23rd August, 2019
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 colonisation 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 honouring 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.”
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 favourite of her grandfather Wright, often accompanying him on visits to his orange groves.