Coming to Goree Island was beyond an emotional experience for me. Being from the south (Georgia), I have had the opportunity to see the ports where ancestors were brought in on massive ships. I have seen the markets where ancestors were sold as though they were pieces of property instead of living, breathing men, women and children causing destruction of the family unit. I've seen the cobblestone roads that people forced into slavery laid in Savannah, Charleston and other coastal cities.
But there was something emotionally different about my experience at Goree Island; seeing where people were taken from their homeland to be used as slaves if they survived a devastatingly treacherous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to an unfamiliar land to work in inhumane conditions was beyond words. I'd seen the other end of the Trans- Atlantic slave trade but today I saw where some of my ancestors' journey began and words cannot express the mixture of emotions that I felt.
To learn more about Goree Island, please click on this link: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/26 .