Travels In Mind & Space

By Yma A. Johnson

“When we win we will free you from your shackles.” So proclaimed Lord Dunmore, Royal Governor of Virginia, to American slaves after he lost control of his colony in the summer of 1775. The British issued similar proclamations throughout their North American colonies to raise more troops to suppress the American Revolution. Enticed by promises of freedom, protection and land, thousands of indentured servants and slaves, known as the Black Loyalists, joined the British side.

Johnson at a site of childhood romps with her brother in the Diag while their father held summer office hours.

After the American victory, supporters of the British gathered in New York to evacuate. They included more than 3,000 Blacks who obtained “certificates of freedom” and migrated to Britain’s Nova Scotian colony in Canada. The first group arrived in the fall of 1783 and passed a miserable winter in makeshift tents. Many succumbed to epidemics and starvation. Promises of land as reward for their service evaporated for all but a few. After two years of suffering, a delegation of frustrated Black Loyalists sailed to Britain to demand the land promised them. In response a British company offered a new proposition: passage to Africa in 1787 if they would form a British colony there. The loyalists agreed and several hundred set sail for Freetown, a settlement on the Sierra Leone Peninsula on Africa’s most western coast, where the British had replaced the Portuguese as the imperial power.

The indigenous community, dominated by the Mende, wiped out the first settlers. But in 1792, the St. George’s Bay Company (later, the Sierra Leone Company) transported a second group to Freetown, 1,196 Blacks from Nova Scotia along with 500 Jamaicans and dozens of rebellious slaves from other colonies.

In 1807, when Britain outlawed the slave trade, people called “Recaptives” joined the Loyalists and other first settlers. These were Blacks freed from slave ships intercepted by the British on the high seas. Although the Recaptives were from different parts of Africa, all were sent to what later became the Republic of Sierra Leone. Stripped of their original ethnic connections, the Nova Scotians, Jamaicans and Recaptives formed a new tribe, the Creoles (also called the Kri), who fashioned an English-Spanish-French-Portuguese-African pidgin, or creolized, language called Krio, a language born of the African Diaspora. These are my ancestors, and our stories flow through mind and space, back and forth like the sea, touching the coasts of North America and Africa.

With Duddy on the Diag

My parents, Marian and Lemuel Johnson, Mummy and Duddy, were born in tiny villages on the outskirts of Freetown and came to the United States to attend college. My mother studied dental hygiene at Howard University in Washington, DC, on a Sierra Leone government scholarship. My father won a grant from his prep school and majored in Spanish and English at Oberlin College in Ohio. After earning his PhD in comparative literature from Michigan in 1968, he accepted a professorship in the English department, where he taught for more than three decades before dying of cancer last year.

An Ann Arbor kindergartner.

My brother, Yshelu, and I were born and raised in this Midwestern college town. The summers of my youth were magical. My parents rarely left us with sitters, so Yshelu and I spent much of our time with Duddy. We often played in the Diag on Central Campus while Duddy held office hours for his graduate students. Diag traffic is light from May through August, so we held dominion over a vast and peculiar playground flanked with grand buildings and cool concrete benches shaded by sprawling oaks, chasing each other in games of tag, climbing library ledges and running around like little wind-up toys oblivious to the small groups of big kids drifting to and from class in the afternoon heat.

Lucky campus days ended at the Michigan League’s snack shop where, unbeknownst to our dental hygienist mother, Duddy allowed us to gorge ourselves on cookies, pop and ice cream. Then it was off to the public library. My father enrolled us in the book club. Each member could borrow up to 13 books every two weeks, and at summer’s end the library hosted a party for the kids in the club.

Duddy nurtured a passion for learning in us, especially of the classics. He introduced us to Homer and Sophocles when we were in grade school. He found junior editions of The Iliad and The Odyssey; made up rhymes to help us remember the characters from the Epic of Gilgamesh, read us favorite passages out of Shakespeare and bought us cards describing the major Greek deities. On hot summer nights I imagined my bedroom lit with the fires of Prometheus. With Hercules I prepared to battle Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the gates of Hades. A few years later, however, I found myself beginning my own 20-year war against my own three-headed dog: race, class and culture.

‘You’re an Oreo Cookie!’

Prior to seventh grade I was not aware that I was different from most of the other Black children around me. But at my middle school, most of the Black students came from a low-income housing development on the west side of town. Many knew each other from their neighborhood elementary school and decided to torment me. I was an easy target. I was skinny, dressed differently, spoke differently—“like a White girl,” they said—and all of my friends from my neighborhood were White. Some kids called me “Oreo cookie” (black outside, white inside). Brenda and Lisa were particularly vicious and made it clear to me that if I ever wanted to have Black friends I would have to change.

The majority of these encounters happened in the hallway because other Black students were almost never in advanced placement classes, another difference held against me. All the way through middle and high schools I was usually the only Black person in my Latin, French and Humanities classes. Some White friends, in feeble attempts to compliment me, told me I wasn’t “really Black” to them. The fact that I spoke “like a White girl” seemed to make them feel more at ease with me, made them feel they could ask to touch my hair or to explain to them the presumed mysteries of blackness.

What neither my friends, my enemies or I realized then was that I was speaking like an African reared in the United States, no more no less. My parents spoke English with British accents and chatted in Krio with their Sierra Leonean friends. Caged by narrow definitions of what it means to be Black in America, combined with living in a mostly White town, I began to change. Where I had been an almost straight-A student with a docile and attentive attitude, I became rude, contentious and disruptive in class, although I maintained the same grades. Six of my seven teachers called home to report my misdeeds. The seventh merely wrote a note documenting my misdeeds.

I was put on “travel card” status, meaning every teacher marked down whether or not I had accomplished my homework and been punctual and respectful. I shaped up immediately. After two days of perfect reports my father said, “Let’s not have any more of this” and ripped the bright yellow piece of paper into pieces.

I managed to stay out of big trouble for the next few years. However, I was still being hassled regularly in the halls. This went on for nearly four years, until the start of 10th grade. Of my main tormentors, Brenda seemed to find mistreating me merely amusing, but real hatred fueled Lisa. One afternoon in a stairwell I was on the bottom landing, and they faced me menacingly several steps above. “What are you looking at?” Lisa said. I clearly remember thinking, “I may get my rear kicked today, but I am sick of this stuff!” I planned to throw her down the stairs if I had to. I was willing to get suspended over this, willing even to wind up in the hospital, as long as I got in one good punch. It must have shown in my eyes, because that was the last nasty thing they ever said to me. After a stare-down like boxers before a match, Brenda said, “C’mon Lisa, let’s go.”

My troubles with Lisa and Brenda had an almost saccharine ending, just like a Disney movie. As I walked into my argumentative writing class after our stairway confrontation, there sat the evil twins. Fabulous, I thought, an entire year in a class required for graduation with those two only seats away from me. For one of our early assignments, each student was to speak on a topic for 15 minutes. I picked sexual abuse and interviewed a girl who volunteered to tell me her story. I related her experience and ended the speech with information about where people could get help if this was happening to them. When I finished there was dead silence, then loud applause. After class Lisa and Brenda approached me and told me that they thought it was a really good speech. We were never what one might call close, but a certain respect grew between us.

I felt compassion for my former enemies as I moved closer into their world. Lisa and I walked home from school together one day. As we separated, she spoke with palpable envy as I turned toward my neighborhood. “That’s where you live?” It was an awkward moment. I knew where she lived, and it was the poorest neighborhood in the area. I had a similar incident with Brenda, who lived in the same subdivision as Lisa. I was visiting a friend near her home and decided it would be nice to see Brenda. I stopped by and her brother said she was out. The next day at school I mentioned that I’d come to see her. She panicked, blurting out, “Did you go inside?” I said no and the relief on her face was evident.

Brenda was one of the few girls in high school who kept her baby after getting pregnant. I remember her swollen teenage belly lumbering conspicuously down the hall. I felt terrible for her but shunned her because I didn’t know what to say. I wish I knew what happened to Brenda and Lisa.

Rich kids and Poor Kids at Michigan

As I moved from high school to college at Michigan, my experiences with race, class and culture continued to disturb and disappoint me. I was excited about the prospect of rushing a sorority. Then Duddy explained the segregated origins of the “Greek system” on campus. There were Black Greeks and White Greeks and very rarely did the twain meet. I thought then and still think that foolish racism, perpetuated by both sides, has maintained the separatism. The system, though a manifestation of racism, has acquired a life of its own, and no one seems interested in changing it. I did not rush.

The University was similar to high school in that I was usually the only Black person in my classes. One major difference was the fact that I met Blacks with money with a capital M. It’s embarrassing for me to admit, and a little saddening, that I had had no idea that America has concentrated pockets of extremely wealthy Black people. Freshman year, I met Terry from Shaker Heights, Ohio. That girl had money, money, money. Enough clothes for a small nation. Credit cards. A fancy car. She rushed without hesitation and was readily accepted. I found Terry fun but tough to get close to.

The author’s parents, Lemuel and Marian Johnson, in London in the late ’60s, when he joined the English department faculty.

Cynthia and Angela were more my speed. They taught me what it’s like to be Black at Michigan with no money. Cynthia and her four sisters grew up in Detroit with a single mother. Every one of those girls went to college. Cynthia, who had gone to Cass Technical High School, didn’t have problems with the academics, but the stress of holding down a job, and the culture shock of in-your-face affluence, would have undone a weaker person.

One night, several girls were getting ready for a party at the Law Quad as part of their pursuit for what they called “that all-important MRS degree.” Terry, Cynthia, my roommate Mariella and a few others had gathered in my room to strut and preen. I thought their scheme was stupid. I sat on my bed and watched them get gussied up, with dollar signs in their eyes for some handsome stranger. When they were ready to make their grand exit, they looked like they’d stepped out of the pages of Vogue. Everyone, that is, except Cynthia. Her outfit made me look away.

Mariella was wealthy now but had spent some of her childhood poor. She found Cynthia something dressier from our closet. The spectacle was only made more awful, however, because Mariella was 5’2” tall and Cynthia nearly 6’. Cynthia went to the party in her own clothes, obviously underdressed and underclass. Ultimately, she withstood the pressures and humiliations, studied hard and secured her degree.

Angela was not so fortunate. She came from Inkster, Michigan, and her school had clearly not prepared her for the academic demands at an elite university. She hung in for a while but slowly started slipping away. By the second semester, clearly homesick and experiencing devastating culture shock, she began returning to Inkster on more and more weekends. Then she started to miss classes. Next I heard she was hanging around with a man near his 60s who was giving her crack. She didn’t disenroll; she simply vanished.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that there are quite a few “Angelas” at U-M. I’m not saying every or even most Black students who leave U-M abruptly have a substance abuse problem. I am saying that I saw a pattern of inner city Blacks vanishing from Michigan within the first year. Whether the pattern reflected culture shock, financial problems or an inability to build a bridge between their high school education and college is unclear. What was and is clear to me is that more needs to be done to retain and graduate such students.

White Girl Kim

Being poor is extremely tough at Michigan, but being poor and White adds another dimension to the alienation—invisibility. “White Girl Kim,” that’s what they called her in the ghetto, because she was the only White girl for miles. Kim had an alcoholic father who left her mother with five kids, the two oldest of whom were addicted to drugs. There is an unspoken assumption that all Whites at U-M have money. I watched Kim struggle against those stereotypes on a daily basis. “Why do you listen to hip hop?” (This is over a decade ago. Nowadays a White girl listening to hip-hop is no big deal; back then it was an oddity.) “Why do you hang around Black guys?” These were questions wealthy White men felt they had the right to ask her in a contemptuous tone—even if they barely knew her. She had a sharp tongue and sliced up a few frat boys who assumed it was their God-given right to interrogate her while angling for a date while they were at it.

I worked part-time and Kim a full 40-hour week at a retail store near campus. When she could, she also went to school full time, drinking coffee constantly, never getting enough sleep and putting more care into her coursework than anyone else I ever met at college. Some semester, she would get part way through her classes, then her money would run out and she’d have to drop out. She kept going to class, though, for the love of learning, even when she’d get no course credit. I remember days she would fly down the steps of the store, run into the bathroom and start sobbing. “It’s just all the begging, Yma.” She had managed to hold those tears all the way from the financial aid office, across the Diag and through the store. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to have someone pay all of our expenses can’t imagine what poorer students go through. People with money pursue their education. The poor fight for it. That is one of the many things I learned at Michigan.

Home, Bittersweet Home

Every Black person in America—and other Americans, too—should spend at least one month in a place where the beggars, the garbage men, the doctors and the president are Black. Knowing only life in America can give us an extremely narrow context within which to interpret what it means to be Black. A disproportionate number of Blacks live in poverty in the United States, but being in Sierra Leone smashes to pieces the framework in which Blacks are identified with poverty and opens up a more complicated vista.

The author’s father in Sierra Leone on Africa’s West Coast.

Although I’ve always felt a sense of liberation when visiting Sierra Leone, my sense of otherness tracked me across the ocean. I’ve gone there at the ages of 2, 9, 11, 16 and 26. The first two trips I was blissfully ignorant of the racial, class and tribal dynamics in my parents’ homeland. Basic pleasures can make a child feel included: I enjoyed copious quantities of my favorite foods, and my relatives embraced me unconditionally. But one day, when I was 11, I visited a maternal aunt’s house in Hastings, a village near Freetown. A little girl standing across the street nudged her friend and said in Krio, “Look the whet man pickin” (Look at the White man’s child). I’ll never forget the two shabbily dressed children pointing through the red heat and dust at me in my new Western-style clothes.

There is a maddening sense of disconnection when I try to gain a deeper understanding of the intricacies of Sierra Leone culture and Freetown life as my parents experienced it growing up. While writing this piece, I called an uncle to check my chronology of key events in Sierra Leonean history. Then I read him something about his homeland that I thought I had learned from my father and from his conversations with other relatives.

As I read to my uncle, he objected again and again. Ultimately, he advised, “Stick to your personal experience,” adding that not only I but also his own children “don’t know anything [about Freetown] because you didn’t live there.” It was like being slapped in the face.

The vignette that particularly offended my uncle dealt with the relationship between Creoles and “up country” people, also known as “Unto Whoms.” One of my father and uncle’s teachers took great delight in tormenting students from the interior, reminding them each morning that they were unworthy and unwelcome. After singling out those with non-Creole last names—that is, their family names were African and not English—he’d call them to the front of the class one by one and say, “Repeat after me, ‘I have come to rub shoulders with my betters.’”

My uncle asked me, “Do you know what Unto Whoms means?” I admitted that I didn’t. He explained that the term referred to their lack of westernization and the fact that they were not Christians. It was the Creoles’ derisive play on biblical phrases like “Unto whom alone the earth was given, and no stranger passed among them” in the Book of Job. My uncle took exception to my including the story because, he said, the teacher’s attitude was not representative of most Creoles. “That’s not something we’re proud of,” he continued, saying that while Creoles may have felt superior to “up country” villagers, many traveled to the interior on missionary expeditions, took “up country” children into their care and gave them access to opportunities they might not have had otherwise.

My latest trip to Sierra Leone was a few years ago, when I was 26. For the first time, I noticed the Lebanese. They had, of course, been there all along, having begun immigrating to Sierra Leone in the late 1800s. From humble beginnings as merchants trading seashells along the coast they have become prominent players in the country’s diamond trade. Creole and Lebanese social circles are such that in all my trips to Sierra Leone, I’ve never spoken with a single Lebanese. They were like ghosts to me. They own businesses in the shopping district, which is the only area of Freetown I have ever seen them in, but when the stores close, they vanish into the dusk.

This trip was also the first time I became more aware of my social class within Sierra Leone society. My hairstyle complicated matters. At the time I wore a short Afro, both a political statement and financial necessity. (Ask any Black woman who straightens her hair how much it costs to do so every six weeks with a weekly “styling” to maintain it. A lot.) As it happened, Freetown prostitutes at the time were wearing their hair in an Afro. So here I was with the hairdo of a hooker, expensive American clothes and an upper-class last name.

Then, about two weeks into my visit, I discovered that shorts were considered borderline indecent. I also smoked then, adding to my decadent look. People in the streets, especially women, sized me up with murderous glances. One man actually shouted, “How e go walk the streets looking so when people are starving?”

I didn’t understand this conservative culture that was supposed to be my own. People I barely knew asked me for money I didn’t have. Others asked me to leave clothes from my wardrobe for them when I returned to the States. It was extremely uncomfortable to face daily the longing and envy in their eyes. Beggars filled the streets, some hideously deformed; others, thin and dirty, stretched toward me in blackened rags. If I gave them nothing, my comparative affluence was like spitting in their face. How could I explain to them that back home I was struggling myself, that I couldn’t afford such a trip, that my parents paid for it? I honored some requests for gifts, but in retrospect I feel I should have been more generous.

Even though I’ll never be at home in Sierra Leone, it is still a healing place for me, far from the soul-slaying realities of what it can mean to be Black in America. As my father used to say, “Going back clears away the noise of American society.” I wept on the ferry ride to the airport. I felt as though I was leaving part of myself behind.

Puerto Rico: No Utopia, Yet Gloriful

I moved to Puerto Rico one year after that last trip to Freetown. I had no friends, no home, limited funds and spoke very little Spanish. I was naively searching for some sort of racial utopia. I found no such thing. Puerto Ricans look down on the Dominicans. The Dominicans look down on the Haitians. I’m not sure whom the Haitians scapegoat but, people being what they are, I’m sure they’ve cooked up someone to oppress, even if it’s only other Haitians.

Being dark-skinned was not an asset in Puerto Rico; nevertheless, I never feared that a gang of Puerto Ricans might beat up someone on the basis of their victim’s darker complexion. I worked for a newspaper there and never saw an article on racial attacks or heard about any in the five years I lived there.

The Puerto Rican ethnic mix of Taino Indian, African and Spanish adds a layer of complexity to race relations. If somebody light-skinned is being racist, there’s the standard comeback: “Y donde está tu abuela?” (And where is your grandmother?) It’s nearly impossible to find a Puerto Rican without a Black relative, and that changes the social dynamics of race and color.

Although I didn’t find a utopia, I did find traces of my ancestors. Slaves from Sierra Leone were brought to Puerto Rico, and their descendants have remained where they landed, on the coast in Loiza and Piñones. Red rice looks and tastes quite a bit like Jolof rice, a Sierra Leonean dish. I saw in the darker-skinned Puerto Ricans from the coast an unadulterated “Africanness.” They looked like my relatives from “home.”

I returned from Puerto Rico with a daughter who embodies the racial harmony that I’ve been searching for. Her father is a man of Polish and German descent who was adopted by Puerto Ricans and speaks English with such a heavy accent that it is sometimes difficult for mainlanders to understand him. Her name, Shechinah, means “the Glory of God” in Hebrew. Her ancestry crisscrosses oceans like the roots of the flowery flame tree, which grows in Sierra Leone and in Puerto Rico. I don’t expect to live to see a harmonious blend of races in the world. We still have too much hate for that. But I can have a small sliver of that harmony every day in Shechinah, the Glory of God.