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By Root 1308 0

Then I got up and the feeling was—you have been assessed and you’ve been tried and you’ve been approved by all them who went before. So go ahead. And then I went back down in the hold. I had a terrible cold, head cold, flu-ish like. I had with me a long, yellow tablet and some pencils. This time I did not take my clothing off like I’d been doing before. I kept them on because I was having such a bad cold. I laid down on the piece of timber. I had the tablet there, when I would think.

Now Kunta Kinte was lying in this position on a shelf in the ship, the Lord Ligonier. She had left the Gambia River July 5, 1767. She sailed two months, three weeks, two days. Destination: Annapolis, Maryland. And he was lying there. And others were in there with him whom he knew. And what would he think?

What would be some of the things they would say? And when they would come to me in the dark, I would write. You know how you can write kind of large looping letters on something.

And that was how I did every night, only eight nights. From there, to this country, to Florida and when I got to Florida, I remember rushing through the big, big Miami Airport. I came in at 1 AM and I had to go to the other end. Barely made the flight. Flew back to San Francisco. Got with a doctor, Kimbro was his name. And he kind of patched me up and gave me stuff and everything, antibiotics and all until I got ready.

And then I sat down with those long, yellow tablets and transcribed and then I began to write that part which is now in Roots as the chapter where Kunta Kinte crossed the ocean in a slave ship. And that was probably the most emotional experience I had in the whole thing. Again it all really goes back to here, Reader’s Digest, the morning the editors met at the place up there and said they believed in it and they would sponsor me. So, thank you.

A condensed version of a portion of this work first appeared in Reader’s Digest in the May and June 1974 issues. Copyright © 1974 by Reader’s Digest Association. Copyright renewed 2002 by Myran Haley, Cynthia Haley, Lydia Haley and William Haley.

Copyright © 1974 Alex Haley. Copyright renewed 2004 by Myran Haley, Cynthia Haley, Lydia Haley and William Haley.

Alex Haley on the writing of Roots.

Special contents of this edition Copyright © 2007 The Roots Venture, c/o IPW LLC, 2049 Century Park East, Suite 2720, Los Angeles, CA 90067

Published by Vanguard Books

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information and inquiries, address Vanguard Books, 387 Park Avenue South, 12th Floor, NYC, NY 10016, or call (800) 343-4499.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haley, Alex.

Roots : the saga of an American family : the 30th anniversary edition / Alex Haley.

p. cm.

Originally published: Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976.

eISBN : 978-1-593-15466-0

1. Haley, Alex. 2. Haley, Alex—Family. 3. Haley family. 4. Kinte family. 5. African Americans—Biography. 6. African American families. I. Title.

E185.97.H24A33 2007

929’.20973—dc22

[B]

2007008822

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