This week I met someone from a country in Africa, and at the end of our conversation, they asked me, “Where is your mother from? Where is your father from?”
I knew instinctively that they were not asking if my parents were from perhaps Connecticut instead of Massachusetts. They wanted to know where my PEOPLE are from. This is a cultural way that Black people connect, and when a Black person asks me that, I know they want to know what land my family is connected to. Not where we live now, but where our roots are. When a American Black person asks me, they do mean where in America we are from, but it still means “Where are your roots?”
But this was different. This person who was born in and lived in Africa wanted to know what my African ethnicity was — what country my people are from. When I tried to explain that I don’t really know where my mother or father’s people are from, they were confused. How can you not know where your people are from?
I clumsily explained how slavery severed my family’s connection to our people and our land, and I felt embarrassed. Embarrassed, for not knowing my PEOPLE. It felt the same as how my mother describes feeling when she was in elementary school and the students were made to share, one by one, their family tree. She remembers counting how many students would share before she would be forced to admit to the class that she did not know where her family was from, because she had no history prior to slavery. She told me she felt so ashamed, so much so that she can instantly recall that traumatic moment in exquisite detail, 60 years later.
How can you not know where your people are from?
But all I know is that multiple ancestors in my DNA line were born into slavery from parents who were kidnapped from their homes hundreds of years ago and forced into generational bondage. I do not know the names of the ones who were stolen. I do not know what they saw as their last glimpse of their homeland before they were forced below to the fetid cargo holds packed with Africans. I do not know who they left behind. I do not know who they wept for in the dark.
I don’t know who they were “bred” to, like livestock, nor do I know who were the first babies in my ancestry born into slavery in America. Dozens and dozens of faces, like mine, about whom I cannot even read because they were not considered people by their white captors. They are anonymous, listed in property tax registers alongside plows and plates and shovels: Eight horses. Twelve spoons. Four plows. One female, age 25.
I don’t know who those ancestors are, but I can imagine, though, that those mothers looked at the faces of their infants and saw their own people, their own mothers and fathers and sisters and aunties, left behind in Africa, never to be seen again. They saw their Mama in the shape of the baby’s eyes, their Baba in the curve of the baby’s smile. I can imagine they bent over this infant, this one person in the country connected to them by blood, and cried for the memory of those who were now lost to them.
As I was driving away in my car after meeting this person from Africa, I was overcome with a profound sadness, so deeply profound that I actually had to pull over because my eyes were blurred with tears.
I was homesick.
My heart, my soul, my very cells longed for the home that was stolen from me and my family. This was historical trauma, punching me in the gut on an ordinary, beautiful sunny day in July. I was re-experiencing the trauma of being cut off from my own people, from our home. I was grieving, perhaps selfishly grieving for myself and my own loss, but also grieving for the many nameless ancestors of mine who felt this anguish from the last moment their feet touched the soil of their home in Africa to the moment they died, abused and exiled, a stranger in a strange land. I swear I felt the distant echo of the same reaching, yearning agony passed on in my DNA from the first ancestor to take their last step on the soil of home.
And in this white land, this white region, filled with white people and white spaces, alone in my car, I mourned.
Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton. She writes a monthly column for the Gazette.