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Every episode ends the same way: Jeliba speaks the names. Tonight he explains what he has been doing all along.

Jeliba and his apprentice Nia travel back to Senegambia, the Mande and Fula homeland where the keeper's paternal DNA points. They explore Bamanaya, the old Mande religion: a creator who stepped back from the world, the nearer dead who answered a family's prayers, and nyama, the dangerous force scholars describe as moving through everything that exists.

They meet the nyamakala, the hereditary blacksmiths, leatherworkers, and griots who were ranked low and yet feared, because they handled what others could not safely touch. They stand at the graveside, where the griot sang the dead across to the country of the ancestors. And they follow the story to Kaabu, the Mandinka federation whose fall in 1867 came at the end of the same wars that filled the slave ships.

The people carried west could bring nothing in their hands. They brought what was in their mouths.

Kevin Bearden reflects on the wall in his own paternal line, his January journey to Tabato, a village of griots, and why the names of the dead are never inert.

Chapters 0:00 Cold open: a graveside in Kaabu 1:13 Intro 1:48 The Bamana way 3:44 Nyama, and those who handle it 5:52 The griot at the graveside 7:40 Kaabu, and the ships 9:48 The keeper's segment 11:19 Closing: the speaking of names

Names spoken in this episode Aaron Bearden, documented as a free person of color by 1840, in Clarke County, Georgia · Anderson Bearden · William Irving Bearden, the elder · William Bearden, the younger · Eugene Irving Bearden · Kevin Bearden Jr. · the ones behind Aaron, whose names the paper did not keep · the jeliw of Kaabu

Sources and further reading

• Patrick R. McNaughton, The Mande Blacksmiths: Knowledge, Power, and Art in West Africa (Indiana University Press, 1988)
• Barbara G. Hoffman, Griots at War: Conflict, Conciliation, and Caste in Mande (Indiana University Press, 2000)
• Sory Camara, Gens de la parole (Karthala, 1992)
• David C. Conrad and Barbara E. Frank, eds., Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande (Indiana University Press, 1995)
• Thomas A. Hale, Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (Indiana University Press, 1998)
• Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves (Heinemann, 2003)