Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

Dad, who had by now nearly completed his master’s thesis, came home from Cornell to take over the lumber mill, as Mama started teaching in our local school. Having loved Grandpa so deeply myself, and having seen Grandma’s terrible grief, she and I soon became extremely close, and there weren’t many places she went that she didn’t take me along with her.

I suppose it was somehow to try to fill the void of Grandpa’s absence that now during each springtime, Grandma began to invite various ones among the Murray family female relatives to spend some, if not all, of the summers with us. Averaging in her age range, the late forties and early fifties, they came from exotic-sounding places to me, such as Dyersburg, Tennessee; Inkster, Michigan; St. Louis and Kansas City—and they had names like Aunt Plus, Aunt Liz, Aunt Till, Aunt Viney, and Cousin Georgia. With the supper dishes washed, they all would go out on the front porch and sit in cane-bottomed rocking chairs, and I would be among them and sort of scrunch myself down behind the white-painted rocker holding Grandma. The time would be just about as the dusk was deepening into the night, with the lightning bugs flickering on and off around the honeysuckle vines, and every evening I can remember, unless there was some local priority gossip, always they would talk about the same things—snatches and patches of what later I’d learn was the long, cumulative family narrative that had been passed down across the generations.

It was the talk, I knew, that always had generated my only memories of any open friction between Mama and Grandma. Grandma would get on that subject sometimes without her older women summer guests there, and Mama always before long would abruptly snap something like, “Oh, Maw, I wish you’d stop all that old-timey slavery stuff, it’s entirely embarrassing!” Grandma would snap right back, “If you don’t care who and where you come from, well, I does!” And they might go around avoiding speaking to each other for a whole day, maybe even longer.

But anyway, I know I gained my initial impression that whatever Grandma and the other graying ladies talked about was something that went a very long way back when one or another of them would be recalling something of girlhood and suddenly thrusting a finger down toward me say, “I wasn’t any bigger’n this here young’un!” The very idea that anyone as old and wrinkled as they had once been my age strained my comprehension. But as I say, it was this that caused me to realize that the things they were discussing must have happened a very long time ago.

Being just a little boy, I couldn’t really follow most of what they said. I didn’t know what an “ol’ massa” or an “ol’ missis” was; I didn’t know what a “plantation” was, though it seemed something resembling a farm. But slowly, from hearing the stories each passing summer, I began to recognize frequently repeated names among the people they talked about and to remember things they told about those people. The farthest-back person they ever talked about was a man they called “the African,” whom they always said had been brought to this country on a ship to some place that they pronounced “’Naplis.” They said he was bought off this ship by a “Massa John Waller,” who had a plantation in a place called “Spotsylvania County, Virginia.” They would tell how the African kept trying to escape, and how on the fourth effort he had the misfortune to be captured by two white professional slave catchers, who apparently decided to make an example of him. This African was given the choice either of being castrated or having a foot cut off, and—“thanks to Jesus, or we wouldn’t be here tellin’ it”—the African chose his foot. I couldn’t figure out why white folks would do anything as mean and low-down as that.

But this African’s life, the old ladies said, had been saved by Massa John’s brother, a Dr. William Waller, who was so mad about the entirely unnecessary maiming that he bought the African for his own plantation. Though now the African was crippled, he could do limited work, and the doctor assigned him in the vegetable garden. That was how it happened that this particular African was kept on one plantation for quite a long time—in a time when slaves, especially male slaves, were sold back and forth so much that slave children grew up often without even knowledge of who their parents were.

Grandma and the others said that Africans fresh off slave ships were given some name by their massas. In this particular African’s case the name was “Toby.” But they said anytime any of the other slaves called him that, he would strenuously rebuff them, declaring that his name was “Kin-tay.”

Hobbling about, doing his gardening work, then later becoming his massa’s buggy-driver, “Toby”—or “Kin-tay”—met and eventually mated with a woman slave there whom Grandma and the other ladies called “Bell, the big-house cook.” They had a little girl who was given the name “Kizzy.” When she was around four to five years old, her African father began to take her by the hand and lead her around, whenever he got the chance, pointing out different things to her and repeating to her their names in his own native tongue. He would point at a guitar, for example, and say something that sounded like “ ko. ” Or he would point at the river than ran near the plantation—actually the Mattaponi River—and say what sounded like “Kamby Bolongo,” along with many more things and sounds. As Kizzy grew older, and her African father learned English better, he began telling her stories about himself, his people, and his homeland—and how he was taken away from it. He said that he had been out in the forest not far from his village, chopping wood to make a drum, when he had been surprised by four men, overwhelmed, and kidnaped into slavery.

When Kizzy was sixteen years old, Grandma Palmer and the other Murray family ladies said, she was sold away to a new master named Tom Lea, who owned a smaller plantation in North Carolina. And it was on this plantation that Kizzy gave birth to a boy, whose father was Tom Lea, who gave the boy the name of George.

When George got around four or five years old, his mother began to tell him her African father’s sounds and stories, until he came to know them well. Then when George got to be the age of twelve, I learned there on Grandma’s front porch, he was apprenticed to an old “Uncle Mingo,” who trained the master’s fighting gamecocks, and by the midteens, the youth had earned such a reputation as a gamecock trainer that he’d been given by others the nickname he’d take to his grave: “Chicken George.”

Chicken George when around eighteen met and mated with a slave girl named Matilda, who in time bore him eight children. With each new child’s birth, said Grandma and the others, Chicken George would gather his family within their slave cabin, telling them afresh about their African great-grandfather named “Kin-tay,” who called a guitar a “ ko, ” a river in Virginia “Kamby Bolongo,” and other sounds for other things, and who had said he was chopping wood to make a drum when he was captured into slavery.

The eight children grew up, took mates, and had their own children. The fourth son, Tom, was a blacksmith when he was sold along with the rest of his family to a “Massa Murray,” who owned a tobacco plantation in Alamance County, North Carolina. There, Tom met and mated with a half-Indian slave girl named Irene, who came from the plantation of a “Massa Holt,” who owned a cotton mill. Irene eventually also bore eight children, and with each new birth, Tom continued the tradition his father, Chicken George, had begun, gathering his family around the hearth and telling them about their African great-great-grandfather and all those descending from him.