Roots (107 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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