During a holiday in Ghana I picked up a pebble as I walked along the Atlantic.
The beach in the fishing community of Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abirem was near Cape Coast Castle, a 15th century fort that by the 18th century English traders were using as a center for the brutal business of slavery. Days before my walk on the beach, I’d stood with other tourists, many of them fellow African Americans, before the castle’s Door of No Return, through which millions of Akan and other Africans were marched to board slave ships bound for the Americas. I remember wishing I could carry a tune. It was a moment for “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the hymn written as a poem by the African American civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson in 1900 and set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
If I had started the song, however tunelessly, maybe others would have lifted more harmonious voices.
The pebble I had found on the beach is slightly rough to the touch, flat and shaped vaguely like a tongue. As if it has a story to tell, a song to sing.
As I held it on that beach, I thought I would like to wear it. It is not a gemstone, but it is precious to me.
Once I got back home to Denver, I searched the internet for African American jewelry designers. I sent emails describing my stone and the sense of past and possibility it evoked. No one responded. I put the stone aside.
More than a year passed. I found myself on the internet again, this time looking for earrings with cowrie shells, inspired by the costumes I’d seen actress Jodie Turner-Smith wearing as the character Gracie in the TV crime show “Bad Monkey.” My fashion choices aren’t always heavy with history.
I came across the site of Connecticut-based African American artist and jewelry designer Jessica Dickens. Her work involved crocheting wire into discs she embellished with cowrie shells for earrings. The voids of the crocheted discs reminded me of the holes that swirling water had carved over eons in large rock formations I’d seen on that beach near Cape Coast Castle.
I ordered a pair of earrings. And followed up with a message to the artist about my Ghanaian pebble.
She responded quickly, agreeing to take the commission. And thus was launched a lively email exchange in which we went from referring to one another as Ms. Bryson and Ms. Dickens to Donna and Jessica.
I sent Jessica photos I'd taken of the large rock formations. I also told her about images I'd seen during a visit last year to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art to see "From the Deep" by artist Ayana V. Jackson.
Jackson was inspired by Drexciya, the Detroit techno duo James Stinson and Gerald Donald, who with their music created a myth that enslaved Africans who jumped or were thrown overboard during the trans-Atlantic voyage known as the Middle Passage did not die, but instead founded an underwater country of free merpeople of color. Some 2 million African people were killed during the Middle Passage, making the Atlantic a watery Dachau in Germany or Nyarubuye in Rwanda.
Jackson created jewelry, sculpture, photographs and video to realize the underworld that Drexciya sang about, turning Smithsonian galleries into both a memorial to those murdered in the Middle Passage and a metaphor for the astonishing energy, intelligence and heart that those who survived brought to America.
Jessica asked if a particular piece by Jackson spoke to me. I told her I was mostly moved by Jackson's mood -- of wonder, of creative mourning. But there was a piece in "From the Deep" that I'd wanted to take home from the museum. I sent Jessica a photo of a bodice Jackson had forged from the kind of cheap metal mixing spoons home cooks use to prepare food for their families. In Jackson's portraits of herself wearing the bodice, the spoons overlapped like fish scales. She looks like an Afrofuturistic merqueen, regal and humble at once.
When Jessica sent me a photograph of a prototype for her design, I saw a cartouche in which the stone would rest that resembled the voids in the rock formations. She had wrapped the edges with fabric reminiscent of a sumptuous skirt Jackson had created of strips of handwoven material for "From the Deep" -- Jessica had done her own exploration of Jackson’s work.
Both Jessica's prototype and Jackson's skirt evoked textiles such as Ghanaian kente, stitched from strips of fabric woven on narrow looms, and the quilts African-Americans in Gee’s Bend, Alabama make using techniques handed down from generation to generation. It also brought to mind the way contemporary West African designers are ripping up used jeans and other clothing that Westerners ship to poor countries and piecing the scraps together into high fashion dresses and jackets.
At one point I emailed Jessica a photo of a necklace by Valencia Mtimkulu, a South African friend who is a clothing designer and seamstress. Valencia had sewn an array of buttons onto a reinforced patch the size of a hand, creating a large pendant she strung from beaded cords. "It's button patchwork!" I wrote Jessica, adding that patchwork techniques were handed down to African Americans by Africans.
Jessica replied with what she called one of her favorite Nikki Giovanni quotes:
"If we can't have ham, we will boil chitterlings; if we are given rotten peaches, we will make cobblers; if given scraps, we will make quilts; take away our drums, and we will clap our hands. We prove the human spirit will prevail. We will take what we have to make what we need."
The message from ancestor Giovanni set me rummaging through a stash of fabric remnants I've collected over the years. My treasures include what was left from a piece of veritable Vlisco I bought at a now-closed outlet of the renowned fabric design company in Johannesburg and gave to a West African tailor to make my wedding dress three decades ago. I also have scraps from dresses that Valencia made for me from Vlisco-style wax print by designers in Senegal and Ivory Coast, and from Three Cats brand South African shweshwe, an intricately patterned printed fabric. I packaged up treasures from my hoard and sent it off to Jessica.
And I entrusted her with my pebble.
As she worked through ideas, Jessica moved from fabric to clay for the cartouche. She took various colors of polymer clay and made her own stone, a faux geode from which she cut small pieces to incorporate into a frame that holds my pebble the way I had held it in my palm. The bright "shards" of her geode were in geometric patterns that echoed patchwork. I had not considered clay. Which is odd, because I love ceramics.
She hung the pendant on a length of her crocheted wire that is like a rivulet streaming over stone.
Not quite three months and more than 50 emails after Jessica and I first connected, I was holding her work in my hands and marveling at details such as tiny beads the color of red clay she had strung near the clasp joining the crocheted wire chain. She’d included a surprise: earrings, each in the pair unique and echoing the patchwork clay piece she had created for my stone. I love mismatched earrings.
The package from Jessica arrived three days after Black creativity strode into the Met Gala, whose theme this year was "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style." And it was a day before I attended a Mother's Day dance program of work by Cleo Parker Robinson, Winnifred Harris, Hope Boykin and Katherine Dunham, four acclaimed Black choreographers.
Wearing Jessica’s piece to the dance concert made me feel as if I were walking the midnight blue, flower flecked carpet at the Met. My theme was “Souvenirs: Weaving the past into the future”