The Door Of No Return

About the Book

         Pope John Paul stood at this door and apologized to millions of Africans in diaspora

for the role that the Catholic church played in facilitating the  African slave trade.

Nelson Mandela huddled in a small cell designed for the most  recalcitrant slaves and emerged 20 minutes later visibly shaken. President Clinton, Hilary and Chelsea Clinton and a large delegation

of the Black Caucus visited this place where the President stopped short of apologizing to

African-Americans for the pain that slavery inflicted upon them. Other African-American dignitaries have journeyed  to this sacred place and left scathing indictments of anger

or wrenching words of profound sorrow: Mohammed Ali, Dick Gregory, Jessie Jackson,

Rev Al Sharpton, and hundreds of others. “The Door Of No Return” is the door of  the

slave house on Goree Island located in Senegal (west Africa) where millions of African slaves looked back to get their last glimpse of “The Motherland” before being loaded onto slave ships headed to America. They were then stacked human length to human length onto European ships and sold to the Americas and Carribean Islands to work as free laborers  making the western

world  the great civilization that it is today.

         Robbed of all ancestral ties, Africans in America were treated like chattel and were housed on this small island of Goree where they were subjected to deplorable conditions and sold to America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. These African slaves were sold to  one of the greatest powers of the western world which was built on the backs of the  slave. These contradictions  of freedom built on the backs of slaves still haunt privileged American  and the heirs of the slaves whose ancestors were sacrificed to make this  nation great. Misdirected anger in the African-American community has led to a surge of  Black on Black crime, gang warfare, drug addiction, massive imprisonment of Africa-American males, tremendous rise in the incidence of AIDS, and infectious self loathing. It is this very sense of hopelessness and helplessness that led me to seek comfort in the arms of “Mother Africa” and in doing so I have discovered a new sense of purpose and direction.          

         My book, “The Door of No Return”, A Spiritual pilgrimage For Africans in America” is 250 pages long and it catapults the reader along with 3 African-American female physicians to Dakar, Senegal after I am involved in a drive-by shooting. It is a fictionalized non-fiction work which uses real life characters and events some of which have been altered to protect the privacy of individuals or institutions. Starting from a small crime ridden town in California, I seek refuge with my girlfriends  on this  small slave island of  Goree where inadvertently I  claim the pain of my slave ancestors. There on this small island I am reunited with my soul when we visit the slave castle as tourists. “The Door of No Return” is steeped in African history and famous African-American quotations which are  interspersed throughout the text are meant to inspire those who choose to take this pilgrimage to “The Door of No Return”.

About the Author

Mary A. Flowers, M.D. is a practicing physician in Los Angeles, California. In 1968 she graduated valedictorian of George Washington Carver High School in Montgomery, Alabama  and studied premedical sciences at Tuskegee Institute  where she graduated summa cum laude in 1972. Her medical training was finished at Harvard Medical School in 1978. In 1984 Dr. Flowers moved to California to complete a fellowship in nephrology  at U. C. L.A. Her extensive travels  with kidney patients to China, Japan, Europe, Carribean Islands, and Africa including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia and west African cities such as Mali, Nigeria,  Ghana, Gambia, Cameroon, and Senegal led to the creation of her first book, The Door of No Return. Her latest work in Senegal with Dr, Boucar Diouf at Le Dantec Hospital of Dakar  assisted her in establishing a relationship with Mr. Joseph Ndiaye, the museum curator of the slave house where she was appalled by the way slaves were treated before they were loaded onto ships before their  transit through  the middle passage to America.            Dr. Flowers is a child of the civil rights era and the proud survivor of slaves who were forced from the Motherland of Africa and brought  to America in chains. She is one of many Africans in diaspora who is seeking  her roots and groping with the aftermaths of the brutalities inflicted upon African-Americans. She grew up amongst bus strikes in Montgomery, Alabama, voter registration marches from Selma Alabama, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Kennedy, Medgar Evers, and other important leaders during the 60's. Only through the  gut wrenching experience of being involved in a drive by shooting in San Bernardino, California did Dr. Flowers actively seek to deal with life altering questions about her African heritage because she felt that the pain of  her ancestors history would be too much for her to endure.         Catapulted by the pain of Black on Black violence, Dr. Flowers sought refuge in Africa, the land of her ancestors. There she  came to realize  just how much the pain and anguish caused by  the enslavement of her ancestors still plays a role in the way that African- American youths interact with each other and with the American establishment in the form of misdirected anger. The absence of visible African- American leaders has left a gapping hole in the spirituality of the African- American community while the imprisonment of close to 1 million African-American males has crushed our spirits as a race of people. Where are the reparations for African- American people who endured the most abominable atrocities on earth?  Africa was stripped of its mineral resources and human resources to build the western world. It seems ironic that Africa owes a debt to western powers when western  wealth such as gold, diamonds, oil, free human labor, and inventions were all stolen from Africa. These questions are pertinent and the  answers will only be found when African-Americans journey back through The Door of No Return.