell of spirit. And there it was...AFRICA.

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The Negro Americans, when they were Africans, came from all over Senegal, even from my village...you must go to Senegal. You must see Goree island. It is where the slavers kept the Africans before they were taken across the sea to be slaves and later Negro Americans...

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Life had acted upon me unsympathetically and complicated affairs I had much wanted to keep simple...

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The word Black, the most recent peel-off label for our race ( they were getting hard to keep track of), was just coming into vogue at that time, and Aunt Clarice threw that in...” And I’m sick of all this ‘Black’ stuff, Gray. And where’s it takin’ us? Pulln’ us down, I tell ya, I’m sick of it...”

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In the dream, my husband and I had names , but we have somehow forgotten or lost them...It is summer and the night is full of sounds and smells in the black of the moonless forest. We can only see clearly the star that we know can lead us to Canada and the Quakers and freedom. The night is so black that we have lost our faces too and have trouble finding each other in the wet swampy undergrowth. In the distance we hear the dogs closing in on us from the south and the east. We stumble and fall in the muck, and Canada seems farther from Albermarle County, Virginia, than it ever did before...My husband tries his best to remain brave sounding, but I can hear the fear in the rising pitch of his voice...

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Families reach a point where almost nothing can be explained rationally within them, where words are used but language is not formed and all reason is abandoned to the ghosts of forgotten wrong turns and fossilized hurts and misconstrued purposes...

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“You like sardines Gray?”...”Love ‘em. You know that, Grandma.”... “Well,son, when they were fish swimmin’ in the ocean , they weren’t called sardines. Did you know that? They weren’t called sardines until they were put in cans. And we weren’t called Negroes until we were put in chains. Slavery’s the reason why we’re the only people in the world to be called by so many different names—and now, some not-so-nice ones we’re calling each other...”

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Those were terrible times back then when the country started draftin’ Negroes to fight Germans. Even as soldiers on their way to die, they were treated as second class citizens. They got second class trainin’ and even traveled over there segregated in the second-class parts of the ships. And the men that survived came home to face lynchings in the South and segregation in the North.

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West Africans, since before the time of Christ, generally believed in the immortality of the soul-I mean really, really believed in it...that while Americans sort of visited their religion, Africans back then LIVED their religion. For the Africans-or the West Africans, at least-religion wasn’t something you just observed, as if you existed outside of it. It was something you wore, as you would wear your own skin, without which you would not be able to get along in the world.

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