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WINSTON-SALEM — And so they came.

Drummers, dancers and a crowd of hundreds converged this week in the heart of Winston-Salem's downtown to celebrate their roots and the return of the National Black Theatre Festival.

See and hear more from the drum circle

They ringed a walkway and huddled close to a two-story stairwell for hours, and if the spirit moved them — and it often did —- they tossed wadded-up bills like celebratory confetti toward a cardboard box below.

At the base of a parking garage, underneath a wall of concrete and glass, sat a clutch of African drummers who created an incessant, muscular rhythm that you could hear for blocks until midnight.

It's a tradition. Their tradition.

Every two years, during the biennial festival, Winston-Salem's Otesha Creative Arts Ensemble turns this small concrete garden across from the Marriott into a visual, aural example of Mother Africa.

They play in a sunken spot some like to call The Hole. But Hashim Saleh, Otesha's longtime director, calls it by another name: Holy Ground.

"If you lose your culture,'' Saleh told me this week, "you're dead.''

Saleh will tell you it's hard to be black in America, where racial tensions always seem to simmer near a collective boiling point. Look at the headlines and you'll realize that.

He talks about an overbearing European mind-set that for centuries has suffocated almost everything African.

So, he carries on the conversation of his homeland. He drums, especially at every National Black Theatre Festival. He and Otesha have been drumming since Tuesday near the party corner of North Cherry and West Fourth.

They'll be there again tonight for the festival's final shows. They'll watch people dance, shout, repeat the name of a long-deceased relative, and bow reverently.

And it all takes place below a royal purple banner of Mr. Marvtastic himself — Larry Leon Hamlin, the festival's founder who died in June. The banner's slogan: "Marvtastic — nothing greater or better than.''

It centers on what Chief Bey, a respected African drum master, once said: "When we dance, we free ourselves from ourselves.''

Georjean Moore knows. She came to UNCG to major in biology. But after taking one dance class, she switched majors.

She's now Otesha's artistic director, a mother of three, who realized the spiritual depth of dance when she visited Senegal three years ago. She heard many Africans tell her, "Welcome home, my sister.''

So, while Saleh drums, she dances. To educate.

"We can't go forward and do anything until we recognize what got us here in the first place,'' she said, "and even if it's just a moment — even the sound of a drum — it's a visual and auditory reminder of our connection to the continent.''

That connection almost didn't happen. Saleh started the drumming during the festival's first year in 1989. Yet, every time he and a friend cropped up on a street corner, the police shut him down.

Enter Hamlin. He had known Saleh for years. Saleh had played at his wedding. So, he created a role for Otesha in the festival.

He asked the drum corps to lead the procession of celebrities during the festival's first night and convinced hotel personnel to allow Otesha to play in that sunken spot off North Cherry Street.

So, in 1993, The Hole became Holy Ground.

Since then, celebrities such as actors John Amos and Harry Belafonte — as well as people from every corner of American black culture — have gravitated to this one spot to hear Otesha drum and dance.

Olando Speas, a shipping manager from Greensboro, brings his three sons — ages 10, 12 and 17 — to rediscover their culture. Numalanga Emiafe, a dance teacher from Nashville, Tenn., comes to recharge her artistic batteries.

Harun Black, a friend of Saleh who paints and teaches psychology at Atlanta's Morehouse College, comes to play. He yearns for that elusive creative path once walked by such homegrown talent as Coltrane and Monk.

He finds it beneath a wall of concrete and glass, every time he plays his djembe, a mushroom-shaped hand drum. He calls it his "spiritual plane.''

"That,'' he says, "is where the peace is.''

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jrowe@news-record.com