Day 36

August 19, 2009

Some more volunteers from the U.S. came on Tuesday. We all went to town to go to the market and the girls wanted to go to the Cape Coast slave dungeon which, oddly, people call “the castle.” I went there last summer. We walked inside and there is a little courtyard where people are selling items. My chest hurt. My heart started beating fast. I couldn’t walk inside the courtyard. Something happened in that place. I got that same heaviness in my chest. This feel was compounded by the fact that Ghanaians were selling items in building that was build to sell Ghanaians. In a dungeon, build, specifically, to tourcher, rape, and sell black bodies, the volunteers wanted to take a happy group picture. My chest still hurt. I didn’t join them. It like I wanted to say, “Don’t you know where you are? How can you be happy in this place?” It was weird and uncomfortable. We ended up leaving because the charge was too high. Even paying to enter into a place where people sold is just... so discomforting. We walked outside and there were vendors right outside the dungeon. They walked up to us, wanting to talk, sell things. The volunteers went over to buy things. I couldn’t stand there. I passed the vendors and walked towards the ocean. I felt this odd mixture of being solemnly stiff. Not sure how else to explain it. One of the Ghanaian volunteers asked what was wrong. I said, “This place makes me feel uncomfortable.”
“Why?” she said.
“Because it’s a dungeon.”
I felt like, maybe being the only black American in the group that what I was feeling wouldn’t make any sense to them. And who knows if I said something, it might be misinterpreted as some attack on Ghanaians, when it wouldn’t be, and I wasn’t in the mood for all of that.

I went to sit down to wait for the other volunteers a little ways down, away from the dungeon. One other volunteer and I started walking past the castle to wait for the others. As I walked by the right side of the castle to the left, my heart got heavy again. Something happened in the particular space. It the same area were the shops were located inside. I don’t know what.

I went to check what I wrote last year when I first entered the dungeon. Its interesting that I wrote this before reading “Ain’t I a Woman” by Deborah Gray White who discusses the various ways African women who were enslaved in the US, resisted slavery (in some ways through their children). Here is what I wrote:

Day 10: June 22nd 2008
The minute I looked at Cape Coast Castle two things happened simultaneously: Weight and noise. I felt the same heaviness I felt at Elmina. Like someone. Some people sat on me. Not on my external body but on my insides. Like a cannonball was placed inside of my rib cage. And there was a noise. Not audible though, but I heard it. It was like when you watch a scary movie and the camera turns to something that is suppose to incite fear in the viewer and there is a loud “boom” to accompany the jolt your body is suppose to perform. I watched the castle as we traveled the road towards it. It feels so weird that it is right in the middle of the city. When I stepped in the castle the heaviness got heavier. Not unbearable but noticeable. I got used to it. Somebody was trying to get my attention. Make me pay attention.

Cape Coast Castle felt more like a dungeon. It was made to be a slave dungeon where Elmina wasn’t. The men’s dungeon was so scary. Huge. Six or more of my apartments could fit in there. Dark. Even in the middle of the day with the couple of light bulbs in the dungeon it felt like night. The Cape Coast builders felt the need to make the space more accommodating but creating corners in the rooms so that the body fluids had a designated area. For the fluids that didn’t get in the corners areas for when they over-flooded the builders created a crevasse in the floor so that the fluids would flow down through the rooms and collect at the room at the end of the slight slope. I asked where the fluids went after it went into the room because there wasn’t a hole or opening that went outside. Apparently the fluids traveled through the now closed off tunnel that led to the women’s dungeon. That means the women had their own fecal matter, urine, blood, and vomit to sleep in as well as the men’s. The tour guide really looked over the living conditions. He didn’t really try to paint a picture for us. I didn’t care for him too much.

The women’s dungeon was significantly smaller. They had a little more ventilation but it was still very dark. Were the children scared? Yes, but did they eventually lose their fear of the dark with such limited chances to be in the day light? How did the lack of sunlight affect the captives? Black people must get their vitamin D from the sun. How did that affect living conditions? Lack of sunlight also means lack of serotonin. Serotonin combats depression. How many slaves committed suicide in the dark? How many died and others didn’t know because they could see? I know more slaves die in the coffles and in the dungeons than during the middle passage, but did less die in the coffles and more in the dungeons because of the mental effects of being held captive? How many babies were born here? How many women killed their babies in here? Did they hold the babies until a solider grabbed it from them and threw it in the ocean? How did she feel afterwards? Happy that the child wouldn’t have her same fate? Sad because the child that she was once happy to carry now meant something else? What did she say to herself?
They won’t make any money off of my son! The only way I can prevent my child from dying a mental death I must send him home, to ancestors, to Nyame. Nyame knows I have to do this. He has to know.

Did the other women try to convince her not to? Did they watch, turn their heads? Pray? Help? Was it easier because it was dark? Couldn’t watch your son die as you convince yourself it is in his best interest. Did she regret it after she had to hold his lifeless body for days?
I became emotional at the door of no return. The doors were huge. Not small like the one at Elmina. With the female dungeon to my right I could imagine standing there in a line with other women awaiting our fate. Wondering where our husbands, father, uncles, and nephews were.

We can’t see them enter or exit the death chamber because it was too far away from the female dungeon. Could only hear screams of those going in. They all began to sound the same. Didn’t know who they were. After some days, we could hear the door open again. Silence this time. Bodies being removed. Maybe, if I listened closely I could hear bodies being thrown into the ocean, but the crying children, mourning women, and the sounds of my own thoughts and fears drowned out most of those sounds. Sounds I didn’t want to hear anyway.

The tour guide began to open the “door of no return” where the captives would be led onto a slave ship. I started to breathe heavy. Needing to cry but not wanting to. Holding it in. Heaviness still there.
He opened the door.
I was snapped back into the present. I saw little children playing on the beach and people fishing. Anti-climatically. Not sure what I expected since I knew this was going to happen. Caught up in the moment. In the heaviness. Or whoever put the heaviness there.