Still, she felt that I needed a Black male presence in my life. Mom was tough, much larger than her five-foot-one-inch frame. Her first husband, Jack Wright, was a drinker, unreliable in the way that drinkers can be, and she divorced him in 1967, when I was two, raising Myriam and me on her own, working menial jobs to pay the bills. Virginia, gave birth to two biracial kids, my older sister, Myriam, and me. bride of an African American soldier, and, in the years before Loving v.
The eldest of three children of French Jewish parents, in her youth she had survived the Nazi occupation of Paris. Right up to her death, six years ago, at the age of eighty-five, she sustained an improbable sort of idealism-a wholehearted aspiration for equality, regardless of race, gender, or class, which was underpinned by a near-providential belief in basic human goodness, despite her own experiences. Until I was sixteen, I believed that, on my father’s side, I was descended from the enslaved people who had crossed the Atlantic in chains, perhaps forced onto ships in Dahomean waters. Aspects of African American culture emerged from West African traditions-music and dance, culinary practices and religious beliefs, notably vodun, what we call voodoo in the United States. Those sold off resisted the spiritual death that could accompany enslavement, striving to retain some tie to their past. Though Dahomey was smaller than New Jersey, with a population of three hundred and fifty thousand by some estimates, three-quarters that of Staten Island’s today, it is believed that about fifteen per cent of all the slaves sent to the Americas departed from this stretch of coast-nearly two million women, men, and children. Anyone not Dahomean was either a vassal, a victim, or a captive to be sold to European trading companies, which had established barracoons by the sea. During months-long campaigns, their army, which featured a corps of women warriors who served as shock troops, overran towns and villages, horrifically murdering some people as a tactic to get others to submit. From around 1724 until the eighteen-sixties, when the last slave ships heading for the Americas set out from these shores, the kings of Dahomey used terror and brutality to supply human chattel to the triangular trade. The kingdom of Dahomey, at its peak, dominated the sliver of West Africa known as the Slave Coast.