- So, 'about two weeks ago, I was at a family cookout,
eating that second plate of mac and cheese
I promised myself I wouldn't eat.
(audience chuckles)
And I was hangin' out with my nephew. He's seven years old.
I was doing some card tricks for him.
And at a certain point after a couple of tricks,
he looks up at me,
with those seven-year-old, big brown eyes,
and he asks me if magic is real.
So I put the cards down.
Because, on one level, yeah, I want him to believe
that anything is possible,
and that he's going to do these amazing things,
and most of all, that he's protected
by these forces that he can't see, and that I can't see.
On the other hand,
he's a seven-year-old African-American boy,
and I know he's going to grow
into an adult African-American man.
He needs to know what he's up against.
And I need him to believe in himself.
So I told him, "Jonathan, look.
Here's what you need to know.
Don't let anybody ever tell you
you can't do what you want to do,
but also, you always got to deal with reality."
And I saw his little seven-year-old face drop.
He went back to playing.
And I knew that even though I had tried to soften the blow,
he had gotten the real message.
There is no magic, and there is no real magical protection.
And it was funny that I was the one to deliver that message,
'cause my own relationship to that question
is much more complicated.
See, when I was 13 years old, my aunt moved to Senegal
for a job for a period of time,
and she asked, she said I could come visit with her,
and hang with her, right?
Now, I had never been to Africa.
Like most African-Americans,
I have no idea where my family really is from,
and this was my first time out of the country.
So when I landed in the busy city of Dakar,
everything was new.
This was nothing like the exotic, primitive huts
I had learned about in school, right?
I mean, this was like, even just going down the street
to get a piece of bread was like an adventure.
New languages, new smells, and new sounds, right?
And now, my aunt was going to be real busy,
so she hired a young African man to kind of be a chaperone,
to hang out with me while I was there.
And his name was Ron.
And for the time I was in Dakar,
Ron was like my big brother, right?
He showed me around, and he told me about his life,
and I told him 'about my life,
'cause I was 13, and things were changing.
Up until that point, my family done a pretty good job
of sheltering me from the ugliest parts of life,
but this was Baltimore in 1980s, and it felt like the danger
could just walk right up to your door.
I told Ron about how I was playin' tag one day
and the cops followed me home and questioned my mother.
I told him how a lot of my friends had seen people shot,
and some people, some of my friends even had guns.
So this was horrifying to Ron, right?
This was not the America he had heard about.
And he wanted to give me some protection.
Ron knew an elder in Dakar
who was skilled in the making of certain kinds of charms,
special talismans that could protect people
from guns and knives.
And he was like,
"A lot of people have these things in Dakar."
He wants to get one for me, his little brother,
to protect me from the violence of America.
So, couple days later, we got on a bus,
and drove to the outskirts of Dakar.
We got off the bus, we walked into this little white house
that was filled with necklaces, and statues, and candles.
They told me to walk into, to go into the bathroom,
get into a tub, and cleanse myself
with this water from this old pail.
And when I came out, I put a robe on,
and they handed me a white cloth,
and it was filled with some black powder.
And then Ron and I took that white cloth with black powder
to a local tailor,
and had it sewn into a belt made from animal skins.
And I remember just holding it
in my little 13-year-old hands, and feeling the power.
I was like, "Yeah, now I'm going to be protected."
But then Ron told me there was a catch.
He said, "In order for this belt to work,
you got to believe in it.
And the only way for you to believe in it
is we got to go back to the priest,
you got to put the belt on, and then I got to shoot you."
(audience laughs)
I looked at Ron like he was crazy.
I was like, "You got to shoot me?"
I mean, he's like, "Oh, no, little brother, trust me.
The charms is going to work.
I would never put you in harm's way."
Now, I know what you're thinkin', right?
This should've been a easy decision.
(audience chuckles)
I mean, I wasn't the most street-savvy kid,
but I did learn rule number one,
never let somebody shoot you.
(audience laughs)
Even if they ask nicely.
(audience chuckles)
But I really wanted that belt to work.
I wanted that shield.
Could you imagine walking through the streets of Baltimore
with that, right, the power?
It was going to change everything.
Plus, I trusted Ron, right?
Why would Ron do this to me if it wasn't going to work?
He still had to answer to my aunt.
So then I was thinkin', so I was like, "All right, well,"
but I just thought of,
pictured myself facing the barrel of a gun,
and standing still while they shot it,
and I was like, "Oh hell no, I can't do this."
(audience chuckles)
So Ron was disappointed, but he accepted my choice,
and we left, we went back.
When we got back to my aunt's house,
I made an executive decision not to tell my aunt
that the chaperone she had hired had just asked to shoot me.
(audience laughs)
But I was curious what my aunt thought,
'cause my aunt is a very no-nonsense kind of person,
and I was like,
"Surely she'll validate my responsible choice."
And so I kind of posed to her, I said, "Hey listen.
What do you think about charms
and kind of like magical talismans?"
And she said, "Well, actually, I think they work,
but only if you believe in them."
So I was like, "Aw, seriously?"
So, I never really quite got over this.
I went back to Baltimore, and I would put the belt on,
and I kept it, and I would move from place to place with it,
but every time I picked it up, I just wondered,
"What if I had gone through with it," right?
"Does this belt work? Should I have trusted myself?
Should I have trusted Ron?"
I felt like I had blew my one chance
to have that protection.
Couple years later, when I was 16,
my aunt went to move to Ghana,
and once again, she invited me to come stay with her.
Now, this time, while I was in Ghana,
I spent a lot of my time
hangin' with a friend named Quabina.
And Ghana was a really religious place,
but my friend Quabina
could never quite figure out what religion I was, right?
He was like, all he knew
was I had long dreadlocks down to my shoulders,
and I didn't eat meat.
So he was like, "Okay, you're a Rasta," right?
And he was like, he just called me a pure Rasta.
And sometimes other Ghanaians
didn't understand why I didn't eat meat.
They would be like, "What kind of African is this?
Come on, man. What are you?"
And he was like, "Shut up! He's a pure Rasta!"
(audience chuckles)
But as I got closer to Quabina,
I wanted him to know the real deal.
So, one day I told him, I said, "Quabina,
I really respect the Rastafarian culture and tradition,
but I'm not a Rasta."
And he was like, "Well, are you a Christian?"
I was like, "No."
He was a Muslim. He was like, "Are you a Muslim, like me?"
I was like, "No."
He was like, I said, "The truth is,
I gravitate more to traditional African religion
because that's what was taken away from us.
We never had that back in the states."
When I told him that, his eyes lit up,
and he was like, "Ah."
He said, "My family is Ewe,
and we also practice these traditions.
And I want to take you
to see how it really goes down in my town."
So once again, I found myself traveling
to a rural West African town, this time to the Keta region
in the northern part of Ghana.
And we had this long bus trip.
He was telling me all about the religion.
He said, "The religion is not all about magic.
It's not all about the way we've learned.
But there are some things that, to your eyes,
are going to seem like magic."
We got off the bus,
he said his grandfather had been the keeper of secrets,
but his grandfather was now dead,
and had passed the secrets on to a young man,
and that was who we had to find.
We walked from house to house,
and what we learned really quickly
was that this young priest
was not the kind of person you can find.
He has to decide if everything is okay, then he finds you.
And at 11:00 pm, in a bar, he found us.
He walked in, and he explained
that he had done some spiritual readings,
and found out that, yes, Quabina was an heir
to his grandfather's tradition,
and also, he had some stuff that he wanted to give me.
And we left the bar, we walked down a long dirt road,
they stopped, he had an assistant with him, they stopped,
and they bought a machete.
And I was like, "Oh, that's interesting, okay."
And then we got to a shed,
and they explained that there was going to be an initiation.
And that initiation would involve a test.
And that test would involve a machete.
(audience chuckles)
And then they started sharpening the machete.
(audience chuckles)
And while the machete was sharp, something about that metal
just scraping on that metal like that,
just made me realize, "Wow.
This is really super real.
I could actually die out here tonight."
But I also knew I had spent all these years just wondering,
"Does this stuff work? I mean, is there this protection?"
So I made a decision
that I was going to face whatever was in this shed.
And I can't share with you everything
that happened in that shed
because some of it is just for me,
but here's what I can share with you.
There were prayers made to God,
and to forces of nature, and to our ancestors.
At some point, the priest pressed the cold, sharp edge
of the machete against my chest,
and gave me a word, which I cannot repeat.
And said that, basically, when I said I was ready,
they were going to take a wooden stick,
and bang the, knock the back of the machete
so that it went right into my chest,
but that it would not cut my skin.
And then they asked me if I was ready.
I took a deep breath, and I said I was ready.
And then I said the word, and it was like slow motion.
I watched him pull back with this wooden stick,
and then with all his body weight,
just slam the machete into my chest, bang, bang!
On this side, bang, bang! On my arms.
I looked at my arms, and there was no cuts,
and there was no blood.
And so we all made it out of there alive.
And when I reflect on that night,
I'm not sure I'll ever understand what fully happened.
I mean, I'm somebody who believes in science, right?
I believe in climate change and all that.
(audience chuckles) Yeah, for real.
Just sayin'. (chuckles)
At the same time, for some reason,
I needed to take that leap of faith,
and I don't have any scars on my skin.
And I think that makes me believe
that we haven't figured everything
in this world out just yet.
I also think about what I would tell my nephew
if I had a chance to do it all again.
And I think, a lot of what I would tell him
will be the same.
I would say, "Listen, believe in yourself.
Try to control the things you can control."
But I would also tell him this.
"There is magic in the world,
but don't spend your whole life chasing it,
'cause when the time is right, it'll find you," thank you.
(audience cheers and applauds)