William “Damani” Keene and Carole “Ife” Keene
Married for 54 years, William “Damani” Keene and Carole “Ife” Keene met the second day of freshman-year at Howard University and have been together ever since.
After military service and graduate school, Damani returned to work in Student Affairs for 32 years at Howard. Upon his retirement in 2004, Damani began Family Heritage Research and was astonished at the information he found about his once-enslaved maternal great-grandmother Mariah. The Keenes decided to tell her story. And quite a story it is.
Damani and Ife chose historical fiction as the most captivating genre to chronicle this fascinating tale. Family lore is that she was a spy for the Union. They wove the facts of Mariah's life into the major historical events of her Ancestors' lives and her own. Mariah was enslaved, given as a human wedding gift, emancipated, stepmother to eight, a midwife, and a twice-widowed mother of nine surviving children, including two sets of twins.
Ife, born in Knoxville, Tennessee, is a retired Information Systems executive and a twice-published fiction author of Cancer of the Spirit and All Of A Sudden It's Too Late. She is also author of an unpublished autobiographical chronicle, A Trilogy of Rear Windows. Ife was the proud co-owner and Vice President of Quality Solutions, Inc. (QSI), a woman-owned and -operated management consulting firm before retiring.
Damani is a native New Yorker, a retired university executive, a former member of the Howard University Board of Trustees, and a long-time history buff. While Damani has written many essays and a family memoir entitled Keene Reddick Roots, the novel CLANDESTINE is his first major literary work. Damani holds a Master of Arts from Cornell University, and was recently appointed as a Member of Parliament of the State of the African Diaspora, a component of the African Union.
The geographical nexus of CLANDESTINE's storylines is in Franklin, the seat of Williamson County, Tennessee. The African-American Heritage Society of that county selected the Keenes to receive their Preservation Award in 2017 in recognition for their research. That research led to the recognition of Damani's grandfather John Watt Reddick after whom a street and housing development was named in the 1950s.
Damani and Ife have lived in the Republic of Panama since 2004. They are the proud parents of three children, grandparents of four, and have four great-grandsons. "Sunset Dreams" is what they named their little slice of paradise in the Panama highlands.
