A Lesson from the Coconut
July 25 through August 3, 2019 Assin, Ghana
“Bernard, did you see that?” Mark yelled, excitedly coming toward me. “No,” I replied, with a small amount of sweat on my forehead and arms as we were preparing to make our way down to the Ancestor’s River for the First Returners. I was standing, facing the direction heading toward the river when I heard a very loud thumping sound behind me! I was standing in front of a coconut tree, when a coconut shell covering fell to the ground, missing hitting me in the head by less than two feet. This tree stands between twenty-five to fifty feet tall.
Three of the local police who were coming up from the river witnessed the event. As they passed us by one of them said with a very deep voice: “Just a coconut.” At that moment, Mark rushed up to see if I was okay and to take a picture. “Bernard, you should have seen how fast it came down!” I was in a small state of shock when I turned to look at the shell covering. “Wow! . . . the ancestors are truly watching over me!” I felt it in my spirit and then said it aloud!
Next, we made our way down to the river. I knelt with a spirit of reverence and an attitude instantly transformed into humility and gratitude. I proceed to face my head and my face. I at once felt my spirit renewed; I was being reborn. “You must be born of water and of spirit, you must be reborn,” Jesus said to Nicodemus (John 3).
As my friend Gary Henderson and I stood near the river, our foreheads touching each other (a way that some African communal men come together to pray and to honor the ancestors) with conscious awareness that we were standing on sacred and hollow grounds. This was the last river where thousands . . . upon thousands . . . upon thousands . . . of our ancestors were able to take their last bath before walking hundreds of miles to be enslaved in dungeons at the Cape Coastal Fort and the Elmina Fort. I felt renewed, reborn, cleansed! In a word, transformed!
After leaving the river, my group and I moved back to a market area before going to the parade of tribal Kings and their entourage. It was then that I saw a little boy around eleven years of age. Our eyes locked. He wanted money, yes, but our eye conversation went deeper. It wordlessly said more than him asking me for money. We could not stop looking at each other, deep into each other’s eyes, seemingly into the depths of our souls. It was an emotional connection, spiritual in its own sphere. Later, it occurred to me that he was me when I was eleven! In other words, I saw myself backwards; he saw himself forward. We smiled at each other in that we knew each other.
Next, as I was walking toward the festival, an older man, perhaps around my age, comes toward me with a wide grin and openly expressive eyes. Then he exclaimed with open excitement to me: “I know you! I—know—you! You look like my cousin.” I stood there in utter shock and gleeful surprise. Then, he comes into my personal space and he hugged me and I hugged him back, smiling. “I must go call him!!” he shouted with a sense of joy in his voice, in his eyes. He begins to weep! I had no words and I felt in my heart and in my spirit that I was, indeed, home.
THE QUESTION:
What has this travel home meant to me in some broader points? (More of the actual experiences are hand written in my journal. I may draw from those pages during this short essay.) What discovered me, anew?
THE LESSON:
First: The Epiphany! Awareness, I am covered!
The lesson from the coconut awakened within me a new freshness of humility. When the sound of the coconut hit the ground, I reacted as though nothing had happened. Mark, in utter amazement, rushed to me: “Bernard, did you see it?” “No!” “Man, you should have seen how fast it was coming down!” Then four police or military soldiers were passing by at the same time exclaimed in a low baritone voice: “just a coconut,” with no energetic affect like Mark’s excitement. I was covered and protected—by the spirit of the ancestors!
When I walked down to the Ancestors River, baptized myself in the last river our ancestors were allowed to take a bath in before walking to the camps at the dungeons in Elmina and Cape Forts, it began to occur to me— “the ancestors were watching over me,” I felt and thought. At that moment, a deep humbling feeling rushed over me. Gary and I came to each other and placed our hands on each other’s shoulders with our foreheads touching; and, we began to pray and praise God and our ancestors for the moment.
I realized at that moment that they were calling me to something deeper; inspiring me to reach deeper inside myself and offer this healing experience to others. I felt deep in my spirit and heard the spirit of the ancestors say to me, that I must return to the USA and offer and teach and represent their legacy in the art of pastoral psychotherapy. I understood, humbly speaking, that I was simply an extension of my ancestors on a foreign soil and must return and honor their suffering. With humility (or Humbly), I am summoned to be a healer and a teacher of human beings upon my return home, by my ancestors! I am summoned--to remain open in my heart and in my spirit and to keep learning—by my ancestors!
Second: The blessing—Gratitude! I am home, and unapologetically black!
On 31 July 2019, it was Holsey’s birthday. He would have been 112-years-old. He died when I was 11-years-old, March 19, 1967, (if you write one date in military style you need to write them all in military style, be consistent.) at the age of 59. I still miss him. He was my adopted father and a black man in America who served in WWII and was black, unapologetically. He did not like white people, at all! That morning, on his birthday, 31 July, in my journal I wrote:
“Daddy, as I pen this prayer of gratitude for your spirit that lives
in me and through me, on the soil where millions of our people were
treated ‘less than’ human, I simply say, thanks!” P.21
Gratitude is refreshing! I did not get hit in the head by the coconut!! If I had, my trip would have been completely different. Again, when one brother came down to the river and walked into the water up to his knees, bowed and begin to wash his face, I felt grateful to be able to do the same and to bear witness to his sense of freedom and connection, too, with the ancestors.
This new gratitude that I began to experience was first toward myself! I gave myself permission to come on this trip, home, to the Motherland! I was grateful while standing both in and near the river, listening to its moving current. The group journeyed back up to the open area to witness the observation of the Panafest and the Emancipation Celebration, the tribunal parade of the Kings, their court and their entourage. It was gratitude that I experienced to be able to see true royalty, a proud people parading in the gathering space with dignity and grace! My African family moved in rhythm and in style to the beating drums!
In the West, Americans are usually thankful for material possessions, comfortable homes and the ability to earn economic capital. Westerners are grateful to experience high technology and a sense of freedom to go here and there with relative ease. White Americans relish in their position of power and, both consciously and unconsciously, take delight in the spirit of entitlement and exceptionalism. There is an external, surface level display of gratefulness with no real sense of depth or inner grit. It’s like witnessing white Americans wearing a façade-unapologetically.
From the moment that we set foot on the soil, everyone’s sense of being so grateful that we were home remains a central hallmark of this trip. There were no facades. The depth of their sincere spirits could be seen in their eyes, their smiles, the extending of their hands to shake your hand. It was inner joy. This was expressed even by Solomon (a worker at the hotel where we lived): “We can never earn enough to save; whatever I make, I must pay rent, buy food and other home needs.” With a touch of sadness in his voice, Solomon maintains a sense of gratitude.
I am grateful to my long-term friend, Gary Henderson, who asked me in January 2019 if I wanted to travel with him and a small group of wonderful people to Ghana. I, without hesitation, said yes! And a year later, the world has the COVID—19 pandemic. I am grateful to Gary’s wonderful wife, Gwen.
Gwen was always present with a warm spirit and gracious smile and energizing spirit. As I tried not to be a therapist, she squeezed some of clinical expressions from me: “auntie, I feel excited for you that you can feel your disappointment, but I do not take any pleasure in you having to feel it,” I said in one story telling moment. One day, Gwen opened one of her several bags and had travel gifts for each of us. She has made a wonderful fragranced body moisturizer for us. I used mine bottle very slowly, it would be the only one we would get!
Gloria was our quiet and spiritually attuned mother of the group. She would listen to each of us with care and compassion. When I shared a personal story with her about being sexually molested the day after my dad died (age 11, 6th grade), Gloria response was warmly: “and look where God has brought you from today!”
Mark was our physical fitness pro and quietly insightful and observant as I expressed at the beginning of this essay. When Mark sat on the “Punishment Rock,” (a stone where our ancestors were made to sit on a 45-degree angle, their hands behind their backs and feet off the ground, and they could NOT move; if so, they would either be killed or severely punished) he did not move from the position. The guide asked: “Are you an athlete?” “I am a professional fitness trainer,” he replied, smiling. At dinner one evening, Mark expressed perhaps the more sensitive and profound statement: “when in the Female Dungeons[1], I could not help but to think about the women’s menstrual cycles.” Wow, I thought, and I will say more about this later.
Ofia was perhaps the most focused and in tune with our every move and stop. She was very clear about what she was and was not going to do and held to her plan to the letter. “Gary, don’t take my picture,” she would say lovingly and firmly. Gary did not take her picture. She was well versed and always interested in learning more as we moved from place to place on our tour. I enjoyed her quiet confidence and gentle spirit.
Vesta was a gracious and tireless guide. She made our experience easy and fun. When she told me what not to do, I occasionally did the opposite, not intentionally but rather because my Ghanaian brothers and sisters knew the lay of the land. When we visited the Kwame Nkruman Mausoleum, for instance, she said, “Bernard, just keep walking because they are going to try to sell you something.” I thought, ‘no big deal,’ to myself. As soon as we stepped out of the van, “brother, I made this, take a look, I can make for you!” I saw the red, black and green risk bans they had me. Before I knew it, I had purchased 25 wrist-bands. “See Bernard, I told you.” It was a great laugh once we got back on the van. Whatever we needed, Vesta and Gary made it happen.
We worshipped together, ate our meals together, walked together, engaged in our group reflective sessions together, were openly vulnerable together with respect to our inner thoughts and feelings. We rode across regions to visit various significant landmarks and sites. There is gratitude for new relationships, while the sharing of a wonderful experience together is, indeed, one of the great gifts from this journey.
Third: The Validation: I am a flawed human being; and, I am okay!
After I thought through and, many days later, reflected on how close the coconut had come to hitting me in the head, I realized, as I have expressed earlier, that this could have been a very different experience and trip for me. Flawed in this context means that I am fully a human being! Flawed in this context also means that I fully embraced my “self-fact” that I am endowed with both virtues and flaws mutually and that they belong to me, and I am a child of the Transcendent and the Ancestors, and, that I am okay! And, nothing else is required!
Not only the recognition of this “new self-fact” (Howard Thurman), that I am flawed and have always known this intellectually, but now, an emotional and a spiritual embracing of this self-fact. In retrospect, from that moment onward, I felt so confident that I was not alone. There was a new freedom given birth within me. I was consciously aware that a spiritual force was covering me, and was within me, unlike any I had felt in a long time before that moment of the resounding echoes of the coconut hitting the ground!
I knew that the seven of us were traveling together and engaged in all of the activities together; however, this inner awareness was a powerful assurance that the Eternal, and all of those ancestral spirits that had traveled through and live in this land, were making their presence known.
I cannot remember if it were before this experience or afterwards that I purchased a Sankofa neckless (The bird turns around and retrieves an egg while moving forward simultaneously—translated; it’s okay to return for what has been left behind while moving ahead at the same time). I do remember, however, that I began touching it with a sense of grace and humility as a gentle reminder that the ancestors are always with me on my journey.
Finally: The Movement: I am in a more authentic place of self-acceptance.
The movement into a new level of consciousness with respect to accepting all of myself, as I am, with my virtues and my flaws mutually is a new, and different, place for me. As I walked the streets, in the countryside of Tamale, the visit to Crocodile Pond and the Pikworo Slave Camp, as well as in the city of Accra, I began to feel a deeper sense of pride of being a Black man--unapologetically. I began to feel a sense of ‘wholeness,’ ‘completeness’ that was beyond words.
Self-acceptance, as used in this essay, is the conscious awareness of being in relationship with one’s self as human being that lives in and with the God-given virtues and flaws that comes with being a human. The acceptance is also related to one recognizing that as a human being one has the spiritual capacity to be inspired by the Eternal to embrace one’s limitations as well as one’s strengths without judgment in a self-condemning way or with a narcissistic arrogance to think of one’s self more highly than what is actually honest.
Acceptance of one’s self, then, also is a movement that happens from within as a result of existential and spiritual experiences that grant one the emotional and psychological permission to examine more of his/her ‘shadow’ side with an ongoing attitude of humility and interest. This requires being open to one’s own vulnerabilities, by an ongoing exploration of the self and engaging in a process of critical self-reflection, with the hope that one’s examination of his or her self-facts will be a means for spiritual, relational, and emotional transformation.
As I write this, I am aware that this process is difficult and not for the faint of heart. For those who are able to do it, however, there is a universal and divine call to join in with others and be of help in teaching them how to do what is already innately within them. Howard Thurman, in his sermon entitled Growing in Love of God, says that we must move beyond living our lives “peeking out and under” being afraid of being seen to a place where we can feel, “completely secure and completely vulnerable” (The Living Wisdom of Howard Thurman, 2010).
By way of conclusion, this is the essence of self-acceptance. It is a relational balance between one’s inner darkness and one’s inner light; between “the temporal and the eternal, the finite and the infinite, necessity and possibility” (Soren Kierkegaard).
The Lesson from the Coconut was a 10-day odyssey for me. I learned more about myself in those days than I could have ever dreamed up! The fellowship, not only that of those with whom I had the pure pleasure and delight of traveling beside, but also those with whom I encountered on the streets, in the hotels, in the cape forts (the living and the dead), the shopping markets, the night clubs, the church service, the Panafest night march and celebration, in the WEB Dubois Center and the Kwame Nkruman Mausoleum, the parade of the Kings and their entourages; and, even the landing at the airport upon our arrival and hearing a brother in his baritone voice say the word with pride: AFRICA!!
And, for the most memorable words coming from her heart with expressed sincerity and warmth as she—an official hospitality hostess—looked directly into my eyes and said: “Welcome home, it is good to see you!”
[1] The Elmina Fort and the Female and Male Dungeons: To this very day, these dungeons carry the smell that tortured human beings were there. The bodily fluids of urine, feces, vomit, and in the Female Dungeon, menstrual cycle blood was packed under our feet. The gut wrenching scent in the Female Dungeon is stronger than it is in the Male Dungeon—no menstrual cycle. These ancestors were chained from their necks to their angles and did not speak the same language or dialect. They were chained in blocks of five and if one had to relieve herself or himself, they would have to communicate, if they could, with everyone enchained with them to move over to the trenches dug in the middle of the dirt floor or around the walls. If they could not make it, they would have to relieve themselves where they stood. It is estimated that there are several hundred feet of human waste and blood, covered now only by limestone.