They had abandoned the dream and been rewarded with university chairs, fat salaries, and celebrity, while he labored in the trenches and pieced together an existence. I always have felt at a distance from the events of my time, and I have never believed that the balance of power hung upon any act of mine.

What better illustration of the degradation of gold than its capacity to transform persons into things; what better example of its offensive character than the excremental conditions of the barracoon; what better sign of its mutability than the "black gold" of the slave trade. From the holding cell was it possible to see beyond the end of the world and to imagine living and breathing again? He said less about her than about his grandmother, maybe because his grandmother raised him or maybe because speaking of his mother made him feel like the grief-stricken fifteen-year-old he had been in 1907 when she died. For the first time since my arrival I was very nearly home…I drove into Cape Coast before I thought of the gruesome castle and out of its environs before the ghosts of slavery caught me. I wasn't able to dislodge the atrocities committed in wars of capture and slave raids: the elderly and infirm slaughtered by the conquering army, infants murdered by bashing their heads against trees, pregnant women disemboweled with a lance, girls raped, and young men buried in anthills and thrown onto pyres and burned alive.

I grew up in the aftermath of African independence and the civil rights and Black Power struggles, and like many of my generation I was pessimistic about my prospects at home and abroad. Who wouldn't yearn for a place where the color line didn't exist and black bodies were never broken on the rack or found hanging from trees or expiring at the end of a police officer's gun or wasting away in a cell on death row? It is the placeholder for the missing, the mark of the passage, the scar between native and citizen. All that comes from man's imagination is realizable," or sobered by them: "We are backed up against the wall in our destitution like bald and mangy dogs whose lamentations and cries disturb the quiet peace of the manufacturers and merchants of misery. He was fiercely intelligent and self-educated, so he had little patience for most academics, whom he could think circles around and whom he found tedious.

A group of children were playing near the fetid pool, and one boy created ripples on its surface with his small arc of urine. They were accused of betraying Nkrumah and of being in cahoots with the CIA, which had engineered the coup. Was it foolish to long for a territory in which you could risk imagining a future that didn't replicate the defeats of the present?

The political opponents of the Osagyefo, the Redeemer, who after the coup were now the leaders of the country, distrusted the Afros because they had been religiously loyal to Nkrumah.

And the longing and the loss redolent in the label were as much my inheritance as they were that of the enslaved.Nearly a century and a half later, in 1951, when William Patterson, the national executive secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, and Paul Robeson presented a petition to the UN charging the United States with genocide against the Negro people, they too conceded that black folks in the United States were without a state to protect their human rights. Telling the truth risked sullying the love of romantics who kissed the ground as soon as they landed in mother Africa, not caring that it was the tarmac of the airport. Torn from kin and community, exiled from one's country, dishonored and violated, the slave defines the position of the outsider.