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 culture 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.