BACKSTORY

Ghosts live in me tonight. The ghosts of slaves, of prostitutes, of poverty. On the cab ride home tonight, the history of this place hit me in one unsettling weight over my bones. The violent sea I felt when I first arrived, I understand it now. There is such an undercurrent of history that is still very much alive. The thousands bones sunk at the bottom of the Atlantic. The women squatting on the dilapidated porch of a closed down office building and the men who give us a turn in our tummy when exiting the car across the street. The children who carry water on their heads and beg their hands into car windows.

Today my eyes fully opened to the poverty that exists here. Mud shanties on the way to Elmina and Cape Coast. I feel like a ghost myself, coming back to the silent dorms, unprepared to describe what I saw at the slave castles today. There is no word in my vocabulary to push forward the impact of the horrific smell in the dungeons of these beautiful European forts. Years and years of calcified bones and feces and menstrual blood. A small portion of the odor that existed when the dungeons were packed unbearably with bodies of malnourished, diseased and dying men and women. There is no human tongue that can describe the feeling of standing in the place where the women were drawn out of their cells like cattle, unkempt, unbathed, teeth filmy from two months of no shower and no bathroom. Where the Governor stood to pick his prey. The stairs she walked after bathing publicly to be raped in his chambers. The small opening where slaves were led to "the door of no return," forced to stoop half their size in order to enter. The slit in the wall, enough for one skeletal body to step through, onto the boat waiting to take them to their new masters. Seeing how lavishly the Governor lived above it all. How a whole world could allow this to happen.

Watching Patricia cry, I let my own salty tears spill, but the real feeling hits me later, when I am completely alone. I don't push the ghosts away. I embrace them the way Yusef tells us to embrace the mystery in our work. Come in, I say. I'm here.

Elmina

Cape Coast