Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [388]
Down in there they had, on the deck, a long, wide, thick piece of rough sawed timber. They called it dunnage. It’s used to store between cargo to keep it from shifting in rough seas. And what I did, after dinner the first night, I went down, made my way down into this hold. Had a little pocket light. I took off my clothing, to my underwear, and laid down on my back on this piece of dunnage. I imagined; I’m going to try to make believe I’m Kunta Kinte. I laid there and I got cold and colder. Nothing seemed to come except how ridiculous it was that I was doing this. By morning I had a terrible cold. I went back up. And the next day with my cold, the next night, I’m down doing the same thing. Well the third night when I left the dinner table, I couldn’t make myself go back down in that hold. I just felt so miserable. I don’t think I ever felt quite so badly. And instead of going down in the hold I went to the stern of the ship, the end of the ship, the back part. And I’m standing up there with my hands on the rail and looking down now where the propellers are beating up this white froth. And in the froth are little luminous, green phosphorescents. At sea you see that a lot. And I’m standing there looking at it and all of a sudden it looked like all my troubles just came on me. I owed everybody I knew. Everybody I knew looked like they were on my case. Why don’t you finish this foolish thing? You ought not be doing it in the first place—talking about writing about black genealogy.
That’s crazy. And so forth. All such stuff as that. And I was just utterly miserable, didn’t feel like I had a friend in the world. And then a thought came to me that was startling. It wasn’t frightening. It was just startling. And I make a point of saying it was not dramatic at all; it was just simply something that happened. I thought to myself, hey, there’s a cure for all this. You don’t have to go through all this mess. And what the cure was, was simply all I had to do was step through the rail and drop in the sea.
Now I say again, it wasn’t with any great dramatic thing at all; it just simply arrived at me. And once having thought it, standing there kind of musing about what I had just thought, I began to feel quite good about it. I’ve since read things—like people who were in a position about to freeze, felt warm, or something like that prior to. And I’m standing there; I guess I was half a second away from dropping into the sea. And it wouldn’t have made a difference. Fine, that would take care of it. You won’t owe anybody anything. The hell with it and all that. You can go. Hell with the publishers and the editors and all that and all this kind of thing.
And then again I stress it wasn’t dramatic; it was just sort of like everyone of us has been dreaming and you heard people speaking in a dream. And I began to hear voices, which were positioned behind me. I could hear them. They were not strident. They were just conversational. And I somehow knew every one of them. Who they were. And they were saying things like, no, don’t do that. No, you’re doing the best you can. You just keep going. You go ahead. And so forth. It was like that.
And I knew exactly who they were. They were Grandma. They were Chicken George. They were Kunta Kinte. They were my cousin, Georgia, who lived in Kansas City and had passed away. They were all these people whom I had been writing about. They were talking to me. It was like a dream.
I remember fighting myself loose from that rail, turning around and I went scuttling like a crab up over the hatch. And finally made my way back to my little stateroom and pitched down, head first, face first, belly first on the bunk and I cried dry. I cried more I guess than I’ve cried since I was four years old, at least it seemed so.
And it was about midnight when I kind of got myself together. I can’t really describe how it felt, but it was like recovering from a vacuum or something.