The Gorée Commercial

“The Door of no Return” stepping foot on the infamous Gorée island is dream many of us who are descendants of slaves. We ponder the action of going back and defying the notion that the spirit of those who where taken and tortured on Gorée could never find their way back. Gorée as well as other slave ports serve as important corner stones in the identity of the diaspora, reminder of the most critical parts of black history. Luckily I had the chance to see and experience this place with my mother and sister who came to visit me for a week. None of us knew what to expect but my mother raised us for moments like this one. My sister and I knew and experienced many sacred black spaces in our childhood. We snaked through the Carolinas; where most  slaves were taken and compared the tighly cramped slave quarters to the lavish antebellum home of the master. We ate fried fish with the Gullah people of the Carolina Islands; a group of black Americans who had managed to keep their original Afro-english dialect and even kept some of their folklore and culture from Africa. We spoke to Queen Quet, the leader and spokesperson for the Gullah people, she talked to us about the importance of not only preserving but respecting sacred ancestral places. We ran down the dirt roads of the deep South of Georgia and stumbled on the massive cotton fields that our sharecropping great grand parents used to pick for next to nothing. Birmingham Alabama was the place of my birth and the epicenter of the Civil rights movement so it was no surprise that our house was down the street from previous house of the revolutionary activist  Angela Davis. My sister and I would often sneak on the porch of the house despite the no trespassing sign and read the thick silver historical plaque on the door. We peeked through the windows because our childhood imagination had tricked us into believing that she might come back for a visit. We felt our throats close up as we passed by the infamous 16th Street Baptist Church in which four little girls around our ages were bombed and pondered the motivation for such an act. Needless to say being in the prescence of greatness and tragedy was  nothing new to us. And now we were at the beginning. Where the journey of the transatlantic all began. However what we saw was much different than we expected.