When I first walked Charleston’s rugged cobblestone streets under a cloudless sky, I almost overlooked the black iron gates standing sentinel in place of the ancestors who made them. Part of the quaint, lovely infrastructure there, these gates severed pathways to townhomes set back from streets made more for horses than for cars. The intricate wrought iron separated tourists, like me, from the private, the important, the sovereign.
These gates called to mind a combination of industry and creativity I often take for granted, and I projected the notion that they walled off the most compelling parts of the past. I came to find pieces of my history here and in my mother’s birthplace of Orangeburg, parts of my family story placed beyond my reach, behind virtual gates of family secrecy and shame. So I also saw these iron gates as a metaphor. Protecting me from something, or something from me.
The gates, the homes—I am descended from the so-called “salt water Negroes” who built the bones of this city. Some four hundred thousand shipped in iron shackles from West Africa with the gifts they could make with their bodies: iron work, spinning, music, all extracted in the name of capitalism shaped by slavery.
Inside the eerie Old Slave Mart Museum in downtown Charleston, a dank two-floor memorial to the last open-air slave market, I wished (as I had many times that weekend) that I could know the specific details of my ancestors’ identities. I wanted to apologize to them by name for sins I did not commit as I stood where they surely had, where they were assessed and broken. On the second floor, another story: a map of slave rebellions around the world, including one in Mexico in 1522. For nearly five hundred years, we had been trying to be free. For nearly five hundred years, freedom had eluded us.
Charleston was languid in May. Men in seersucker suits towered over me; pudgy tourists in faded pastel t-shirts, khaki shorts, and Tevas clustered nearby. We all wore a sheen of sweat, carrying our personal music in our steps.
Mine was a Black girl’s song. I ate fried green tomatoes at a lunch counter, thinking of the Black children who had milkshakes emptied on their heads in an attempt to humiliate them out of their desire for liberty. I thought about the first faces I saw when I arrived three nights before: aggressive banners advertising the Marine Corps Reserve, white faces in white uniforms, an accompanying boast of the millions of dollars that come into South Carolina ports each year. I contemplated the automatic association I make between ships and ports and slavery. I thought about our dispossession, how we were supposed to be stripped of our Gods, our memories, our rituals, our songs—and yet, they remained.