Opinion: I'm not sure where my ancestors were from. But I know where I belong.
The arts installation stood at the end of Cadillac Square Park during a rally to honor National Immigrants Month. Its greatest feature was a big red heart at its center.
That June 9 celebration, sponsored by FWD.us and Global Detroit in honor our of city's many cultures, offered boxes of flag stickers from the world's countries. They asked attendees to grab their country and paste it onto that huge heart.
These moments once were difficult for me, and millions like me, whose only known country is America. As involuntary immigrants, my ancestors were torn from other countries and brought here to build it without credit, to serve it without freedom and to fight for it even as it fought back as hard as some other enemies.
That beautiful lineage that so many of my white friends and co-workers recite, sometimes back to the 1600s, was something I knew I might never have.
But something happened 13 years ago that changed my life and soothed my heart.
I was part of a U.S. delegation to the Third World Festival of Black Arts and Cultures in Dakar, Senegal in 2010. The delegation included African-American mayors of small cities across the country who met in a United Nations-type setting with mayors of small African cities. After this historic summit, we broke off into small groups and pairs to chat. It was no surprise that almost everyone spoke English.
Amidst all that pomp and color and culture and history, I sat at a small table with a lump in my throat. It was, once again, one of those moments throughout my life where I lamented not knowing where I was from.
A small man in a beautiful hat came and sat across from me.
"What is it, child?" he asked me.
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I recalled how I'd finally convinced my grandfather, Willie Bennie Pitt, to tell me about his ancestors, something he had refused to do for years. I was a young reporter at The Washington Post, and he was my hardest interview. He went back three generations to an enslaved man named Bailum with a wife named Jane. And then he was done and shooed me away like a fly.
But I was a journalist, so a few weeks later, I went to the N.C. State Archives in Raleigh, N.C., approached a kind, elderly, white woman and told her I was searching for my great-great-grandfather.
She smiled uncomfortably and said, “Oh!”
“He will probably be in some tax records or property records," I offered.
“Oh,” she said again, her voice an octave lower, her eyes downcast.
She pointed out death certificates, census records and tax records.
It didn’t take long to find a death certificate for Bailum Pitt with a reference number to the records of a W.S. Pitt, an attorney from more than a hundred years before.
I looked up the attorney's will and found my great-great-grandfather, the property of one W. S. Pitt.
Years later, I looked at this small, ebony man with kind eyes, sitting at a table in Dakar and said:
"That is as far back as I have been able to go. So I don't know where I belong."
He reached out his hands to me, hovered them on either side of my face, touching my soul, but not my skin, and said:
"My sister, you belong to all of us."
I wept.
I thanked him.
And from that moment to this, I have proclaimed Senegal as the birthplace of my culture, as the place where it began before the pain and suffering that came after. So at the rally in Cadillac Square Park, I proudly walked up and planted a flag on that big red heart that said Senegal.
It will hold the place for the origin I still seek, and one day hope to find.
Rochelle Riley, a former Free Press columnist, is director of arts and culture for the City of Detroit.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Opinion: Immigrant celebration hard for descendants of enslaved people
