Alex Haley: Roots: The Saga of an American Family

In my mind’s eye, rather as if it were mistily being projected on a screen, I began envisioning descriptions I had read of how collectively millions of our ancestors had been enslaved. Many thousands were individually kidnaped, as my own forebear Kunta had been, but into the millions had come awake screaming in the night, dashing out into the bedlam of raided villages, which were often in flames. The captured able survivors were linked neck-by-neck with thongs into processions called “coffles,” which were sometimes as much as a mile in length. I envisioned the many dying, or left to die when they were too weak to continue the torturous march toward the coast, and those who made it to the beach were greased, shaved, probed in every orifice, often branded with sizzling irons; I envisioned them being lashed and dragged toward the longboats, their spasms of screaming and clawing with their hands into the beach, biting up great choking mouthfuls of the sand in their desperation efforts for one last hold on the Africa that had been their home; I envisioned them shoved, beaten, jerked down into slave ships’ stinking holds and chained onto shelves, often packed so tightly that they had to lie on their sides like spoons in a drawer . . . .

My mind reeled with it all as we approached another, much larger village. Staring ahead, I realized that word of what had happened in Juffure must have left there well before I did. The driver slowing down, I could see this village’s people thronging the road ahead; they were waving, amid their cacophony of crying out something; I stood up in the Land-Rover, waving back as they seemed grudging to open a path for the Land-Rover.

I guess we had moved a third of the way through the village when it suddenly registered in my brain what they were all crying out ... the wizened, robed elders and younger men, the mothers and the naked tar-black children, they were all waving up at me, their expressions buoyant, beaming, all were crying out together, “ Meester Kinte! Meester Kinte! ”

Let me tell you something: I am a man. A sob hit me somewhere around my ankles; it came surging upward, and flinging my hands over my face, I was just bawling, as I hadn’t since I was a baby. “ Meester Kinte! ” I just felt like I was weeping for all of history’s incredible atrocities against fellowmen, which seems to be mankind’s greatest flaw . . . .

Flying homeward from Dakar, I decided to write a book. My own ancestors’ would automatically also be a symbolic saga of all African-descent people—who are without exception the seeds of someone like Kunta who was born and grew up in some black African village, someone who was captured and chained down in one of those slave ships that sailed them across the same ocean, into some succession of plantations, and since then a struggle for freedom.

In New York, my waiting telephone messages included that in a Kansas City Hospital, our eighty-three-year-old Cousin Georgia had died. Later, making a time-zone adjustment, I discovered that she passed away within the very hour that I had walked into Juffure Village. I think that as the last of the old ladies who talked the story on Grandma’s front porch, it had been her job to get me to Africa, then she went to join the others up there watchin’.

In fact, I see starting from my little boyhood, a succession of related occurrences that finally when they all joined have caused this book to exist. Grandma and the others drilled the family story into me. Then, purely by the fluke of circumstances, when I was cooking on U. S. Coast Guard ships at sea, I began the long trial-and-error process of teaching myself to write. And because I had come to love the sea, my early writing was about dramatic sea adventures gleaned out of yellowing old maritime records in the U. S. Coast Guard’s Archives. I couldn’t have acquired a much better preparation to meet the maritime research challenges that this book would bring.

Always, Grandma and the other old ladies had said that a ship brought the African to “somewhere called ’Naplis.” I knew they had to have been referring to Annapolis, Maryland. So I felt now that I had to try to see if I could find what ship had sailed to Annapolis from the Gambia River, with her human cargo including “the African,” who would later insist that “Kin-tay” was his name, after his massa John Waller had given him the name “Toby.”

I needed to determine a time around which to focus search for this ship. Months earlier, in the village of Juffure, the griot had timed Kunta Kinte’s capture with “about the time the King’s soldiers came.”

Returning to London, midway during a second week of searching in records of movement assignments for British military units during the 1760s, I finally found that “King’s soldiers” had to refer to a unit called “Colonel O’Hare’s forces.” The unit was sent from London in 1767 to guard the then British-operated Fort James Slave Fort in the Gambia River. The griot had been so correct that I felt embarrassed that, in effect, I had been checking behind him.

I went to Lloyds of London. In the office of an executive named Mr. R. C. E. Landers, it just poured out of me what I was trying to do. He got up from behind his desk and he said, “Young man, Lloyds of London will give you all of the help that we can.” It was a blessing, for through Lloyds, doors began to be opened for me to search among myriad old English maritime records.

I can’t remember any more exhausting experience than my first six weeks of seemingly endless, futile, day-after-day searching in an effort to isolate and then pin down a specific slave ship on a specific voyage, from within cartons upon cartons, files upon files of old records of thousands of slave-ship triangular voyages among England, Africa, and America. Along with my frustration, the more a rage grew within me the more I perceived to what degree the slave trade, in its time, was regarded by most of its participants simply as another major industry, rather like the buying, selling, and shipment of livestock today. Many records seemed never to have been opened after their original storage; apparently no one had felt occasion to go through them.

I hadn’t found a single ship bound from The Gambia to Annapolis, when in the seventh week, one afternoon about two-thirty, I was studying the 1,023rd sheet of slave-ship records. A wide rectangular sheet, it recorded the Gambia River entrances and exits of some thirty ships during the years 1766 and 1767. Moving down the list, my eyes reached ship No. 18, and automatically scanned across its various data heading entries.

On July 5, 1767—the year “the King’s soldiers came”—a ship named Lord Ligonier, her captain, a Thomas E. Davies, had sailed from the Gambia River, her destination Annapolis . . . .

I don’t know why, but oddly my internal emotional reaction was delayed. I recall passively writing down the information, I turned in the records, and walked outside. Around the corner was a little tea shop. I went in and ordered a tea and cruller. Sitting, sipping my tea, it suddenly hit me that quite possibly that ship brought Kunta Kinte!

I still owe the lady for the tea and cruller. By telephone, Pan American confirmed their last seat available that day to New York. There simply wasn’t time to go by the hotel where I was staying; I told a tax driver, “Heathrow Airport!” Sleepless through that night’s crossing of the Atlantic, I was seeing in my mind’s eye the book in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., that I had to get my hands on again. It had a light brown cover, with darker brown letters— Shipping in the Port of Annapolis, by Vaughan W. Brown.

From New York, the Eastern Airlines shuttle took me to Washington; I taxied to the Library of Congress, ordered the book, almost yanked it from the young man who brought it, and went riffling through it . . . and there it was, confirmation! The Lord Ligonier had cleared Annapolis’ customs officials on September 29, 1767.