The Gullah people believe Birth sometimes brings with it unique spiritual powers. So Gullah people are always on the look out to discern the divine character of their children. One such distant daughter I know was born a ways apart from the gathered group of usual observers, 150 rivers outside of the cloister. This child was born up North. Despite her parents having four year college degrees, they, thank God's mercy, had Georgia and South Carolina roots. These roots are storehouses of knowledge and nurture and mechanisms that work to build private purpose in every season--even if our understanding of the goals and processes are incomplete. These roots will twist around obstacles. These roots draw from the surrounding world. They look like tenacles of lightining about to strike. But these roots have turned out to be patient, nurtured in love. These roots are the spiritual sources that compose new riffs out of the very principles of creation. Miles Davis. Duke Ellington. Romare Bearden. Jacob Lawrence. Catlett. Mahila Jackson. Toni Morrison. And all them somebodies in your family.   

She was born a lantern child. But from the beginning, you might not know it. The ones with the light among the hardest to find. The Gullah, they always looking to see if their children be healers, teachers, priests, warriors, guides, griots, mediums, hearers, seers, cooks, smiths, planters, stewards, singers, dancers, royal musicians or any of the tens of categories unique to sustaining Gullah life and community. The roles they ascribe celebrate the spiritual dimensions of life. These roles are encoded in how the named ones live. For within the named ones is a truth that guides them through the world. When they speak and act, they reveal this world view. You can see their light shine.  Now, you think finding the light, spying the lantern children would be easy, but they's one of the hardest to find. We will telll you why.

One reason: the light swings in the storm, and it's hard to pin down. She was born the day after the night of a terrible storm, it snowed and rained across three states and the usually mundane eight hour interstate trip to Cleveland took twelve. It was an early snow, in October, too. The storm piled up danger and challenged the innocents, setting its soft center in a hard place. Booming, buzzing, it swirled everywherewithout stoping, weighing the branches, piercing the shadows, and threatening the balance of peace.

A Libra, with a ------ rising, and a ------ moon, her hairy head had already crowned before they rushed to wheel her into delivery, and I was barely gowned. With the locks of her hair swirling like the stone clouds above the west entrance to the National Cathedral, she emerged, chanting loudly, suddenly quieting after she was spot cleaned and given to me. AS I held her I noticed there was blood above her winking, recognizing eye.

Ten minutes later, with her still smiling in my arms, in trimphant secession, we returned down the hall to the room. She had her first meal, a quick lunch, and we all instantly fell asleep.

Of course, every family since (and before) Dr. Spock looks for the appropiate developmental features: the appearance of personality, the first steps, the baby's likes and dislikes. But psychology is about face and ego, biology and training, social advantages, money and power. The Gullah elders stress attention to the deeper markings. to the terrain of the inner path. Tucked into the shadows of a smile is a secret reflection of the Grand Scheme, invisible, impentrable in the thicket of life which is its shelter. Few elders are left who can guide themselves to the source the righteous claim, and acess the plan. Few can guide the very young in accord with these gifts, who know what to look for on the journey. Few can find it when its fresh and tend it.

The trick, the elders say, is finding the signs. Unfortunately, these signs are more like connections, a coming together of several different experiences or events, a set of responses that easily slide by without the right iterpretation. This complex of faith doesn't mesh well with the new mother's segments on cable talk shows. In fact it frightens mothers whose own spirits have been dulled in the lapping shallows of wet sands where they built their castles and unload mini-vans on their asphalt driveways. It makes them shudder that this mystic, nurtured spark might be more important than the right nursery school.

I was a kid when I first stumbled on my first witness of the true meaning and fufillment of this mystic view. I also become aware of how the two world views, 1) one of social paths (task achievement ), 2) one of spiritual connections (embedded security and rewards), were often confusingly assigned, and often referred to the same role.

My case in point was Mrs. Lucy Washington, the head cook at the black elementary school I attended. I loved food, and Mrs. Lucy Washington cooked food that I loved. Her school lunches were better than anybody's cooking that I knew in the whole world. My mother, never jealous or put off by my praise and devotion to Mrs. Washington's school lunch, was eager to hear as I got off of the bus, the epicurean delight of the day. My mother took an active interest in this high point, because she loved food, loved me, and believed in my judgement and taste. So empowered, together we shared, revered, and celebrated the gifts of Mrs. Lucy as I described her daily triumphs in the school cafeteria.

Mrs. Lucy Washington was a cook (worldview 1) because (or but) she could cook (worldview 2). She brought something special to the process that magically transformed the outcome. What she did with food was rooted in spiritual connections. Cooking was her gift, an irrevocable talent assigned with her fiber so as to be as natural as breathing, as commonplace as sunshine, except that every meal was Christmas Day.

For ten years, like it was the New York Stock Exchange, we students traded tuna salad, meatloaf, and fish sticks, but the currency were her breads--her fresh hot corn biscuits (with whole corn), peanut butter muffins, blueberry muffins, and cherry upside cake. Our trades had real value; two biscuits for an entree was a common measure, but we established a community around her food, and found something special in each other, a bond we shared, enriched by our differences.

The proverb about the whole village doesn't do her singular role, justice. Daily she brought us under her taeachings--and through her simple but extraordinary fare she taught non-verbal lessons about pride and love and faith and sharing, about community and caring and respect, and thanksgiving and excellence and gifts.

Of those who gathered at her welcome table, one of the Faust twins was killed in a New York shoot-out. Gerard spent time in Guam as a federal personnel specialist. Danny, her son, lived in Germany, is a professional tenor, and sings on all the world's stages, including Carniege Hall. But there are days when the single thought of a bite of her breads are enough to sustain me through the crush of a world that has left me straved for so much.

Back in the day, The newspapers and a few books seized a few of the birth signs and sensationalized them. They touted the birth of the veils and the seventh sons, invoked their births with curiousity, ridicule, and fear. The caul, a thin opaque membrance film found on the face of rare newborns, was called a veil and was an easy physical target as were the seventh sons, by birth assigned to a supposedly lucky number. The accounts of these cases hinted at dark powers assumed with these conditions. The raised the idea of a confused "mumbo-jumbo" that could have tragic consequences if left unmonitored, or approached without caution. Roots, blood sacrafices, dervishes, spirit possession were names given for acts taken out of context. Yet the accounts leave much incomplete. Only think of Nelson Mandela, born with no veil, in a South African village near Umtata in the Transkei, a lawyer who after 28 years of imprisonment became the first African President of his nation. It is this power of spirit to be God's instrument with unwavering acceptance and everpresent joy that the Elders seek to touch and annoit, to prepare the trials of the wise who will be responsible for the universal welfare.

Or put another way, Mandela's rise to power and world recognition is seen by world view 1 as evidence of democracy's ability to create opportunity for all, even those of humble backgrounds. In worldview 2, Mandela's trail and journey is seen as the pilgrimmage of one who gifted with the responsiblity for the universal welfare, and who prescience is tied to a divine presence. Hence, Mandela says, "my life is the struggle." 

At first her light blended in with the regular days. A Yoruba student was among those who first felt a sign for this infant born during the snow. I gathered up a note and a poem he wrote, left in my mailbox with the campus notices. "Children are the profit of the world," he wrote in Yoruba, and congratulated me, offering her the traditional praise poem.

By three months, she was being passed down the aisles miles from us at Don Cherry's loft concert in DC. Cherry had just returned from years of study with master musicians in West and Southern Africa, and was teaching a master class, involving an African lullaby with a beautiful, haunting memory, to local players and forty or so of us in the audience.

Later she sat quietly on John Lewis' desk while her mother got her first freelance interview. Jimmy Carter had just appointed John Lewis the assistant director of the Peace Corps. Her mother interviewed him for his reactions to his Washington appointment. 

During her toddler years, she was always the target of weekend photographers at various street fairs, photograhping her dancing, lifting a drink, biting into an international dish, baking in her own charisma. And on Sundays, there was the ritual of walking to Heller's after watching the crowds from the window, go down and back with string tied boxes of pastries. I always got the Hispanic woman who could ring the math totals in her mind; it became a game between us.

Later, when her hometown was the murder capital of the United States--so busy and furious that the Amry trained its surgeons in local hospitals to appropiate combat conditions--she traveled home, alone after school, carrying on a single refree's whistle on a nylon rope around her neck.

If the risk seems unnecessarily high, it is because . . .

The light. Surrounds. Finds. surveys. Discovers. Protects. Guides. Illuminates. Connects.

One of the most memorable early signs was her pull her top sheet tight one winter Saturday, she must have been 5 or 6. While folding down the crease, she was listening to Coltrane's "My Favorite Things."

At 4, on the plane trips to grandparents, traveling as an unescorted minor, she never failed to ask for a window seat.

At eight, she was authorizing security clearances for the Legislative Black Caucus Weekend.

By eight, spices were her speciality and cooking was her soltice for all.

As a fifth grader, she lead all the city's six graders in math in the Math counts test, and finished in the VA-DC-MD regional top ten.

After school, she worked as a crossing guard at one of the citys busiest intersections. A block off Wisconsin Avenue at a cross street with quick stops and people committing California rolls all afternoon in their hurry to get nowhere or home. She smiled as each group of first, second, third, or fourth graders gathered to a full stop, awaited her signal as she darted into traffic with her reflector belt and handhelp stop sign, nodding when it was safe for tthe little ones to cross. The group moved together safe, secure, over and over, for the 180 days of school. And her poster won the safety contest, too. It was a bit disconcerting, to wach her with only a belt and a sign, a firece pride and careful timing tackle the multitude of drivers in the world's most powerful city. She seemed so skinny and frail. Yet as I watched, which was seldom, I could not bear it often--she had a laser's edge about her work--keen, incisive, no second guesses, errors excluded, no rote routines, each stop fresh, filled with energy, untiring, w/out applause, marked by the movement in rhythm of small feet set toward learning..

by --- By junior high, she had graduated to a Mother's Helper, having her own students from a family in the neighborhood to play with and tutor. She walked them around the block in the afternoons, and reviewed primary colors, and read stories.She answered questions and fixed them snacks, and was a big sister, welcome in this house where mother was a lawyer, and the family accepted a multi-ethnic relationship.

Her name means "Beautiful Vision," and is East African. Her middle name, Chou, is for the Chinese Premier who survived more overthrows and kus than any major whole leader. Damali Chou has a gullah rhythm to it, the sense of tone that mirrors the blues conclusions and the soil-triggering seed.

For the past five years or more, when asked about me, I refer to myself as pilgrim. I journey the earth as its devotee, earnestly visiting out of my space and place to share in the bounded joy of others as they eat, worship, and play. Norma once told me the creeping vine goes far but has an entirely different stature than a tree. But I have become close to the ground, smelling its dry thin dust stirred by the breezes, inhaling its rich wet loam as the rainfall pelts its surfaces, puddles, and twists in.

For example, as children, we once loved to play moonlight games. Boys and girls alike, we chanted songs with rhythms under the indigo sky and its night and landscape.  We ran, laughing in the darkness, embracing it. Disappearing and emerging in it. Learning its ways. In shadow and silhouette, our play depended upon collective improvisation, a blending in, an adding to, an immediate reading of change and paths of repsonse from embedded choices, a calculated misdirection whose risk often brought higher success. These impressions upon the soul made memory. Memory became an elemental force in our lives. Memory was a source for living, for slipping the fixed, for guideways across the boundaries.

Her method was to master the application process, and use education as a gateway. 

During 2003, she was the chair for the Delta's Kwanza program at the Contee Cullen Library, a city branch in Harlem. how uncanny is her sense of tradition the Harlem branch named for a distinguished poet of the Harlem Renaissance, an academic poet who surveyed racial themes, a poet who married W. E. B. Dubois' daughter, in the wedding of Harlem society.   

"All nations are proud when their kin thrive."

Damali pledged Delta as an undergraduated at Dartmouth, and was missing for a month, leaving the family in the dark. Something was up, since she was being hard to get on the phone. I think now that the Delta is the symbol of the pyramid--the ultimate in "old schule" leadership! Her reasons were more pragmatic, a campus tradition of leadership on issues and personal achievement, she wanted her mark to be a part of that community.

The camera has enveloped and marginalized the old class of lantern children were global tril blazers. Now the path is to the light, the role is celebrity, the end is simply to see us and substitute us--who you can never be.The camera is an enemy, attack weapon of massive destruction whose target is intelligence.  It is a passive neutron bomb lleaving on the body intact, with reason or conscience. The struggles of the Yao in Brazil, the rebuilding of Somoliland and the furthering women's rights with th family and community of elders, the provicne of the AME church it its five African districts to fight the overwhelming ---- of AIDS, the blood being shed in the Sudan is no longer known to the crowds, discussed in the barberships, or shared on the playgrounds or the school steps, places where the style of language and thought is blunt but vital without false hope or false images. Places where the language is freedom-filled with dreams more wanting than waiting. 

We will not die for nothing.
Not anymore.
Our deaths shall be noisy and beautiful to the swing.
And deep
Evenly spread all over; without a wrinkle or a tear.
We shall die properly, all at once!
....
We shall go spirits first,

Or:

Get this now!
Listen the the stomp and thunder of the long trip home
Here we come down our own uterus
Paid in cash.
                  No more lay-ways.

Memory spills into the world as poetry. The human stomp and the Lordy thunder, one eatrh bound, the other heaven caused, are bound together for a trip that covers more than just the earth. Like ply, we slide, unknowingly, innocent, from the technical name, implying the control that others want right from the beginning, the measures that have established to monitor and watch and sound alarms if we are different. The immediate placement is jarring: paid in cash. Slavery, capitalism, worker, ignoring any human dimension besides the economic. Cold, indifferent, cruel, system, a powerful summary of the totality of balck experience in America. And after the set-up , the pattern of call and response takes place. The response, a powerful resolution of the problem. Short and sweet. Her grandmother's grandfather was a slave, assigned to watch the chickens until he was six and freed. She's now at Tuck, the oldest business school in the US, and one of the top ten elite. She's assigned to a study group that she loudly adores, in a setting in which she thrives.The lantern children find the way, and cast light nto the shadows."No more aly-awys" no more shelf life, time to waste, time spend tied up in this system, time going along with this system, deferred dreams, reduced opportunities, or maintenance of the status-quo.

Yet the light swings in all directions. Even as it was captured, it transformed the snow. You can read the future in ther eyes.