Yesterday morning I posted a bit about the meaning for me of my personal history and the history of the times. Yesterday afternoon, driving and listening to NPR, I heard Gene Demby speak of a dramatic experience in his history. Demby was born in the U.S. to an American mother and a father from Ghana whom he never met. Demby speaks of the distance he felt from his absent father. Then he describes a trip he took to Ghana, not to find his father but to attend the wedding of a close friend. The climax of the trip was a visit to the Elmina slave castle. After sitting in one of the cells and looking out “the door of no return,” he says this:

I felt none of Ghana, the genealogical fact of it, in me in the castle that day. I felt linked to different forebears. Not to my absent father, but to the people who were wrenched from that part of the African coast, crammed into the hulls of ships and sold on another continent like livestock. Those people from far-flung tribes and villages who arrived in their new land and cobbled together families that slavers and slave masters tried to shatter centuries before anyone sounded an alarm about the "weakness of the family structure."

I felt the pull of this shared story, horrifying and beautiful, that shaped the lives of millions of Americans, including a black woman, her daughter and me.

I have copied the most moving sentences from his essay. The essay shows again the personal and societal legacy of past history. You can read it all here.