Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

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As the words weaved their way through the crowd and landed on me, I imagined myself in their eyes: an alien tightly wrapped in the skin of a blue rain slicker, the big head bursting from its navy pod. Hartman delineates a clear divide between how African-Americans view their ties to slavery and the African continent, and the perspective of the Ghanaians she meets, who largely see visiting African-Americans as a source of tourism revenue and do not readily discuss slavery, which they see as a source of shame - to those of slave ancestry in particular. By the time the captives arrived on the coast, often after trekking hundreds of miles, passed through the hands of African and European traders, and boarded the slaver, they were strangers. John Ray was a slender, handsome man with dark, piercing eyes that made you falter and a mouth set in a fixed expression of disapproval. In following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, I intend to retrace the process by which lives were destroyed and slaves born.

As I drank the beer Mary Ellen placed in my hand, I wondered how Ghana would look in my eyes by the end of the year. Or forget the disobedient wives who were sold under the pretext of witchcraft, the quarrelsome young men who were sentenced to slavery for being troublemakers, and the ever-growing list of petty infractions punishable by slavery that cost many commoners their lives. Poppa took us on a tour of the rural outskirts of Montgomery County, where our people had lived before moving into town. Pan-Africanism had yielded to the dashed hopes of neocolonialism and postcolonialism and African socialism (which Nkrumah defined as the traditional spirit of African humanism and communalism refashioned for the modern world), had been ambushed by the West and bankrupted by African dictators and kleptocrats, all of whom had made a travesty of independence. While the Afros were far too intelligent to believe the past could be forgotten, they definitely wanted their distance from slavery and colonialism.To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. Before I had the chance to ask what was going on, she flew out of the room and pulled the door behind her. Her own journey begins in the stacks of the Yale library, where as a graduate student she came across a reference to her maternal great-great-grandmother in a volume of slave testimony from Alabama.

I've been to the British Museum, the Public Records Office in Kew, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and to the National Archives in Accra. But Hartman, who “dreamed of living in Ghana” since college, is also interested in the country’s more recent centrality in the Pan-African movement since its independence in 1957, when the first president, Kwame Nkrumah, opened up the country to members of the African diaspora, creating a Ghana whose slogan was “Africa for Africans at home and abroad. They sold strangers: those outside the web of kin and clan relationships, nonmembers of the polity, foreigners and barbarians at the outskirts of their country, and lawbreakers expelled from society. What better illustration of the degradation of gold than its capacity to transform persons into things; what better example of its offensive character than the excremental conditions of the barracoon; what better sign of its mutability than the "black gold" of the slave trade. Whenever he was drunk, Mary Ellen would say, "We're losing my husband," as if to assure herself that the belligerent man tottering through the living room wasn't the same man she had married.

When Nkrumah explained that he was very thirsty, the waiter pointed to a spittoon and said, "You can drink there. Cars moved carefully on these roads, not out of concern for the goats, chickens, and pedestrians with whom they shared it but because of the large potholes.

I blockaded the door with a chair and put on running shoes so I would be able to flee if and when I needed to. African Americans crossed the Atlantic in droves to do something momentous—to participate in an international movement for freedom and democracy and to build a black nation.When he had been a student at Lincoln University, Nkrumah experienced firsthand the assault of Jim Crow. Old and new worlds stamped my face, a blend of peoples and nations and masters and slaves long forgotten. The structural adjustment programs and debtor country initiatives orchestrated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were the new slavery.