This Be the Place: A Castle With a Door of No Return

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

In the summer of 2023, I departed for Ghana on my first trip to Africa. The journey had very personal roots. It was tied to genealogical research for my third poetry collection, which was based on my family’s history of enslavement in the US. Specifically, the trip was inspired by a letter in plantation archives revealing that a group of Black Hairstons, my maternal ancestors, was freed and assisted in emigrating to West Africa under the auspices of the American Colonization Society in the early 1800s. I was familiar with the fact that 19th-century African-American emigres in search of a life free of American racism didn’t always find their dreamed-of reward after emancipation. Historical newspapers and recolonization records are rife with doomed voyages and disillusioned landings on foreign soil. In addition to malaria, recent immigrants faced the harsh reality of anyone who has fled or been dragged in chains from their native land: assimilate or perish as the inescapable conundrum of survival. Still, I envisioned my pilgrimage to Ghana as a moment of healing—a seamless coming together of past and present on African shores.

The highlight of my trip was touring one of the famed slave castles where traders corralled captive Africans and prepared them for the transatlantic journey to their final destinations. During the height of the slave trade, these coastal fortresses served a dual purpose: the lower levels held dark, crowded cells for the newly captured, while the upper floors housed the European officers who oversaw the trade. The separation between the brutal conditions below and the relative comfort above was stark and deliberate.

The castle I visited sat on the shores of Cape Coast, in the humble fishing village of Elmina, about a four-hour drive from Accra. From a distance, it appeared almost idyllic: a terra cotta-roofed vision of Mediterranean architecture, framed by ocean views and palm trees. Its whitewashed facade gleamed in the sun, camouflaging the sinister history behind its walls.

Outside, tourists were greeted by men, women, and children selling African trinkets, paintings, and traditional hand instruments. The sales pitches were insistent but not aggressive. My husband and I promised the children we’d catch them on the way out, bypassing the pop-up marketplace to reach the entrance gate and pay for our tour. Our group was promptly assigned a guide, and together we stepped back through history to learn how captive men, women, and children were housed, fed, and punished for resisting their captivity.

As I paced the halls of Elmina, I was reminded that this was a journey of blood ties. Built by the Portuguese in 1482 as a mining fort, Elmina Castle earned the title castle long before it became a prison for the enslaved. A recent DNA test revealed that 28 percent of my ancestry traces back to Mali, with additional markers of Portuguese heritage. During an earlier meeting in Ghana, a cultural minister mentioned that captives were often marched from Mali down to the Cape Coast for export, making it quite possible that some of my ancestors had taken that route. I let my fingers trail along the cool stone walls, as if touch might convey the sorrow of those who had once passed through, newly torn from their freedom.

Our guide led us into a holding cell and, immediately after we filed in, slammed the wrought iron door shut, plunging us into complete darkness. It was done for dramatic effect—and it worked. Though our group numbered only 10, we felt disoriented and stranded in the few seconds before we grasped what was happening. When the guide resumed his monologue, we learned that these roughly hewn stone cells had once held three to four times as many people. Bodies were crammed together, pressed chest to back, shoulder to shoulder—a standing preview of what awaited the captives in the bowels of a slave ship, where they would be laid down and packed even tighter for the transatlantic crossing.

While in Ghana, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ghanian writer Bisi Adjapon, whose novel Daughter in Exile (2023) addresses the slave castles. During our conversation, she elaborated on her cultural point of view:

Those who live on the continent [of Africa] take these places for granted. Ghanians don’t like to confront, but to forget and move on. I know African Americans are very upset to see people playing soccer around the castle. This is where my ancestors came through and died and here you are playing soccer! When someone dies here, after the church service and funeral burial, there is a reception a few hours later during which people actually celebrate the life and they dance around the person’s picture. The Western way of mourning is very different from Ghanaians’. Maybe we need to be more sensitive to the African Americans. It doesn’t mean we don’t care; it just means we’ve moved on.

I see moving on as a subjective process—and, in the case of slavery, one intimately tied to land. For me, the slave castles marked an ancestral beginning. My transatlantic flight echoed a reverse Middle Passage: the journey my African ancestors once dreamed of but never lived to make after arriving on American shores. Every castle along Africa’s coastline contained a “door of no return,” an aperture leading to ships rigged for the six-week voyage away from village, family, tradition, and history. My return to Africa brought together a narrative trilogy: those who stayed, those who were taken, and those coerced into returning during the 19th-century colonization project that used Black bodies to sustain American racism abroad.

Adjapon’s words about the cultural dissonance between Africans and African Americans resonated across a wide divide. I noticed the tolerant patience some Ghanaians extended toward my interest in the origins of slavery. While slavery may have begun in Africa—with various ethnic groups enslaving captives from regional conflicts—American slavery, from 1619 to 1865, unfolded on US soil. Those 246 years—from slave castles, through the Middle Passage, to plantations—were my history. The feelings I carried, shared by others who had also come to reflect on this past, stemmed from an ancestral inheritance rooted in a common American soil—our generational home. And yet, standing on Ghanaian ground, I couldn’t forget that my “home” in the US, seven generations deep, was still a 10-hour flight away. Filtered through the visceral experience of the slave castle, my modern ancestral home felt as real and inescapable as ever, even as Africa, my second home, began to lay its claim to my heart.