Three generations of Cesaires believed to varying degrees that America had been hostile to Haiti, unrelentingly and for so long, because of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s unprecedented humiliation of the slave holding White world, that Americans believed only in White freedom, not in Black Freedom.

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One Black American’s decision to escape the anti-Blackness of America...

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...the Dogon people , 700 years in residence beneath Mali’s Bandiagra escarpment, had developed a comprehensive knowledge of the existence and working of an interplanetary universe well in advance of the Western White world...

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I told her about my grandmother’s dream of being a Dogon teenager in the year 1394...

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...after all, who would believe, in the prevailing social climate of America, that Africans (the Dogon people) had understood such things ( the solar system) before the invention of the telescope? Before Copernicus and his heliocentric model of the solar system?...

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I had been the only aspiring writer in my class, or in the whole high school, for that matter...certainly we’d heard of the famous Black writers, but not one of our English teachers had required us to read anything that any of them had written...

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Parents of my mother’s generation hid themselves from their children behind walls of parental propriety that had been taught to them just as, I suppose, it has been taught to me...they talked about the state of our health. Never about the tone of our lives and the race-nasty boxed-over society that had foreordained it. This was all normal to me., even in a numbing sort of way.

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How could the Dogon people have known, maybe for thousands of years, about a star that cannot be seen without the aid of a telescope? How could they have known about the path of its orbits and the substance it is made of! That it spins on its axis and makes the big star wobble because of the heavy material Po Tolo is made of. That the little star’s orbit around the big star requires fifty years. No one any longer questions that the Dogon knew these things... but how is this possible?

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The mortals who wrote the Kebra Nagast and the Bible were indeed fanciful and poetic. It was the literary fashion in those days. But all they wrote was not meant to be taken literally...read all you can, curious and unafraid. Education requires that we open books, not close them. I doubt that what you find will weaken your faith. It, more likely, will strengthen it...

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Centuries of enslavement , segregation , discrimination, family deconstruction, rape and slaughter — all tools of extreme social coercion—have taken an incalculable toll on us...No people can flourish without a recalled past.

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