Exits from Elmina Castle: Cape Coast, Ghana

Gotta find a way out of no way.

Traditional Black folk saying

The Journey

There is no perfectpast to go back to. Each time I lookinto your eyes, I see the long hesitationof ten thousand years, your mothers’ motherssitting under the shade trees on boxes, waiting.There is some great question in your eye that nolonger needs asking: the ballglistening, wet; the black irisintense. We know the same things.What you wait for, I wait for.

The Tour

The castle, always on an outcrop of indifference;

human shells, the discards on the way.

Where our mothers were held, we walk now as tourists, looking for cokes, film, the bathroom. A few steps beyond the brutalization, we stand in the sun:

  This area for tourists only. Our very presence an ironic point of interest to our guide.

Tourists’ Lunch

On a rise, overlooking the past, we eat jolaf with pepper sauce and chicken, laugh, drink beer, fold our dresses up under us and bathe thigh- deep in the weary Atlantic.

Beneath Elmina

Chained, unchained finally from the dead, from months of lightlessness and the imprisoned stink (a foot-square breech had been the cell’s only opening for air—air which had entered sulphurous, having passed over the stocks of ammunition in an adjoining tunnel), they pressed and fell against each other. The only other way (besides death) had been for the few women who were hauled up into the blinding sun to be scrutinized by the sick and lusting officers, the chosen pulled up to apartments through a trap door: If they got pregnant, they were released— their children becoming the bastard go-betweens who could speak both tongues. * At the bottom of the dark stone ramp, a slit in cement six (?) inches wide, through which our ancestors were pushed— the “point of no return,” so narrow because the Dutch feared two going together to the anchored ship might cause rebellion, and because, starved for so many months, that opening was their bodies’ perfect fit.

Above Elmina

At the top of the castle, orderly pews. We enter under a lintel carved with news: ”This is the house of God.”

Slavery

It had struck some of us in those dungeons beneath the earth— though we had come to Africa to heal—there was a huge rip between us: those were rooms through which our ancestors had passed, while theirs had not. ”Another way to look at it,” a Nigerian poet answered levelly, ”is that perhaps your ancestors escaped.” Power The palace of an African king: two courtyards (a public and a private) in a complex of bone-white stucco edged with a blood-red stripe; the King, in a huge carved chair, gold-painted and lioned, wearing an understated robe of grays and browns, his face, a structured pleasantness— the bones of one who has become slightly more than human; his ministers smile from faded velvet sofas— old men with remarkably intact teeth.

A few of us standing in the courtyard are surprised by a thin man, boyish, though middle aged, who comes toward us signalling he is begging— one hand outstretched, the other nearly touching his lips— his robe of subtle greens, his feet bare, his naked shoulder well-defined as an aging athlete’s. “‘The Imbecile Prince,’” our guide explains, ”The only remaining member of the last King’s family. We take care of him as if the present King were his father.”

Market

Those huge platters on their heads on which everything is placed accurately, each small red pepper, prawn, each orange—arranged in piles so tall they defy gravity— avocados, crabs, dried fish of silverish brown, or one great yam, thirty pounds, dirt brushed, counterbalanced in a kind of aquarium. A woman approves me with a fluent grin and offers her light basket for my head; I walk a yard, tottering awkwardly. The unremarkable commonness of the everyday— a beauty shaped by women’s hands.