Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [382]
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,