Roots the saga of an American family

within cartons upon cartons, files upon files of old records of thousands of slave-ship triangular voyages among England, Africa, and America. Along with my frustration, the more a rage grew within me the more I perceived to what degree the slave trade, in its time, was regarded by most of its participants simply as another major industry, rather like the buying, selling, and shipment of livestock today. Many records seemed never to have been opened after their original storage; apparently no one had felt occasion to go through them. I hadn’t found a single ship bound from The Gambia to Annapolis, when in the seventh week, one afternoon about two-thirty, I was studying the 1,023rd sheet of slave-ship records. A wide rectangular sheet, it recorded the Gambia River entrances and exits of some thirty ships during the years 1766 and 1767. Moving down the list, my eyes reached ship No. 18, and automatically scanned across its various data heading entries. On July 5, 1767—the year “the King’s soldiers came”—a ship named Lord Ligonier, her captain, a Thomas E. Davies, had sailed from the Gambia River, her destination Annapolis . . . . I don’t know why, but oddly my internal emotional reaction was delayed. I recall passively writing down the information, I turned in the records, and walked outside. Around the corner was a little tea shop. I went in and ordered a tea and cruller. Sitting, sipping my tea, it suddenly hit me that quite possibly that ship brought Kunta Kinte! I still owe the lady for the tea and cruller. By telephone, Pan American confirmed their last seat available that day to New York. There simply wasn’t time to go by the hotel where I was staying; I told a tax driver, “Heathrow Airport!” Sleepless through that night’s crossing of the Atlantic, I was seeing in my mind’s eye the book in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., that I had to get my hands on again. It had a light brown cover, with darker brown letters—Shipping in the Port of Annapolis, by Vaughan W. Brown. From New York, the Eastern Airlines shuttle took me to Washington; I taxied to the Library of Congress, ordered the book, almost yanked it from the young man who brought it, and went riffling through it . . . and there it was, confirmation! The Lord Ligonier had cleared Annapolis’ customs officials on September 29, 1767.

Renting a car, speeding to Annapolis, I went to the Maryland Hall of Records and asked archivist Mrs. Phebe Jacobsen for copies of any local newspaper published around the first week of October 1767. She soon produced a microfilm roll of the Maryland Gazette. At the projection machine, I was halfway through the October 1 issue when I saw the advertisement in the antique typeface: “JUST IMPORTED, In the ship Lord Ligonier, Capt. Davies, from the River Gambia, in Africa, and to be sold by the subscribers, in Annapolis, for cash, or good bills of exchange on Wednesday the 7th of October next, A Cargo of CHOICE HEALTHY SLAVES. The said ship will take tobacco to London on liberty at 6s. Sterling per ton.” The advertisement was signed by John Ridout and Daniel of St. Thos. Jenifer. On September 29, 1967, I felt I should be nowhere else in the world except standing on a pier at Annapolis—and I was; it was two hundred years to the day after the Lord Ligonier had landed. Staring out to seaward across those waters over which my great-great-great-great-grandfather had been brought, again I found myself weeping. The 1766–67 document compiled at James Fort in the Gambia River had included that the Lord Ligonier had sailed with 140 slaves in her hold. How many of them had lived through the voyage? Now on a second mission in the Maryland Hall of Records, I searched to find a record of the ship’s cargo listed upon her arrival in Annapolis—and found it, the following inventory, in old-fashioned script: 3,265 “elephants’ teeth,” as ivory tusks were called; 3,700 pounds of beeswax; 800 pounds of raw cotton; 32 ounces of Gambian gold; and 98 “Negroes.” Her loss of 42 Africans en route, or around one third, was average for slaving voyages. I realized by this time that Grandma, Aunt Liz, Aunt Plus, and Cousin Georgia also had been griots in their own ways. My notebooks contained their centuries-old story that our African had been sold to “Massa John Waller,” who had given him the name “Toby.” During his fourth escape effort, when cornered he had wounded with a rock one of the pair of professional slave-catchers who caught him, and they had cut his foot off. “Massa John’s brother, Dr. William Waller,” had saved the slave’s life, then indignant at the maiming, had bought him from his brother. I dared to hope there might actually exist some kind of an actual documenting record.

I went to Richmond, Virginia. I pored through microfilmed legal deeds filed within Spotsylvania County, Virginia, after September 1767, when the Lord Ligonier had landed. In time, I found a lengthy deed dated September 5, 1768, in which John Waller and his wife Ann transferred to William Waller land and goods, including 240 acres of farmland . . . and then on the second page, “and also one Negro man slave named Toby.” My God! In the twelve years since my visit to the Rosetta Stone, I have traveled half a million miles, I suppose, searching, sifting, checking, crosschecking, finding out more and more about the people whose respective oral histories had proved not only to be correct, but even to connect on both sides of the ocean. Finally I managed to tear away from yet more researching in order to push myself into actually writing this book. To develop Kunta Kinte’s boyhood and youth took me a long time, and having come to know him well, I anguished upon his capture. When I began trying to write of his, or all of those Gambians’ slave-ship crossing, finally I flew to Africa and canvassed among shipping lines to obtain passage on the first possible freighter sailing from any black African port directly to the United States. It turned out to be the Farrell Lines’ African Star. When we put to sea, I explained what I hoped to do that might help me write of my ancestor’s crossing. After each late evening’s dinner, I climbed down successive metal ladders into her deep, dark, cold cargo hold. Stripping to my underwear, I lay on my back on a wide rough bare dunnage plank and forced myself to stay there through all ten nights of the crossing, trying to imagine what did he see, hear, feel, smell, taste—and above all, in knowing Kunta, what things did he think? My crossing of course was ludicrously luxurious by any comparison to the ghastly ordeal endured by Kunta Kinte, his companions, and all those other millions who lay chained and shackled in terror and their own filth for an average of eighty to ninety days, at the end of which awaited new physical and psychic horrors. But anyway, finally I wrote of the ocean crossing—from the perspective of the human cargo. Finally I’ve woven our whole seven generations into this book that is in your hands. In the years of the writing, I have also spoken before many audiences of how Roots came to be, naturally now and then someone asks, “How much of Roots is fact and how much is fiction?” To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within Roots is from

either my African or American families’ carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents. Those documents, along with the myriad textural details of what were contemporary indigenous lifestyles, cultural history, and such that give Roots flesh have come from years of intensive research in fifty- odd libraries, archives, and other repositories on three continents. Since I wasn’t yet around when most of the story occurred, by far most of the dialogue and most of the incidents are of necessity a novelized amalgam of what I know took place together with what my researching led me to plausibly feel took place. I think now that not only are Grandma, Cousin Georgia, and those other ladies “up there watchin’,” but so are all of the others: Kunta and Bell; Kizzy; Chicken George and Matilda; Tom and Irene, Grandpa Will Palmer; Bertha; Mama—and now, as well, the most recent one to join them, Dad . . . . He was eighty-three. When his children—George, Julius, Lois, and I— had discussed the funeral arrangements, some one of us expressed that Dad had lived both a full life and a rich one in the way that he interpreted richness. Moreover, he had gone quickly without suffering, and knowing Dad as well as we all did, we agreed that he would not have wanted us going about crying. And we agreed that we would not. I found myself so full of the memories that when the mortician said “the deceased,” it startled me that he meant our dad, around whom things rarely got dull. Shortly before the first service that was held for him in a Washington, D.C., chapel thick with family friends, my brother George told the Reverend Boyd, who was in charge, that at an appropriate point, we sons would like to share some memories of Dad with the friends there. So after brief conventional services, a favorite song of Dad’s was sung, then George got up and stood near the open casket. He said he vividly recalled that wherever Dad had taught, our home was always shared with at least one youth whose rural farmer father Dad had talked into letting his son attend college, the “no money” protest being solved by Dad’s saying, “He’ll live with us.” As a result, George estimated that about the South were around eighteen county agricultural agents, high school principals, and teachers who proudly call themselves “‘Fessor Haley’s boys.”

George said that among earlier memory was once when we lived in Alabama and at breakfast Dad said, “You boys come on, there’s a great man I want you to meet.” And just like that Dad drove us three boys the several hours to Tuskeegee, Alabama, where we visited the mysterious laboratory of the small, dark genius scientist, Dr. George Washington Carver, who talked to us about the need to study hard and gave us each a small flower. George said that in Dad’s later years, he had been irked that we did not hold annual large family reunions as he would have liked, and George asked the audience now to join us in feeling that really we were holding a reunion both for and with our dad. I got up as George took his seat, and going over, looking at Dad, I said to the people that being the oldest child, I could remember things farther back about the gentleman lying there. For instance, my first distinct boyhood impression of love was noticing how Dad’s and Mama’s eyes would look at each other over the pianotop when Mama was playing some little introduction as Dad stood near waiting to sing in our church. Another early memory was of how I could always get a nickel or even a dime from Dad, no matter how tight people were going around saying things were. All I had to do was catch him alone and start begging him to tell me just one more time about how his AEF 92nd Division, 366th Infantry, fought in the Meuse Argonne Forest. “Why, we were ferocious, son!” Dad would exclaim. By the time he gave me the dime it was clear that whenever things would look really grim to General Blackjack Pershing, once again he would send a courier to bring Savannah, Tennessee’s, Sargeant Simon A. Haley (No. 2816106), whereupon the lurking German spies sped that news to their highest command, throwing fright into the Kaiser himself. But it seemed to me, I told the people, that after Dad’s having met Mama at Lane College, his next most fateful meeting for all of us had been when Dad had transferred to A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and was about to drop out of school and return home to sharecrop, “Because, boys, working four odd jobs, I just never had time to study.” But before he left, word came of his acceptance as a temporary summer-season Pullman porter. On a night train from Buffalo to Pittsburgh, at about 2 A.M. his buzzer rang, and a sleepless white man and his wife each wanted a glass of warm milk. Dad brought the milk, he said, “and I tried to leave, but the man was just talkative and seemed surprised that I was a working college

student. He asked lots of questions, then he tipped well in Pittsburgh.” After saving every possible cent, when Dad returned to college that September of 1916, the college president showed him correspondence from the man on the train—a retired Curtis Publishing Company executive named R. S. M. Boyce—who had written asking the cost of one full year’s everything, then had sent his check. “It was about $503.15 with tuition, dormitory, meals, and books included,” Dad said, and he scored marks that later saw him win a graduate-study scholarship that the Cornell University School of Agriculture began giving that year to the top agricultural student at each of the Negro land-grant colleges. And that, I told the people, was how our dad got his masters degree at Cornell, and then was a professor, so that we, his children, grew up amid those kinds of influences, which when put together with what a lot of other people on our mama’s side also had done, was why we were fortunate enough to be there seeing Dad off now with me as an author, George as an assistant director of the United States Information Agency, Julius as a U. S. Navy Department architect, and Lois as a teacher of music. We flew Dad’s body then to Arkansas, where a second ceremony was thronged with his friends from Pine Bluff’s AM&N University and its area where as the dean of agriculture, Dad had rounded out his total of forty years of educating. As we knew he would have wanted, we drove him through the campus and twice along the road where the street sign near the agricultural building said “S. A. Haley Drive,” as it had been named when he retired. The Pine Bluff service over, we took Dad to where he had previously told us he wanted to lie—in the Veterans’ Cemetery in Little Rock. Following his casket as it was taken to Section 16, we stood and watched Dad lowered into grave No. 1429. Then we whom he had fathered— members of the seventh generation from Kunta Kinte—walked away rapidly, averting our faces from each other, having agreed we wouldn’t cry. So Dad has joined the others up there. I feel that they do watch and guide, and I also feel that they join me in the hope that this story of our people can help to alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners.

ALEX HALEY (1921–1992) A BIOGRAPHY Alexander Murray Palmer Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, on August 11, 1921. The oldest of three sons (George and Julius Haley), Haley was born to Simon and Bertha (Palmer) Haley. He grew up in the South in an African-American family also mixed with Irish and Cherokee ancestry. Haley’s father, Simon, was a professor of agriculture who had also served in World War I. Haley always spoke proudly of his father and the incredible obstacles of racism he had overcome. Credit: ©Bettmann/CORBIS At the age of fifteen, Alex graduated from high school. He attended Elizabeth City Teachers College for two years and on May 24, 1939, he began his twenty-year service with the Coast Guard. He enlisted as a seaman and then became a third-class petty officer in the rate of mess attendant, one of the few enlisted designators open to African-Americans at that time. It was during his service in the Pacific Theater of Operations that Haley taught himself the craft of writing stories. After World War II, Haley was able to petition the Coast Guard to allow him to transfer into the field of journalism. By 1949, he had become a first-

class petty officer in the rate of chief journalist. He then rose to chief petty officer until his retirement from the Coast Guard in 1959. Alex Haley was the first and only person to receive an honorary degree from the Coast Guard Academy, presented by President George H. W. Bush, and he had the singular honor of having a Coast Guard Cutter named after him. Alex Haley’s numerous awards and decorations from the Coast Guard include the American Defense Service Medal, World War II Victory Medal, and the National Defense Service Medal. In 1941 Haley married Nannie Branch. The marriage ended in divorce in 1964, and in the same year Haley married Juliette Collins. They divorced in 1972. His third wife was the former Myra Lewis of Los Angeles. After his retirement from the Coast Guard, Haley began his writing career and eventually became a senior editor for Reader’s Digest. Throughout the 1960s, Haley was responsible for some of Reader’s Digest’s most notable interviews, including an interview with American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell. Haley conducted the first Playboy Interview for Playboy magazine. Following this, Alex conducted a series of interviews with jazz legend Miles Davis, the first of which appeared in the September 1962 issue. His interviews with Malcolm X lead to his first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (1965). Selling more than six million copies by 1977 in the United States and other countries, it was translated into eight languages. This literary work accorded Haley true fame as an author and was later named by Time magazine one of the ten most important nonfiction books of the twentieth century. In 1976 Haley published Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a novel based loosely on his family’s history, starting with the story of Kunta Kinte, kidnapped in The Gambia in 1767 to be sold as a slave in the United States. This work involved ten years of research, intercontinental travel and writing. Haley went to the village of Juffure where Kunta Kinte grew up, which was still in existence, and listened to a tribal historian tell the story of Kinte’s capture. Haley also traced the records of the ship, the Lord Ligonier, which carried his ancestor to America. Roots was eventually published in thirty-seven languages. It won a Pulitzer Prize as well as a special citation of merit from the judges of the National Book Award and went on to become a landmark television

miniseries in 1977. The book and film both reached unparalleled success. The television miniseries attracted a record-breaking 130 million viewers when it was serialized on television. The series set records for the number of viewers, and the Sunday night finale achieved the highest ranking for a single television production. Roots emphasized that African-Americans have a long history and that not all of that history is lost, as many had previously believed. Its popularity sparked an increased public interest in genealogy as well. Roots and Alex Haley attracted controversy over the years—which comes with the territory of path-breaking iconic books, particularly on the topic of race. In 1978, novelist Harold Courlander sued Alex Haley, claiming that portions of Courlander’s novel The African had been plagiarized in Roots. After a trial, Haley settled out of court for $650,000 after admitting that several passages of Roots were copied from Courlander’s novel. However, Haley stated that the appropriation of these passages was unintentional and also claimed that researchers helping him had given him this material without citing the source. The settlement permitted the continued publication of Roots as Alex Haley wrote it. In 1988 Margaret Walker also sued him, claiming that Roots violated the copyright for her novel Jubilee. Her case was dismissed by the court. There were also some questions about whether Roots was fact or fiction, and whether Alex Haley confused these two issues. Haley addressed these issues head-on in the book itself: To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within Roots is from either my African or American families’ carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents. Those documents, along with the myriad textural details of what were contemporary indigenous lifestyles, cultural history, and such that give Roots flesh have come from years of intensive research in fifty- odd libraries, archives, and other repositories on three continents. Since I wasn’t around when most of the story occurred, by far most of the dialogue and most of the incidents are of necessity a novelized amalgam of what I know took place together with what my researching let me to plausibly feel took place.

Haley received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1977. Four thousand deans and department heads of colleges and universities throughout the country in a survey conducted by Scholastic Magazine selected Haley as America’s foremost achiever in the literature category. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was selected in the religious category.) The ABC-TV network presented another series, Roots: The Next Generation, in February 1979 (also written by Haley). Roots had sold almost five million copies by December 1978 and had been reprinted in twenty-three languages. Haley’s later literary projects included a history of the town of Henning, Tennessee, and a biography of Frank Wills, the security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in. In the television series Palmerstown, USA (1980), Haley collaborated with the producer Norman Lear. The series was based on Haley’s boyhood experiences in Henning. A Different Kind of Christmas (1988) was a short novella, in which a slave manages to escape and as a result, the son of slaveholding southern parents slowly realizes that the practice of slavery is wrong. Then, in the late 1980s, Haley began working on a second historical novel based on another branch of his family, traced through his grandmother Queen—the daughter of a black slave woman and her white master. Queen (1993) was a strong epic novel, which focused on Simon Alexander Haley’s side of the family. In 1987 Haley left his home in Beverly Hills, California, and moved to Tennessee, his family’s home state. Haley died of a heart attack on February 10, 1992, at the Swedish Hospital Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, before he could complete Queen. At his request, the novel was finished by David Stevens and was published as Alex Haley’s Queen. It was subsequently made into a movie in 1993. Haley was posthumously awarded the Korean War Service Medal from the government of South Korea ten years after his death. This award, created in 1999, did not exist during Haley’s lifetime, but demonstrates how both his life and his legacy continue to impact the lives and works of people throughout the world to this day.

On October 10, 1991, Alex Haley gave a speech to the employees of Reader’s Digest that included information about the writing of Roots while traveling on freight ships. This is an excerpt from the live recording. ALEX HALEY ON THE WRITING OF ROOTS Reprinted by permission from Reader’s Digest. There’s something about when you go out on a ship and usually, I go out on freight ships, cargo ships; I wouldn’t get caught on a liner. How can you write with 800 people dancing? But on the freight ships, not many of them carry passengers, but those which do carry passengers carry a total of twelve, a maximum of twelve people. The law is that if a ship carries more than twelve, it must have a doctor on board. So the people who go out there tend to be very quiet people. It is said, not too far amiss, that excitement on a cargo ship is when someone finishes a jigsaw puzzle. But what I do is I go and work my principal work hours from about 10:30 at night until daybreak. The world is yours at that point. Most of all the passengers are asleep. Sometimes there are only three other people awake on the ship. On the bridge, the officer of the day and the helmsman, and the guy who makes the rounds punching clocks every hour, and you. The thing I particularly love is when you get in there and you’ve got all your notes and your research and stuff literally in the one room with you. It’s sometimes up on your bunk, and you sleep with it all by your feet. It’s a lovely feeling—like being in the womb with what you are trying to do. I find myself from time to time, when I’m writing, I’ll do things, visual things. I’ll remember you as an audience. I’ll remember what you look like as a group. And it’s just kind of nice. And I think, well, I want to write this

thing so they will read this or they’ll print that. It just comes into your head, things like that. You’re out there by yourself. When you get far enough along, you really start to talk with your characters. I had so many conversations with Chicken George and Kunta Kinte it wasn’t even funny. It was natural. I’m sitting up in my underwear, by myself, minding my business, talking with them. And that was just as routine as it could be. Come around about 1:30 in the morning—you’ve been working since 10:30 and decide you’re going to take a little break. So you get up and you walk up on the deck. And you put your hand on the top rail, your foot on the bottom rail, and you look up. The first most striking thing is, man, you look up and there are heavenly objects as you never saw them before. You find yourself looking at planets at sea. And what you start to realize is that you never saw clear air before—even out here where it’s clear compared to New York City. This is nowhere near like it is at sea. In some latitudes, down off West Africa, South America, on the night of a full moon, there are times when you get into an illusion. If you could just stretch a little further, you feel like you could touch it. And you are out there amidst all this, God’s firmament, and then you stand and you feel through the sole of your shoe a fine vibration and you realize that’s man at work. That’s a huge diesel turbine, thirty-five feet down under the water, driving this ship like a small island through the water. Still standing there now you start hearing a slight hissing sound. You realize that’s the skin of the ship cutting through the resistance of the ocean. With all that going on, feeling these man things and seeing the God things, that’s about as close to holy as you’re going to ever get. I find that’s why I just love to get out in the ocean. And I find that you are really out there, find yourself thinking in ways you haven’t thought before. We are here doing the jobs we all do. We really operate by rote. You don’t think. You do something you’ve done 500 times before and you know how to do it. But out there you find that your mind will engage something almost like biscuit dough. And feel it turning around and your mind can examine it and so forth. And I’ve been really seriously thinking about maybe the latter part of next year trying to see if I can’t set up a schedule where I would spend one month at sea and one month ashore right around the year. And that way I’d get my work done. And I could come back here and be all the things that you are as a kind of public writer.

As it is, it’s silly, but I would like to be cloned. I’d love to have one person who was chained to a type writer, computer, whatever. And the other one would be a public writer who would go around talking about writing. And the other would be a relatively normal human being. Something like that. It’s the truth. Most of us who are writers get writers and other creative people; I meet with a lot of creative people. I was talking with a dear buddy of mine, Quincy Jones, two weeks ago. We were at New York for the funeral of Miles Davis. We were talking about how you get caught up in what’s called success. Once you have that blessing, it’s so hard to do what you did in the first place to get it. Quincy said he couldn’t remember when he composed anything. And I know he hasn’t; he’s so successful. Miles, bless his heart, was still playing his horn right up to the end. But lots of people who are very successful have a hard time working as well as they did before. I would tell you the truth. The best writing I ever possibly could do was when, after The Digest gave me the help to go to Africa and to go to Europe, and I was not known and I could just take my time and nobody there was pressing me. God, I don’t know how long it took me. I told all kinds of lies to editors here about when I would finish. But I was working slowly, slowly. Let me tell you one thing more before we go. And I would like to share this ’cause we’re talking about the essence of writing now. When I had done all the research, nine years, working in between doing articles for other magazines and stuff, I was now ready to write. I didn’t know where to go, didn’t know what to do. I knew I had a monumental task. And I got on a ship—this is where I started this freight ship thing called the Villager. And I went from Long Beach, California, completely around South America and back to Long Beach. It was ninety-one days. And I had written from the birth of Kunta Kinte through his capture. In the course of this, that’s where I got into the habit of talking to your character, I knew Kunta. I knew everything about Kunta. I knew what he was going to do. What he had done. Everything. And so I would just talk to him. And I had become so attached to him that I knew now I had to put him in the slave ship and bring him across the ocean. That was the next part of the book. And I just really couldn’t quite bring myself to write that. I was in San Francisco. I wrote about forty pages and chunked it out. You know writers know, and I know we’ve had this experience where you just know that ain’t

it. That ain’t what you want to say. And when you write well, it isn’t a question so much of what you want to say, it’s a question of feel. Does it feel like you want it to feel? The feel starts coming into something around the fourth rewrite. And then I wrote twice more about forty pages and threw it out. And I realized what my bother was. It was—I couldn’t bring myself to feel like I was up to writing about Kunta Kinte in that slave ship and me in a high-rise apartment. I had to get closer to Kunta. I had run out of my money at The Digest, lying so many times about when I’d finish, so I couldn’t ask for any more. I don’t know where I got the money from. I went to Africa. Put out the word I wanted to get a ship coming from Africa to Florida to the U.S. I just wanted to simulate crossing. I went down to the country that was born of the U.S. People went there. What was it? Liberia. And I got a ship called, appropriately enough, the African Star. And I got on this ship. She was carrying a partial cargo of raw rubber in bails. And I got on as a passenger. I couldn’t tell the captain, who was such a nice man, nor that mate what I wanted to do because they couldn’t allow me to do it. But I found one hold that was just about a third full of cargo and there was an entryway into it with a long metal ladder down to the bottom of the hold. I’m sure most of you don’t know how big the hold of a ship is. But you could just about put this auditorium in the hold of some big ships. Down in there they had, on the deck, a long, wide, thick piece of rough sawed timber. They called it dunnage. It’s used to store between cargo to keep it from shifting in rough seas. And what I did, after dinner the first night, I went down, made my way down into this hold. Had a little pocket light. I took off my clothing, to my underwear, and laid down on my back on this piece of dunnage. I imagined; I’m going to try to make believe I’m Kunta Kinte. I laid there and I got cold and colder. Nothing seemed to come except how ridiculous it was that I was doing this. By morning I had a terrible cold. I went back up. And the next day with my cold, the next night, I’m down doing the same thing. Well the third night when I left the dinner table, I couldn’t make myself go back down in that hold. I just felt so miserable. I don’t think I ever felt quite so badly. And instead of going down in the hold I went to the stern of the ship, the end of the ship, the back part. And I’m standing up there with my hands on the rail and looking down

now where the propellers are beating up this white froth. And in the froth are little luminous, green phosphorescents. At sea you see that a lot. And I’m standing there looking at it and all of a sudden it looked like all my troubles just came on me. I owed everybody I knew. Everybody I knew looked like they were on my case. Why don’t you finish this foolish thing? You ought not be doing it in the first place—talking about writing about black genealogy. That’s crazy. And so forth. All such stuff as that. And I was just utterly miserable, didn’t feel like I had a friend in the world. And then a thought came to me that was startling. It wasn’t frightening. It was just startling. And I make a point of saying it was not dramatic at all; it was just simply something that happened. I thought to myself, hey, there’s a cure for all this. You don’t have to go through all this mess. And what the cure was, was simply all I had to do was step through the rail and drop in the sea. Now I say again, it wasn’t with any great dramatic thing at all; it just simply arrived at me. And once having thought it, standing there kind of musing about what I had just thought, I began to feel quite good about it. I’ve since read things—like people who were in a position about to freeze, felt warm, or something like that prior to. And I’m standing there; I guess I was half a second away from dropping into the sea. And it wouldn’t have made a difference. Fine, that would take care of it. You won’t owe anybody anything. The hell with it and all that. You can go. Hell with the publishers and the editors and all that and all this kind of thing. And then again I stress it wasn’t dramatic; it was just sort of like everyone of us has been dreaming and you heard people speaking in a dream. And I began to hear voices, which were positioned behind me. I could hear them. They were not strident. They were just conversational. And I somehow knew every one of them. Who they were. And they were saying things like, no, don’t do that. No, you’re doing the best you can. You just keep going. You go ahead. And so forth. It was like that. And I knew exactly who they were. They were Grandma. They were Chicken George. They were Kunta Kinte. They were my cousin, Georgia, who lived in Kansas City and had passed away. They were all these people whom I had been writing about. They were talking to me. It was like a dream.

I remember fighting myself loose from that rail, turning around and I went scuttling like a crab up over the hatch. And finally made my way back to my little stateroom and pitched down, head first, face first, belly first on the bunk and I cried dry. I cried more I guess than I’ve cried since I was four years old, at least it seemed so. And it was about midnight when I kind of got myself together. I can’t really describe how it felt, but it was like recovering from a vacuum or something. Then I got up and the feeling was—you have been assessed and you’ve been tried and you’ve been approved by all them who went before. So go ahead. And then I went back down in the hold. I had a terrible cold, head cold, flu-ish like. I had with me a long, yellow tablet and some pencils. This time I did not take my clothing off like I’d been doing before. I kept them on because I was having such a bad cold. I laid down on the piece of timber. I had the tablet there, when I would think. Now Kunta Kinte was lying in this position on a shelf in the ship, the Lord Ligonier. She had left the Gambia River July 5, 1767. She sailed two months, three weeks, two days. Destination: Annapolis, Maryland. And he was lying there. And others were in there with him whom he knew. And what would he think? What would be some of the things they would say? And when they would come to me in the dark, I would write. You know how you can write kind of large looping letters on something. And that was how I did every night, only eight nights. From there, to this country, to Florida and when I got to Florida, I remember rushing through the big, big Miami Airport. I came in at 1 AM and I had to go to the other end. Barely made the flight. Flew back to San Francisco. Got with a doctor, Kimbro was his name. And he kind of patched me up and gave me stuff and everything, antibiotics and all until I got ready. And then I sat down with those long, yellow tablets and transcribed and then I began to write that part which is now in Roots as the chapter where Kunta Kinte crossed the ocean in a slave ship. And that was probably the most emotional experience I had in the whole thing. Again it all really goes back to here, Reader’s Digest, the morning the editors met at the place up there and said they believed in it and they would sponsor me. So, thank you. credit: ©Bettmann/CORBI