It wasn't until my sophomore year at Yale, as a student auditing Robert Farris Thompson's art-history class, the Trans-Atlantic Tradition: From Africa to the Black Americas, that I began to understand how "black" the New World really was. Professor Thompson used a methodology that he called the "tri-continental approach" -- complete with three slide projectors -- to trace visual leitmotifs that recurred among African, African-American and Afro-descended artistic traditions and artifacts in the Caribbean and Latin America, to show, à la Melville Herskovits, the retention of what he called "Africanisms" in the New World. So in a very real sense, I would have to say that my fascination with Afro-descendants in this hemisphere, south of the United States, began in 1969, in Professor Thompson's very popular -- and extremely entertaining and rich -- art-history lecture course.