Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [376]
I again visited Cousin Georgia in Kansas City—something had urged me to do so, and I found her quite ill. But she was thrilled to hear both what I had learned and what I hoped to learn. She wished me Godspeed, and I flew then to Africa.
The same men with whom I had previously talked told me now in a rather matter-of-fact manner that they had caused word to be put out in the back country, and that a griot very knowledgeable of the Kinte clan had indeed been found—his name, they said, was “Kebba Kanji Fofana.” I was ready to have a fit. “Where is he?” They looked at me oddly. “He’s in his village.”
I discovered that if I intended to see this griot, I was going to have to do something I’d never have dreamed I’d ever be doing—organizing what seemed, at least to me then, a kind of minisafari! It took me three days of negotiating through unaccustomed endless African palaver finally to hire a launch to get upriver; to rent a lorry and a Land-Rover to take supplies by a roundabout land route; to hire finally a total of fourteen people, including three interpreters and four musicians, who had told me that the old griots in the back country wouldn’t talk without music in the background.
In the launch Baddibu, vibrating up the wide, swift “Kamby Bolongo,” I felt queasily, uncomfortably alien. Did they all have me appraised as merely another pith helmet? Finally ahead was James Island, for two centuries the site of a fort over which England and France waged war back and forth for the ideal vantage point to trade in slaves. Asking if we might land there awhile, I trudged amid the crumbling ruins yet guarded by ghostly cannon. Picturing in my mind the kinds of atrocities that would have happened there, I felt as if I would like to go flailing an ax back through that facet of black Africa’s history. Without luck I tried to find for myself some symbol remnant of an ancient chain, but I took a chunk of mortar and a brick. In the next minutes before we returned to the Baddibu, I just gazed up and down that river that my ancestor had named for his daughter far across the Atlantic Ocean in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Then we went on, and upon arriving at a little village called Albreda, we put ashore, our destination now on foot the yet smaller village of Juffure, where the men had been told that this griot lived.
There is an expression called “the peak experience”—that which emotionally, nothing in your life ever transcends. I’ve had mine, that first day in the back country of black West Africa.
When we got within sight of Juffure, the children who were playing outside gave the alert, and the people came flocking from their huts. It’s a village of only about seventy people. Like most backcountry villages, it was still very much as it was two hundred years ago, with its circular mud houses and their conical thatched roofs! Among the people as they gathered was a small man wearing an off white robe, a pillbox hat over an aquiline-featured black face, and about him was an aura of “somebodiness” until I knew he was the man we had come to see and hear.
As the three interpreters left our party to converge upon him, the seventy-odd other villagers gathered closely around me, in a kind of horseshoe pattern, three or four deep all around; had I stuck out my arms, my fingers would have touched the nearest ones on either side. They were all staring at me. The eyes just raked me. Their foreheads were furrowed with their very intensity