I was an African Gray. In every life, I was an African. For an African , the worlds of the living and the dead are one...For Africans, my grandmother told me, death does not separate the dead from the living.

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Most people live enclosed in small yards behind tall fences...They don’t look out. They don’t try to look out.... they spend their lives looking at—-even worshipping—-the fence.

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“Never rate people by the jobs they hold or the money they have. That stuff comes and goes like a suit of clothes. Look deeper. Find the soul of a person. See how decent it is. Then make a judgement..”~Makeda

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The four freshman, scarcely six months in college, just up and left campus, went to downtown Greensboro,found four empty stools, and sat down on them, just like that....four young men, boys really, walked to downtown Greensboro with only each other for comfort, for reassurance , and covered a wretched symbol of the old South with their bottoms. Turned the place on it’s head. Four boys...

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The sight of the word DOGON in print on a page in a book gave me a stir of jittered excitement. I turned quickly to page 52 and there it was, text and pictures. The pictures were of a breathtaking topographical feature and a Black family dressed in flowing white robes...

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I sat on my bed and attempted to gather my thoughts about what I had learned...I had never before heard an African name said aloud before my grandmother told me... that they had been her Dogon parents in the dream...Staring now at the dark brown skin on my arms, I wondered why...Just that morning in history class, our teacher Mr. Brown had taken up most of the hour telling us about Agamemnon and the Trojan war before allowing that both the King and his war may have been a myth. No one I knew outside my family ever spoke about Africa without disparagement. That is, if they mentioned Africa at all.

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....At the very foundation of the Dogon religious knowledge is a far-reaching understanding of the role in our lives of the stellar world. “Stellar?” “The stars, son, the stars.”

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Why did your mother name you Makeda?...I asked my mother that very question and all she would say to me was You are Makeda’...Where did the name Mattie come from?... My mother said that folks would not hire someone named Makeda, even to wash their clothes, and that I should call myself Mattie, but that I was never to forget that I was really Makeda....

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She was believed to have been blind from birth...when I was seven or eight she told me, as if she were sharing a delicious secret, that she dreamed in pictures -color pictures-pictures of people, pictures of odd places-though she had never in her life seen a human soul...Imaginative as she was , she never betrayed the smallest curiosity about what she looked like, though once, curiously, she had been heard to say, somewhat matter-of-factly, to her family that her skin was dark like “Ghanaian cocoa”.

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A preview...

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