The Atlantic Sound
Caryl Phillips
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0375701036
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this fascinating inquiry into the African Diaspora, Caryl Phillips embarks on a soul-wrenching journey to the three major ports of the transatlantic slave trade.
Juxtaposing stories of the past with his own present-day experiences, Phillips combines his remarkable skills as a travel essayist with an astute understanding of history. From an West African businessman's interactions with white Methodists in nineteenth-century Liverpool to an eighteenth-century African minister's complicity in the selling of slaves to a fearless white judge's crusade for racial justice in 1940s Charleston, South Carolina, Phillips reveals the global the impact of being uprooted from one's home through resonant, powerful narratives.
December 1950, Henry Briggs, a thirty-four-year-old black Navy veteran and father of five children, filed a complaint in Clarendon County against the chairman of the district's board of education, Roderick Elliot, and other members of the board of trustees. He did so with the backing of the NAACP, and the complaint was soon known as Briggs v. Elliot. The issue was the legitimacy of offering ‘separate but equal' education, and if it was possible for this practice to exist without it being
don't look for difference.' John simply stared at this man, who stared back at John as though urging his passenger to absolve him of past sins. The man looked and spoke as though the weary memory of slave ships was lodged in his soul. A puzzled John quickly reached into his pocket and withdrew a coin, which he held out hopefully. But the carriage driver, lost as he was in his own thoughts, did not notice that payment had been proffered. He continued to stare into the middle distance and then, as
a state of decline. I decide to take a taxi from the train station to my hotel, although I suspect that it is not very far. This is confirmed as I slide into the back seat of the cab and announce my destination. The taxi driver spins around in his seat and looks at me in disbelief. ‘Something wrong with your legs, whack?' The driver starts to laugh, his shoulders shaking as though independent of the rest of his body. And then he turns back round and begins to drive off. I look in his rear-view
the hand of the five-year-old boy who has on a green jacket with a matching bow tie. As we walk along, it occurs to me that I have been welcomed into Africa by a family. There is something surprisingly reassuring about this. Some weeks earlier I had telephoned Mansour from London. This involved calling a neighbour, and letting him know that this was an overseas call and that I wished to speak to Mansour. I was then informed that I must call back five minutes later. I imagined the neighbour
and he certainly exhibits the chief characteristic of such people. He wishes to talk to somebody from the old world. The subject is almost irrelevant, he simply wishes to talk. However, although Dr Robert Lee may have stayed on, he has not stayed on past ‘his time'. He seems remarkably attuned to contemporary events and ideas, and I realize that I have seldom met anybody less ‘fossilized' than Dr Lee. ‘You see, back in the States they can call me a nigger all they like, but nobody can insult me