Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

Rocked emotionally, my eyes dropped downward as we tend to do when we’re uncertain, insecure, and my glance fell upon my own hands’ brown complexion. This time more quickly than before, and even harder, another gale-force emotion hit me: I felt myself some variety of a hybrid ... I felt somehow impure among the pure; it was a terribly shaming feeling. About then, abruptly the old man left the interpreters. The people immediately also left me now to go crowding about him.

One of my interpreters came up quickly and whispered in my ears, “They stare at you so much because they have never here seen a black American.” When I grasped the significance, I believe that hit me harder than what had already happened. They hadn’t been looking at me as an individual, but I represented in their eyes a symbol of the twenty-five millions of us black people whom they had never seen, who lived beyond an ocean.

The people were clustered thickly about the old man, all of them intermittently flicking glances toward me as they talked animatedly in their Mandinka tongue. After a while, the old man turned, walked briskly through the people, past my three interpreters, and right up to me. His eyes piercing into mine, seeming to feel I should understand his Mandinka, he expressed what they had all decided they felt concerning those unseen millions of us who lived in those places that had been slave ships’ destinations—and the translation came: “We have been told by the forefathers that there are many of us from this place who are in exile in that place called America—and in other places.”

The old man sat down, facing me, as the people hurriedly gathered behind him. Then he began to recite for me the ancestral history of the Kinte clan, as it had been passed along orally down across centuries from the forefathers’ time. It was not merely conversational, but more as if a scroll were being read; for the still, silent villagers, it was clearly a formal occasion. The griot would speak, bending forward from the waist, his body rigid, his neck cords standing out, his words seeming almost physical objects. After a sentence or two, seeming to go limp, he would lean back, listening to an interpreter’s translation. Spilling from the griot’s head came an incredibly complex Kinte clan lineage that reached back across many generations: who married whom; who had what children, what children then married whom; then their offspring. It was all just unbelievable. I was struck not only by the profusion of details, but also by the narrative’s biblical style, something like: “—and so-and-so took as a wife so-and-so, and begat . . . and begat . . . and begat ...” He would next name each begat’s eventual spouse, or spouses, and their averagely numerous offspring, and so on. To date things the griot linked them to events, such as “—in the year of the big water”—a flood—“he slew a water buffalo.” To determine the calendar date, you’d have to find out when that particular flood occurred.

Simplifying to its essence the encyclopedic saga that I was told, the griot said that the Kinte clan had begun in the country called Old Mali. Then the Kinte men traditionally were blacksmiths, “who had conquered fire,” and the women mostly were potters and weavers. In time, one branch of the clan moved into the country called Mauretania; and it was from Mauretania that one son of this clan, whose name was Kairaba Kunta Kinte—a marabout , or holy man of the Moslem faith—journeyed down into the country called The Gambia. He went first to a village called Pakali N’Ding, stayed there for a while, then went to a village called Jiffarong, and then to the village of Juffure.

In Juffure, Kairaba Kunta Kinte took his first wife, a Mandinka maiden whose name was Sireng. And by her he begot two sons, whose names were Janneh and Saloum. Then he took a second wife; her name was Yaisa. And by Yaisa, he begot a son named Omoro.

Those three sons grew up in Juffure until they became of age. Then the elder two, Janneh and Saloum, went away and founded a new village called Kinte-Kundah Janneh-Ya. The youngest son, Omoro, stayed on in Juffure village until he had thirty rains—years—of age, then he took as his wife a Mandinka maiden named Binta Kebba. And by Binta Kebba, roughly between the years 1750 and 1760, Omoro Kinte begat four sons, whose names were, in the order of their birth, Kunta, Lamin, Suwadu, and Madi.

The old griot had talked for nearly two hours up to then, and perhaps fifty times the narrative had included some detail about someone whom he had named. Now after he had just named those four sons, again he appended a detail, and the interpreter translated—

“About the time the King’s soldiers came”—another of the griot’s time-fixing references—“the eldest of these four sons, Kunta, went away from his village to chop wood . . . and he was never seen again. . . . ” And the griot went on with his narrative.

I sat as if I were carved of stone. My blood seemed to have congealed. This man whose lifetime had been in this back-country African village had no way in the world to know that he had just echoed what I had heard all through my boyhood years on my grandma’s front porch in Henning, Tennessee . . . of an African who always had insisted that his name was “Kin-tay”, who had called a guitar a “ ko, ” and a river within the state of Virginia, “Kamby Bolongo”; and who had been kidnaped into slavery while not far from his village, chopping wood, to make himself a drum.

I managed to fumble from my dufflebag my basic notebook, whose first pages containing grandma’s story I showed to an interpreter. After briefly reading, clearly astounded, he spoke rapidly while showing it to the old griot , who became agitated, he got up, exclaiming to the people, gesturing at my notebook in the interpreter’s hands, and they all got agitated.

I don’t remember hearing anyone giving an order, I only recall becoming aware that those seventy-odd people had formed a wide human ring around me, moving counterclockwise, chanting softly, loudly, softly; their bodies close together, they were lifting their knees high, stamping up reddish puffs of the dust....

The woman who broke from the moving circle was one of about a dozen whose infant children were within cloth slings across their backs. Her jet-black face deeply contorting, the woman came charging toward me, her bare feet slapping the earth, and snatching her baby free, she thrust it at me almost roughly, the gesture saying “Take it!” . . . and I did, clasping the baby to me. Then she snatched away her baby; and another woman was thrusting her baby, then another, and another . . . until I had embraced probably a dozen babies. I wouldn’t learn until maybe a year later, from a Harvard University professor, Dr. Jerome Bruner, a scholar of such matters, “You didn’t know you were participating in one of the oldest ceremonies of humankind, called ‘The laying on of hands’! In their way, they were telling you ‘Through this flesh, which is us, we are you, and you are us!’”

Later the men of Juffure took me into their mosque built of bamboo and thatch, and they prayed around me in Arabic. I remember thinking, down on my knees, “After I’ve found out where I came from, I can’t understand a word they’re saying.” Later the crux of their prayer was translated for me: “Praise be to Allah for one long lost from us whom Allah has returned.”

Since we had come by the river, I wanted to return by land. As I sat beside the wiry young Mandingo driver who was leaving dust pluming behind us on the hot, rough, pitted, back-country road toward Banjul, there came from somewhere into my head a staggering awareness . . . that if any black American could be so blessed as I had been to know only a few ancestral clues—could he or she know who was either the paternal or maternal African ancestor or ancestors, and about where that ancestor lived when taken, and finally about when the ancestor was taken—then only those few clues might well see that black American able to locate some wizened old black griot whose narrative could reveal the black American’s ancestral clan, perhaps even the very village.