Black History — The Umbilical Cord: What Brazil and Cuba Kept That America Lost

It began in a restaurant in California. Early 1980s. I was having dinner with a woman — her name I no longer remember, which turns out to be the right thing, because she was not one person. She was many.

She had mentioned, once, that she felt uncomfortable in certain spaces. That people looked at her. That she was aware, at all times, of being the only one in the room who looked the way she looked. I did not understand. Not because I was indifferent — I simply could not see what she was describing. It did not register as a problem. It did not register as anything at all.

So she showed me instead. The following Friday she took me to a restaurant where everyone was Black. We sat down. We ordered. And partway through the meal she looked at me across the table and asked a single question.

Do you feel any different?

I did. And I understood — not everything, not yet, not even close — but I understood that this was an argument about identity. About who we are in relationship to the rest. About the room that reads you before you have said a word. She did not lecture me. She did not explain. She relocated me. And that relocation — physical, wordless, precise — was the beginning of an education that has continued across decades, across continents, across films I have made and conversations I have had and places I have sat with a camera and tried to listen.

She represented millions. So did I.

She represented millions. So did I.

I should say: I had sat in rooms where everyone was Black before. In Salvador, Bahia. In Santiago de Cuba. It had not felt like this. Those rooms were simply rooms — warm, ordinary, unremarkable to me as a foreigner, because the culture that filled them had never been severed from its roots. What she showed me that Friday evening in Los Angeles was something different. Something specifically American. A tension that does not travel. A line of separation that exists in that particular form only in that particular country — the product of a rupture so deep and so deliberately enforced that it is still present in the air of a restaurant, felt across a table, without a word being spoken.

With Haroldo Costa and the research team in Rio (2005)

The African diaspora is not one thing. Anyone who has moved through it with attention — in Brazil, in Cuba, in the United States, in Peru — understands this almost immediately. It takes the shape of the container it inhabits. The history of that container, its laws, its racial mythology, the specific form slavery took and the specific form its aftermath took — all of this becomes the diaspora's local identity. What is shared across those containers is the root: the original act, the removal from the continent, the crossing of the water, the arrival in a place that did not want its people as people but needed them as labor. That act is the seed. Everything else is what grew from it in different climates.

I came to understand this over years of reading, studying, and filming — in Bahia, in Rio de Janeiro, in Havana, in New York, in conversations with historians and artists and ordinary people who carried extraordinary histories in their bodies and their music and their faith. But the sentence that gave me the clearest intellectual key to the question came from Haroldo Costa, historian, scholar, and one of the most lucid voices on Afro-Brazilian culture. I was filming him for what would become Samba on Your Feet. We were sitting by the Bay of Guanabara in Rio de Janeiro. Behind him, the water. The same water the slave ships had crossed.

He said: "We did not split from Africa. We didn't cut the umbilical cord. On the contrary, we brought Africa with us and we spread it all over Brazil. After all is been said and done — Brazil is still a part of Africa."

I have been thinking about that sentence ever since. What Haroldo Costa was describing is continuity. The African diaspora in Brazil — and in Cuba, in somewhat different but related ways — did not lose the thread. The gods traveled. Oghun, Shango, Yemanjá — they crossed the water and arrived and continued to be fed, continued to be worshipped, continued to govern the daily spiritual lives of millions. Candomblé is not a memory of Africa. It is Africa, still living, still naming its orixás, still finding its way into syncretism — every Catholic saint covering an African deity like a new garment over an older body that has not changed. The community recognizes itself not through genealogy, which is largely impossible to trace, but through culture. Through the rhythms. Through the names — Congo, Angola, Yoruba, Karabali — that are not surnames but origins, spiritual coordinates, a way of knowing where you come from without a document.

I was able to spend time with priestesses and priests of different variations of this collective tradition. I witnessed ceremonies that had been performed, in one form or another, for centuries. What struck me was not the exotic — it was the ordinary. This was not performance. This was daily life. This was Tuesday morning. This was Africa on a Tuesday morning in Salvador, Bahia, in the twenty century.

The umbilical cord had not been cut.

The American chapter is different. It is also more complex, and more charged with the specific electricity of a society that has never fully resolved its relationship with the people it enslaved. That chapter deserves its own essay — and it will get one. What I will say here is only this: the diaspora in North America was subjected to a deliberate and systematic cultural erasure that was part of the project of slavery itself. Languages were separated. Families were separated. Religions were suppressed. The cord was not merely cut — it was cut and the cutting was enforced. What survived, survived underground, in fragments, transformed almost beyond recognition: in the spirituals, in the blues, in the church, in the way certain rhythms refused to disappear no matter how many times the law tried to silence them.

With Xangô Da Mangueira in Rio de Janeiro (2005)

That survival is extraordinary. It is also different in character from what I witnessed in Bahia or in Havana. To trace one's roots in the American context often requires, as another historian once told me, traveling to Africa and looking for people who look like you. In Brazil, in Cuba, you do not need to travel. Africa is already there. It has been there all along, spread across the land, embedded in the water, present on a Tuesday morning in the way someone ties a cloth or beats a drum or calls a name that is older than the country they were born in.

I want to take this opportunity to invite you to see the film that first gave shape to these ideas. Samba on Your Feet — in Portuguese with English subtitles — premiered at the Rio International Film Festival and is available since in public and academic libraries. It begins with the notion that Haroldo Costa articulated by the bay. Watch it. Then come back and we will continue the conversation.

Because there is more to say — about the Black Fiddlers, about Julian Bond tracing his roots to slavery, about Rita Dove's family carrying what they could carry from the Deep South to the industrial North, about what it means that I, a white filmmaker with a European formation, spent decades inside these stories and what that witness did to me. That is the American chapter. It is coming.

One final thing. You may have noticed that this essay does not begin in February. It does not end in February. It has nothing to do with February. The idea of a specific month to contain Black History — to schedule it, to permission it, to make it a seasonal event like a holiday sale — is, I would argue, itself a product of the rupture. Black History is history. The umbilical cord is the subject. You may have noticed that this essay does not begin in February, nor does it end there. To me, February is the month in which we all go to the water, to the shore, to bring flowers to Yemanjá. And we are only beginning to trace it.

Note: If this essay resonated with you, share it with someone who should read it. Leave a comment below — I read them all. And if you would like to follow this conversation as it continues into Cuba, into the United States, and wherever the cord leads next, subscribe to A Filmmaker's Journal.