Alex Haley - His Search For Roots (1977)

ladies and gentlemen Alex Haley when I was a little boy I lived in a little town of which you never heard probably called Henning Tennessee about 50 miles north of Memphis I lived there in the home of my mother's mother my grandmother who was very close to me and I'd to her and my warmest earliest memories include that every summer my grandmother who was whittled would invite to her home various women members of the family they came from places which in the context of a little boy from Henning Tennessee sounded very exotic like Inkster Michigan st. Louis Dyersburg Tennessee Kansas City places such as that they had names such as cousin Georgia great-aunt Leah's great-aunt till rate and binding and others and they would come there someone stayed for just a couple of weeks when they arrived others would stay for the whole of the summer depending on whatever their family situations permitting and my earliest members include that every single evening across those summers after supper as we call the evening meal when the dishes had been washed these ladies who generally averaged about my grandmother's age range late forties early fifties would go out from the kitchen and kind of filter out onto the front porch they would each take seats in keene bottom rocking chairs and they would begin rocking back and forth when they all got going it was like so many metronomes just rocking in time turns it would be about as dusk deepened into early evening lightning bugs flickering around the honeysuckle vines just beyond the porch and they would talk each evening unless there was some local gossip to superseded temporarily they will talk about this self same thing it was a long narrative history of a family although I didn't know that as a little boy it was not a verbatim thing but bits and pieces and patches which were told together kind of in a mixed homogenized way about this family they would speak about people they would speak of places speak of things and I as a little boy didn't have the orientation to understand a great deal that they talk about for instance when they spoke of people and they talked about an old Massa I didn't know what an old Massa was I didn't know what an old missis was when they spoke about places and they mentioned the plantation I didn't know what that was although after a while I began to get some impression it must be something rather like a farm from the things I heard being dumb on them and I know that my first impression awareness as a little boy that whatever they were talking about and whomever they were talking about went a long way back would come when every now our then one of these old ladies would get talking animatedly about something which had happened in her girlhood and it would come sooner or later and one of them would kind of abruptly turn about in her chair and sort of fling her hand down toward me behind my grandmother's chair where I always said and exclaimed something like I wasn't any bigger than this young man here and the very idea that someone as old and wrinkled and gray as they had once been no old or bigger than I was just blew my mind I could are let me leave but it gave me the impression that whatever they were talking about was something which went a long way back when they were speaking of people the furthest back person they ever would speak of was someone whom they called the African they will tell how this African was brought on a ship to this country to a place which they pronounced as necklace and they will tell how he was bought off that ship by a man whom they called Massa John Waller who took this African to his plantation in a place which they described as Spotsylvania County Virginia and they told how there this African desperately kept trying to escape the first three times he escaped he was caught brought back in each time given a worse beating than previously as his punishment and then the fourth time he escaped this time he had the misfortune to be caught by a pair of professional slave catchers I have since done some peripheral research on that profession I think it's safe to say that there has never been a more beastial profession ever walked the face of this country the story went that these men cornered this African who had escaped for the fourth time and he in his desperation hurled a rock which hit one of them in the head and wounded demand rather badly nonetheless they were able to overwhelm him and then the story was that they brought him back before a group of other slaves who had escaped fewer times than he and apparently one because he had injured one of them and two because he was such a repetitive escapee that he set up a very glaring bad example in the course of slavery at that time he was given an exemplary punishment or in fact choice of punishments it was told that he was given the choice before the others either of being castrated or of having a foot cut off and this African chose the foot the story was that his foot was put on a stump and with an axe was cut off across the arch it was a hideous act it was by no means a necessarily uncommon act in the of Antebellum slavery as it would turn out it was going to play a very major role in the keeping intact of the history of a black family down across literally generations that would play out against one major background fact and that was that slaves had very little sense of that which we today know value and treasure as family continuity and the principal reason that they did not was because slaves tended to be sold back and forth enough that only average when those who were of parent age had children very often those children grew up knowing little if indeed anything at all about their parents which is to say that many parents were sold away from children too young to him remember their parents and then when those children grew up and in turn head children there was yet less that they could pass on to their children so over a period of successive generations it came to be that slaves as a body were characterized with appreciably less and less knowledge of family lineage or heritage as we know it and in this time when this was the case when this particular African whose foot had been cut off managed first to survive then to convalesce he posed now to his master an economic question slavery was after all an economic matter viewed in that perspective by those who were owners of slaves the master parent had decided that although he was crippled and he hobbled about he could do limited work and that he would be more valuable doing that limited work than if he were sold away at one of the auctions held periodically in the area because had he been sold at auction he automatically in his condition would have been sold at what was called the scrap sale at the end of auctions when those who were variously heeled incapacitated or otherwise not so physically desirable were sold for quite low prices as a rule so it happened that in a time when slaves were characterized by very little knowledge of self in lineage terms this particular African by his master's decision was kept on one plantation for what was going to turn out to be quite a long period of time limping hobbling about working as best he could in the vegetable garden where he had been assigned this African in time admit and made it with another slave there on that plantation in Spotsylvania County Virginia and in this story is told by my grandmother and aunt Lee as in cousin George and aunt plus and impiety and the rest of them she was described as bill the big house cook and of this union was born a little girl and she was given the name Kizzy as the little girl Kizzy grew up it was said that when she got to be four or five or so and could begin to understand such things this African father of hers every chance he got would take the little girl his daughter by the hand and lead her about the plantation he would point out to her various natural objects a tree a rock the sky a cow a chicken anything of this nature and every time he poured out any such object to his daughter he would tell her the name for that thing in his native tongue and the little girl Kizzy like any child today hearing an alien tongue spoken heard and learned strange phonetic sounds gradually with repetitive hearing of them and repetition of them on her own part she memorized these sounds and she came to associate certain sounds with certain objects for instance it was said that there was in the slave quarters a screened instrument of a sort which was in some places called a qua qua it kind of roughly resembles say a banjo or maybe loosely speaking a guitar or something and it was said that every time this African would point to this instrument with his daughter in tow he would say to her Cole as if it was failed Keo a single syllable and the little girl Kizzy came to know that in her African father's turn that stringed instrument meant cold there were numerous other sounds for other objects that he would point out from time to time perhaps the most involved of the objects are sounds that he would point out a make with her was that there was a river which ran nearby this plantation in Spotsylvania County Virginia the river in fact was the man Tapani river and it was said that whenever this African would point to this river with his daughter present he would say to her kamby bolongo and she came to know that strange phonetic sound and to know that to him her father hid mint River there was about this African something which was characteristic of all those Africans who were brought from Africa and bought all slave ships and taken to plantations when they were taken to plantations about the very first act in the case of virtually every one of them was that they were given an anglicized name and for all practical purposes that was the first step in the psychic dehumanization of an individual or collectively our people the removal from the individual of the native name with which went his or her subjective sense of self-identity the same as it is with us today whatever may happen to be our names in the case of this African he was given by his master they named Toby but it was said that on that plantation that every time any of the other slaves would address him as Toby he would strenuously rebuff and reject it and tell them that his name was Kinte sharp to syllabic angular sound Kinte was the little girl Kizzy came to know was her father said his name there was about this African yet another thing again characteristic of all those Africans who were the ancestors of all we black people here in this auditorium or here in this country and that was that every single one of them had been torn from some place where they had spoken whatever was native tongue and they had been brought to this place where it was a matter of necessity that they learned to speak as quickly as possible what was for them a strange agent new tongue English gradually haltingly a word here a phrase there those Africans learned to speak this new tongue English in their own individualistic way that we now call idiom a dialect or somesuch and as this process happened with this particular African he began now with a little wider range in the language that his daughter better understood English to tell her little anecdote stories about himself as a matter of fact it would appear he had a passion for trying to communicate to his daughter a sense of his past among the stories he told her was how he had been captured he said that he had been not far away from his village chopping wood intending to make himself a drum when he had been surprised set upon overwhelmed and thus had been kidnapped into slavery and the little girl Kizzy came to know that story that her father told among other stories that he told to compress what would happen on that plantation in Virginia over the next five years and then further along the girl Kizzy stayed there growing up on the plantation directly exposed to her African father to his stories and to his sounds until at the age of 16 Kizzy was sold away she was sold away to a new master his name was Tom Lee Lda he had a much smaller plantation in Caswell County North Carolina and it was on that plantation that within her first year there the young woman Kizzy gave birth to her child a boy who was given the name George the father or at least a saya was the new master Tom Lee which was not at all an uncommon situation in the antebellum South as it would turn out when this boy George got to be four or five or so and began to ask the obvious question about who was his father his mother Kizzy rather than tell him the truth that the master was his father began instead to tell him about her father and so this boy among others that he had contact with began boastfully to talk about his grandfather this African who said his name was Kinte who called a guitar coal who called a river kamby bolongo who said that he had been chopping wood intending to make a drum when he'd been captured and all the rest of the story as it had come down from his mother Kizzy independent of slaving at the time when the boy George got to be about 12 years of age he now was apprenticed to an old slave to learn a useful occupation in his case the old slave was uncle Mingo who held a master's fighting Gamecocks the fighting of Gamecocks in the antebellum South was a sport comparable in popularity to say the basketball or football of baseball among us today and this young boy it seems together with whatever uncle Mingo was able to teach him seemed to have a kind of innate green film-like ability for this court to the degree that by the time he was in his mid-teens he had been given by others involved in the sport the nickname that would stick indelibly to him for the rest of his long life and that was Chicken George when Chicken George got to be about 18 he met the young slave woman with whom he later with mate her name was Mathilda and in time Matilda was going to give birth to eight children and now it was Chicken George in the role of father who sent into motion what was later going to become a rigid family tradition that every time one of those infants was born Chicken George in a formal way would gather the family within the slave cabin he would sit with the new infant on his left and speaking ostensibly to the infant but actually to his older audience he would tell the story which had come down from his mother Kizzy and for that eventual children of Chicken George and Mathilda it was something most unusual in the knowledge of slave children and that was direct knowledge of a great-grandfather this same African who said his name was Kinte who called a river kamby bolongo a guitar coal who said that he had been chopping wood to make a drum when he was captured and all the rest of the story that had come down from Kizzy to her son as fate would have it those children grew up and took mates and had children in the way that things happen their fourth child of Chicken George and Mathilda tonk would become a blacksmith he was sold away in his latter teens to a man whose name was Marie who headed tobacco plantation in Alamance County North Carolina and it was on that plantation that Tom the blacksmith in time met and mated with a young slave woman whose name was Irene she was half black half Cherokee Indian she came from the Edwin Holt plantation in another section of Alamance County North Carolina and in time also Irene was going to give birth to eight children and now it was Tom the blacksmith in the father role who carried on the tradition begun by his father that every time one of those children was born he too would gather their family in a formal way with in the slave cabin and he would sit with a new infant on his lap and tell the story that had come down and for this second set of eight children hearing the story it was something all but unheard of in the knowledge of slave children on the average and that was direct knowledge of a great-great-grandfather this same African who said his name was Kinte who called a Quaqua guitar Cole who called a river can be bolongo who said that he had been chopping wood to make a drum when he'd been captured and the rest of the story as it had come down as things would turn out of that second set of eight children hearing about this African great-great-grandfather the youngest a little girl whose name was Cynthia and his fate was further to have it Cynthia was to become my maternal grandma and I told you at the outset how I grew up in my grandma's home and little hinting Tennessee and she popped that story into me as if it were plasma it was by all odds the most precious thing in her life the story of the family which had come down across the generations in the manner I have described I stayed around grandma's until I was around in my early teens by which time I had two younger brothers George and Julius our Father by this time he had finished getting his master's degree at Cornell University in agriculture and he had begun to teach his small black land-grant colleges about the south and we were kind of faculty brats here or there wherever he was teaching and then when world war ii came along i the oldest of the three sons was one of the many many young men who thought that if i could hurry up and get into the u.s. Coast Guard an organization of which I had recently heard that maybe I could spend the war walking the coast somewhere and I managed to get into it and to my great shock rather suddenly discovered myself on an ammunition ship in the southwest Pacific it was not at all what I'd had in mind and what I look back on it now however it seems to have been part of a mint to be series of incidents that one day I would write a book called roots going back the series of incidents begin with grandma having told me that story in the first place and the other elderly ladies of their family and then the next thing would be as I look back upon if I was one day to write a book obviously I had to become a writer something I had never thought about it was not the kind of thing to which one aspired if one was brought up into the inning Tennessee and what not the way I got to be a writer was completely accidental looked at in one aspect and then from another aspect it seems to me also to have been intended that these things would happen we would be at sea about sometimes as much as two months at a time the biggest problem we had was not the enemy it was just sheer boredom of evenings when your day's work was done and there you were out there in the middle of the southwest Pacific with nothing to do at night there was a running poker game a running crap game and other things and I didn't do either of those things very well and it just sort of happened I became a cook on this ship and in the evenings after I had washed my pots and pans from the evening meal I would generally go down in the hold of the ship and get my most precious possession a portable typewriter I had learned in high school to take and I would write letters I just began writing letters to all my ex schoolmates even teachers anybody I would write letters to and everything and every now then ships would come out to us bringing mail to us from home and they would take our mail and take it ashore where it would be mailed and once I got things going pretty well every mail call that we had I would get 4050 letters at a time I rather swiftly got imaged on the ship as its most prolific correspondent now this was playing directly into a series of things that would lead into my becoming a writer one day way down the line from there being at sea as long as we were and as far away from home as we were when we finally would get ashore you generate some port in Australia or New Zealand bunch of lusty young sailors that we were some fairly lusty older ones as well I don't really have to tell you what was our topmost priority when we got ashore we would go and we would do the best we could and then pretty soon [Music] and in pretty soon we've been back out at sea and now there would be all these fellows who was smitten with the memory of some young lady they left ashore and girls have a way of getting all the more lissom and voluptuous in your mind and longer you stay at sea and it got to be too some of my buddies who were generally what we might call using a colloquialism the great rapper types they're very vocal types they were not awfully hot on paper however begin to come around and ask me because they knew I wrote so many letters if I would help them write a letter to some girl and I was of course glad to do it if I could and so they set up a practice just accidentally began to happen in the ways that things can happen in the service where each evening at just about this time I would sit at a mist table in the mess deck with a stack of three by five cars in front of me and my clients would literally line up and as they got to me one by one I would interview them about this girl I said okay now what she looked like hair eyes mouth nose what not what did you say to her where did you go with what do you want to say to her now is there anything special such as that and whatever he told me I would reduce to tight little notes on index card and then later as I got chance I'd take each of these cards with his and her name on it and using that specific information about that young lady I would write a personalized sort of love letter for him to copy in his own handwriting and would it would be something like say almost all my clients were white if the guy had told me as many did the girl's hair was blonde well out there in the middle of the ocean I'd get in some fit of creativity and come up with something like your hair is like the moonlight reflected on the rippling waves or stuff like that and these girls would get these letters and I will never forget one day and night that would prove very pivotal in my being a write up this night we had been at sea a little over two months during which time three batches of mail had gone off our ship asure so that each of my clients girls had had these many letters and we got in after two months at sea into the city of Brisbane Australia Liberty was declared that evening of six everyone who had lived just flew ashore by midnight most of them had come wobbling stumbling back to the ship having accomplished the most they had been able on such short notice which was to get drunk and they were just alcoholically imbibed they were just plain drunk but then with my clients it was almost as if a script had been written around 1:00 in the morning they began to come back individually and each of them before us steadily enlarging and increasingly all struck audience were describing in the graphic graphic ways that only young sailors can how when he got to that young lady behind these letters I had written for him that he just meant with astounding results practice on his spot and I [Applause] and I became heroic that night on that ship and I can tell you the truth that for the rest of World War two I never fought a soul all I did was write love letters [Applause] [Music] and that was when I began trying to write stores for magazines it was how I began while a sailor on ships at sea to write it would turn out some part of every day seven days a week for the next eight years collecting in time hundreds of rejection slips before finally I was selling things to small magazines and then to some others I stayed on in the service until I was 37 years of age when I had 20 years and then I retired I went to New York I went to Greenwich Village rented a room in a basement and there I began to have a rare rough time trying to make it as a full-time freelance writer it would come to be in time however I began to get assignments from The Reader's Digest on a fairly regular basis and I would do biographical articles for them and then in a big switch I went over from The Reader's Digest to Playboy where I happened to begin the feature called the Playboy interviews the first of them who would interest you probably to know was when I was given an assignment to do an article about the great genius jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and I was having a great deal of problem with that story and the main reason for it was that Myles talked so little one day I was talking with a friend of his and it was brought out to me that Myles was as good a cook as he is a trumpeter and the thing came to pass that I just had a hard time getting him to say anything to give you an example if you were home and a friend of Miles one afternoon say around 6:30 your phone would ring and you'd pick it up and say hello and a voice would come over and say chilly and hang up and the translation of that was at Myles had cooked chili and that you should come over that evening and have saw the third interview that I did for Playboy I believe it was third or maybe the fourth was of Malcolm X at a time when Malcolm was just coming into major prominence in the National periodicals and newspapers when the interview of him appeared among its readers was a book publisher who asked Malcolm if he would be willing to tell his life in book length detail Malcolm was hesitant at first but he finally agreed that he would and then because I believed Malcolm associated me as the black writer who probably was affiliated more with major national magazine stories he asked me if I would be willing to work with him on this book I was pleased honored flattered to do so and I would spend the next two years with Malcolm X the first year interviewing him very exhaustively the second year taking all that interview material putting it out first in a very exacting chronology breaking it up into what seemed to be logical chapters sections and then studying each of those sections very intensively and then writing by Kerr as the first person as if I were he a manuscript which hopefully would sound as if Malcolm had just sat down across a table and was trying to tell a reader his life as best he could recall it from earliest days when the manuscript was finished I went back down and worked with Malcolm I was by now living upstate New York and worked with him on a hotel and he went across from first page to last making this event editing change with his favorite ballpoint pen and at the bottom of each page putting his MX and then he said to me I don't think I'm going to live to read this in print Malcolm proved to be very prophetic because it was less than two weeks later he was shot to death in the Audubon Ballroom and the following morning after that I sat down and began the most traumatic writing I have ever in my life calling forth as best I could reminiscing of having met and worked with this man anecdotes and insights into him put together in some kind of tumbling rhinology and that is that part which now appears at the end of that book called the epilogue and the Autobiography of Malcolm X was concluded and on its way into print at that time I had stepped in to a period that most writers of books are familiar with it said that writing a book is like having a baby and I think it's not a bad analogy something you've been very very close with you have indeed internalized and all of a sudden it's gone and you the writer feel a void of vacuum and you don't quite know what to do with yourself and it was in that situation now that a magazine gave me as assignment that took me to Washington DC and I had interviewed someone a Saturday morning and in the afternoon came and I had nothing particularly to do and I was down in an area of that city near the National Archives I had never been in the building I knew of course that it symbolized history and I don't know what but just some impulse sent me up those steep stairs and I got into the lobby area looked around walked around looking at the displays they have all the time of historical documents of one another nature under glass there in the lobby and then I went on up in the service area and a young man came up to me at a desk and asked if he could help me and it kind of startled me because I really hadn't been expecting him to walk over there and when he asked me I wasn't about to tell him what I really had here kind of kicking around in my head for a while I wasn't gonna say to him I'm kind of curious about some slaves I've heard about from my grandmother when I was a boy I said to him instead I wonder if I might see this census record four elements' County in North Carolina in the year 1870 and he said that I could now the reason I asked about that specific record was because it was the first census following the Civil War and I knew that it the first census in which black people have been listed by their names previous to this time black people have been recorded in something called the slave schedule the top of it would contain the name of their master and then if he say for instance of talk had five slaves there would be five X's in a vertical line and to the right of each X age and so forth they would describe that slave but no name was given anyway the young man said I could see these records in microfilm and I went on up in the microfilm room the records were delivered in the little cardboard boxes that they deliver this in and I begin creating microfilm into machine looking through this scope and I'm looking down upon rows of lines of names after names after names of people long gone there was a name that was aged and some little identifying thing about them and as I would turn the handle it seemed to me almost mystic these names in the handwriting of a census enumerator 1870 where the IFS look like essays and so that old-fashioned handwriting which we've all seen you have to kind of accustom yourself to reading it and it began to dawn on me that each of these lines was somebody some human being who had lived out a life some of them you could see by the breath each day had lived long life some had lived short lies one thing another sometimes you saw we're children little children had passed away in the course of a record things like that and what got to me was the feeling that they were moving along walking if I turned the handle slowly they went in slow stately tread if I turn the handle more rapidly they seemed to sprint along and the thing just intrigued me and I kept on doing it and after I'd say about an hour intriguing though it was it had just got monotonous and I decided I would just get up and Eve go on out and thus I got up and started out of the archives to this day it gives me the Quivers to reflect upon how easily I might have gone on out of that National Archives building and gotten back out on the sidewalk and I'm sure if I had I would never have given it another thought but what happened again I think one of these meant to be things was that in leaving I happened to take a route that took me through a room where they do genealogical reading and as I walk through this room I had been in many libraries in my life I caught my peripheral vision caught something I'd never seen before you know we've all been in libraries lots and you know how people in libraries log back we're trying to be comfortable as much as at ease as we can as we read whatever we have but when I picked up as I went through this room was that everybody in that room was bent raptly intently over the table whatever they had and they were studying with the most careful intensive effort whatever they had some of those people had magnifying glasses in their hands and they were going line by line poring over this copy and I could see that the documents they had were old things they were letters they were ledges they were Scrolls things of this nature and somehow a thought just came to me rather as a bubble might rise in a glass of water and it was these people are trying to find out who they are and with that I just kind of turned around and went back up into the microfilm room where I had been to start with and the thing then was that the people hadn't moved my materials and I began to thread them into the machine and turned the handle again and look and I guess I had gone about another hour when I suddenly found myself looking down upon Tom blacksmith under column heated color b4 black his age right beneath his name was Irene his wife mium formula tow and then her age and then there were their children their oldest children and I found myself recognizing names I'd heard about long time ago but it didn't seem really to focus and hit on me until I got to the youngest of those children was one whose name was Elizabeth and she was age six on this record at this time and it suddenly dawned on me for God's sakes that's aunt Liz I used to play with her long gray hair on grandma's front porch and the thing just galvanized me to realize what I was looking at and what really got to me when I got to thinking about it was these are grandmas words these are grandmas stories and it wasn't that I had not believed my grandma because you didn't not believe my grandma but but the point was that there were the stories she had told in the National Archives on microfilm in official United States records housed in the same building that that kept the original Constitution the Bill of Rights and so forth and the thing was something that just made me start taking notes very brief notes of what the records were which roll of microfilm where it was to be found on that roll and I made my way on back to New York and the more I thought about that thing the more my mind went back to where I had first heard all this from grandma and from all those old gradients on the front porch in Henning and now that I began to think of I begin to realize what I had known all the time but never in a canoe give way that with a single exception all but one were dead the only one that survived the last survival of those old ladies was one whom we used to call cousin Georgia what our particular men what about cousin Georgia was that she was the youngest among them she was about 20 odd years my grandmother's junior and I remembered also that cousin Georgia was the one whose mouth ran like a trap hammer you could hardly believe the way that blade had talked but they would never really let her get loose they were always drown her out they would say something collectively like now you just be quiet because we know the story better than you and we'll tell it and you listened and she would get sputtering with indignation now however she was the only one left and I knew that she was still alive I'd heard this and in my family as in most families there is somebody who knows where every cousin is and my family is my immediate younger brother George and I called him and he said yes she's in Kansas City on Everett ever knew and so I had this driving compulsion to see cousin Georgia and I got on a plane and I flew to Kansas City and I never will forget the most moving experience it was that after the initial hugging's and the kissing's and the boy you done growed up good the minute the minute that I told cousin Georgia spoke to her about the story she was off and running as if we'd been sitting on that front porch the previous afternoon she said yeah boy that African he said his name was Kinte he called the guitar cold he called the river can be bolongo he say he was chopping wood for to make his supper drum when they cussed him and all the rest of the story told in her own colorful way it was like echoes from boyhood a difference was I was no longer a little boy just sitting behind my grandmother's chair ingesting the story but I was now at least a fledgling writer and I was taking notes of everything she said is best I could and when cousin Georgia finished in the way that elderly people often can she said something that would later become extremely meaningful to me it was at this time extremely motivational to me she looked at me and she said something about those who had been on that front porch with her and me she spoke of them not as if they were dead as I had been tending to think of them but rather as if they maybe had just walked off stage somewhere behind a curtain up in a balcony somewhere she said boy you're sweet grandma and all the rest of them they sitting up there watching you now you get on honey and do what you got to do it was big it was amorphous and yet it was supremely driving as a force I didn't know quite how to translate it but I went on back to New York and the more I got to thinking about what is it I have quote got to do and I got to thinking of course about the story that was the truck the genesis of it all and it seemed to me that the clues to doing something lay in those strange phonetic sounds always attributed to that Africa speaking to his daughter telling her the identification of things and the more I thought about the seeming thing I had to do was get to lots of Africans because many tongues are spoken in Africa these sounds were obviously fragments of some tongue living in New York I began to do what seemed to be natural to me I began to go up to the United Nations Lobby about quitting time people were rushing off the elevators rushing to get home it was not hard to spot Africans and every time I could I'd stop one and I'd tell him my little sounds I suppose in a couple weeks I'd stopped a couple dozen Africans each and every one of which took a quick look quick listening took off and I can understand that with me trying to tell them some alleged African sounds in a Tennessee accent that go get it I have a friend a master researcher is named George Sims who knew what I was trying to do and he came up to me with a listing of people who in the academic world are known for their knowledge of African linguistics I looked at the little thumbnail notes that he had with each one of them and the one who intrigued me was a man born and reared in Belgium partially educated there then we had moved to England he had attended the University of London and he had done found his graduate work at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London then what particularly impressed me was he had done post doctoral work living in African villages studying the tongues are spoken there and then writing a book in French originally called la tradición or rail it was the oral tradition and I found a man was in this country his name dr. yan van sina he was at the University of Wisconsin and I just felt this tremendous compulsion to see this man I got on the phone person-to-person and after while I'm talking with him he was a little puzzled by what I was trying to convey but he was gracious he said he'd be glad to talk with me and it was one Thursday that I got on a plane in New York curious about a few phonetic sounds some syllables that had been passed down across generations of my maternal family and with no idea in the world what I was about to get into that evening in the ven Cena's living room I sit with him and I told him everything that I could muster about the story every shred every nuance of it and it went on for quite a time and then dr. Van Sina oral historian that he is began to question me he was particularly interested in the physical transmission of the story from one to the next generation and it drew late and he asked spend the night at their home and I was happy to do that and then the following morning when I looked back upon it seems to me like miracle to dr. van Sina came down before breakfast he had a very serious expression on his face and he said I wanted to sleep on it then he told me he already had been on the telephone with colleagues of his like the eminent africanist dr. Philip Curtin others and they felt it certain that the collective sounds which had been kept down across the generations of my family represented the Mandinka tongue I had never heard the word I was told now that was the sound of the tongue rather spoken by men dingo people and then he began to guess translate he said that there was a sound that meant cow or cattle another meant the baobab tree generic in West Africa he came finally to the sound I had told him as had been the case that they had said that this African always would point to this stringed instrument and say Cole and I was told now that almost surely this related to an instrument old in the mandingo culture called the kora he came finally to the most involved of the sounds which had been passed down across the generations I had told him as had been the case that this African they had said it always in Spotsylvania County Virginia would point to a river the Mantovani river with his daughter in tow and say to her can be belong though and I was told now that in Mandinka without question the word bolongo translated two large moving running stream such as a river and that preceded by the word can be it very probably meant Gambia River I had never heard of such a place it was a work of short order for dr. van Sina to point out the me on a map the Gambia a long narrow country midway down the west african coast jutting into senegal bordered on three sides by Senegal fronting on the ocean bisected by the Gambia River and I just had all of a sudden this enormous compulsion to go to that place in Africa but at the same time it was an ambivalent kind of feeling because I didn't know I hadn't thought about Africa and I realize you don't just pop up in Africa and I didn't know what to do I knew I had to find somebody to help me Shepherd me go with me I finally wound up in Washington again in various lists I could find it the State Department who referred me to various embassies and I found that there were a considerable number or several thousands of African students in this country and then I found that at that time from that tiny country called the Gambia there were exactly 12 and the one who physically was closest to me was at a place called Hamilton College in upstate New York Clinton New York his name was EBU manga I got to that campus one Thursday afternoon around 3:30 and practically snatched EBU manga out of an economics class it took a while before I was able to get visas and stuff together and then to get us on pan-american and we flew to Dakar Senegal and then we got a light plane and flew over to Yun dong which serves the Gambia we got in a van and went to the city of Bathurst it was called at the time now it's been Jo the capital city of the Gambia EBU manga took me to his home his father Alhaji Malik manga the people in that section are predominantly Muslim historically and today Alhaji manga was most hospitable and he when he spoke with me he got together three men whom he knew to be very knowledgeable of the history of the country and I met with those men in the lounge of the little Atlantic Hotel and there they said in their robes their pillbox hats their shoes it with it the toe kind of turns up and the heel is out and I'm telling them as I had told dr. van Sina every strength every nuance of that story which I first had heard as a little boy on a western Tennessee front porch and these Africans listened most intently when I finished with the story it again gives me the Quivers to reflect upon how tissue-thin at times have been the hinges on which this whole adventure is swamp because what these Africans reacted to was of that whole story of mere two syllables they said now there may be significance that your forefather said his name was Kinte I said there was nothing more clear in the whole of the story or explicit than in pronunciation of his name and they said well now look here in our country our oldest villages tend to be named for those families those clans which settled those villages centuries ago and they got a little map and showed me look here is the village of kin takunda and another here is the village of kin takunda John a yaa and some other places with a Kinte prefix then they told me something of which I had never had the slightest dream not the slightest comprehension they told me how history has been kept for centuries in Africa they told me about the existence of very old men who are called grills it spelled GRI OTS as they described them Rio seemed to be like walking living archives they told me of men who are in a line of reels the senior griot would be about late sixties early seventies beneath him would be men at about decade younger down to a teenage boy and that the boy would grow on up mature hearing the story of a large family clan told over and again until he began to tell parts out a little more and a little more until that boy one day hopefully would be the senior griot able to talk for sometimes in some big family cases as much as two days without once repeating himself telling in the most meticulous detail in great grade microscopic detail the story of a clan over a period of century or more and what I heard such a thing I was just staggered and then they explained to me why I was so staggered they said that I had come from this culture here where we live where as they put it we have become so conditioned by the quote crutch of print that we have almost forgotten what the human memory is capable of if in fact it is trained to know such things and then these men told me that my forefather having insisted that his name was Kinte they would see what they could do to help me and I came back to this country enormously bewildered I just didn't know what to make of it I was confused because the people whom I had met day in Africa was so at odds with all I had ever had as my own impressions of Africa and his peoples and his culture like most of us here my whole of my main impressions of Africa of the physicalist second largest continent on the face of earth had been derived from Tarzan from Jungle Jim of things of that nature and seriously that was really the most I knew and I was confused and it seemed now I had to learn more and I began a veracious period of reading everything I could lay my hands on about Africa West Africa particular circus slavery I can remember reading all day until my eyes hurt and then sitting on the edge of my bed at night looking at a map of Africa studying how the countries in related physically one against the other within the other so forth and weeks past and then a letter came that I should come back as soon as I could I wanted very much to come back but I didn't have any money I didn't have any way to get any money that I could see certainly not the kind of money that involved going back I had spent everything I had and could borrow on short notice to make the first few and I got to thinking now I remembered something that when I had been working at the Reader's Digest one day any kind of social gathering there among the people present had been mrs. DeWitt Wallace the co-founder or one of the two co-founders with her husband mr. Wallace and mrs. Wallace had commended me for an article I had written it was one of the unforgettable characters which I had written about an old cook under whom I had worked in the coastguard his name was Scotty an old sea-dog type and when she finished commending me as she was leaving she just had said to me if I can ever be of help to you let me know and I've never forgotten that and now I sit down and I wrote a rather embarrassed letter to mrs. Wallace explaining as best I could what was obviously a nebulous thing they hoped that maybe I might be able to make some connection in Africa based on a story told in West Tennessee in boyhood it sounded so nebulous I was really embarrassed to send a letter but as it turned out mrs. Wallace did remember and she got in touch with some of the editors of The Reader's Digest and they got hold of me and I was asked to come up and I did go and at lunch I was supposed to talk an hour about my idea I talked non-stop for about three hours it just poured out of me and I never will forget that afternoon those editors said to me we will gamble with you or we will gamble on you and they agreed that the Reader's Digest will support my travel expenses and give me a stipend per month for a year to see what could I do in the course of that year and thus I went back to the Gambia the same man with whom I had previously talked told me matter-of-factly that there was now found in a backcountry village an old real knowledgeable of the Kinte clan story when I heard that I was ready to have a fit where is he and they said he's in his village and I would have expected here's an American magazine writer they they had him there with a PR man for me to talk to but I discovered now if I was to see him I was going to have to do something I had never dreamed would fall my lot and I was get together a kind of modified Safari it took me three days to rental laws to get up River or lorry and Land Rover to get supplies by roundabout Landru there and find it a higher total of 14 people three interpreters one each Experian Li Wolof visual ax and the Mandinka tongues they said we'd meet in different places along the way for musicians because they told me in the back country these old men would not talk without music in the background and barrows and so forth and we hated up the gambia river on the morning vibrating in a little launch called a batty boo and we now head on as our destination this village calls you for a and we got to a village called El Breda and there we set sure went ashore and then by an on foot we were headed toward that village you furry where it was said this old man the griot lived when we got to that village near it the little children playing on the perimeter of the village gave the alert and the people came hustling out of the village it's a very small village only about 70 people and as they rushed toward me I had entered into something that is described as the peak experience it is that which emotionally one experiences that nothing ever in the rest of your life can trends in and I feel certain that is what was my experience that morning in that village when the people came I saw among them a short man compactly built on Ulf white robe or pillbox head and when they got close of the interpreters with me sure enough went to him and meanwhile the seventy odd people of this little village came rushing toward me they came quickly curiously around me they were round me it sort of in a horseshoe design and I held up my arms at full length I would have touched the nearest ones on either side and they were about three four deep all around and the first thing that got to me was the intensity of how they were staring at me the eyes just raped from head to foot the four heads were followed in the intensity of their staring and I felt very very discomforted being stared at as if I was a thing or something and the first thing that got to me was I began to now another feeling it was also in me and yet it seemed apart it was visceral as if my inserts are gonna churn around or something I felt almost nauseous and I remember standing up there thinking to myself what in the world is the matter with you and what came to me was that I had been in crowds lots of times in my life but for the first time in my life I was in a crowd and I was the only one of my complexion which might be said to be brown everybody else I was looking at was jet black and emotionally that thing hit me like a thunderbolt I took this day don't know the components of why I felt as I did and you know it's sort of like body English if we are insecure uncertain whatnot we tend to drop our glances and I drop mine and without having intended to do so I found myself looking almost studying my own hands the colour of my hands inside outside and naturally involuntarily it's in contrast with their complexions and this time it didn't take so much time I had this rolling wave of a feeling come over me it was just terrible awful I felt hybrid I felt impure among the pure and it was just awful I remember standing there being rocked by that when the old man left the interpreters and briskly walked away at which point all the people around me quickly left me and went to the old man one of the interpreters his name was Salah came up and spoke quickly whispering sort of in my ear and what he said rocked me as much as the rest when I understood the import of it he said why they stare at you so they have never in this place seen a black America and I suddenly realized they were not looking at me as Alex Haley writer individual as I tend to think of myself but they were seeing me through their eyes as the symbol of the 25-plus millions of us black people in this country whom they had was seen and it was just awesome to realize that someone had imputed to you that enormity of symbolism well I was sending that kind of rock by that when just sort of adjacent word now all these people seventy all of them plusted around this old man and they were darting glances at me and there was intense conversation in Mandinka and although I couldn't understand a syllable of it yet in some way there's a universal language of gestures nuances inflections and somehow I knew exactly what they were talking about I knew they were trying to rev it how did they feel collectively about me symbolizing to them all we black people in this country whom they never had seen and they came a point when the old man turned and quickly as was his way he walked right through the people he walked right up to me stood maybe a yard from me his eyes piercing into mine and he spoke in Mandinka as if he felt I instinctively ought to understand it which of course I couldn't and the translation came from the side and once I understood the import of that translation are the words I made a vow to myself that once I get this book and the film and everything all settled down pretty well I am going to see these words put in some appropriate permanent location somewhere along the southern coast of this United States and along the western coast of Africa the way that they decided they felt about me symbolizing to them all we black people in this country whom they never had seen and the translation was quote yes 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 and that was the way they felt about it the old man the griot his name was Kevin kanga Fofana he had 73 reins their way of saying seventy three years of age one rainy season a year he began now to tell me the history of the Kinte clan I should tell you that one of the most awesome things I have since come to try and deal with was that if and this particular here fought to be and let us six feet high because it is so rarely possible because of intervening occurrences nonetheless if any black person in this auditorium any black person in this country only could know a few vital clues if he or she only could know what was the original African name of the four father therefore parents brought out of Africa if he or she only could know when were they brought out and from where where they brought out that to this day it is not impossible that the contemporary black American might be put in touch with a wizened old grill some way in back country black West Africa who could tell the contemporary black American literally the ancestral clan from which he or she sprang if they could know those clues I was there blessed to know the things I had gotten through a series of miracles which had begun on a West Tennessee front porch from my grandmother and other elder relatives and now I was about to hear the story of the Kinte clan because I had been able to say as had been the case that my forefather in this country always had insisted his name was Kinte I should tell you that when a griot begins to speak it's a neo religious occasion within a village the people get in a wide semicircle their posture is something kind of like parade rest the griot sits he comes forward as he begins to speak he bends forward his torso is rigid the core stand out his neck he speaks and the words are almost as if a scroll is being read he would say two or three sentences and the interpretation or translation would come to me when I had heard a good fair amount of it I was AB solutely all immersed in just wonder that such could be that out of this man's memory and his mouth was coming such an incredible array of lineage all the way across on family land a hundred odd years ago who married whom what children in what order all the way across that land then dropped back down to the children themselves each child whom they had married their children and what are all the way across I was struck by the biblical way it was being expressed in the translations and so-and-so took as a wife so-and-so and begot and begot and begot and every now then when he would name some begot other he would tell some little thing about that person which had happened later in life I can strip out of the hours I was to hear that day of into a few minutes the history that I was to give the Kinte clan and I again remind that the counterpart of his history exists this day is somewhere in backcountry black West Africa for every single black American their ears if he or she only could know the clues and only could be put in touch with the right real he said that the Kinte clan had been begun in the country called old Mali the men preponderantly were blacksmiths the women were mostly potters and Weaver's a branch of that plan had moved into the country called Mauritania and it was out of Mauritania that one son of that clan his name caribou Kunta Kinte had come he was a young marabou which is to say a holy man of the Muslim faith the people of that section as I've said historically were predominantly Muslim of faith caribou Kunta Kinte as a young marabou moved down into the long narrow country called the Gambia he stopped first in a village called pakka Linden and then he went to a village called as Jafar wrong and he went next to a village called as you furry and the village of Jafar took his first wife a Mandinka maiden whose name was Cyrene and by Sai ring he begot two sons whose names were as Jean a and Salome then [ __ ] man plural marriages he took a second wife her name Jason and by ASA he begot a son whose name was omuro the three sons grew up there in the village of Jafar a and when they came of age the elder to Jean and Salome went away and founded a new village called kenta-kun de Jean ay yah and then the youngest of them all merle stayed there until he had thirty rings 30 years of aged and he took a wife her name was Benton Kevin and by been together within the decade that we and our calendar system would call roughly between 1750 1760 omuro Kinte B got four sons who in the orders of their arrival were named Kuta lamine sua do and Mahdi the old man had been talking for about in excess of two hours when he got down to that level of their family then as he had stopped I would suppose 50 times it would seem in the course of that time to tell some little tangential thing about some individuals some begot other he stopped now and he spoke and the translation came from the side and I heard in disbelief it began about the time the Qing soldiers came and I interject to tell you that's one of those time fixing references which Creole storytellers use to fix events they use events to fix dates and if you would know the event you must find a date but anyway here in backcountry black West Africa hearing the ancestral story of the Kinte clan told because I had been able to come saying my your father had always insisted that was his name now I heard this wizened old grill see through the interpreter quote about the time the Qing soldiers came the eldest of these four sons Kuta went a way from this village to chop wood and he was never seen again and he went on with his story while I sit there as if I was called of rock goose pimples that felt to be the size of grapes all over me there was no way in the world for that man to know what he had said to me it was with physical effort that I got my hand into my duffle bag and got out my little notebooks the first book the early part of it was devoted to a kind of a synthesis of what grandma and aunt Leah's in cousin Georgia and they invited in all of them had said and I showed it to the interpreter Salaam and I watched as he reared and he began to perceive the meaning of it and he got very agitated he went to the old man talking very rapidly explaining to him the old man after a point tall boots grabbed a book jabbing his finger at his pages talking very rapidly to the people explaining his significance that I had come from a place where my forbear on this side had been one who always said his name was Kinte who had always said he was not far from his village chopping wood with the intent to make a drum when he had been surprised set upon captain into slavery I remember I had been sitting on a little three-legged stool with a cowhide top and I just felt like helium had been pumped into me I popped up like a jack-in-the-box just stood up I don't remember anyone giving an order I just remember subsequently becoming aware that those people the 70 out of them had formed a circle or ring around me they were sort of dancing it might be said of kind of hitching Progress dance counterclockwise the movements kind of like drum majors to hide the action they were chanting something their voices alternative loud and soft and I'm standing there in the middle of them feeling like an atom in the desert how could you feel I felt wiped out and I remember I happen to be looking right toward the face of one of the about 12 ladies in that moving circle who had little infants over their back the way they care of them in those claws and this lady with a fierce cowl on this shinola black face broke from this circle charging in toward me her bare feet knocking up little puffs of dust and when she got to me she took her infant at all but thrust it at me the gesture saying take it and I took it in that class but the way we instinctively do babies and as soon as I hated class pretty good she all but snatched it away from me and there stood her another lady with her baby and it went on I suppose it took about two minutes for me to hug all those babies I would be back in this country speaking at Harvard University and a very famous scholar in this country dr. Jerome Bruner who knows of such things said later to me you were participating in and you did not know it one of the oldest ceremonies of humankind called the laying on of hands then in their way they were saying to you through this flesh which is us we are you and you are us and there were many many other things that were gonna happen that day in that village almost too emotional to try and deal with what I remember was the men took me to their mosque I didn't know what to do I'm Methodist they're Muslim and I was trying to be careful to do the right thing watching out of the corner of my eye you take off your shoes to go in there you down on your knees and I remember down there on my knees feeling so forlorn and lost and thinking I found out where I've come from I don't even understand what they're saying they were praying around me in his high and nasal wailing Arabic and later when we came out the crux of what they were praying was translated for me it was praise be to Allah for one last long from us whom God has returned and things just went on until it got to the fact that emotionally I could not handle anymore I told him I wanted if I could to go out by land we had come by water up the river and it turned out it was long enough after the rainy season it could be arranged and I was going out now it was set up I would go out with a driver in a Land Rover backcountry black West Africa big monkeys the incredible foliage the green parrots that streak around screaming at you just backcountry sight sounds that I've never had any idea about because just cannot describe Africa unless you've been there and as we were going along there was also in my mind a great turmoil they begin to come in my head as we might have a dream as when we sleep a rough ragged newsreel type of thing It was as if all that I had read by now about the ways that Africans had been brought out of Africa seemed to be enacted I began to see the way that are long in the coastal areas as had been the case with Kunta mostly they were people who were kidnapped because they were close to the coast but further back inland I began to see the way that by far most of the slaves were captured come screaming awake at night with the thatched roofs of their homes falling in on them or fire aflame the thatch was in flames and they would rush out into the bedlam into the carnage and those who survived it in any kind of fit shape were captured as prisoners linked neck to neck with thongs into what were called coffins if you do much reading in this you will run into that word coffin see old double-f Elias it is said that some coffins of slaves were as much as a mile in length and they would begin those torturous marches from way over the villages were down toward the air is where the ships were and when they got down with many dying along the way from many reasons and when they got to the shoreline area the survivors were herded into long low buildings built of small timbers and thatched roofs called barrack UNS in the barrack UNS they would be washed they would be fed almost force-fed they would be crudely medicated to hurry them toward a fit physical condition when it was considered that they were in sufficient condition now a few at the time they would be moved out into the yards of the barrack homes and they're the owners of this ships would come the captains and the mates and they would ensue these hideous physical examinations every orifice of the human body and then the purchases and then the branding usually between the shoulder blade usually with the initial of the ship that was going to take them out and then would come to time as I pictured it in my mind's eye from things I'd read that they were being moved from the Barracuda cross that strip of beach to the little cockleshell canoes at the edge of the water and when these Africans from the inland areas many of whom had never seen the sea they were terrified those who saw the surf march up the beach to them it was the jaws of some incomprehensible animal they'd never seen anything like that a ship lying offshore was to them a floating flying house or something like that they didn't even know what a ship was it seemed it was when those Africans were being moved from Barrow Kuhn toward the canoes that for the first time they begin to perceive the enormity of the unknown that was in store for them because it was on that beach that I had read so many times that so many of them who up to this time had been virtually story went into absolute spasms of terror they would fall prone on the beach they were grumbling they were screaming they would use their fingers like claws digging into sandé they would use that Nixon he is like the beaks of giant birds trying to bite up one last hold on the land that was their own and it will beaten up from that beaten down across their further beach on to and into those canoes that took them out through the surf out to the ships and it was into the holes of those ships that they were put and that was how the ancestors of every black person in this country without exception were brought here there were no exceptions there was no other way and I was riding along with my head so full of this when we came to a big village up ahead and I looked up ahead and I was astounded to realize that those people up there knew what had happened behind us in village of Jafar a obviously they knew obviously someone had come out and the news had relayed ahead of it before I had left because ahead of us now they were poles sticked along the road there were green like anti vines hanging like the cords from microphones but thicker and at intervals along these vines holding the great glossy green sabor leaves and Africans are Gambia Jews for sun shades are umbrellas and the people were thronging out into the road milling waving we could see them as we approached and they were crying out some cacophony of sound and we came on the driver slowing down when he finally got to the people I guess he was doing then maybe two miles an hour and we were trying to nudge he was through the people who were all just lling and crowding around I didn't know what to do again I felt this full of helium feeling I just stood up again like a jack-in-the-box now in the Land Rover and I'm looking down at these people these people who are jet black all around wizened elders and all ages and sizes and whatnot and it came to me looking at them staring up at me as they waved what a huge Caprice it was there they were looking at me seeing me as the symbol of all we 25 plus million people over here and I in turn am using in effect our eyes looking at them seeing people who have never left Africa since the beginning of man so far as we know and the huge Caprice was that the only reason either of us was in either place was that Caprice of which of our forefathers had happened to be taken out of Africa and which had been left there that was the only reason either of us was in either locale and I was full of that going on in among those people when I suppose we had gotten about a third of the way through them and I suddenly began to understand what it was that they all were crying out I think I hadn't understood it because I didn't understand their tongue and they were all closely clustered and I didn't get anything but the wall of sound as opposed to the individual sounds but it began to come to me now that what they were all crying out from wizened old elders the men the old grandmother's were skin like leather their breast like old Bell straps the childbearing women many of them pregnant they maidens the youth and the little youngsters jaybird naked of both sexes they were all milling thronging looking up at me with beaming boolean expressions on their faces and what they were crying out which I had not understood now until now was mr. Kinte mr. Kinte and I tell you what I am a man but I remember when a sob hit me about ankle level I remember throwing my hands up to my face my fingers and streaking crying I don't think I ever cried like that since I was a little baby it just seemed to me that if one really knew the story of black people if one knew the way that our forefathers have been brought here that it really didn't matter what one thought about black people individually or collectively but it just seemed that as a human being one ought to weep that that thing called slavery had ever happened in the annals of human being and I just couldn't help it I whipped on out through that village and all the way more or less until we got back to their car and I got myself onto a flight back to New York and when I got there I found that it took me a while to get used to being back about half a day that I couldn't even call my own people and then I called my brother George and he told me the sad news that while I was away cousin Georgia had died in Kansas City my brother's a lawyer he's very orderly and he brought me a folder with the data about the funeral then it included a hospital report and on there was time of death and I whipped the way I sort of fiddle around with information and I made the time transfer from Kansas City to West Africa and then it hit me like a thunderbolt when suddenly I realized what had in fact happened that as the last survivor among them all cousin Georgia the youngest who had told a story to me and to whom I had gone back several times since our reunion because she was sick my source of strength my source of support my source of story my source of history and now it seemed that as the lair survivor one of the reasons that I have to feel that this whole thing was meant to be was that the time transfer or the transposition of the times from Kansas City to West Africa showed that cousin Georgia had died literally within the hour that I had stepped foot in that village in Africa and it always senses seemed to me that as that layer survivor it was her role to see me to that village where the link across the ocean in the family story would be made and then cousin Georgia too went on and joined the rest to watch me and see what would I do with it it was a charging moment and a kind of motivation that it is hard to put to words I got myself together emotional enough to go to the publishers and I told them the story of what had happened I told them that actually I wanted to write a book that technically would be the story of a family my own but which broadly would really be the saga of a people that every black person does not matter who he or she is ancestrally traces back to some African born and really in some village captured in some way put into some ship brought across the same ocean into some succession of plantations and I told them that what I wanted to do now was write a book that would be the symbol story the saga of all black people and it would be a book called roots I told him that we had to have I hid there what we called in the writing business saturation research and they said they understood it meant that I would try to bring every possible thing to this book every avenue of research everything I could commit myself to and what intrigued me now and it was because of my Coast Guard background was this ship that had brought cooter Oh I had some clues when I was a little boy grandma and the others always had say that ship brought him to nap list they would pronounce it there was no place they could possibly have been talking about but Annapolis Maryland it was at that time I did a little quick reading a burgeoning young City vying for supremacy as a port with Baltimore numerous ships came in and out of Annapolis some of them slave ships on occasion I had another clue and that was that now I knew whether African Kuta Kitty had come from the Gambia River and the next thing I needed to know was about win had this ship sailed and now had a clue for that too was the old grill had said preface in his story of Kunta Kinte he had said about the time the king's soldiers came and I had to find out what was he talking about he had obviously been talking about some kind of military thing I went now to London got on a plane flew over there and I went searching this was my first experience in heartbreaking research I searched and searched and it finally I think it took me about six weeks sifting through records before in the British Parliament area records I found that there was a group called Colonel O'Hair's forces his name was Colonel Charles O'Hare who had been sent with a 30-odd men from London to the Gambia River to God that then British held fort James slave fort there was no question but that was what the griot had referred to it had occurred in early 1767 so this gave me a time frame it had to have been around in that area of time that cooter had been captured now I begin another search they incredibly involved the incredibly difficult and incredibly frustrating search for what ship was it I went to Lloyds of London the fact that I've been in a Coast Guard 20 years was helpful with any maritime people I finally got to a very high official and I remember I was talking with this man and he was sitting behind his desk and I remember his eyes kind of falling in a way that made me kind of looked down and I realized I had never had realized I was just tears draining down on my shirt as I poured out of me their passion their fervor the drive of trying to pull together the history of a people and finally the man stood up his name was mr. Aris see he Landers and he said young man Lords of London will do all we can to help you and it was he and they who began to open up to me doors to places where there are records of slave ships there are more records of slave ships and one would dream it seems inconceivable until you reflected for 200 years ship sailed carrying cargoes of slaves and there are boxes of them the records which have never even been opened nobody's had occasion particularly go into them lately and anyway to compress I work for about seven solid weeks finally I was in the one thousand twenty third set of slave ship records in the public records office in London one afternoon going down across this sheet that had thirty ships movements on it and I went on down and my I came to number eighteen all of it in this old-fashioned handwriting you have to adjust to it my I would go out to the right as it had with endless endless before cases of the same thing and I looked out and there was destination of nathless and somehow it didn't really grab me at the moment I remember I took the little information picked up the records went back and turned them in proper and went on out around the corner from the public records office is a little tea and crawlers shop I got me some tea in a crawler and I was sitting there sort of sipping the tea and swinging my foot like it's all in a day's work when it suddenly hit me maybe I had indeed found that ship I still owe that lady for that tea and crawler I would out there like a shot I got to a telephone and call I got the last available seat on the six o'clock flight to New York and I got on that plane that night there was not even time to go back to the hotel to get my stuff if I was to make that flight and I didn't go back and I flew that ocean that night sitting up sleepless seeing in my mind's eye the book I had to get my hands on I could see it I'd hit it in my hands I had a light brown back dark brown letters shipping in the port of Annapolis by vorn W Brown I got to New York took the shuttle flight to Washington Library of Congress got this book flipping through it there was one light and agit I pretended to support that was in fact a ship and I just about went berserk in time I would get to the author of that book Vaughn brown he was a broker in Baltimore he dropped what he was doing he left his office got in his car he drove to Annapolis and he helped me pin down that was indeed the ship I worked there in the Maryland Hall of Records st. John's College campus and different things little bit here little card file here Phoebe Jacobs and a master archivist helped me find things and then the area widened I was in New England at Peabody Museum Widener at Harvard various other places moving around and then I was crossing the ocean again there was a one period when I made three rounds over the ocean in a 10-day period it never occurred to me the telephone ought to cable I had to go somebody might miss it you had to go and it was pulling together astray adhere a little bit there of about that ship to recreate the ship which brought Kunta Kinte and which symbolized the ship are the ships which had brought so many many many out of Africa over such a long period of time finally I got together her name was Lord Ligonier she was named for British Field Marshal she was built in this country in 1765 probably in New Hampshire she came out of Maryland and sailed with a cargo of ROM a skeletal crew of 16 her captain Captain Thomas Davies DAV IES and she sailed the graves in England she's a brand-new ship maiden voyage they sold the ROM used the proceeds to buy the slaving hardware and the foodstuffs they would need and to put on a full crew 36 and she sailed out of graves in and she was moving on up now on her way I could read the captain's mind he had a brand new ship he'd been entrusted with a command he wanted to make the quickest possible trip to get the best possible cargo of slaves and get back to look good to the people who had entrusted him with such a command and he's moving on up the channel and as he moved on up the weather began to grow bad I was tracking her there were different places I could get their records off one thing about England he gave us the greatest system of civil service and one thing about civil servants is they're always writing something and their records on in and the records would let me track her she was making pretty good time she was doing about 5.2 nuts I could see her in my mind's eye she was of ship her timbers were Hekmat exceeder her planking was loblolly pine the flex in her sails was grown in New Jersey the nails that held her together were not really nails as we know them but they were called trouble-free nails dowel pegs of black local splitting on top with a wedge of white oak and it will outlast an eye on fastening and she was moving on up that coast and she was doing good and then I came upon the thing that for God's sakes she dropped an anchor and I nearly had a fit why on earth would he drop the anchor I knew the man was trying to make a good fast trip and it threw me into a dither why did she stop and I began to think now that ships then had no engines all ships will sail ships so if I was to know why she stopped as well as why she went what I had to know was more than I knew about weather so I dropped everything I found out the British Meteorological headquarters is in a city called Bracknell England and it got on a train went over there I remember was a Thursday afternoon you get off the train as a little rise and then a high iron wall and a big gate and I got in through that gate about half an hour before they closed and I remember rushing in there and telling these people look I have got to have this weather for the spring/summer 1766 and they looked at me as if I was crazy and I just couldn't understand why I did not they have what I had to have there was no question but what I had to have it and I went back to London that night as deep in despair as I had been up to that point when I got back to the hotel I got a hold of the little bellman they say a hotel bellman can get you anything and this I don't drink much but this time I told us that I had to have a bottle of I didn't care what he got me a bottle of that Puerto Rican rum that looks like Malaya's I don't know way from and by morning it was gone well it was three days before I was functional again and it was a good thing I felt as if I was a total failure if I couldn't find of what I had to know why I did that ship stop and then I got to thinking about something I guess lioness blanket for me kind of his grandma long gone she is but whenever I get in any strain my mind goes back to my grandma I'm very close to anybody's grandma because it symbolized my own and when I get to thinking about grandma in this little hotel then I got to think about hitting the town in which we live and then about how our town was structured around its church and its school all little southern towns are and I got to thinking about some of our church in particularly was that among our congregation in New Hope's emé church was a lady named sister will ADA Couric and everybody in Henning knew that sister will ADA was the best prayer in town there was no question after church every Sunday when I grew up I don't know how this thing started but it grew up with me sister will ADA always wore a dress to church it had two big pockets one on either side and after church out in the church yard people moving around as they do rather in the spirit that people today will go drop a coin in a fountain for good luck or something with sister we later people were sort of sidle up by her and all they do is make certain she saw who they were and they drop a nickel in one of these pockets and a general feeling about it was that meant you would be included in her general weekly prayer and it couldn't hurt you know now somebody had a particular problem they would let her see it was a dime and dropping me and and if it was something catastrophic you'd give her a quarter and that meant you had a pipeline soda well I got to thinking about that laying up in this little room in a hotel in London and I knew it was crazy and yet everything else was crazy it seemed and it seemed hopeless and I got on the phone it is an experience to hear an international operator going through getting through to the United States in the first place information getting Henning Tennessee and finally getting a phone number of will ADA curry I knew she was still there hadn't seen an item so long finally she's on the phone we are on the phone it didn't take very long for me to establish who I was Khushi Neumann soon as I got straight which young and I was then she was confused about she wouldn't question what London was but she knew it was somewhere across the water and we got that settled and then I recalled what she used to do and she's saying yes and I still does that and then I told her I said sister will ADA I'm over here and I need a big prayer honey I mean I need a big prayer and so she listened then I told us it's sister will later when we get down I'm gonna send you $100 and she never believed she said son it sure is good talking with you but you hang up cuz I'm gonna start right now I don't know exactly what she prayed but I'll tell you what happened an idea came to me I got to thinking that I needed to get any kind of valid weather data that I could document between April and September 1766 in that strip of ocean between the English Channel and macam BIA River I went got me a big blank meteorological chart figured just marked that strip of ocean at any ship sailing that particular destination would have to go through and now I begin to get on two trains and go to every city in England that in the 1760s had been a major seaport Liverpool all the others and when I'd get off the train I'd go in those cities to everything that looked like a library this was when I began to strike up what I'd like to think of now as a love affair with librarians I discovered something about librarians that most people I think take librarians pretty much for granted take libraries themselves pretty much for granted but I found out that if you can excite a librarian if you can make a library and share your passion for something you've got to find they can turn detective and do things that neither you know they would normally think once I could get them to understand what I was trying to do librarians got really excited about it what I was trying and they sent me to places which are now like a blur in the memory old warehouses old shipping record places homes of seafaring people who had collected logs of ships all kinds of places and I would go and I always I was looking for one thing the log of any ship of any kind which at any time between April and September 1766 had been in my strip of ocean and I knew one thing if having been an old sailor and having done a lot of work in old ship records that in the days of sailing ship every time they changed a watch on a ship they record the longitude and the latitude and the weather and whenever I'd find in any of these logs a ship that had been in my strip of ocean in those months I would pluck out the longitude latitude and with my little stuff I could pinpoint where she was when she made a specific weather reading and I could reduce that weather reading to the symbols and in that way three weeks about I had 411 weather readings scattered over that strip of ocean I went back to Bracknell and got to lieutenant commanders Royal Navy and showed it to them and they became engrossed with it it was like a double-crossed expose and then they went in with colleagues and with the modern weather prognosis methods they were able to recreate the weather in which the Lord Ligonier had sailed I found that the reason she had dropped anchor was a very valid one she had been coming out of graves in and the weather had been getting worse on her and she came to that point where you have to make a starboard turn and what it needed East in the wind to make that turn safely but the wind had shifted to Southwest she had to drop the anchor because if she hadn't she would have been in danger of drifting over into an area called the Goodwin Sands and she laid in there waiting for the wind to shift and she waited and waited until finally it was July 5th 1766 she was in eight fathoms of water it was a Tuesday morning the millibar reading was 1010 the weather was a drizzle becoming fair and the wind shifted east northeast and that was a days she ran up the sails she went on down now past Shakespeare Cliff passed the White Cliffs of Dover Dungeness Billy head down the lizard's head and into the open sea she went southeast Lee across the bay of biscay down to the Cape Verde the Canaries and then she made the Bend upwards and came up to the Gambia River she was spending the next 10 months in that Gambia River slaving at the end of 10 months she had a cargo 3265 elephants teeth as they called ivory tusks 3,700 pounds of beeswax 800 pounds of raw cotton 32 ounces of gold 140 Africans and with that cargo she set sail July 5th 1767 it was a Sunday she sailed directly to Annapolis she arrived in Annapolis and when she got in there I knew of her coming in there because I went now to Annapolis and I went into one set of Records that you can generally find back to the time of Christ and that's tax records to find out to find out what had she declared for tax when she got in there the captain was very honest he declared everything that he declared on leaving the fort in the Gambia River the James Ford whose ruins I had seen he now declared in Annapolis everything there but the original 140 Africans had become 98 who had survived a voyage which was about average for slave ships another little interesting side thing I happen to sort of stumble upon in the course of the research was that percentage-wise more whites crew died on slave ships than slaves did the Lord Ligonier would bear it out she had left England with a full crew of 36 and she arrived in Annapolis with 18 of them alive at that time I knew that if you had cargo as valuable as slaves to sell then as down one would advertise and I went now looking for the records of the media of the day I went into the microfilm records of the Marylanders said the issue of October 1st 1767 page 3 the far left column the third aired down there was a Lord Ligonier Zayin plays by its agents that she had quote just arrived from the river Gambia with fresh slaves to be sold the following Wednesday and then that auction was held now I had one thing left to pin down beyond any question that the miracle indeed had been achieved through the help of God that's the only way I can feel about it I had to be able to pin down that without question that was the same African I had heard about and my clue now went back to the front porch and inning Tennessee that always grandma and aunt Leah's and cousin George and aunt plus and a and finding and all of them would talk about this African always had rejected the name Toby which he had been given by his master and I knew that they had always said that Massa John Walla bought him off the ship and later after his foot had been cut off Massa William Waller the brother of John had bought him from his brother it was oral history kept down across generations of a black family in America and I had had things now which tended to make me put great reliance in what grandma had said I didn't doubt it at all anymore but the thing was trying to document it I went now to Richmond Virginia and got again into that experience of working in that world of the old-fashioned handwriting me else like essays I'm working now in the longhand legal deeds of the 1760s Spotsylvania County Virginia and I searched and searched and searched and I believe it was in the fourth week that I found what I had been looking for there it was a deed dated September 5th 1768 Kunta Kinte by that time would have been 11 months in this country or colonial America and there was a deed Spotsylvania County Virginia between William Waller on the one part and John Walla and his wife on the other transferring from John and his wife a and to William Goods the first pays dealt with the transfer of 240 odd acres of land their fences and other things on that land and then on the second page I think was about two fifth line down between two commas worthy words quote and also one Negro man slave named Toby and that brought it full circle there was no question it was gulpy it was my god time the rest of the research I could stand up here six hours I guess and talk but I'm not gonna do that it would just be telling about what happened in the way of the research the drama the adventure of it across nine years finally to flesh out the book that took another three years to write the book called roots I learned I've tried to share with people a lot about the history of black people and when I got myself very aware of the history of black people I began to reflect upon how little I had known at the outset what a hoax I felt had been pulled on me by many forces that I had gotten to be a grown man and knew next to nothing about my own people that all I had known about Africa the ancestral culture of us head as I say been drawn from Tarzan jungle gym sort of things and that I knew little about slavery really and then I got to reflecting that if this had been the case with me what did I know about other people and I just got curious me black but me human being about other people's and so what I began to do was just for me to go into the libraries with which I'm pretty familiar by now and just do a little peripheral study about virtually every ethnic group of the peoples who comprise the population of this United States of America and what I began to discover and what collectively I know has enriched me as few things I have at least so I feel is that it does not matter who they are from whence they came but every single ethnic group in this country if you go back and you study and you know about that group of people in whatever was their old country their trials their problems their tribulations their frustrations in some cases persecutions if you know about they hope that beacon that America represented about the time they came to the immigrant generation and then the generation that got here and assimilated that what you deal with with every ethnic group on the face of this country is a thrilling stirring human drama in this nation of immigrants in which black people happen to be the only unwilling immigrants none of us ever must forget that blacks were the only ones who came here in Chapel slave status and in Chains in this nation of immigrants and then I reflected about how it seems to me that all of us every one of us it does not matter who have a stake in something that I thought to be one of the most stirring moving dramatic heart-rending things I came upon in the study of the culture of Africa for the book roots and that was the thing that had to do with how the babies were named in this land that we have all heard about as heathens and savages peopling it that in this land 200 300 400 years ago in any little village when a baby was born the people of the village would not see much of the father for seven days because he was occupied with going about keeping pretty much to himself thinking up a good meaningful significant name for this infant and bear in mind these are these heathens and savages we've heard so much about and that these babies are the ancestors of we black people here today on the eighth day the people of the village would gather at that particular little circular mud-walled home with the thatched roof and there would be a stool sitting just outside the people brought with them in the Mandinka culture anyway a jolly bar a drummer who brought a cylindrical drum called the tentang and then they had another man there who's the equivalent of our minister they called him the Alamo and a jolly bar would give a roll on his drum and the people would stand rigidly at attention a second roll on a drum and the mother who had been inside waiting for that signal now would step out and sit herself on this stool holding the little eight-day-old black infant these heathens and savages the third rolled on a drum and the other mama would step forth and bless the gathering because this had happen to everybody there when they were eight days of age and then the next roll their father would come from the bush he was waiting somewhere just for this signal and now this father would walk over with every eye on him his fellow villagers his neighbors his tribesmen and he would walk over to where their mother sat holding this little a day old infant and the father now would bend and he would lift up this infant and he would turn it so that one of its ears was very close to his lips and into that tiny ear that father would whisper the name he had selected three times and the thinking of these alleged heathens and savages in doing it this way was that the individual thus named always would be the first to know who he was those are the ancestors of us as a people and it seems to me that the symbolism for us all having nothing to do with our race whatever race we may be but just us people as human beings it seems to me the potential of us and the symbol for us is contained in the second part of the baby naming ceremony and that was that night when the father now alone would take his infant us distance away from the village and he would hold it up so that its face its eyes looked up toward their firmament the stars in the moon and the father would speak to his infant again the symbol for us all and our potentials they quote behold the only thing greater than thyself thank you [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: reelblack

Views: 171,585

Rating: 4.7631168 out of 5

Keywords: Roots, Alex Haley

Id: Kq7lID_KfKY

Length: 121min 28sec (7288 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/mankuulic]

Outstanding researcher. He and the Harvard Professor, made it profoundly easier for African Americans today to start researching their heritage.