Roots: The Saga of an American Family

by Alex Haley

  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.

  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 “s
omewhere 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.

  Renting a car, speeding to Annapolis, I went to the Maryland Hall of Records and asked archivist Mrs. Phebe Jacobsen for copies of any local newspaper published around the first week of October 1767. She soon produced a microfilm roll of the Maryland Gazette. At the projection machine, I was halfway through the October 1 issue when I saw the advertisement in the antique typeface: “JUST IMPORTED, In the ship Lord Ligonier, Capt. Davies, from the River Gambia, in Africa, and to be sold by the subscribers, in Annapolis, for cash, or good bills of exchange on Wednesday the 7th of October next, A Cargo of CHOICE HEALTHY SLAVES. The said ship will take tobacco to London on liberty at 6s. Sterling per ton.” The advertisement was signed by John Ridout and Daniel of St. Thos. Jenifer.

  On September 29, 1967, I felt I should be nowhere else in the world except standing on a pier at Annapolis—and I was; it was two hundred years to the day after the Lord Ligonier had landed. Staring out to seaward across those waters over which my great-great-great-great-grandfather had been brought, again I found myself weeping.

  The 1766-67 document compiled at James Fort in the Gambia River had included that the Lord Ligonier had sailed with 140 slaves in her hold. How many of them had lived through the voyage? Now on a second mission in the Maryland Hall of Records, I searched to find a record of the ship’s cargo listed upon her arrival in Annapolis—and found it, the following inventory, in old-fashioned script: 3,265 “elephants’ teeth,” as ivory tusks were called; 3,700 pounds of beeswax; 800 pounds of raw cotton; 32 ounces of Gambian gold; and 98 “Negroes.” Her loss of 42 Africans en route, or around one third, was average for slaving voyages.

  I realized by this time that Grandma, Aunt Liz, Aunt Plus, and Cousin Georgia also had been griots in their own ways. My notebooks contained their centuries-old story that our African had been sold to “Massa John Waller,” who had given him the name “Toby.” During his fourth escape effort, when cornered he had wounded with a rock one of the pair of professional slave-catchers who caught him, and they had cut his foot off. “Massa John’s brother, Dr. William Waller,” had saved the slave’s life, then indignant at the maiming, had bought him from his brother. I dared to hope there might actually exist some kind of an actual documenting record.

  I went to Richmond, Virginia. I pored through microfilmed legal deeds filed within Spotsylvania County, Virginia, after September 1767, when the Lord Ligonier had landed. In time, I found a lengthy deed dated September 5, 1768, in which John Waller and his wife Ann transferred to William Waller land and goods, including 240 acres of farmland ... and then on the second page, “and also one Negro man slave named Toby.”

  My God!

  In the twelve years since my visit to the Rosetta Stone, I have traveled half a million miles, I suppose, searching, sifting, checking, crosschecking, finding out more and more about the people whose respective oral histories had proved not only to be correct, but even to connect on both sides of the ocean. Finally I managed to tear away from yet more researching in order to push myself into actually writing this book. To develop Kunta Kinte’s boyhood and youth took me a long time, and having come to know him well, I anguished upon his capture. When I began trying to write of his, or all of those Gambians’ slave-ship crossing, finally I flew to Africa and canvassed among shipping lines to obtain passage on the first possible freighter sailing from any black African port directly to the United States. It turned out to be the Farrell Lines’ African Star. When we put to sea, I explained what I hoped to do that might help me write of my ancestor’s crossing. After each late evening’s dinner, I climbed down successive metal ladders into her deep, dark, cold cargo hold. Stripping to my underwear, I lay on my back on a wide rough bare dunnage plank and forced myself to stay there through all ten nights of the crossing, trying to imagine what did he see, hear, feel, smell, taste—and above all, in knowing Kunta, what things did he think? My crossing of course was ludicrously luxurious by any comparison to the ghastly ordeal endured by Kunta Kinte, his companions, and all those other millions who lay chained and shackled in terror and their own filth for an average of eighty to ninety days, at the end of which awaited new physical and psychic horrors. But anyway, finally I wrote of the ocean crossing—from the perspective of the human cargo.

  Finally I’ve
woven our whole seven generations into this book that is in your hands. In the years of the writing, I have also spoken before many audiences of how Roots came to be, naturally now and then someone asks, “How much of Roots is fact and how much is fiction?” To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within Roots is from either my African or American families’ carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents. Those documents, along with the myriad textural details of what were contemporary indigenous lifestyles, cultural history, and such that give Roots flesh have come from years of intensive research in fifty-odd libraries, archives, and other repositories on three continents.

  Since I wasn’t yet around when most of the story occurred, by far most of the dialogue and most of the incidents are of necessity a novelized amalgam of what I know took place together with what my researching led me to plausibly feel took place.

  I think now that not only are Grandma, Cousin Georgia, and those other ladies “up there watchin’,” but so are all of the others: Kunta and Bell; Kizzy; Chicken George and Matilda; Tom and Irene, Grandpa Will Palmer; Bertha; Mama—and now, as well, the most recent one to join them, Dad . . . .

  He was eighty-three. When his children—George, Julius, Lois, and I—had discussed the funeral arrangements, some one of us expressed that Dad had lived both a full life and a rich one in the way that he interpreted richness. Moreover, he had gone quickly without suffering, and knowing Dad as well as we all did, we agreed that he would not have wanted us going about crying. And we agreed that we would not.