The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent at least since the early nineteenth century when 3 000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.
When my grandfather died I started adopting some of his accents to sort of remind myself of him. A homage. He was a war hero and he was really great with his hands.
