Asante Moran forcibly embarked on The Jesus at Cape Coast and landed on an Irish plantation down the Carolinas three months later as Toby Johnson… actually it was his grandfather who had been kidnapped and dumped in the stuffy and fetid hold of a slaver – The Jesus – preaching the one-sided gospel of economic expediency… branded by middle-passage brass-knuckles and jackboots – it is a devil-may-care world when prison records are passed down from father to son and teen pregnancy from grandma to mama and daughter – public schools that are no public schools at all, but holding pens of rigid social control, till tired walls of deliberate neglect crash and crumble and give in to chaos… rock salt as solid coke and crack, talcum coke and the glazed eyes of suburban blond kids – poised on the ledge of ruination, savaged with a curricular diet of ethnic self-alienation and racial hatred – for us, somehow, the past remains an open sore, however far we may have come as a clan… Santa Maria, rust of memory wickedly blots the Stygian expanse of crimes conceived and hatched in luxury suites of those who claim to possess vintage mantles of divine beneficence – vehicular songs of survival, freedom and hope, rethread myths mixed with ancient songs which are not ancient at all, save for their ancient themes which, of course, are no ancient themes at all but tinder twigs of the here and now… 11/20/10 By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr.