Tani Sanchez and her daughter Tani Sylvester are part of a growing number of African Americans exploring their ancestral roots in Ghana via alessaprentice
CAPE COAST, GHANA - Halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, the plane carrying Tani Sanchez and her daughter Tani Sylvester on a heritage tour to Ghana crossed paths with a powerful storm.
They had set off the previous day from Los Angeles, where Sylvester works for a digital-streaming service. But their family’s journey began nearly two centuries before on a sugarcane plantation in Louisiana – and, before that, the homeland to which they were bound.Sanchez’s great-great-grandmother Mary Ann Moss was born into slavery around 1838.
Using oral histories, court transcripts, land deeds and census documents, Sanchez, who is an associate professor of Africana Studies at the University of Arizona, gathered enough information to form a clear picture of the past few generations on her mother’s side. 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.
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.After arriving in the sprawling, humid Ghanaian capital, Accra, Sanchez and her daughter joined a group of around 40 mostly African Americans.
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. Before she turned 20, Mary Louise married Curley Euell, who worked as a lumberjack in the local sawmill. His father had been the victim of a lynching in the area. Euell never spoke about his father or his death.
The tour involved long bus rides on bumpy roads hedged with tattered banana and palm trees. As they journeyed inland to the Ashanti capital of Kumasi and then back to the slave sites on the coast, they passed shops tacked together out of sheet metal, old boards and tarpaulin offering everyday services with a religious flavor: “Great Miracle, fax and printing,” “With God Tailoring” and “Peace Be With You Keycutting.
“My ancestors would have given anything to go back, anything to escape the horrific situation,” Sanchez said. “And here we are. And I truly believe that they were looking down and they got a kick out of it.”After the move to Arizona, the Wright-Euell family continued to encounter unequal treatment. They weren’t welcome in restaurants and were only allowed to sit in the balcony of cinemas.
The information didn’t surprise Mary Louise. “Well, we didn’t come here empty-handed. We didn’t come from nothing,” she replied.
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