I was transfixed from first time I saw this combination. This is half true. At every affair throughout my childhood where my father sold books there was someone at least playing a djembe, and some head-wrapped mama singing the Swahili prayer “Funga Alafia.” But my new fascination corresponded to my age, I think, because the djembe, the way it hangs between the legs, is virility itself and has a special call to young boys looking for ways to express the change popping off inside. There was a boy playing. In his hands the drum sounded like a gun, if guns were made to be music. The boy, only slightly older than me, affixed it between his legs with the aid of a long strap, and ever so casually began to make it sing. We were learning the dance steps culled from the Mandé, the traditional gyrations made to heal the insane, celebrate the harvest, or inaugurate a tournament of wrestlers. I could not move. True enough, the initial cause was great fear—everyone knew I danced as awkwardly as I moved through life. But more so, I was held by how the brother played, and how unconsciously it all came out. It was like he had no plans. I could catch the basic beat, but what he brought out of it showed that he heard more. And as I listened, I became bewitched.
The djun-djun held a steady rhythm, and the boy on djembe would follow until the spirit got the best of him and he was off on his own solo. He would beat out a series of rhythms meant to match particular dance steps. The drum had a sharp, piercing sound, and followed the heartbeat of the djun-djun. It was like watching a great MC rhyme wordlessly, scatting almost, pulling new patterns and rhythms from the air. My breathing quickened whenever the drumming began. I would bob and nod unconsciously. My hands would move involuntarily.
And I was not even the hardest hit. On our last day we did our performance, a spirited bit of dancing and singing anthems that connected us to the Mother. At the end, we gathered with our smiling, proud parents. My mother told me I looked straightened out, slimmed down, and all in all more assured. I walked back to say my good-byes and found a group of kids circled around our dance instructor. She was a lovely woman with a short natural and glasses—a second wife, in the old Akan tradition, taken in with her young son by one of the community patriarchs.
She walked back and forth in a line, bouncing almost, her arms akimbo, her eyes rollicking wildly in their sockets. At her side stood her husband, who explained that the drums had called in the old deities and now one of them had taken her body as its own. She was now an oracle of sorts. Each of us approached individually and on our knees, and through the fog of tongues, we were each given a word of heeding in scattered English. None of this was planned. Our parents stayed back.
I did not understand, nor remember, what was said to me. I had no context for what I saw. I was raised godless, and in place of the One True, given a pantheon of ancestors, some direct, some in spirit, who had made my life, as it was, a possibility. I don’t know, still don’t know, if I believed the possession. Still, when the djembe called, I knew I had felt wild ecstatic energies coursing through me over which I lacked control. The thought of touching that sort of power, the direct current to the Motherland, sent me reeling. And as we drove home that Sunday night, through the Virginia darkland, I thought only of djembes. I had only drumming running through my head.
CHAPTER 6
Float like gravity, never had a cavity…
The babas dropped us off in the blackness, at the tip of Washington, D.C., Chocolate City, in the midst of late winter rain. Above, we heard cars screeching through puddles, water splashing off to the side. There were five of us, all told, five with names as heavy as my own—Ibrahim, Changamire, Banatunde, Kier—and me, the oldest, presumptive leader of this line. A week before, we were back in the liberated lands in Virginia, where they worked us all day, then made us spar outside with the older, bigger boys. I stood in my fighting stance, in the manner of our self-defense trainer, Baba Mike, my elbows bent, holding back my power right. But when they paired me off with big Kwaku, who’d crossed over the year before, all that technique went to the wind, and I was swinging for creation. He slapped me up for a good two minutes, which sounds short—but in a fight, it’s enough time to put a mind out, or at least remove all its higher brain function. We were just sparring, but I don’t think I even landed a jab. Still, afterward, they fed us fried chicken, biscuits, greens and built us all back up.
Now, it was breakdown time again. They’d dropped the five of us in the wild, charged us with finding our way back home. This was the last private ritual in our transition into manhood. We were still admonished for leering at girls, expected to live under the orders of our babas, and perform at the top of our class. But the world was opening fast upon us, and few among our generation had been prepared.
This was 1991. The mania was declining and the crack era was fading into a haze of stuffed White Owls and reconstructed Phillies. Still, at night the Enchantress appeared before my brothers and implored them to madness. They’d wake up the next morning, lumber down to the corner, the rec centers, the ball courts, talking up their parish’s murder numbers, scheming on the murder capital’s crown.
The righteous third were still marshalling their forces. Grandmothers rode up from the Carolinas, snatched boys off the street ear first and into flagging homes of worship. Uncles came home from Germany, Korea, and went upside knuckled heads. Banished fathers in their county blues pleaded on collect calls, across plastic dividers. Around my way, the great autodidacts and awesome seers—Dr. Ben, John Henrik Clarke, Asa Hilliard, Tony Browder, Marimba Ani—searched our history for any way out. What they sought were artifacts of culture that once kept us whole, relics of rituals lost to the Cataclysm. From their work, the elders of NationHouse emerged with the Great Rites, a series of labors meant to instill the warrior code in boys who would, always too soon, be men. Across the land, babas, like the ones at NationHouse, carried the ritual, until now, anywhere you find the Conscious, you find these ancient rites of redemption.
Every Saturday morning for six months, me and Kier came to NationHouse and were drilled on all the rudiments of what awaited. We started with self-defense and calisthenics at seven A.M. Then moved to elementary plumbing, history told from our side, and the cosmology of the Dogon. Later we learned the correct posture for firing a rifle. But I left the iron alone. Something about it never felt right. The end was enthronement in the House of Ankobia, NationHouse’s fraternal order whose hierarchy and rituals were borrowed from ancient stately kingdoms. Among the Twi, the Ankobia were the standard-bearers, the vanguard of the people. I was senior on my line of boys, and thus handed the lead. The thought was that I would be a leader in deed, setting an example for my younger brothers. And though in theory, I believed in what was to be done, I half worked my way through the entire piece. During the week, I skipped calisthenics. I just barely memorized the Ankobia pledge. That was the old me. Even reborn, a part of me stayed in the old world where I was still a teenager and bucked authority like it was my job.
But I had made it to this final test. The night before our group of imminent Ankobites stayed at the home of an appointed elder. Kier and I played Super Nintendo until we were sent to bed. A few of the babas woke us only a few hours later, sent us to get dressed; and when we saw them next, they were in their winter coats, wiping no sleep from their eyes, clutching blindfolds, and guiding us out of the house and into the back of a van. The van would stop every twenty minutes. The door would slide open with a rusty crash, and under our blindfolds we could feel the seats pressing further down and buckling under the extra weight of additional boys. Under the overpass, we were hustled out onto a street, where we stood in a blind gaggle by the van. Baba Yao, one of the kindest of the elders, removed the blindfolds and returned to the driver’s seat. He lowered the window.
Be back to NationHouse by dawn, he told us.
Then he drove off.
We stood there for a moment gathering our faculties and blinking in the dark. I was on alien land, a forty-minute ride out of Baltimore, but the D.C. boys figured things out quick.
We were in Blackbyrd’s woods, and to make dawn we had to get moving. Despite our slothful resistance, we’d been made fit by thousands of jumping jacks, and ably assumed a light running pace. It was dark almost the entire way. We did not talk much, except to complain, and guess which baba had come up with this stupid test, and how it had anything to do with Kemit, Kush, or Punt.
And then the babas’s minions arrived, brothers who’d gone through the Rites the year before and now had their chance to give out some of the hardship they’d taken. We were jogging down Georgia Avenue, the main artery of black D.C., when we saw them pulling up in another minivan. I think back on it now, and am amazed at how violence was everywhere, even in our theater. In their minds they were prepping us for some amorphous war. By now the Conscious had come to grips with the nonrevolution but still clung to the hopeful thought that an army in waiting was needed for the moment when things turned.
The minions hopped out, threw up their hands, and started dancing like boxers. We went at it—right there in the street—no closed hands to the face, but everything else allowed. All I remember is the flailing limbs, half nelsons, and headlocks, and then the older brothers laughing and driving off. We picked ourselves up, kept moving.
The sun was just barely out when we got back. Baba Yao saluted us at the door and gave us black sweats, our medallions of initiation, then marched us inside.
That’s as far as I can go. I haven’t been Ankobia in years, can’t recall a word of the pledge. But I honor what they did for me, the aim of those reclaimed rituals, and how they saved us from a savage time.
I was anchored. Against everything we saw, against all the wild stories of sisters turned night hags and brothers gone ronin, every Saturday morning we would drive to NationHouse and be greeted by a squadron of the unbroken who recalled the days of old splendor, of Nefertari, Askia, and Akhenaton, and instructed us to bring it back. On our shoulders they loaded a nation, and every elder who knew us believed we were prophetic, that we’d pull Celestia from the Nine Hells of Baator, that we’d bring sun and oceans to this wasteland.
It was a slow-acting drug. But through the years I came to know that in the galaxy of DuBois and Booker T., of Cheryl Waters and Paul Coates, of Mama Makini and Baba Jules, my errors were never borne solo, my accolades were never mine alone. So many of us had turned to henchmen and mercenaries. Whether bourgeoisie in Woodlawn or thugging in Flaghouse, niggers were acting like it could not happen, like their lives were only theirs alone. But the Rites were a great web tying me to all my people in all times, from West Baltimore to Dakar, from Mondawmin across the haunted waves to Gorée.
The Ankobia elders brought us back the next week for a public entrance into the world of men. We were swaddled in all white and each handed a spear. In age order, we were led out through the broken streets of Chocolate City, but wherever we walked the concrete shifted, glowed, and healed. The stunned community turned to the processional, which wasn’t just the newly minted men I was with but all of Ankobia’s mamas and babas and the girls too, our counterparts, who’d undergone their own private rites. In these darkening years, even the Unconscious had some sense that things had gone bad, and thus they took anything upright among children as a righteous step. So the old heads on the corner, the mothers with their heads under scarves, they all smiled and clapped as we walked past silently, even if they knew nothing about what we were.
Ankobia rented out a middle school cafeteria for our final ceremony. We walked in, and family and friends stood in ovation, spines of the great web. We were introduced by name and accomplishment. We recited our pledge, holding spears aloft. But I did not come completely into focus until I heard the djembes. It was like a girl you’d seen once, exchanged everything but numbers and had been plotting on for weeks. In our final days we learned a sacred dance that we performed with the drums. But hearing it there, watching big Kwaku go off and the crowd clap and cheer, I was entranced.
Mornings I’d wake up with old rhythms in my head, drum patterns that I could not even name. My mother saw no future for me in drumming. But still it was one of my parents’ approved activities, the sort of thing that would further strengthen my bond with the community. My time with my folk was close to the end. I was the last of a group of Dad’s children born into uncertain times. We were poorly planned for and chaotically conceived. In two years they would see me off, and turn their attentions to Menelik, eight years my junior, whose only great concerns were dinosaurs and the cycles of active volcanoes.
I saw it coming. That fall, Dad drove us down Liberty Heights until it became Liberty Road and the streetlights became less frequent. There, up a forested hill with houses tucked in the right side, he revealed our new manse on Campfield Road. It was astonishing. Six bedrooms, a breezeway, garage, barn, grassy acreage so sprawling that you’d need a tractor to keep it in shape. It was Barrington Road and more, a haven out in the county near enchanted woods. I should have been relieved, struck that the great horror initiated with the snatch of a skullcap was now at end. But I was old school like Charlie Mack and Ready C. I had made my home among an alien Tioga, had learned the customs, made it native to me, earned my colors so wherever I walked if I wasn’t Little Melvin, I was West Baltimore all the same.
And there was politics. For years, we’d held out against the scourge, like the last lost platoon, and now we were folding our red, black, and green in retreat.
I took it to my father. He was seated in the basement of Tioga, and all around were shelves of books. Two steel desks were jammed together, with invoices and paperwork scattered on top. I told him of my concerns, that there were—ideals at stake, principles in living where the struggle was, in never moving or giving up.
This is what I said. But underneath was also the fact that I’d become proud that Mondawmin, with all its allure of danger, was my backyard. That I survived it daily and could raise my hand when anyone yelled Is West Baltimore in the house? Maybe Dad heard that in my protest, because he just listened and nodded, did not offer a counter, just leaned back and took it in. When I was done, he lowered his head until he was looking above his reading glasses and spoke.
Son, all my life I’ve lived among the people. I’ve lived in cramped quarters since I was born. I am forty-four. I have never had a big yard.
He caught me flush with that one. I thought my science triumphant; I knew I had no answer for all his years. I had never been evicted. My house was strange, but none of my brothers doubled as cousins, and I had never tangled with the gangs of North Philly. My dad had come up among a sort of mayhem. They were at war. That was all. So in the autumn we moved north, and I was left wondering what it all—Lemmel, Mondawmin, the Great Rites—had been worth. Just as soon as I dropped anchor I was afloat again.
But I got my drum, a dark brown djembe with a wide mouth and rich, deep sound. At first I took a Saturday train to Chocolate City for lessons, and practiced alone during the week. I got nowhere. A natural can pull from a simple palette of sound and paint you the universe. His technique is to ride out with his brother drummers, then at the ordained moment take the lead and find rhythm where others hear none. But when I touched my drum there was nothing but a muddy, plodding groan. I spent six months like that, traveling to D.C. for lessons and coming back with only a murmur for a sound. After school, I’d practice out in the breezeway, desperately trying to play anything distinct. But all I got back was that old dirty rumble.
There was drumming in Baltimore, too, and I banded with the Sankofa Dance Theater. In the heyday of the movement ’60s, my elders reached back for anything original they could grab—plantain, kufis, a new name. Then they saw gorgeous West African ballets, with their fervid dancing and drumming, and knew that the tradition had to be brought to the other side. They founded dance companies with names taken from Swahili. They convened at megashows in which each of them would perform in successive order. It became a religion of sorts, like hip-hop, or football down south. My parents saw me embracing the reclaimed cultur
e and it filled them with hope.
That year, I drummed with some brothers from Sankofa. My technique was still invisible, but the events of the day outstripped personal concerns. We were in a church. My old friend Salim’s father had died. We were the sort of boys who were close at a young age, who played together and slept over, whose parents would babysit the others’ children, and then for reasons that are never explained to kids, just drifted apart. His mother, Mama Kabibi, was a beautiful dancer, who’d founded the Sankofa Dance Theater, and I remembered his father as healthy and robust. But when I last saw him at a Sankofa drumming class, he was depleted, and thin, a victim of years of HIV, which was roiling all of Baltimore.
He had fallen, like so many fathers of that time, and in his place had stepped another, Baba Kauna, who took up with Mama Kabibi and assumed the four kids who were left behind. When he picked up the sword, Baba Kauna became mythical to us, much like my own father, so much so that we simply addressed him as Baba. His new charge, Salim, was golden and at thirteen could make a drum do things that a lifetime in Senegal would not teach. He led Sankofa’s drum squad with another sun child, Menes, and always they subtly competed to see whose hands would carry the day.
They were not supposed to be Sankofa’s lead drummers. But every time an older god was brought in to take the reins, he’d give it a few months and then fade out. And so the drumming was handed over to the kids. I played with them at the funeral for Salim’s father, and immediately felt a bond that went beyond the actual drumming. Later, as I played more with them, as my hands were cleaned, I came to understand what was between us. We’d come up much the same way, raised with the same traditions, abhorrence of pork and the Fourth of July. Here, like Ankobia, was a place where I need not explain my name. So I joined up, and in that I mean I simply made myself a regular, and though still I had hands of stone, they took me on as one of their own.