I began my journey at Elmina, located in Cape Coast. Elmina has become a place of pilgrimage, carrying for many African Americans the sort of emotional charge that Auschwitz bears for Jewish people. It is on these tours that many of us learn that our ancestors were sold by other Africans. I joined a group of black Americans to observe this process for myself. I interviewed some fellow visitors as they emerged from the dungeons into the sunlit courtyard. What did this place make them feel? Sheer horror and deepest rage at European brutality was the shared answer. Few were prepared to confront the curious ease with which black Africans could sell other Africans to the white man. "Surely they couldn't know how terrible it would be," one woman mumbled almost to herself. Despite rejecting outright any claim that guilt is heritable -- a repulsive and irrational notion -- I felt a profound discomfort in Elmina, a discomfort that would recur on this trip everywhere I met a descendant of the black Africans who had sold their fellows -- perhaps an ancestor of mine -- into slavery.