Length: about 90 mins. Pleasant chat, she felt at ease and happy to talk about her father.
There is an equally dramatic story. [She shows me a Xango axe made of wood]. They divined for all of us. His god was Xango, my mother’s Yemanjá, mine up to puberty was Oxossi after which Oxun would take over. It comes the day we had to leave, sometime between June and August, and everything we had was loaded onto a ship. There were a lot of sinkings in the South Atlantic. My father received a delegation from Bahia, giving him this axe and telling him: do not take that ship. My parents, after the experience with Marotinha and many other things, could not explain it, but they could just pay attention. All their belongings went on the ship, we came back on a DC3 that took three days from Rio to Miami, stopping to pick up survivors of torpedoed ships. The ship we had our stuff on is at the bottom of the South Atlantic. So, I have taken very good care ever since. In fact, I think the reason why I have survived the Nigerian complexities in my life is because of the Brazilian Yoruba … the candomblé people have taken care of me.
Moorman, anthropologist and art historian at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, the one who tracked my doll and all the other dolls, helped me a lot. It was tremendously difficult. I had no guidance. Northwestern wanted it all, but was not clear what they would do with it. Besides, they made the mistake of calling me three days after I had come back from Nigeria, when my mother had died a week before. I was not interested in that type of approach. After all we are looking at art, their papers and their library. I did not want any of this broken off. At Northwestern they were interested in having the African stuff, but not the African-American stuff. At the Field Museum they wanted the art, but not the library and the papers. We could not leave this in the house, it had to go somewhere where people could take care of it. First it went to the Field Museum then to National Museum of African Art, but they did not want the Atlantic connection either. No there isn’t any Brazilian stuff. It is at the bottom of the Atlantic. It took me fourteen years to find the Schomburg as the place that would take the whole thing and would take it with respect and loving care, which they have done. But in the meanwhile my mother had given something to Northwestern. I don’t know how Indiana got what it got. The reason why things went to Indiana is because Allan Merriam was from there, the student who was such a fine musicologist who died very young. One major difficulty is that some of his students, who could have told you many of the things I do not know, are not around anymore … I remember Ruy Coelho well. Easterbrook should be able to tell. He is doing a wonderful job. …
There are very few pictures of the whole family, simply because my father was the photographer.
My father was absolutely not a religious Jew. I did not get Jewish upbringing. I mean, it was not an anti-Jewish education that I received! My father told us about the Jewish holidays, explaining what they were. In fact, I have been in a synagogue just a few times.