One Sunday, my father packed me, Kier, Jovett, and Ma into the yellow and brown station wagon, and compared a white sheet of directions with his road atlas. It was hot August. Me and Kier had been remanded to NationHouse, and their plot of land. In the summer they ran a camp, in hopes of deprogramming kids from the lies of the great Satan. Dad drove down a long highway, till it connected to another highway, and that highway became a street, and that street turned into a narrow dirt road. The liberated acres were not formidable. What I saw was a big house presiding over sprawling fields, a valley, and forest. There was orientation and the completion of some forms, and then we were left there with our hooded sleeping bags, bug repellant, army surplus flashlights, and spare clothes.
We were not afraid, even though we knew no one. We arrived early, and shot hoops on a netless rim behind the house. All that Sunday, kids arrived until we had enough boys for fifty putout, then three on three. By then, I had learned that the rock and hoop were the king of icebreakers. All the other kids were camp vets, but by dinner we were joking and doing two-man military satire — Back in the war, you didn’t have dinner. Someone passed you sticks and gruel, and you liked it.
I was teased those next two weeks, as always. Big, awkward, and still without a jump shot, I was too tempting a target. But I fell in with these kids in a way that I had fallen in with no one before. All of us knew why you abstained on the Fourth and the meaning of Nkrumah.
All our names were alien — Kwame, Jua, Ansentewaa — and traceable back to the continent of the originators. It was as if, on this holy plot of land, the revolution had come off and the world had been remade as the brothers envisioned it in ’68. I lost myself there, felt confirmed and the freedom of being unoriginal.
We were forbidden to eat candy, cookies, and cakes. We were fed oatmeal in the morning, sandwiches for lunch, and groundnut stew in the evening. On Fridays they set us free with turkey hot dogs and potato chips. All the elders were addressed by the title Mama or Baba. We had to run a mile every morning, then shower, and participate in the day’s ordained activities. We had free time, and played pickup football or three on three. We camped out and swapped off guard duty in the middle of the night.
I remember sitting in a small makeshift conference room on the first floor of the big house. It was film night, but our babas even invested this with meaning. We watched Three the Hard Way and giggled at the boom of Jim Brown’s cannon compared with the pop-pop of his racist foes. The next night, we saw the film version of The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Sam Greenlee’s tale of black revolution. For the next hour, one of the babas led us in discussion. Was any of it plausible? What had we learned about the nature of white supremacy?
But most of us were occupied by smaller things. I was like any other fourteen-year-old boy, assaulted by internal chemistry and in the presence of jennys, subject to forgetting my name, address, and other vital information. Of course they were there, remanded from across the East Coast and regal in all their original blackness — dreads, braids, cornrows, short naturals, and head wraps for the two or three who’d foolishly permed. Kier scooped one right away, and these two spent the remainder of camp disappearing at random hours. I was, even in my newfound naturalness, profoundly still me — awkward and perpetually offbeat, crumbs in my hair, juice stains on my tee shirts. So I played my position and sought other outlets to deal with all the improper energy.
Toward the end of camp we were practicing for a final performance to be put on for our parents. There was to be a session of drumming and dancing, rhythms and moves imported from the west coast of Africa in the days when the Conscious folks thought the answers for all our problems lay in connections with back home. By then I was an MC, and thus feeling that the marriage of beats and lyrics was a charter ship back to the Knowledge of the elder world. The current was powered by all the usual angst and alienation of this age. An hour, a pen, a pad and I was plugged in, the material plane falling away, and the world remade along the lines of my yearning imagination. In those years, hip-hop saved my life. I was still half alien to the people around me. I loved them, mostly because I’d realized that there was no other choice. Hip-hop gave me a common language, but that August, on liberated land, I found that there were other ways of speaking, a mother tongue that, no matter age, no matter interest, lived in us all.
The djembe is a drum, carved from wood. Its bottom is a wide outlet. If you trace its outline upward, you find the drum narrows until about halfway through its length. From there, it gradually blooms outward until, at its crown, it is as much as three times the size of its bottom. This crown is covered with the shaved skin of a goat. Rope running along the drum’s side is tightened to effect a sharper sound. The drum is played with bare hands. Its sound varies from a piercing slap to a deep tonal moan and a barely inaudible bass. A djembe drummer is usually accompanied by a djun-djun player, the djun-djun being a giant bass drum played with a stick.
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.