The wave riders: soul-surfers tell their tale

Tony Corley thought he'd done something great a few decades ago by asking a prominent surfing magazine the following question: "How can I find all the Black surfers?"

Weeks after that magazine printed Corley's letter, the California man received a troubling missive in his mailbox. It read: "Tony [N-word] Corly, stay out of the water. Coon. Don't start a Black Panthers' surfing club either. The ocean is for humans not spooks ... If you start a Black [N-word], spook pie club, there's going to be trouble for you, gumby."

That was in 1974, when, Corley recalls, he only heard rumors of other African-American surfers regularly riding the waves off California, Florida and Virginia. Yet now, decades after founding the Black Surfing Association, Corley says he's located some 150 Black surfers--many of them the sport's fastest-rising stars, riding waves in such places as South Africa, Australia and Mexico.

"I continued searching for years," says Corley, 58, of Paso Robles, Calif., who still surfs and just ordered a custom-made board. "I got one letter from a guy in Germany, another in Peru and another in Washington state ... Then I had someone to go out on the water with, to share the friendship and the camaraderie."

These surfers gather, speak their own language of ocean and tide, and ride majestic, unpredictable waves. Many of them liken the frightening, yet exhilarating, experience to a spiritual baptism, where one begins to glimpse the presence of an unseen higher power. They get on chunks of expensive wood sealed by an even more expensive fiberglass process and balance precariously on top of a living, breathing ocean that often tumbles with 20-foot waves possessing the power to flatten entire cities.

Surfing is not for the weak of heart, yet they do it.

Rahim Walker is one of them. This surfer of Jamaican descent grew up on the East Coast and learned to surf while attending college in California. At 21 years old, he quit a $60,000-a-year Silicon Valley job to travel the globe and surf the waters of 12 countries while, at the same time, brushing up on his French, Spanish and Portuguese. He'll finish his world tour in two years.

"I took my own savings and didn't ask for the help of my parents," says Walker, who recently spent four months surfing in Australia while also working as a bartender. He's now taking a brief respite in Hawaii, where surfing is legendary.

With no kids and no wife, he can break out, and enjoy cultures and society through the lens of a very exclusive club.

"It just opens up a whole new world," says Walker, now 25.

"The mentality of surfers is different, and wave-riding is just such a pure form of being connected. It's like there's a higher power that you can feel bur you don't have any need to define it. You just appreciate it and enjoy it for the time that we have."

William Lamar, another longtime surfer, is hoping to spread the word about Black surfing with his soon-to-be-released documentary of the sport and its unique practitioners who seem unbound by house, home and money.

Called Soul on the Wave, the documentary will profile Black surfers of 1950s-'60s California who endured their houses being torched and their families run off the beach by racist Whites. Lamar also hopes to educate American Blacks on the rich tradition of surfing among Africans and others in the Diaspora.

"People in Jamaica, South Africa, Barbados? Those kids have been surfing for 20 years," says Lamar, 43, who hopes to find the next inner-city Black kid who can be groomed into an international surf champ. "But White media are not focusing on that because surfing competition is a trillion-dollar industry."

In addition to firming the body, wave-riding can also strengthen a person's constitution, says Andrea Kabwasa, 38, of Los Angeles. The supreme concentration of observing the ebb and flow of the ocean while standing upright pulled Kabwasa out of a dangerous depression. Now, six years into the sport, Kabwasa feels she can take on anything.

"That first morning I drove to San Diego and took a lesson," says Kabwasa, who soon decided that surfing would take the place of constant trips to the hairdresser. "[The lesson] cost me $35. I stood up, and it just made me happy when I hadn't been happy for six or seven years. And I stayed happy all the way home."

The feeling stuck and now Kabwasa wants to share it. "When you go surfing, unlike other sports, you really think about nothing but the ocean and the waves. Your whole frame of reference changes. It cleansed me slowly. There's a true feeling of happiness."

COPYRIGHT 2007 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning