When I was a kid growing up in Richmond, Virginia between 1953 and 1960, I lived in a middle class neighborhood of single family two story, three and four bedroom homes, some of frame, painted white, others with various types of siding, each built on half acre lots with front yards providing aesthetic balance, and back yards large and deep enough for the neighborhood kids to romp, wrestle, play hide and seek, and dwell in the kid’s world of imagination. In keeping with Southern tradition, each house on the block had long front porches for lazy sitting on summer mornings with a coffee royal; in the afternoon with ice tea; and in the evening with a Jack Daniels. Some houses had garages in the rear of the backyard which sat adjacent to an alley way that ran parallel with the wide paved street in front of the houses.

Middle class black families occupied all of these homes on the north side of town. White folks had vacated these houses gradually during this era of the 1950’s as Blacks migrated to this section of town. Restricted covenants in deeds restricting black folks from buying these houses were prevalent and could still be read in some of the original deeds. The parents and householders of my neighborhood were the post World War II blacks, parents of the current baby boomers, born between 1922 and 1930. My parents were among this group, college educated and professionally employed. An uncommon sense of decency pervaded this generation at this time in our community.

As a young boy I wanted for nothing. I attended a segregated elementary, school in Richmond I attended the “silk stocking” baptist church of the city, made friends with kids like Rockie, the comedian of the group, Marcellus the gentle one, Vincent, the smart kid, Priscilla, sister of Marcellus, Brenda, Rockie’s sister and Claudette. We romped and played in the backyards of our parents homes until called in for dinner in the evenings. Segregated as we were, we knew no difference. The neighborhood kids wrestled and played hardily. When one of these kids got the best of the other and was on top, all the kid on the bottom had to say was “I give” and the kid on top would get up and the match started all over again. This was the kid’s code of chivalry that existed during those days. There was no meanness among the neighbor hood children.

Having a penchant for petty mischievousness, I would come home after school each afternoon and against my parents instructions watched television. I most remember watching “It’s Howdy Doody Time”, “Mickey Mouse and The Mouseateers”, “Amos n’ Andy” and the “Little Rascals”. Of these t.v. programs, the program that haunted me the most was “Amos n’ Andy” with its negative portrayals of black men and women. There was Amos the “Kingfish”, a balding irascible conniver always seeking to pull the wood over his friend’s eyes; Andy, the rotund, big eyed gullible pretender led by the nose by Kingfish his intellectual master; Algonquin J. Clahoun, the lazy, befuddled and inarticulate lawyer; and Saffire, the pigeon headed, loud mouth, protruding derriere, high octane firebrand. For some reason this program penetrated my impressionable brain and planted a seed for an unhealthy self image. There was no reason to have such an image in my head. I was ignorant of race, no one had used the “N” word on me. So why do those contrived derogatory images still return to the cerebral cortex of my brain? Demons die hard. Perhaps if I had not disobeyed, I could have delayed this dilemma but not avoided the inevitable.

In 1960 my family moved to Charlottesville, a town I knew nothing about and had never heard of. I completed junior high and high schools in Charlottesville all within the “Plessey vs. Ferguson” format. I demonstrated my normal moments of brilliance during those years and one would say achieved success. President of my high school student council, state president of the state black student council association, state debate champion, recipient of the best speaker award, voted most likely to succeed, and finalist in several local piano competitions. I was somebody during those years. At least living in Charlottesville made me feel that I was. I eventually surmounted the obstacle course required to become a lawyer. I went on to have a successful law practice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and in Charlottesville, Virginia. But not without a price, a blackman’s price.

All during these early years there was no discussion, that I can remember, at home or at school, about the beauty and the worth of the virtues of our African ancestry, the culture of Africans that embraces discipline, hard work and scholarship, the contributions of Africans to Black Americans through the conduit of slavery and its aftermath. I passed through those years in a fog, ignorant of my heritage and the significant place of that African heritage in the history of the world. Saddled only with the images of Black people as portrayed by white America, I was half baked.

I knew nothing about Haile Selassie, the Lion of Juda, Kwame Nkrumah, liberator and President of Ghana, Leopold Sedar Senghor, the poet and philosopher of “Negritude”, Dubois, the quintessential academic, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, a Russian of African descent who is the father of Russian poetry, wrote that “a lack of respect for one’s ancestors is the first sign of barbarism and immorality”, Thurgood Marshall, an inspiration to all who labor in courts for justice, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes and a pantheon of others throughout the African diaspora. It’s not about acting white when it comes to academic achievement, it’s about acting black in the cultural traditions of African people.

Having meandered through the barren plains of the cultural breach, ignorant of the ancestral self, torn and tormented by the negative stimuli of race debasement and caricature for 55 years, I finally tasted the sweet savoring fruit of cultural renewal and wholeness. I traveled thousands of miles from my home in Jeffersonian Virginia to Goree Island 2 miles to the east of Dakar, Senegal and to Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle at Cape Coast in Ghana, 149 kilometers west of Accra. I went back to and through the door of no return, reentered that door and closed the circle. A warm breeze swept away the clouds that had occluded my view of my self image made opaque by the distortions of ignorance and half truths, blue skies were now overhead, an epiphany occurred.

The ancestral soul of the average American of African descent sails upon the sea with an anchor that extends only to a shallow depth and lacks the weight sufficient to penetrate the deep waters of the inner soul from which springs a value system rooted in antiquity incapable of exploitation and usurpation. Many young blacks act the way they act because they know nothing of their ancestral heritage, don’t have a clue about the richness of that heritage and continue to receive an education from uneducated schools reminiscent of the voids described by Carter G. Woodson in his “Miseducation of the Negro”. Blacks get caught in the undertow of a Western culture dominated by fads and decadent behavior insidiously promoted to their detriment that is inimical to their well being. Those blacks that have overcome will find further sustenance and sustaining power from the knowledge of their ancestral self.

If we can transfer these ideas to our youth perhaps they will be less incline to reject each other and those among them who strive for excellence. The white model of excellence is extraordinary but it is not by far the exclusive example. If we are successful our youth will be compelled to embrace the beauty within that is welded deep in the recesses of their ancestral souls. The gifts of our antiquity are theirs for the grasping.

These ideas are not new, some would say that these ideas are just warmed over afrocentric rhetoric. The issue is not the timeliness of these ideas, but their application.

I ventured out onto a short stone ledge underneath the transom of the door of no return. At my back stood the rear of a labyrinthian complex of dark concrete rooms with little light or ventilation, at the end of a wining dark tunnel twenty feet above the shore line. Flashes of light staccato in sequence beamed upon my face as I gazed upon the glimmering blue sheen of the Atlantic Ocean and imagined the horrible scenes of my ancestors with shackles on their ankles arms tied behind their backs, being led from the dungeons of the barracoons from which they had been kept: waiting to be loaded onto slave ships anchored off shore to be packed like sardines for transport to an alien land for further subjugation, humiliation, and deprivation.

It was at this time that I acquired my African name “Nana Yaw” drawn from a dialect of the Asante tribe in Ghana, meaning chief born on Thursday. The name was bestowed on me during a naming ceremony held outside of my hotel room in Accra. I was impressed by the new nom de guerre particularly because the nomenclature was from the Akan people from the Ashanti region of Ghana.

African names are complex. Usually within the name there is definition of where the child was born geographically within the country, the designation of his tribe and the day of the week on which he or she was born and his father’s surname.

Two questions are raised by this event. What in reality is the significance of a name? And what affect did this naming event have on my being? I was not then nor am I prepared today to discard the patronymic I’ve known all my life. My father toiled and labored to make his name mean something to stand for something good and positive. And he thought well enough of himself to give his name to me, albeit a name he knew not from whence it came, though it can easily be imagined that the name is of slave master origin. Consequently, I have labored hard to give the name meaning and honor. Is all of this work and toil to be disregarded solely for the sake of an ill defined African ancestry? I think not. But how did this new name make me feel? It made me feel, it bridged a psychological gap, contributed to the healing process and made the African experience have deeper meaning and wholeness.

When you boil it all down to the “pot liquor” as my father often said, these experiences make you feel better; lifts the human spirit, elevates self respect, bolsters self esteem and removes from the abstract the African heritage you know is in your blood.

My father, on many mornings before I would leave the house would ask me “whose son are you? I often would reply “come on Dad do we have to go through this again? “Yes, he would affirm “whose son are you”? Otis Lee’s son I would say sheepishly. His point was to make sure that I knew that when I left his home my behavior had better be up to the standard of his name, and I knew that. My Dad would not let me forget it not once.

An attempt to eviscerate a proud and ancient cultural history was only partially successful. Blood proved to be thicker than water. The vestiges of the cultural past that remained after the middle passage was debased and caricatured to sever the remnants from their tenuous moorings on which they clung. With the onslaught of adverse Americana directed at the tenuous moorings that held the waning cultural roots together those flimsy roots began to whither and even became the object of scorn as generations of hitherto Africans became Americanized. The Africans of the middle passage clung to what they had and their successors must work had to stitch together the cultural twill that will withstand any attack. That fabric must be strong enough to connect the past with the present and make it live again.

The African people of the whole must view ourselves from a millennium perspective. The world is the way it is because of the present allocation of power. But the arc of time is long and enduring and will once again at some future time restore mankind to its natural balance. William Cullen Bryant recited the verse “truth crushed to the earth will rise again” (start here 2/16/06).

As the years passed I reasoned that perhaps the fault lay within and not without. Ohh! stop whining man! Forget about it! How important is this cultural thing anyway? To be reconnected with the mother country, to bath in the bosom of kindred spirits. You made it in spite of the real or imagined, perceived amorphous or not so amorphous beast of racism. What does it matter in the end? I crawled into the belly of my deficits and laid claim to the heart of my latent genius and fought to free myself of this scourge and to exorcize from my being those artificial demons fabricated for political, sociological and exploitative purposes. By returning to Africa I tossed overboard the demons I carried and vowed never to carry them again. A scab grew to cover the festering wound.

The transformative experience of exiting the dungeons from the doors of no return and turning around and reentering that door was for me the receipt of the “balm in Gilliard”, I had been released, I had bridged the gap, crossed the divide and in the process personified for me the origins of my beginnings. I reveled in the beauty of my blackness, the dominance of black, the pearl of ebony, no longer a minority but in the majority, that moment of transcendence was exaltation.

The truth is that there are many doors of no return through which we leave and never return, some by choice others by circumstance but the power of knowledge to face these travails is determinative. Thousands of doors of no return exist in every soul untutored, in every ghetto of the mind, every broken home and in every dream deferred. A healthy self image and a good dose of self esteem are essential building blocks for a run at a successful life.

There is peace in the valley of my soul these days. The wanderings of my mind have been stilled. All questions have not been answered, but the essentials needed for a reconciliation with my essence is in place.

Nelson Mandela recounted in a recent biography how knowledge of his lineage, that he had been sired by a king and knew his roots sprang from a line of kings sustained him and kept him from being broken during his 27 years of captivity in South African prisons.

Some say writing about this stuff is cathartic, redemptive, and therapeutic maybe what it really is, is emancipation.