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By Root 1346 0

Cousin Georgia lived with her son and daughter, Floyd Anderson and Bea Neely, at 1200 Everett Avenue, Kansas City, Kansas. I hadn’t seen her since my frequent visits there of a few years before, then to offer what help I could to my politically oriented brother, George. Successively out of the U. S. Army Air Force, Morehouse College, then the University of Arkansas Law School, George was hotly campaigning to become a Kansas state senator. The night of his victory party, laughter flourished that actually why he’d won was . . . Cousin Georgia. Having repetitively heard her campaign director son, Floyd, tell people of George’s widely recognized integrity, our beloved gray, bent, feisty Cousin Georgia had taken to the local sidewalks. Rapping her walking cane at people’s doors, she had thrust before their startled faces a picture of her grandnephew candidate, declaring, “Dat boy got mo’’teggity dan you can shake a stick at!”

Now I flew to Kansas City again, to see Cousin Georgia.

I think that I will never quite get over her instant response when I raised the subject of the family story. Wrinkled and ailing, she jerked upright in her bed, her excitement like boyhood front-porch echoes:

“Yeah, boy, dat African say his name was ‘Kin-tay’! . . . He say de guitar a ‘ko,’ de river ‘Kamby Bolongo,’ an’ he was choppin’ wood to make hisself a drum when dey cotched ’im!”

Cousin Georgia became so emotionally full of the old family story that Floyd, Bea, and I had a time trying to calm her down. I explained to her that I wanted to try to see if there was any way that I could possibly find where our “Kin-tay” had come from . . . which could reveal our ancestral tribe.

“You go ’head, boy!” exclaimed Cousin Georgia. “Yo’ sweet grandma an’ all of ’em—dey up dere watchin’ you!”

The thought made me feel something like . . . My God!

CHAPTER 120

Soon after, I went to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and told a reading-room desk attendant that I was interested in Alamance County, North Carolina, census records just after the Civil War. Rolls of microfilm were delivered. I began turning film through the machine, feeling a mounting sense of intrigue while viewing an endless parade of names recorded in that old-fashioned penmanship of different 1800s census takers. After several of the long microfilm rolls, tiring, suddenly in utter astonishment I found myself looking down there on: “Tom Murray, black, blacksmith—,” “Irene Murray, black, housewife—” . . . followed by the names of Grandma’s older sisters—most of whom I’d listened to countless times on Grandma’s front porch. “Elizabeth, age 6”—nobody in the world but my Great Aunt Liz! At the time of that census, Grandma wasn’t even born yet!

It wasn’t that I hadn’t believed the stories of Grandma and the rest of them. You just didn’t not believe my grandma. It was simply so uncanny sitting staring at those names actually right there in official U. S. Government records.

Then living in New York, I returned to Washington as often as I could manage it—searching in the National Archives, in the Library of Congress, in the Daughters of the American Revolution Library. Wherever I was, whenever black library attendants perceived the nature of my search, documents I’d requested would reach me with a miraculous speed. From one or another source during 1966, I was able to document at least the highlights of the cherished family story; I would have given anything to be able to tell Grandma—then I would remember what Cousin Georgia had said, that she, all of them, were “up there watchin’.”

Now the thing was where, what, how could I pursue those strange phonetic sounds that it was always said our African ancestor had spoken. It seemed obvious that I had to reach as wide a range of actual Africans as I possibly could, simply because so many different tribal tongues are spoken in Africa. There in New York City, I began doing what seemed logical: I began arriving at the United Nations around quitting time; the elevators were spilling out people who were thronging through the lobby on their