Showing results by author "Otis L. Lee Jr." in All Categories

When I attended Jefferson Elementary School in Charlottesville in 1960, I was selected to recite the poem "The Path" by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the noted black poet. That poem captured the story of my life. I had no idea when I first learned it by memory and recited it many times before the class that it would later have such a direct and dramatic application to my life. I recited the words not knowing their true meaning back then, but I know what they mean now, and who would have imagined how appropriate they would be.

I Was Born in the Forest encapsulates the freedom struggle of Africans brought to the Americas in the bowels of slave ships from Congo, Angola, and other parts of Central Africa. In the seventeenth century, many defied the odds by escaping and establishing Afrocentric communities in the mountains in Brazil. Palmares, the most notable among them, existed from 1605 to 1694.

Otis Lee begins this story in the most innocuous of locations: a train from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Penn Station in New York City. But for Otis this journey brings to mind another train, from long ago and far away—representative of a past to which there can be no return.