The Old Souls

Black Americana are the figures that emerged from slavery times which satirize and exaggerate the genetic traits of the African Ancestors of the African American population.   The images were engineered and produced from minds that believed Africans were sub-human and beastlike.  Slaveholders  found support for their actions in the Christian Bible and the Constitution of the United States.

 

If the dehumanization  was a rationalization or psychological defense that  allowed the slaveholder to sleep at night, it was this same attitude which  kept our African Ancestors from resting  in their graves.  The affects of the stereotyped images did not  die with the abolition of slavery in the U.S., no  the images became a  part of American culture  that froze in time and space the thinking carried by some whites about black's genetic heritage.

 

Yes, superfically the stereotypes  were images of racism but they were and are still much more than that. They  are  assault weapons aimed at the African American psyche. They  are the continued enslavement of the self-concept  of  Africans held in the  Americans ,  for if our Ancestors cannot get into or rest  in their graves, then we their descendants cannot be awake and alert in this reality.

 

The Old Africans and their children- the first generation of enslaved dark people born in this land were chained to those icons. They  were literally  held in  limbo in a state of immobility. The founders of the African American nation were unable to return to Heaven also known as the Astral Plane,  Ginea, or Orun. 

 

Why did this happen? Part of the answer is that their descendants began to share the attitude of their oppressors, they began  to revile,  reject and rebuke their own physical traits  as repulsive. This shame   led to a hatred of the characteristics that were passed to them, the dark skin, the  large expressive eyes, big lips, the curved buttocks, the nappy hair. 

 

If the African Ancestors  spoke or were seen,  they were said to be ghosts or haints. If  they tried to speak to their children in the dreams of night they were said to be nightmares.

 

Those living kin that succeeded in making a connection to their Old Souls were usually looked at as being strange, dangerous or afflicted by mental illness by other blacks disconnected from their root culture. 

 

The devasting effect of these images led to a psychological schism, as the rejection of the qualities and characteristics in the succeeding generations  of African s in America led to self-hatred and self-fragmentation on a grand  scale.  The Self-image of the black began to be  manipulated  as blacks began to worship and venerate  the  genetic qualites of the whites. 

 

White skin, blue eyes, blonde hair traits that  few whites  came by naturally were seen as the height of beauty in the Western world. It was Jesus, a mythic  Jesus the possessor of these  attributes who was their intercessor between earth and heaven, a heaven where their own African Ancestors could not go.

 

The fruits of African invention and genius have always been seen as “ public property” by their oppressors. Whites had an intimate insider's knowledge of the blacks who worked for them & around them. Porgy and Bess, the Tales of Uncle Remus, Amos and Andy,  all of these concepts belonged to “coloredfolks” who didn't have the inclination or the ability to copyright their own images, and culture. 

 

Thus *using* the  ancestral images of Africans in the Americas was not questioned. The so- called slaveowners  believed they owned even the images of the enslaved people because they had purchased their flesh. Africans in America were the first marketing tools used  in advertising.  From trademarks  on  packaged products, to the logo of mercantile and other companies these images of endless human labor  were the engine that procured a life-style of wealth and leisure in the South. 

 

The  image of the *slave* was thus created and exported all over Europe. This Black imagery was a primary source of productivity, entertainment, and pleasure to whites in America who  recorded and imitated what they saw in Blacks for profit.  People of African descent continue to be  the generators of revenue in the American marketplace. 

 

In places where modified African systems  functioned such as Haiti, Cuba and Brazil, the Enslaved Ancestors were called upon  remembered and honored. They were  Egun,  Pretos Velhos,  Zanset-yo, and their gifts, i.e. the  African characteristics and traits they passed down to their children were worn proudly.

 

Those system Ancestors that rested in their graves  could return to Heaven and then come back to  Earth at will to aid their children by giving healings, prophecies and magical recipes. They smoked pipes and swizzled rum, they told stories, they hugged and kissed, they swore and they warned. They were the  link back to Africa and between heaven and earth.

 

Blacksfolk in American have traveled all over the world looking to claim the Ancestors of other African systems all the while unaware that the aspects or fractals of their own African Ancestors were right in front of them in the U.S. unattended and unclaimed!  It is in the stereotyped  images of our Old Souls, our African Ancestors that the power base of Hoodoo was and still is being hidden in plain sight!