From around until the eighteen-sixties, when the last slave ships heading for the Americas set out from these shores, the kings of Dahomey used terror and brutality to supply human chattel to the triangular trade. During months-long campaigns, their army, which featured a corps of women warriors who served as shock troops, overran towns and villages, horrifically murdering some people as a tactic to get others to submit.
Anyone not Dahomean was either a vassal, a victim, or a captive to be sold to European trading companies, which had established barracoons by the sea. Those sold off resisted the spiritual death that could accompany enslavement, striving to retain some tie to their past. Aspects of African American culture emerged from West African traditionsโmusic and dance, culinary practices and religious beliefs, notably vodun, what we call voodoo in the United States.
My mother was a white woman. Right up to her death, six years ago, at the age of eighty-five, she sustained an improbable sort of idealismโa wholehearted aspiration for equality, regardless of race, gender, or class, which was underpinned by a near-providential belief in basic human goodness, despite her own experiences.
The eldest of three children of French Jewish parents, in her youth she had survived the Nazi occupation of Paris. She immigrated to the U. Virginia, gave birth to two biracial kids, my older sister, Myriam, and me. Her first husband, Jack Wright, was a drinker, unreliable in the way that drinkers can be, and she divorced him in , when I was two, raising Myriam and me on her own, working menial jobs to pay the bills.
Mom was tough, much larger than her five-foot-one-inch frame. Still, she felt that I needed a Black male presence in my life. We were now a family of fiveโmy younger sister, Chantal, was two years old when we moved to the Panhandle. In choosing a difficult path for herself, Mom necessarily set us, her children, on one, too. Mixed-race people went largely unseen, made nonexistent by the one-drop rule. Myriam and I were two of four Black students in our middle school in Amarillo.
