Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [371]
The eight children grew up, took mates, and had their own children. The fourth son, Tom, was a blacksmith when he was sold along with the rest of his family to a “Massa Murray,” who owned a tobacco plantation in Alamance County, North Carolina. There, Tom met and mated with a half-Indian slave girl named Irene, who came from the plantation of a “Massa Holt,” who owned a cotton mill. Irene eventually also bore eight children, and with each new birth, Tom continued the tradition his father, Chicken George, had begun, gathering his family around the hearth and telling them about their African great-great-grandfather and all those descending from him.
Of that second set of eight children, the youngest was a little girl named Cynthia, who was two years old when her father, Tom, and grandfather, Chicken George, led a wagon train of recently freed slaves westward to Henning, Tennessee, where Cynthia met and at the age of twenty-two married Will Palmer.
When I had been thoroughly immersed in listening to accounts of all those people unseen who had lived away back yonder, invariably it would astonish me when the long narrative finally got down to Cynthia . . . and there I sat looking right at Grandma! As well as Aunt Viney, Aunt Matilda, and Aunt Liz, who had ridden right along with Grandma—her older sisters—in the wagon train.
I was there at Grandma’s in Henning until two younger brothers had been born, George in 1925, then Julius in 1929. Dad sold the lumber company for Grandma, and moved now into being a professor of agriculture with Mama and we three boys living wherever he taught, the longest period being at A&M College at Normal, Alabama, where I was in some class a morning in 1931 and someone came with a message for me to hurry home, and I did, hearing Dad’s great wracking sobs as I burst into the door. Mama—who had been sick off and on since we had left Henning—lay in their bed, dying. She was thirty-six.
Every summer, George, Julius, and I spent in Henning with Grandma. Noticeably something of her old spirit seemed to have gone, along with both Grandpa and Mama. People passing would greet her in her white-painted rocker there on the front porch, “Sister Cynthy, how’s you doin’?” and she generally would answer them, “Jes’ settin’—”
After two years, Dad married again, to a colleague professor who was named Zeona Hatcher, from Columbus, Ohio, where she had gotten her master’s degree at Ohio State University. She busied herself with the further raising and training of we three rapidly growing boys, then she gave us a sister named Lois.
I had finished a second year in college and at seventeen years of age enlisted into the U. S. Coast Guard as a messboy when World War II happened. On my cargo-ammunition ship plying the Southwest Pacific, I stumbled onto the long road that has taken me finally to the writing of this Roots.
At sea sometimes as long as three months, our crew’s really most incessant fighting wasn’t of enemy aerial bombers or submarines, but our fighting of sheer boredom. At Dad’s insistence, I’d learned to type in high school, and my most precious shipboard possession was my portable typewriter. I wrote letters to everyone I could think of. And I read every book in the ship’s small library or that was owned and loaned by shipmates; from boyhood, I’d loved reading, especially stories of adventure. Having read everything on board a third time, I guess simply in frustration I decided I’d try writing some stories myself. The idea that one could roll a blank sheet of paper into a typewriter and write something on it that other people would care to read challenged, intrigued, exhilarated me—and does to this day. I don’t know what else motivated and sustained me through trying