Let’s begin with a door, a threshold, which shackled Africans stepped through as part of the process and journey of losing one’s freedom, one’s family, one’s language, one’s religion, one’s culture, one’s community, one’s nation, one’s native land, one’s home, and one’s rights and freedom—what Zora Neale Hurston so eloquently and concisely, and always so rightly, summed up as “the first leg of their journey from humanity to cattle.”1 The literal and figurative Door of No Return marks the end of the known and the beginning of the unknown.
Oluale Kossola’s oral testimony is riven by this threshold, of being betwixt and between, never wholly belonging to one or the other, “Americky soil” or the “Aficca soil” of memory that he longs for and imagines a way of returning to; giving his life’s narrative to Zora Neale Hurston, he hopes, will provide a form of homecoming: “I want tellee...
