A Brief History of Near and Actual Losses

“All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking.”

—Robert Hass

We are at Cape Coast Castle, and Callie refuses to be held. She won’t let me carry her in my arms. She won’t let me put her in the cloth carrier on my back. She won’t ride on her father’s shoulders. She won’t sit astride my hip. She wants to be in charge of exactly where her body goes. She wants both feet on the ground.

Ariadne Van Zandbergen

I don’t want her feet on the ground. The floors of the slave dungeons are caked five to seven inches deep with centuries of hard packed dirt and sweat and human waste. In one chamber, a drainage canal has been dug to reveal the brick half a foot below. This way, visitors to the former slave-trading outpost on the west coast of Ghana can more fully visualize what constitutes the floor under our feet. What kind of mother would freely let her child walk on such filth? I try to hold her off of the floor, but Callie wiggles out of my arms and runs in circles around her father, our guide, and me, giving the soles of her tiny Keens maximum exposure to the nasty ground. Again and again I try to pick up my daughter. Again and again, she makes it clear she will not be carried anywhere against her will.

It is the middle of May 2013. It is three weeks before my daughter’s third birthday and 206 years since the British Parliament passed An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The dungeons are museum installations now, part of a series of UNESCO World Heritage Sites dotting the Ghanaian coast. Our guide tells us the castle serves, today, to remind people of the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade and to caution us to treat one another better this time around. To never let slavery happen again. I can’t find the energy to remind him that people are still at risk, still being shipped away for profit, every minute, every day. My daughter, running circles around me in her babyGap shorts, is driving me to distraction.

The exterior walls of Cape Coast Castle are brightly whitewashed, so when we walk out of the tropical sun into the male slave dungeons—chambers that are essentially windowless and purposefully dank—we are blinded by the darkness of the place. For extra shock value, our guide turns off a chamber’s one dim bulb. This is to help us imagine something even more horrible than what we can already see.

“I don’t like it here,” Callie says. “I want to get out of this place.”

Our guide turns the light back on, acknowledges how uncomfortable these dungeons are. My family is alone with him in this room, having chosen to pay more for a private tour. The guide assigned to us has been leading these tours for many years and is personable and quietly authoritative. He understands what we want from this experience. He asks us to imagine being packed in here with 200 men, shackled and naked. He asks us to imagine the stench, the vomit, the sounds of writhing bodies, chains drawn against chains. Callie wiggles out of my arms and nearly evades me, but I grip her hand and keep her near. “Shh,” I say. “This is a sacred space. Be still.”

My husband, Ray, and I flew from California to Ghana so I could speak at a conference for pan-African women writers, but also so he could visit Africa for the first time. I wanted to make sure his first trip to the Mother Land was memorable, and so I’d carefully planned our stay. After several days in the capital city, Accra, we’d ventured to Cape Coast to visit the historic sites where Old World Africans were converted into New World slaves. Cape Coast Castle hosted more than...