Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route

Slavery shattered lives, erased personal histories, and “made the past a mystery” (14). This realization conflicts with what Hartman hoped to find through her journey to Ghana: that “the past was a country to which I could return” (15). Hartman, an African American woman, returns to the home of her ancestors, but she finds that she is a stranger to a world that should be her home.

More than 700,000 enslaved Black people passed through Africa’s coastal ports during the era of slavery from the 16th to the 19th century. They were usually captured by warrior tribes overseen by the aristocratic elite. They were not family or kin to those who enslaved them, and they remained strangers in the white world to which they were taken to be used for labor.

The experience of being a stranger is endemic to slavery, Hartman argues. No one knows her in Ghana. Traces of her family and its history were erased long ago when the first ancestors were seized, removed from their villages, and marched to the sea.

Hartman speaks of her parents and their memories, which she hopes will establish bridges to the past; however, her mother remembers no further back than a grandmother who recalled the day in 1865 when a Union soldier rode to the farm and told her she was free.