Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [378]
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