Shorter, Alabama, my father's village

This weekend, in preparation for my trip, I visited the town where my Dad was born. I grew up in Seattle, Washington, the city my parents moved to after they got married and left the city they grew up in, Kalamazoo, Michingan. For the most part the only family I knew was my parents and sister and my Mom's people in Kalamazoo. I knew some of my Dad's brothers and sisters, but I didn't grow up around them, nor my Mother's folks and we've only visited Kalamazoo some number of times I can count on two hands. In some random conversation I was having with my Dad I learned the named Shorter, Alabama and suprisingly, that it was about 4 hours from Tallahassee where I've lived all of my adult life. I'd been planning to go and visit, but this weekend I saddled up the Kia and hopped on the road to Shorter.



Let me tell you though the town had some bad press. You see in the South, not too long ago, and today in the minds of some folk, Black people were lynched. Lynch means killed by groups of White people who would have parties around the event. They would kill grown people, children, what-have-you. The Black person would be hung by a rope, by the neck from a tree until dead, burned, maybe both. Sometimes parts of the body would be cut off and kept as souvinirs. This type of thing happened in Shorter when my father was a child. Which may have been what? 40+ years ago? Just a few years before disco, and likely during disco... Soooo my Dad doesn't go there, aint been there since he was a child. My parents seemed to be quite frightened at the prospect of me going there.



I called my cousin and said... Uhm... in Shorter, dangerous? She said naw, it's gotten much better, these towns have Black police chiefs and mayors etc. these days. Much of that is in the past. Say no more. Only God can take my life, Gede, Papa Baron has to give the word before anybody dies.



Flash forward and I'm driving into Shorter. It's a forest. I looooove the forest, and trees and well, I love this place. The earth is red, even more so than Tallahassee. There are endless trees and it is quite, peaceful, rural, but not what I expected. I'm thinking big farms and the flat Mid-West. Nope Shorter is my Dad's village where there are tons of people who look just like us, his mother's people and fathers people, cousins, great aunties and uncles, all with little colorful gardens and houses in the middle of a forest. Have you ever returned home after having never been there? Have you ever gone to a place and it was... I don't know so very you, you fit like a old shoe? Let me tell you, I love it.



I'm kinda odd to people. I'm an artist which is odd enough, but I'm a Blacksmith (learning anyways) in 2009. Obama just became president, my Dad just brought a hallographic keyboard to work on his computer from his cellphone when he's chillin at the lake and I beat glowing steel with hammers over an anvil. People are usually just like uhh... ok. It doesn't some there though. I collect wood. I find it beautiful. I've carried huge logs on my back through Tallahassee right though the city like I lived in East Afrika in some village. Even the Afrikan centered people find my version of reconnecting with Africa a bit rustic shall we say. Buutttt... I think I get it from somewhere.



I've spent much of my adult life working to build community. I believe in it. It's what I need and I ebelieve it can help people and especially Black people. It's another things that's made me seem odd in an increasingly global, mobile(speel?) world where people largely move where the money is. Well that's Shorter, all these people who look soo much alike, some who collect old tools and things from the past to remember their people, so many who have little gardens growing everything, and it's this little area hidden beneath the trees quite and wonderful. The shades of green under the overcast sky just glow and sing. Brilliant light greens of unchecked nature, birds, and deer, buzzards, frogs, you name it. Somebody down the street was ridding a horse and suprise, suprise it was a cousin. People hunt, which I'm going to study in Mali, they keep chickens, pigs, dogs and as I said, horses. I've seen several lakes that are man made out in people's yards. One of my older cousin builds and made a lake house on his lake. It's a house with very little bottom floor, but a second floor which seems tailor-made for viewing the lake. There are handmade chicken coops and fences, flowers, garlic, onions, greens, trees growing out on logs cut and lining my father's grandparent's house. They call it the home-house. The churches have the family graveyards right next to them where all my people are. I'm told by one of my cousins that human beings, being spirit and a body have a connection to their people and sometimes you see them in dreams because, well, that's there spirit. Also that certain people have certain types of connection, like prophecy, some want to stay connected to the past and thus know the family history. One of my cousins shows me an anvil of her father, or uncle and some metalwork they did. The place looks like something I made in my mind. If you just put some more Afrika in there, people flying, and headed out into the woods a bit, you'd have a place that existed to my knowledge only inside of me.



So what does it all mean? The uncanny way this place is things I've imagined at least at this first very brief short glance makes me wonder. Do the subjective imaginings in our hearts and mind actually simply exist on earth and we simply have not yet found them? Is what we dream of truly simply what we truly are deep down inside? And in the process of Sankofa, where we reach back to find what we have lost to better our future, might it be said that what we also will build in our future what was lost in our past? That time is a circle flowing out of our hearts and our souls where the angels and demons our our past and future are not on some line far out of our reach in the front and behind us, but indelibly and inextricably bound up in us, flowing out of us, and back in? In my African spirituality these days I find the most amazing truths. I find Afrika now whereever I am. I find myself less looking for the great mysteries but looked to to generate them. I've found also in Shorter that while it is my past it's also quite modern and much of the old things, and people have passed and gone and people aren't really trying to connect to them like I am. But, at every turn I'm encouraged to do that work. This Afrikan America, I am finding, is a world of wonder, when we dream past fear.

Here are some photos of Shorter

My visit to get my Immunizations!

When they stuck the foot long needle into my spine I lost feeling in the lower half of my body... The pains we'll go through for our dreams... Actually no, I'm kidding. Walking up to Thagard, the Florida State University clinic, I felt like I was opening up a brightly colored door label Africa-or-bust and walking through. Somehow the promise of getting shot with small doses of diseases, so that on my great pilgrimage home to the land of my ancestors I don't keel over dead, made Africa all the more real. I walked through the hot sun, into the cool clinic, into the elevator, announced my arrival and into the waiting room filled with nurses and needles. "Yes this makes it official I thought."


I was sitting, waiting and truly cool, but something strange was brewing. Nurses were moving about the room coming in and out making remarks like "oh wow, you're getting a lot of shots," "five shots, wow," "well I have given 6 shots before but not often..." But I'm still cool you know? I'm thinking well they may hurt but hey, I'm a metalworker. Flying sparks and burning metal regularly singe my skin, I breathe iron and make knives. I'll be okay. "Well, this arm is going to be sore," "sore," "this arm is going to be sore," "well the tetanus shot will be the worse". Then nurse looks at me sincerely and says something like "well I guess you need Aaall of these, so... well hopefully it wont hurt too much."

I dunno, maybe it's just me but there seemed to be a theme emerging. I figured maybe I'd chant my mantra. For those of you who don't know mantras are magic words learned in yoga class that make everything better. Sort of, kinda... well y'know... Anyways so I'm hoping on this mantra. The nurse pulls out an oil drill disguising itself as a needle that's just been filled with some disease I'm hoping not to get and well... I think I stopped breathing. Imagine your at the starting blocks in a race and the gun goes off. Well something in you changes, most likely your heart is electrocuted and your limbs start failing trying to get you down the track. Well for a millisecond that was me on the inside. Panic. But remarkably I felt nothing. Magic nurse right? Wow, I'm thinking she's good. I'm good to tho because besides that millisecond of horror y'know I'm chillin'. My outer facade is a peaceful lake and a cool breeze. Plus the chanting has me feeling pretty good (I'm chanting inside my head of course).


She sticks the Grandfather of all mosquitos in my arm a few more times and I'm good, just maybe one twinge of ow-there-is-sharp-metal-stabbing-into-my-muscle. Then she says okay here's the Typhoid. Now again... I don't know about you, but doesn't Typhoid sound a lot like death. Bubonic plague? Then she sticks it in my arm... I also forgot to mention early on the nurses mentioning all the possible side-effect of these shots and how I had to stay there for 30 minutes so they could watch and see, I guess, if I actually caught the disease or something. So I'm just thinking about what if I catch TYPHOID... It may not be bad but it sound like it. Then the nurse says and here's the Hepatitis. So I'm thinking no. In retrospect I look back and I see myself running screaming down the hall, though I didn't. Hepatitis... can't we call it the pretty Green shot? Geez. I think the last shot was leprosy mixed with a little uranium. Actually I don't remember, but well... that was slightly disturbing. The nurses would say I'm exaggerating all this because I was truly sitting there looking half asleep (chanting), but some words are bad words that shouldn't be said.


All in all it was a funny trip, really a breeze, so much in fact I thought I wouldn't feel anything much afterwords. Unfortunately I did. I didn't get sick, it just felt like someone had taken a hammer to the area I received my tetanus shot in. For a day it was hard to use my arms and I looked a bit pitiful the next day, because as most people know about me I'm usually trying to do things the hard way engines at 150%. I'm never bored I will tell you. At any rate I am now certified to gain entrance into African countries and not drop dead upon arrival, at least from Typhoid, Tetanus, Hepatitis, Yellow Fever, and Uranium. Next stop entrance visas! Airline tickets and Afffffrrika! You have to stretch the f to make it dramatic!