Sand and Ceremony

In November 1996, Dale Jackson boarded a flight to Accra with two months of savings and a dream about a dead man.

Kwakou Afolabi had taught him Ewe drumming in Boston for five years. When Kwakou died, Dale promised himself he would go and see the country—and then a year later Kwakou came to him in a dream and said he was sad Dale had never come.

What Dale finds in the village of Denu is a school run by Kwakou's three sons, a compound full of teachers who are also salesmen, and a tradition that will not be learned in eight weeks by anybody, least of all a thirty-year-old American who already believes he knows something.

He is taken to a sacred lake at midnight and told never to look back. He kneels for an hour on a concrete floor while cowrie shells are thrown, and hands over money for protection he never asked for and cannot get an account of.

Then he flies home to Boston in January and learns that his father died while he was away, and that his mother did not tell him, because she wanted him to finish.

Rocks come over a wall for eleven days, and there is an explanation for them. A woman with white eyes sits beside a road, and there is not. A crow appears in three countries. A ghost sings a drum phrase across a fire that the man who heard it had only known for four days.

This is a book about music written by a musician—technical about hands and time, unsentimental about what a country does to a body that does not belong in it, and honest about a man who chose, every time, and knew it.