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 A sharp drop in elevation hurled flight attendants to the floor.
Passengers started screaming and crying.
"'Oh my God, I brought my mom! What did I do?'" Sylvester, 40,
recalled thinking as the plane shook. "It was the scariest thing
that has ever happened in my life."
After a few minutes, the pilot pulled the aircraft to safety
above the dark clouds.
Looking back, Sylvester sees the moment of terror as a nudge
from the past, an invocation of the suffering of millions of
Africans who were crammed into the lightless hulls of ships and
sent in the opposite direction during the centuries-long
transatlantic slave trade.
"I think my ancestors were telling me, this wasn't an easy trip
for us," she said.
"They sailed over that same Atlantic Ocean. It was traumatizing
and scary for months, and I experienced five minutes of trauma
and I was freaking out."
The two Tanis are among a growing number of African Americans
exploring their ancestral roots in Ghana, which has encouraged
people with Ghanaian heritage to return in honor of the 400th
anniversary of the first recorded arrival of African slaves to
English settlements in what would one day become America.
They had set off the previous day from Los Angeles, where
Sylvester works for a digital-streaming service. But their
family's journey began nearly two centuries before on a
sugarcane plantation in Louisiana – and, before that, the
homeland to which they were bound.
THE 'LITTLE BITTY' SLAVE
Sanchez's great-great-grandmother Mary Ann Moss was born into
slavery around 1838. Moss was a "little bitty lady" with long
hair pulled back in a bun who was tough from growing up as a
house slave on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation set on an
isolated bluff. After obtaining permission from her master, she
married her first husband according to slave custom by jumping
across a broom together. He died at his plantation; no one knows
how.
After the Civil War, she married a black former Union soldier
from the North named Charles Wright who had moved to Louisiana
to seek his fortune. Wright so cherished his memories of serving
in a Union regiment that he kept his uniform carefully preserved
in his home and was often called "Soldier" by family and
friends.
The couple prospered after Wright bought his first piece of
land, where he established orange groves and grew apricots,
pears and pecans. They had six children, but only three survived
childhood.
They lived in a well-appointed home filled with old-fashioned
furniture and canopy beds and would go to church every Sunday in
a stylish buggy pulled by "fine big old red horses."
TRACING A FAMILY'S HISTORY
These stories from a beloved grandmother about the family's
experiences through slavery, the Civil War and early 20th
century America sparked Sanchez's lifelong quest to discover her
ancestry.
Using oral histories, court transcripts, land deeds and census
documents, Sanchez, who is an associate professor of Africana
Studies at the University of Arizona, gathered enough
information to form a clear picture of the past few generations
on her mother's side.
The result is a 300-plus-page book on her family's history,
"'Didn't Come From Nothing' – An African American Story of
Life." All the details of the family's history here are taken
from the book.
For a long time, Sanchez's efforts to glean insight on earlier
generations came to nothing. Like most African Americans, her
ancestry was erased by the machinery of slavery. Would-be family
historians often reach dead ends because of a lack of personal
records from a time when black people were treated as
commodities.
The advent of genetic testing gave Sanchez hope that DNA could
shed light on the family's lost origins. The results, some
showing a direct link to the Ashanti ethnic group in Ghana
through her great-great-grandfather Wright, helped pave the way
for the mother-daughter tour this month.
On the eve of the trip, sitting at her kitchen table in
California with her mother, Sylvester talked about what the
journey meant to her.
"We're the first people in our family who've ever gone back home
to Africa," she said. "The last people that came from Africa,
they came in chains. They were slaves, and we're going back as
free people."
HANDMADE STOOL AND A HOMELAND
Family lore has it that Charles Wright was never enslaved, but
contradictory public records muddy the picture. He was born in
the 1830s or early 1840s in Maryland or Virginia and in older
age looked like the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, according
to one of his granddaughters.
He enlisted in the United States Coloured Troops in 1864 and
served in Corpus Christi, Texas, before moving to Louisiana.
Very little is known about his early life or his origins. DNA
tests now suggest he has an unbroken black male line extending
back to the Ashanti people.
He made himself a personal prayer stool that ended up in the
possession of grandson Taft Wright. The Ashanti have a tradition
of carving wooden stools as seats for their owner's soul.
Sanchez sees Wright's stool as a clue that he may have been
within touching distance of his African past.
FOOTSTEPS AT THE SLAVE RIVER
After arriving in the sprawling, humid Ghanaian capital, Accra,
Sanchez and her daughter joined a group of around 40 mostly
African Americans. They got to know each other as they were
taken around the city by a tour guide who taught them to sing a
Ghanaian hymn and how to respond to a traditional call for their
attention in the local Akan language.
Mostly strangers before the trip, the group bonded as they
followed the torturous route their ancestors may have taken. In
the dungeon of a slave fort, they stood together in shocked
silence as they heard how the floor beneath their feet was still
grouted with centuries of hard-packed human faeces, urine, blood
and flesh. If one of the group appeared overwhelmed, others
would quickly seek to console them, offering tissues, a hug or a
sympathetic ear.
"I have taught introduction to African American studies and I
have taught slavery, but there is something about being here and
actually walking on the path and looking at the dungeons and
looking at the devastation colonization has left – there is
nothing like it," Sanchez said toward the end of the tour as
Atlantic waves crashed onto the nearby beach.
The previous day, the group had visited a river farther inland
where slaves were forced to bathe before imprisonment on the
coast ahead of their journey to the Americas.
They picked their way down the bank past stands of bamboo to the
shallow, sun-dappled water, helping the less sure-footed as they
went. On the guide's invitation, Sylvester stepped into the
creek, closed her eyes and raised her hands in prayer.
"I felt what my mom was saying about honoring the ancestors,
like my ancestors would want me to get into that water and
retrace their steps," she said. "And even just taking off my
shoes and feeling the same ground that they walked on, getting
into the water, I just feel like I came out of that water a
different person."
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Afterward, Sylvester wrote with black marker on a pink memorial wall
at the site, "Long journey home," and she and her mother signed
their names: Tani S + Tani S.
QUILT-MAKING AND THE PAST
Born in 1897, Mary Louise Wright had a happy childhood, attending
quilting bees and gumbo parties at her grandparents' house in Lake
Charles, Louisiana. She was a favorite of her grandfather Wright,
often accompanying him on visits to his orange groves.
Before she turned 20, Mary Louise married Curley Euell, who worked
as a lumberjack in the local sawmill. His father had been the victim
of a lynching in the area. Euell never spoke about his father or his
death.
In 1924, the couple and their four children joined the "Great
Migration" of African Americans moving away from the South. Euell
had accepted an offer to relocate to Arizona, so the family loaded
themselves and their belongings onto a freight car, sleeping on
mattresses as they headed west.
They eventually settled in Tucson and bought a house that remained a
gathering place for generations.
Quilt-making was an important social activity for Mary Louise
throughout her life. Some of the quilts' patterns or color schemes
appeared to hint at an unconscious African influence. In the quilts,
Sanchez could see her family's connection to its forebears across
the sea.
"WE ARE ONE"
Once in Ghana, Sanchez was electrified by the sense that she was
meeting people whose grandparents' grandparents' grandparents may
have known her African ancestors.
The tour involved long bus rides on bumpy roads hedged with tattered
banana and palm trees. As they journeyed inland to the Ashanti
capital of Kumasi and then back to the slave sites on the coast,
they passed shops tacked together out of sheet metal, old boards and
tarpaulin offering everyday services with a religious flavor: "Great
Miracle, fax and printing," "With God Tailoring" and "Peace Be With
You Keycutting." Street vendors weaved through the traffic, selling
chilled drinks and snacks from bowls balanced on their heads. In the
distance, a vine-draped tropical forest covered the rolling hills of
what the passengers were being told was their homeland.
During a traditional Ashanti "durbar" ceremony of drumming and dance
outside Kumasi, a local chief formally welcomed them back to the
tribe and proclaimed: "We are proud of you. ... We are one."
In a small courtyard, musicians in black-and-white robes beat
waist-high drums as the chief, his wrist stacked with chunky gold
bracelets, performed a ritual dance under a large fringed parasol
spun above him by an attendant.
The tour group lined up to greet the chief one by one. After
stooping to shake his hand, Sanchez returned to her seat. Almost in
surprise, she reached up to catch a tear sliding from beneath her
glasses. She pulled a crumpled tissue from her handbag and dabbed
her eyes.
"I certainly didn't expect to cry. I studied this. ... I'm actually
crying?" she said afterward.
"I was thinking of my obsession with genealogy and how I've been
doing it for years," she said as curious locals stood in the back
watching the event. With a friendly smile, one girl in skinny pink
jeans pulled her phone out to film a member of the tour dancing to
the drums.
"My ancestors would have given anything to go back, anything to
escape the horrific situation," Sanchez said. "And here we are. And
I truly believe that they were looking down and they got a kick out
of it."
NOT A SECOND-CLASS CITIZEN
After the move to Arizona, the Wright-Euell family continued to
encounter unequal treatment. They weren't welcome in restaurants and
were only allowed to sit in the balcony of cinemas. The children
faced insults at school from white teachers and pupils, which their
mother advised them to ignore.
Mary Louise's determination that they receive a good education led
her to work for wealthy white families as a maid, eventually putting
all six children through university or nursing school.
She had inherited her grandfather's resolute character and refusal
to see herself as a second-class citizen despite the severe
restrictions against black people.
In the 1960s, as the Black Power movement was getting into gear, a
young Sanchez excitedly told her grandmother about what she had
recently learned about African and black American achievements.
The information didn't surprise Mary Louise. "Well, we didn't come
here empty-handed. We didn't come from nothing," she replied.
The phrase would ring in Sanchez's ears during her years of research
into the family's history. She had a name for her book.
MISSING PIECE OF THE PUZZLE
As Sanchez and her daughter prepared to fly home from Ghana,
Sylvester talked excitedly about her hope that black people in the
diaspora might eventually take subsidized trips back to Africa
similar to the "Birthright" program that offers Jewish youth from
around the world a free trip to Israel.
"Everyone has a homeland. People go, 'Oh I'm from Ireland, I'm from
Scotland.' Being African American, I tell people I'm from New
Orleans, like that's where I was born, you know?" she said.
"There's something healing about being here, eating the food,
meeting the people – it's the missing piece of the puzzle that
connects you to who you really are."
Sitting side by side, the pair mused over what they would be feeling
as they flew back over the Atlantic to the United States. They were
still dressed in the white clothes worn for an earlier ceremony,
where they had received a traditional name and sipped schnapps from
a cup proffered by a local chief wrapped in a robe of densely
patterned cloth.
No matter the flight conditions, their ancestors would not be far
from her thoughts, Sylvester said.
"They went through all of this hardship so that I wouldn't have to,
but I need to acknowledge that every day that I'm alive."
Sanchez said she was still processing everything she had seen and
learned on the trip, but felt a sense of closure. When asked if she
planned to continue her genealogical quest, she replied, "I'm
actually kind of satisfied."
Nevertheless, her book on the family's history may need to be
updated.
After the durbar ceremony in Kumasi, Sanchez seized a chance to talk
to the chief and asked if he would be willing to be tested to find
out if they share any genetic links. He agreed, and she kissed his
hand.
Later she said she hoped to find someone to do the test. "And then
find out," she said. "Why not find out?"
(Reporting by Alessandra Prentice; edited by Kari Howard. Additional
reporting by Kia Johnson in Washington, D.C., and Rollo Ross in Los
Angeles.
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