Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 487

 

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Roots," by Alex Haley .

"He said that three groups of people lived in every village. First were those you could see - walking around, eating, sleeping, and working. Second were the ancestors, whom Grandma Yaisa had now joined.

'And the third people - who are they?' asked Kunta.

'The third people,' said Omoro, 'are those waiting to be born.'"

“To the north coast of Africa, the toubob ships bring porcelain, spices, cloth, horses, and countless things made by men,” said Saloum. “Then, camels and donkeys bear those goods inland to places like Sijilmasa, Ghadames, and Marrakech.” The moving finger of Janneh showed where those cities were. “And as we sit here tonight,” said Saloum, “there are many men with heavy headloads crossing deep forests taking our own African goods—ivory, skins, olives, dates, kola nuts, cotton, copper, precious stones—back to the toubob’s ships.”

Kunta’s mind reeled at what he heard, and he vowed silently that someday he too would venture to such exciting places.

Four of us now, thought Kunta, lying awake later that night. Four brothers—four sons for his mother and father. He thought how that would sound in the Kinte family history when it was told by griots for hundreds of rains in the future. After Omoro, thought Kunta, he would be the first man of the family when he returned to Juffure. Not only was he learning to be a man, but he was also learning many, many things he would be able to teach Lamin, as already he had taught him so many of the things of boyhood. At least he would teach him that which was permissible for boys to know, and then Lamin would teach Suwadu, and Suwadu would teach this new one whom Kunta had not even seen, whose name was Madi. And some day, Kunta thought as he drifted off to sleep, when he was as old as Omoro, he would have sons of his own, and it would all begin again.

In his hut after the moro had gone that night, Kunta lay awake thinking how so many things—indeed, nearly everything they had learned—all tied together. The past seemed with the present, the present with the future, the dead with the living and those yet to be born; he himself with his family, his mates, his village, his tribe, his Africa; the world of man with the world of animals and growing things—they all lived with Allah. Kunta felt very small, yet very large. Perhaps, he thought, this is what it means to become a man.

Just then the black’s club smashed into Kunta once again, staggering him to his knees, and the toubob sprang loose. His head ready to explode, his body reeling, raging at his own weakness, Kunta reared up and roared, flailing blindly at the air, everything blurred with tears and blood and sweat. He was fighting for more than his life now. Omoro! Binta! Lamin! Suwadu! Madi! The toubob’s heavy club crashed against his temple. And all went black.

The moans of the Foulah shivered through the black hold. Then, after a while, a clear voice called out in Mandinka, “Share his pain! We must be in this place as one village!” The voice belonged to an elder. He was right. The Foulah’s pains had been as Kunta’s own. He felt himself about to burst with rage. He also felt, in some nameless way, a terror greater than he had ever known before, and it seemed to spread from the marrow of his bones. Part of him wanted to die, to escape all of this; but no, he must live to avenge it. He forced himself to lie absolutely still. It took a long while, but finally he felt his strain and confusion, even his body’s pains, begin to ebb—except for the place between his shoulders where he had been burned with the hot iron. He found that his mind could focus better now on the only choice that seemed to lie before him and the others: Either they would all die in this nightmare place, or somehow the toubob would have to be overcome and killed.

As Kunta’s own condition steadily worsened, despite everything Bell and the massa could do, her prayers became more and more fervent. Kunta’s strange, silent, stubborn ways had been entirely forgotten as, herself too tired to sleep, she sat by his bed each night as he lay sweating heavily, tossing, moaning, or at times babbling in spells of delirium beneath the several quilts she’d piled on him. She would hold his hot, dry hand in hers, desperately afraid that she might never be able to tell him what had taken this, after all these years, for her fully to realize: that he was a man of caliber, of strength, and of character, that she had never known the equal of, and she loved him very deeply.

The massa turned and walked very quickly with his head down back into the house, past Bell huddled sobbing by the bottom step. As if Kunta were sleepwalking, he came cripping slowly back up the driveway—when an African remembrance flashed into his mind, and near the front of the house he bent down and started peering around. Determining the clearest prints that Kizzy’s bare feet had left in the dust, scooping up the double handful containing those footprints, he went rushing toward the cabin: The ancient forefathers said that precious dust kept in some safe place would insure Kizzy’s return to where she made the footprints. He burst through the cabin’s open door, his eyes sweeping the room and falling upon his gourd on a shelf containing his pebbles. Springing over there, in the instant before opening his cupped hands to drop in the dirt, suddenly he knew the truth: His Kizzy was gone; she would not return. He would never see his Kizzy again.

His face contorting, Kunta flung his dust toward the cabin’s roof. Tears bursting from his eyes, snatching his heavy gourd up high over his head, his mouth wide in a soundless scream, he hurled the gourd down with all his strength, and it shattered against the packed-earth floor, his 662 pebbles representing each month of his 55 rains flying out, ricocheting wildly in all directions.

In my mind’s eye, rather as if it were mistily being projected on a screen, I began envisioning descriptions I had read of how collectively millions of our ancestors had been enslaved. Many thousands were individually kidnapped, as my own forebear Kunta had been, but into the millions had come awake screaming in the night, dashing out into the bedlam of raided villages, which were often in flames. The captured able survivors were linked neck-by-neck with thongs into processions called “coffles,” which were sometimes as much as a mile in length. I envisioned the many dying, or left to die when they were too weak to continue the torturous march toward the coast, and those who made it to the beach were greased, shaved, probed in every orifice, often branded with sizzling irons; I envisioned them being lashed and dragged toward the longboats, their spasms of screaming and clawing with their hands into the beach, biting up great choking mouthfuls of the sand in their desperation efforts for one last hold on the Africa that had been their home; I envisioned them shoved, beaten, jerked down into slave ships’ stinking holds and chained onto shelves, often packed so tightly that they had to lie on their sides like spoons in a drawer . . . .

My mind reeled with it all as we approached another, much larger village. Staring ahead, I realized that word of what had happened in Juffure must have left there well before I did. The driver slowing down, I could see this village’s people thronging the road ahead; they were waving, amid their cacophony of crying out something; I stood up in the Land-Rover, waving back as they seemed grudging to open a path for the Land-Rover.

I guess we had moved a third of the way through the village when it suddenly registered in my brain what they were all crying out ... the wizened, robed elders and younger men, the mothers and the naked tar-black children, they were all waving up at me, their expressions buoyant, beaming, all were crying out together, “Meester Kinte! Meester Kinte!”

Let me tell you something: I am a man. A sob hit me somewhere around my ankles; it came surging upward, and flinging my hands over my face, I was just bawling, as I hadn’t since I was a baby. “Meester Kinte!” I just felt like I was weeping for all of history’s incredible atrocities against fellowmen, which seems to be mankind’s greatest flaw . . . .

Flying homeward from Dakar, I decided to write a book. My own ancestors’ would automatically also be a symbolic saga of all African-descent people—who are without exception the seeds of someone like Kunta who was born and grew up in some black African village, someone who was captured and chained down in one of those slave ships that sailed them across the same ocean, into some succession of plantations, and since then a struggle for freedom.