Paula Williams Madison - Finding Samuel Lowe: China, Jamaica, Harlem

TO MY GRANDFATHER

Low Ding Chow

Samuel Lowe

TO MY MOTHER

Nell Vera Lowe Williams

Bi Shan Lowe

Found.

Claimed.

Loved.

... you see love liberates. it doesnt bind, love says i love you. i love you if youre in China, i love you if youre across town, i love you if youre in Harlem, i love you. i would like to be near you, i would like to have your arms around me i would like to have your voice in my ear but thats not possible now...

MAYA ANGELOU, LOVE LIBERATES

The same mouth that courts you doesnt marry you.

CARIBBEAN PROVERB

The faults of a superior person are like the sun and moon. They have their faults, and everyone sees them; they change and everyone looks up to them.

CONFUCIUS

To forget ones ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.

CHINESE PROVERB

A man of determination will surely succeed.

CHINESE PROVERB

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

CONFUCIUS

Why not help each other on the way? Make it much easier.

BOB MARLEY, POSITIVE VIBRATION

I WAS ALREADY AN EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT AT NBC UNIVERSAL IN 2008, when the Olympics were held in China. I had traveled to the games with some of the other executives. We were removed from the day-to-day operations of actually getting the events on the air, but we were seriously involved in an informal diplomatic mission from the United States to China.

As our plane circled over Beijing that August morning, preparing for landing, I glanced out the window and saw beneath me the wide landscape of China, a country that seemed not even to have a horizon; it extended so far beyond any dimensions that I had yet seen. To me, this was both a fact and a metaphor. Somewhere in the huge continent of Asia, in this vast country of China, I thought, responding to both the physical and the emotional dimensions of the place, I have family.

Given my appearance and my history, I should have felt this way when I went to Africa. I am, after all, to the world an African American. I have been to Africa more than half a dozen times; in fact, I started my travels there, in South Africa. When we landed in Johannesburg in 1998, I was weak in the knees as I got off the airplane. Like so many African Americans, I had a sense of finally arriving; and this continent of history and myth, liberation and domination, purity and contamination, evoked a complicated stew of emotions: sadness and joy, peace and anxiety, connection and alienation. I looked into African faces, hoping to see my own reflection.

But I didnt.

I was truly happy to be there, but I didnt feel as if I had found my spot in this world. It was different when we went to Ghana several years later. I learned only afterward that many Jamaican immigrants were descended from the Ashanti people of present-day Ghana. When I was there, peoples faces seemed familiar to me; indeed, I thought these people look like me. So did people in Jamaica, and some folks in Harlem. Still, the similarity of appearance did not give me a sense that I was connecting with my ancestors. I was simply connecting with, well, people who resembled me. I assumed, when I arrived in China, that the Chinese faces I saw on the streets of Beijing would have no relation to me at all.

One day, after the opening ceremonies were over, I took a walk in downtown Beijing. We were staying at the St. Regis Hotel in the heart of the city. I thought that I would walk past the embassies and office buildings there, and perhaps visit the Silk Market a few blocks away. The crowds seemed phenomenal, even to a New Yorker like me. As I walked, I absorbed the energy and the intensity of the place; my reportorial instincts snapped into action as I looked at the details of the people, the cars, the bicycles, the storefronts.

And then I saw a face that stopped me cold. I turned my head and watched the woman stride past me and disappear into the crowd. She was tall and graceful, walking with a kind of determination and detachment that I knew very well. Her walk made it clear that she was a woman to be reckoned withwhether in the streets of Beijing or on Amsterdam Avenue in Harlembut no one should dare to try. It was her face that had captured me in a split second. There, in the mass of people on the streets of Beijing, I saw my mothers face.

My mother had been dead for two years, as had my father. So the small band of Williamses, which had become more numerous with marriages and the birth of children and grandchildren, still seemed nonetheless incomplete. But at that moment in the streets of Beijing, seeing my mothers face, I realized that in death she might lead me as she never could during her life. Perhaps here in China, I would unravel the mystery of our identity that resided in our DNA, in our mothers essential loneliness, in the contradictions and achievements that defined us.