"There's a saying in our culture: Don't take notes, take note.  That is remember.  So the culture became our remembered selves.  
And there were among the survivors of the journey of the Middle Passage 
those women who had the ability to remember, 
who had the ability to go into trance and seek both past and future.  
They were the key to the survival of the people over here 
because they remembered enough not to be hopeless, 
not to think we were going to be erased.  
We had no voice, we were branded, and nothing was left but our memory." 
-Beah Richards

(Winfrey, Oprah. Journey to Beloved.  New York: Hyperion, 1998.  102)