Standing At The Door Of Sorrow Visit To Slavery Post Kicks Off African Trip

They stood in the doorway together, mother and daughter, gazing out at the expanse of ocean - as scores of mothers and daughters did ages ago in fear, sorrow and chains.

However, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton turned around Monday at the Door of No Return, unworried about traders with muskets who would shoot them if they refused to board waiting slave ships or the sharks that would devour them if they jumped overboard to swim away.

Nor were they threatened by a horrible journey aboard a cramped, disease-ridden ship or by slavery that would force them apart, sending them to sugar plantations and cotton fields in North or South America.

“I cannot even imagine what that would be like,” Clinton said. She stood in the courtyard of a 221-year-old house where captured Africans were weighed, chained, separated according to their value and herded into captivity.

“That door represents nothing less than the depths of human depravity,” Clinton said. “It is a reminder, always, of what human beings can do to one another.”

This house, called Maison des Escalaves (Slave House), was their first stop on a six-nation tour of Africa. She said she wanted to see the heartbreak of Goree, a hub of the slave trade for 300 years, because of its meaning to black Americans.

She ran her fingertips along a rusted ankle clamp held by Joseph Ndiaye, curator of Goree, who explained that the shackle and a rusty 20-pound weight held down one of the estimated 15 million to 20 million people taken into slavery through the island.

“Millions of African Americans claim their roots in West Africa, through Goree Island,” she told students at a girls school. Her chief of staff, Maggie Williams, had visited Goree Island before and called it a “profound” experience.

She said her goal was to persuade Americans to see Africa as more than a land of crisis and conflict.