My new book, Triumphant Warrior will be released Mother's Day Weekend. Here is a small excerpt:
Once, when I was a teenager, I sat on a huge rock at Fort Fisher, a state park with sugary sand beaches, squawking seagulls and keyhole urchins, all about 30 miles south of Wilmington. During the Civil War, this out-stretched earthen and brick fortress was, as one historical reference put it, “the South’s most powerful bastion.” But on this sunny afternoon, I wasn't thinking much about the Confederacy and the bulging buckets of blood, referring to the union and rebel blood that had soaked this ground. My gaze was fixed on the vast Atlantic Ocean that restlessly rippled and rolled against the shimmering horizon. I was thinking of a mighty carnage, of mass murdering and kidnapping on a global scale.
Before I fully realized it, I was reflecting on what the journey across the Atlantic must have been for my ancestors. I was lost in thought thinking about the Middle Passage. The roar of the waves as they pounded the shore gave due and timely notice of the destructive forces that most certainly confronted any vessel of that time on the high seas. It would have been hard enough for a seaman on some creaking, sea-slickened deck of a slave ship. But what about below, in the bowels of such ships? There, in a dark, dank, stink of a waking nightmare, I contemplated what it must have been like to be captured, chained, innocent of no crime other than being seen as inhuman in the cold eyes of those who captured you. Little did I know that I would, years later, get a glimpse of an answer, experiencing a 20th-century version of the slave ship in which I was captured and locked away – confined -- for no other reason than the color of my skin.In the darkest days of my incarceration behind the “Wall” of Central Prison in Raleigh, N.C., I reached into the not-so-deep recesses of my mind for ancestral memory. I would revisit where I had actually never been, the way lots of African Americans making their first trip to Africa talk about “going back.” I daydreamed, nightmared really, of the ship and felt a real connection between my now and my people’s then. I experienced a kind of inner vision, seeing myself lying on my back in manacles, as the ship groaned all around me in a horror hold of others just like me, chained.I could hear the dying, the sick and the able bodies unable to do anything more than rattle their shackles, and beg their gods for freedom now stolen. I’d live these atrocities in my head, even experiencing enslaved Africans giving birth to the first African Americans in those ships, and I would appreciate, that much more, being a black American. Sometimes, during my incarceration, I would open my eyes and convince myself that I didn't have it so bad behind bars compared to their struggle.Back then behind bars, I’d tell myself an unshakable truth: I come from people who have endured much worse, like slaves, lynch mobs and the likes of the Wilmington Massacre of 1898. With that, my pain would lessen for a while, and I’d feel my shoulders begin to square and my backbone stiffen.I wish I had known all of that, the great record of black people’s relentless courage, strength and faith, when I was a little black boy growing up in Wilmington, North Carolina.
