The American Seed: Slavery, Hybridization, and the Creation of a New Indigenous People—the ADOS  

“Never be afraid, whatever it is, that’s it’s too beautiful or terrible to tell.” -Ntozake Shange

PART I: The Smelting Soil

The LOUD silence
My grandparents, parents, and relatives, were forged in the smelting soil of the Deep South.

My father was born and raised on a sharecropper farm in the Deep South of Georgia. His grandparents, and a host of formerly enslaved great grandparents, did live on the same farm, in clustered shotgun abodes. My father, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and his cousins, and as I vaguely recall the telling, their whole ass town were part of the Great Migration north in the 1940’s.
I did not know what the term ‘Deep South’ meant.
I did not know the crush of what those familial localities signified.
Shielded, I knew nothing of their backstories … then, just fragments of a large puzzle with pieces spoken as ‘grown folks business’.
I had no historical scrim with which to interpret their whisperings, their emphatic utterances of “the white man won’t let you do that”.
Yet, the brand of my skin was in the shadowed game.

I am the oldest of nine children, yet, in many ways a single child; the dissonance of me then … and now.

Growing up, I thought my father overly harsh, crazy at times for the rules of our home, the discipline.
As children, my Dad demanded we travel in a collective; to the store, to school, anywhere. His mandate: “If one goes, they all go”, was grounded in his knowledge of and survival of the degeneracy of Southern whites, in those and these times. A tribalist logic of safety in numbers; my father sought to ensure our collective survival.

Now, I understand.

We lived for a while with my father’s parents, Grandpa Beau and Grandma Bonnie in their home on Osceola. Their northern promise, a real home of their own - no shotgun abodes, no overseers; and no patrollers-as they knew them. The southern survivalist dulling of self, polished-temporarily in what was soon to be revealed as a northern surrogate of the south.
The trinity of Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and of course Jesus, hung on the living room wall; commanding sacred faith as vanguards of Black protection and salvation.

Our then small crew, resided in the large attic.
Transient north bound relatives escaping the south, enriched this communal living organism of home. Comparable to the Underground Railroad, Grandma Bonnie’s home was a place of reprieve and a partial cleansing from the deep south detritus. I state ‘partial’ cleansing due to the southern branding of colorism, a stain that remains. Light skin ‘Negroes’, as we were called then, were favored. If you were dark - step back.
I was not immune to the southern branding of colorism that traveled north with us. Being of a darker hue, like my father, my being “so smart” for my age was my sword and shield. At the age of five or six, I was also enfolding into my eccentric nature; another source of protection, with due awe, and some envy.

Sneakily overhearing some grown folk’s business, as I was prone to do, I heard Grandma Bonnie, speak of a friend who was “dating” a white man. He had bought her a television! That was an eye-popping WOW gift at the time and a solidifying of their dangerous forbidden love aka miscegenation. Overhearing that as a child began my childhood quest for a white man with gifts, or ‘the lighter the better’ “Negro.” (I’m kinda ashamed writing that. Oh well).

Eventually, my parents and us siblings moved to the communal enclave of Glenville, on a street named Grantwood. It was a ‘get in the house when the streetlights came on’ type of neighborhood. A rule strictly adhered to by all. It was an easy walk to my grandparents home on Osceola, and to my Auntie Mattie Pearl, who lived a few houses down from us. She, Auntie, was another vanguard of security. My great grandparents, Papa and Mama, as they were respectfully called, had come north too and lived with Auntie. It was our village. I, we, felt the embrace of familial comfort and love. That type of family adhesion would slowly erode as growth, transitions and whiteness would impinge upon us.

During my high school years in a predominantly white all girls Catholic school, my weekly routine was to stop at the store to get my Nadinola - a skin bleaching cream. I’d hide it from my mother and then go into the back of my closet to perform my anti-black cleansing ritual. Closets do hold secrets.
With a faith-held vigor, I’d rub it punishingly onto my dark face and wait … to no avail. Dammit.
Later in life, I mutilated my nose surgically to made it thinner, in an effort to make me less visibly ‘Negro.’ A fail. 

Can you imagine?

I grew up a colored-negro. Yet, emerged Black! My Black transfiguration evolved to the nexus of being an ADOS. My body and soul fought to love its own audible-Blackness against the orbit of whiteness, and at times intra-racial discrimination.
Yet, we were subtly taught survival … without explanations, without the talk, because in this regard, my family was speech-less and spoke-less; which only fueled my naivete and racial ignorance.
I thought … we, Blacks and whites were all the same.
My father’s protective love was expressed stiffly to my siblings and me, with unexplained rules - to be understood later in life, when perhaps we could handle the truth.
This lack of explanations and no background deepened my rebellion for a freedom I thought owed me - from my family and their mysterious beliefs. To me, coupled with my teen angst, that was their America, not my 60’s-70’s zeitgeist America.

Yet, I was shielded not to know that whites did lynchings, cannibalism, performed depraved brutality, collected Black/Negro body parts as souvenirs, and of the sanctioned lawful genocides my deep south family saw, experienced, lived through, and held deep in their chest … and psyche.
My Tabula Rasa was spared, sequestered in innocence and ignorance.
Perhaps, the greatest gift of my childhood.

(In stark contrast to white children who attended with family and celebrated, in gathered community lynchings, the burning of Black bodies, and casually observed dismemberments. Some of those ‘children’, are still alive with us now)!

Years later my father had ghastly dementia, as had Grandma Bonnie.
During a visit at the nursing home, a portal opened.
I looked straight into my father’s eyes and said, “I love you Dad.”
My dad looked at me as I cannot ever recall and said, “I love you too. Now, I know my life had meaning.”
The darkness made audible. The keloid of silence-excised.
Through that ontic portal, I didn’t just find my father’s love, I found the unspoken history itself; the reason for all the rules, the unspoken explanations. Imagine that.

Dad, I love you … more.

Like being thrown into an arctic river – came the Black Griot stories, our gruesome histories, unbelievable, unconscionable at first. I could not fathom at first, those stories of an America to which I recited the Pledge of Allegiance to for years. After all, I was raised on cowboy Westerns and their philosophical pabulum; the white hat guys good, anything black -bad …Ohh.
The portal my father opened didn’t just reveal his love; it unleashed the history behind the rules, letting me see the
pattern in everything—the stories, the news headlines, the very structure of our being.

I cried inconsolably at the murders, the human sacrifices of Alice in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Kindred’, and for Dana. And, for the snatched youth of Trayvon Martin, Ma’Khia Bryant, Korryn Gaines, Tamir Rice, Philandro Castile, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner and…so many more. I peeped that the body of Michael Brown, was staged as a mere carcass lying in the hot street for hours. Michael Brown’s staging messaged the impunity of whiteness and utter disregard for Black lives.
I wept learning of the horrific lynching of Mary Turner, her husband, and the stomping death of her fetus, that was cut out of her abdomen.

I and other ADOS ‘feel’ the deaths, the lynchings, the hurts, and screams. I know that our divine dark matter core assimilated each spirit into the indomitable whole of our Being.

This mini book is what eventually poured out.

Behold … the ink of my tears.

“I have rape colored skin, My light brown blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the old South. My body is a monument. My skin is a monument.”
——Caroline Randall Williams, New York Times, OpEd, June 6, 2020

When I read that commanding weapon of words, I-was-shook. Her incisiveness allowed a further ooze of ancestral recall and the naked depravity of being enslaved. I heard the Naked Invisibles.

My mother’s “rape-colored” family were in part from Alabama. Grandma Mable, my mother’s mother, and her sisters were all rape-colored, with the so-called “good hair”- and other markers of white male-African slave admixture; the trickle down and trickle up effects of hybridization.
Precocious young me, always with a sneaky ear for grown folks business, overheard my Grandma Bonnie spit that my mother was a breeder. I had no idea what that meant at the time.
Now, I do.
I often wondered if my mother was really my mother, based on her color, in stark contrast to mine. Can you imagine.
My daughter is her twin in looks. It is enigmatic yet comforting, and a source of confusion on my part; being envious of that genetic arch. Tho, every now and then, Mommy reflects her face in my face, in my mirror! A stern proclamation that I belong to her. She was like that.

Jane Passing: My white-skinned ex mother in law, Jane, was “passable” to the extent that whites mistakenly thought she was white like them. She and her mother were from South Carolina. I once peeped Jane in the grocery store near her home. She was bedecked in a fur coat, sunglasses, playing the part of a white lady of status-magnificently, I might add.
I thought “Nihil de nobis, sine nobis”, the Latin quote for “Nothing about us without us”, (a slogan of centuries past to advocate for the inclusion and direct participation in decisions that affect oneself).
I gave Jane the nod (iykyk) and kept it moving. Jane was a ADOS chameleon; able to guise herself and infiltrate their world. A ‘double naught’ spy. She was always true to her dark matter, and a staunch activist.
Jane was not a breeder. She was bred.

PART II: The Core Theory – The Alchemy of Us
We begin not with a question of blood, but a question of Being.
For centuries, a fractured tale has been told to the American Descendant of Slavery: you are from Africa, but you are not African. You are of America, but you are not truly American. We have been suspended between worlds, a ghost in the machine of a nation’s corroded conscience.

My thesis provides a new lens, not of fracture, but of fusion.
Here is a simple, logical idea: Through the brutal, systematic hybridization of slave rape and the complex history of interracial coupling that followed, a new people was forged nowhere else on Earth, the ADOS.
The profound and provocative Hegelian ‘unity of opposites’ coupled with the force of our dark matter esemplastic, are the cohesive agents of our indigeneity in the settler-colonizer’s creation of America.
In physics, dark matter is the invisible, foundational mass that determines the structure and fate of the universe. As ADOS, our African core is our cultural and genetic dark matter. It is not always visible in every single trait or custom on the surface. Still, it is the gravitational center that holds our entire identity together. It determines the shape of everything.

                                                                                Every ADOS Person is a Miracle.

American Descendants of Slavery-ADOS are not a people defined by loss, but by an alchemical creation.

• The THESIS is the African Base: Our primal “Dark Matter.” This is the Noumenon—the Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself; the invisible, massive core—the cultural, genetic, and spiritual girded ore—that gives our Being and identity its shape and gravity. It is the divine consciousness at and of our core; the un-killable thing they could not whip, breed, or legislate out of us. It is the pulse in our Being that remembers the frequency, the vibration, the throbbing whispery beats. The oppressors could interact with the phenomena (the bodies, the cultures they tried to break), but they could never touch the essential, foundational African ontic. It was (and is) the thing-in-itself that persisted, immutable, behind the traumatic changes imposed upon the phenomenal world.

• The Noumenon (The African Thing-in-Itself) encountered the Phenomenal Antithesis (the American Crucible of slavery, rape, law). The result was not the destruction of the African Thing-in-Itself, but a new Synthetic Phenomenon (the ADOS Hybrid people and culture), whose visible, tangible reality (music, language, DNA, culture, struggle) is manifest proof of the enduring, shaping power of the unseen Noumenal core.

• The ANTITHESIS is the American Crucible: The furnace of unimaginable heat and pressure. The fires of slavery, systemic rape, and legalized oppression—the forces of erasure and admixture whose intent was to destroy, dilute, or control the Thesis. According to a simple narrative, the Antithesis should have won. But our dark matter did not disintegrate. It endured. It engaged. ADOS are an observable effect. It, we, performed the ultimate act of historical resilience.

• The SYNTHESIS is the ADOS Hybrid: The “unity.” The African Noumenon absorbed the shock, assimilated the opposing forces, and transformed them, hence unified them through esemplastic power. The European genetic contribution, introduced through violence, was incorporated into a biological identity that remains socially and culturally ADOS/Black. The English language was bent to the grammatical will of African linguistic structures.

The result is not a narrative of dilution, but of divine transmutative resilience. We are the living resolution of America’s central conflict—a new, synthetic people, a synthesized human montage. The-thing-in itself protected, preserved and elevated us. We, ADOS are the alchemy that turned the lead of brutality into the gold of a profound and enduring culture. We are the New World alloy, forged in the old world’s fire.
We are as fundamental to the American landscape as the Mississippi River—a force that has been shaped by the land and, in turn, has shaped the land irrevocably. We are not a problem to be solved. We are the synthesis that has been here all along.

ADOS are not a transient group. Our lineage, our culture, our struggle, and our very genetic makeup are products of a 400-year American experience. No other group has our specific profile because no other group was created by the specific institution of chattel slavery in … America. One key to understanding this is in the name: American Descendant of Slavery. The most important word is the first one. No other group on Earth has our specific genetic profile because no other group was created by the specific institution of chattel slavery in America. We are in the most profound sense indigenous to the American experiment—its original sin and its enduring testament.
ADOS are the original hybrid Americans, synthesized in the “new” settler-colonizer creation of America.

ADOS and Africans are not a monolith. Respectfully, we differ in culture, looks, Tribe, dress, foods, language and other intuitive factors. Black Africans are indigenous to predominantly Black African countries. ADOS are not the native and/or indigenous citizens of predominantly Black African countries; and thus not of that strand of static Africanicity. We are a static conveyance of American hybridization. The Noumenon is our collective, shared gravity.

The story of our hybridization is the truth of our African Noumenon asserting its dominion over every phenomenal force arrayed against it. It transformed rape into genetic resilience, oppression into identity, and fragments into a whole. This is the foundational, brutal chapter of the American story—the American Crucible, forged not by choice but by violence and law.
We are the living proof that —the Infinite within—cannot be erased.

PART III: The Evidence – The Grammar of Our Genesis

The proof of our genesis is written in three sacred texts: the body, the soul, and the law of the land.
First, the Text of the Flesh: The Genetic Testament.
Our very DNA is a living archive. It whispers of the West African coast and echoes with the footsteps of Europeans and Indigenous peoples, all woven into a helix that exists nowhere else on earth. This was not a gentle blending. The initial admixture was a crime, a testament to the brutal reality of slave rape and reproductive coercion. But to look upon us and see only that crime is to miss the miracle. We, the living, are the resolution of that violent contradiction. Our bodies are the synthesis. We carry the evidence of the crime, but we are the verdict of survival. The African dark matter absorbed the shock and held firm.
What was intended to break us, to dehumanize us, ultimately failed. Our very bodies, our DNA are a living archive of both the crime and the unimaginable resilience of our foremothers. Yes, our strong ADOS mothers! They endured the unendurable and we are their testament. We are not defined by the violence of our creation; we are defined by our survival of it. To be an ADOS Hybrid is to carry the legacy of African strength that was/is so potent, it could not be erased even through attempted genetic domination and genocide. Even … now.

Second, the Text of the Spirit: The Cultural Synthesis.
Listen to the blues—that sound is not just sadness; it is the African tonal system bending a European scale to its will. Hear the call-and-response in a Black church—that is not just liturgy; it is the grammatical structure of African communalism reshaping a European religion into a theology of liberation. Our language, our cuisine, our rhythm—they all follow this same esemplastic flow. The African “grammar” provided the underlying structure, and the American experience provided the vocabulary.

The lyrical gospels of music encircled us with a family of sounds and codes. The rebel vibrancy of Rock n Roll (our teen years), the Blues (the parent holding internal sorrows), Gospel music (the adult in the room), Hip Hop, and the quirky intellectual loner nestled in the lofty abstractness of Monk and Miles-Jazz. The summoned manna of our dark matter, our ontic.

We did not lose our African soul; we used its deep grammar to speak a new world into existence.
This is not an export of Africa.
This … is a transmission from America and proof of our new consciousness born in the crucible. The ADOS unity of opposites is the global soundtrack to and of our sovereign hybridity.

Third, the Text of the Land: The Legal Fiction and the Lived Truth.
America sought to legislate our identity using hypodescent, colloquially known as the “one-drop rule”; a southern caste fiction made real; to oppress, create faux status, inflict self-hated and control.
But in a stunning historical irony, this tool became the frame for our unity. By legally grouping all of us with any African ancestry into one subjugated class, it inadvertently codified the very hybrid people it sought to deny. Our shared political struggle—from Jim Crow to the fight for reparations—is not just a history of oppression; it is the evolution of a people becoming a people, solidifying our unique, shared experience on this soil. We are native not by fiat, but by fight.

PART IV: The Inversion – Frankenstein’s America and The Sovereign Hybrid
So we arrive at the final terrible inversion.
The white man’s burden—that flattering myth of noble sacrifice—is revealed to be the very engine of its own horror. It was never a burden shouldered, but a scalpel wielded.
As ADOS we possess a dual nascence. We are born of an African mother and an America white father—a birth fraught with violence, but a birth nonetheless. We are fundamentally rooted in an African past but uniquely forged in the American crucible of fire and the bedrock of the nation’s creation.

In the parable of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, Victor sought to conquer nature by assembling a new life from the graveyard, only to be horrified by the living, breathing consequence of his own unnatural act. He beget a Being and then abandoned it, refusing all responsibility, all kinship.
So it was with and is with the Colonial Frankensteinian Project of slavery in America. The Frankensteinian Urge masked as Manifest Destiny, dismembered parts of stolen nations, Tribes, cultures, and peoples. And yet, a new Personhood was assembled in the colonial laboratory: the ADOS people.

Our African ontic was the primal life force that animated this new body, this ADOS hybrid consciousness. And, as with Victor Frankenstein, the begetter-the colonizer-enslaver-looked upon what he had made—this sovereign, resilient, demanding new life—and saw only a monster. We are not the monster!
The term "monster” was always a lie. The true horror for Victor, and for whiteness was never the creation, but the Being’s humanity—its sovereign demand for justice.
Thus, in this inversion the reference is not to the monster, but the begetters, the settler colonizers, and the transgenerational agency of whiteness.

This understanding transforms our narrative from one of victimhood to one of sovereignty. Our hybridization is the cosmogenesis of our African thing-in-itself asserting its dominion over every phenomenal force arrayed against it.
It transformed rape into genetic resilience, oppression into identity, and fragments into a whole.

The burden was never ours.
The burden was, and remains, yours, white America. The terrifying, inescapable responsibility for the ADOS that rightfully demand our due. Our existence is the proof of the crime, and the demand for its resolution and Reparations.
We are the living receipts that the Noumenon—the Infinite Consciousness within—cannot be erased.

Whiteness has and is having right now, its moment of anagnorisis. You feel me.

The Last Assize: Crazy Niggas.

Yo!
Niggers don’t exist.
Nigga/Niggas don’t exist.
Never have. Never did.
That label is a concoction of Colonial Frankensteinism, a branding, a 400 year-old verbal terrorism.
The ever-present frequency and casual use of ‘nigga’, is a dastardly heirloom of the plantation, a self-inflicted affirmation of negation of Self, of anti-Blackness. It is a tether, an uncut rotting umbilical cord to the place of its inception.
Claims of reclaiming it are refusals to let go of the tenacious grasp of the plantation. Its usage demonstrates the colonizer’s Frankensteinian Urge, the keeping alive of an atrophic grasp … even into the 21st Century.
To fully step into our sovereignty as the Sovereign Hybrid, we must perform the final act of esemplasticism: we must reshape the very language used to define us. We must refuse the final brand.
The necessary act of sovereignty: Smoke that bitch outta your vocabulary. 
See. Your. Self.

Conclusion:
This is not the end. It is the opening of a new and necessary conversation.
We are ADOS - American Descendants of Slavery.
We are Sovereign Hybrids.

WE. EXIST.