Roots: The Saga of an American Family

by Alex Haley

After an hour, the trail took them by a low, spreading tree strung thickly with beads. Kunta wanted to explain to Lamin how such a tree meant that living nearby were some of the few Mandinkas who were kafirs, pagan unbelievers who used snuff and smoked tobacco in pipes made of wood with earthen bowls, and also drank a beer they made of mead.

“There is a legend, little brother, that it was traveling Mandinkas who named the place where that old man is bound. They found there a kind of insect they had never seen before and named the place ‘Tumbo Kutu,’ which means ‘new insect.’”

Kunta picked up a small stone, spit on it three times, and hurled it far back down the trail, the stone having thus carried behind them the spirits of misfortune.

baobab

“A griot rests inside there,” adding from his own knowledge that griots were always buried not as other people were but within the shells of ancient baobabs, since both the trees and the histories in the heads of griots were timeless.

Lamin would one day take Suwadu, and Suwadu would take Madi.

Behind the petitioners, in rows, according to their ages, sat junior elders such as Omoro, and behind them sat the new men of Kunta’s kafo. And behind them the village women could sit, though they rarely attended except when someone in their immediate family was involved in a matter to be heard. Once in a long while, all the women would be present—but only if a case held the promise of some juicy gossip.

This was done according to their ages, to serve the needs of the oldest first.

Whoever it was would stand, stating his case, the senior elders all staring at the ground, listening until he finished and sat down. At this point, any of the elders might ask him questions.

If the matter involved a dispute, the second person now presented his side, followed by more questions, whereupon the elders turned around to present their backs as they huddled to discuss the matter, which could take a long time. One or more might turn with further questions. But all finally turned back around toward the front, one motioning the person or persons being heard to st...

Even for new men like Kunta, most of these hearings were routine matters. People ...

asked for a bigger farm plot for the husband and an additional rice plot for the wife—requests that were almost always quickly granted, as were the first farming-land requests of unmarried men like Kunta and his mates. During man-training, the kintango had directed them never to miss any Council of Elders sessions unless they had to, as the witnessing of its decisions would broaden a man’s knowledge as his own rains increased until he too would be a senior elder. Attending his first session, Kunta had looked at Omoro se...

At his first session, Kunta witnessed a land matter involving a dispute. Two men both claimed the fruit of some trees originally planted by the first man on land to which the second man now had the farming rights, since the first man’s family had decreased. The Council of Elders awarded the fruit to the f...

At later sessions, Kunta saw people frequently charged with breaking or losing something borrowed from an irate lender who cla...

valuable and brand-new. Unless the borrower had witnesses to disprove that, he was usually ordered to pay for or replace the article at the value of a new one. Kunta also saw furious people accusing others of inflicting bad fortune on them through evil magic. One man testified that another had touched him with a cock’s spur, making him violently ill. A young wife declared that her new mother-in-law had hidden some bourein shrub in the wife’s kitchen, causing whatever was cooked there to turn out badly. And a widow claimed that an old man whose advances she had spurned had sprinkled powdered eggshells in her path, making her walk into a long succession of troubles, which she proceeded to describe. If presented with enough impressive evidence of evil magic’s mot...

Kunta saw debtors ordered to pay up, even if they had to sell their possessions, or with nothing to sell, to work off the amount as the lender’s slave. He saw slaves charging their ...

food or lodgings, or with taking more than their half share of what the slaves’ work had produced. Masters, in turn, accused slaves of cheating by hiding some of their produce, or of insufficient work, or of deliberately breaking farm tools. Kunta saw the Council weigh carefully the evidence in these cases, along with each person’s past record in the vi...

But sometimes there was no dispute between a master and his slave. Indeed, Kunta saw them coming together asking permission for the slave to marry into the master’s family. But any couple intending to marry, first had to obtain the Council’s permission. Couples judged by the Council to be too close of kinship were refused out of hand, but for those not thus disqualified, there was a waiting period of one moon between the request and the reply, during which the villagers were expected to pay quiet visits to any senior elder and reveal any private information, either good or bad, about the couple in question. Since ...

either of them ever displayed any undesirable tendencies of any kind, such as cheating or telling less than the full truth? Was the girl known for being irritable and argumentative? Was the man known for beating goats unmercifully? If so, the marriage was refused, for it was believed that such a person might pass these traits along to his or her children. But as Kunta knew even before he began attending the Council sessions, most couples won approval for marriage, because both sets of parents...

At the Council sessions, however, Kunta learned that sometimes parents hadn’t been told things that people did tell the senior elders. Kunta saw one marriage permission flatly refused when a witness came forth to testify that the young man of the planned marriage, as a young goatherd, had once stolen a basket from him, thinking he hadn’t been seen. The crime hadn’t been reported then, out of compassion for the fact that he was still a boy; if it...

exposed at last, burst into tears, blurting out his guilt before his horrified parents and the girl he was asking to many, who began screaming. Soon afterward, he disappeared fr...

After attending Council sessions for a number of moons, Kunta guessed that most problems for the senior elders came from married people—especially from men with two, three, or four wives. Adultery was the most frequent charge by such men, and unpleasant things happened to an offending man if a husband’s accusation was backed up with convincing outside testimony or other strong evidence. If a wronged husband was poor and the offending man well off, the Council might order the offender to deliver his possessions to the husband, one at a time, until the husband said “I have enough,” which might not be until the adulterer had only his bare hut left. But with both men poor, which was usually the case, the Council might order the offender ...

receive a public flogging of thirty-nine lashes across his bare back by his most recently wronged husband, according to the ancie...

All of Juffure had danced and feasted when she found her way home after escaping from some toubob who had kidnaped her. Then, a few moons later, she became big with child, although unmarried, which caused much gossip. Young and strong, she might still have found some old man’s acceptance as a third or fourth junior wife. But then the child was born: He was a strange pale tan color like a cured hide, and had very odd hair—and wherever Jankeh Jallon would appear thereafter, people would look at the ground and hurry elsewhere. Her eyes glistening with tears, she stood up now and asked the Council: What was she to do?

Jenkeh Jallon was raped by a white slave captor, and though she was able to escape and return home whe bore a child who possessed a mixed complexion. The elders were not sure about how to handle this situation.

Why would a man want to marry when he could get a woman to cook for him and sleep with him without getting married?

There must be some reason. Perhaps it was because it was only through marrying that a man could have sons. That was a good thing. But what would he have to teach those sons until he had lived long enough to learn something about the world—not just from his father, and from the arafang, and from the kintango, but also by exploring it for himself, as his uncles had done?

Fulani herdsman in the distance as he waved his grass torch to frighten away some animal, probably a hyena, that was roaming too close to his cows. So good were the Fulani attending cattle that people claimed they could actually talk with their animals.

Kunta, however, meant to put his eyes and feet upon that distant place called Mali, where, some three or four hundred rains before, according to Omoro and his uncles, the Kinte clan had begun.

These forefather Kintes, he remembered, had won fame as blacksmiths, men who had conquered fire to make iron weapons that won wars and iron tools that made farming less hard. And from this original Kinte family, all of their descendants and all of the people who worked for them had taken the Kinte name.

But he was no longer a boy, and he had learned to treat all of Allah’s creatures as he himself wished to be treated: with respect.

This place in the early morning would always fill Kunta with a greater sense of calm, and wonder, than anywhere else he knew of. Even more than in the village mosque, he felt here how totally were everyone and everything in the hands of Allah, and how everything he could see and hear and smell from the top of this tree had been here for longer than men’s memories, and would be here long after he and his sons and his sons’ sons had joined their ancestors.

“Kill toubob—and their traitor black helpers!”

The worst thing was that he couldn’t move anywhere; he felt he wanted to bite through his chains. He decided that he must keep himself focused upon something, anything to occupy his mind or his hands, or else he would go mad—as some men in the hold seemed to have done already, judging from the things they cried out.

Serere

alcala

sasso borro

His mind reeled; he couldn’t comprehend how black men would docilely follow behind a toubob who wasn’t watching them or even carrying a weapon, rather than try to run away—or kill him.

It seemed to him that every time in his life when he had been punished, it had been because of carelessness and inattention.

suba

wondering about these black ones who looked like Africans but ate pig. It meant that they were all strangers—or traitors—to Allah. Silently he begged Allah’s forgiveness in advance if his lips would ever touch any swine without his realizing it, or even if he ever ate from any plate that any swine meat had ever been on.

Kunta managed to move his left hand far enough for the fingers to scratch up a small mound of the hard dirt where the toubob’s foot had been. Pulling the dirt closer, Kunta pressed his eyes shut and appealed to the spirits of evil to curse forever the womb of the toubob and his family.

Kunta felt a special closeness to the sun each time it rose. He recalled what an old man who had been an alcala had said down in the darkness of the big canoe: “Each day’s new sun will remind us that it rose in our Africa, which is the navel of the earth.”

When Kunta continued to stare at him dumbly, the black one began jabbing at his own chest. “Me Samson!” he exclaimed. “Samson!” He moved his jabbing finger again to Kunta. “You Toby! Toby. Massa say you name Toby!” When what he meant began to sink in, it took all of Kunta’s self-control to grip his flooding rage without any facial sign of the slightest understanding. He wanted to shout “I am Kunta Kinte, first son of Omoro, who is the son of the holy man Kairaba Kunta Kinte!”

It seemed to him that for moons without end, all that he had known was being tracked and attacked and captured and chained.

No! He would not allow himself to act this way. After all, he was a man now, seventeen rains of age, too old to weep and wallow in self-pity. Wiping away the tears, he crawled onto his thin, lumpy mattress of dried cornshucks and tried to go to sleep—but all he could think of was the name “To-by” he had been given, and rage rose in him once more. Furiously, he kicked his legs in frustration—but the movement only gouged the iron cuffs deeper into his ankles, which made him cry again.

Some days they served foods Kunta knew of from his home, such as groundnuts, and kanjo—which was called “okra”—and so-so, which was called “black-eyed peas.” And he saw how much these black ones loved the large fruit that he heard here being called “watermelon.” But he saw that Allah appeared to have denied these people the mangoes, the hearts of palm, the breadfruits, and so many of the other delicacies that grew almost anywhere one cared to look on the vines and trees and bushes in Africa.

Kunta couldn’t fathom what had happened to so destroy their minds that they acted like goats and monkeys. Perhaps it was because they had been born in this place rather than in Africa, because the only home they had ever known were the toubob’s huts of logs glued together with mud and swine bristles. These black ones had never known what it meant to sweat under the sun not for toubob masters but for themselves and their own people.

Most of the other toubob words that Kunta heard still confused him. But behind his expressionless mask, he tried hard to make sense of them, and slowly he began to associate various sounds with certain objects and actions. But one sound in particular was extremely puzzling to him, though he heard it exclaimed over and over nearly every day by toubob and blacks alike. What, he wondered, was a “nigger”?

One thing he didn’t hear, it occurred to him, and hadn’t heard since he left Africa, was the sound of drums. The toubob probably didn’t allow these black people to have any drums, that had to be the reason. But why? Was it because the toubob knew and feared how the sound of the drums could quicken the blood of everyone in a village, until even the little children and the toothless old ones would dance wildly? Or how the rhythm of the drums would drive wrestlers to their greatest feats of strength? Or how the hypnotic beat could send warriors into a frenzy against their enemies? Or perhaps the toubob were simply afraid to

allow a form of communication they couldn’t understand that could travel the distance between one farm and another. But these heathen blacks wouldn’t understand drumtalk any better than the toubob. Kunta was forced to concede, though—if only with great reluctance—that these pagan blacks might not be totally irredeemable. Ignorant as they were, some of the things they did were purely African, and he could tell that they were totally unaware of it themselves. For one thing, he had heard all his life the very same sounds of exclamation, accompanied by the very same hand gestures and facial expressions. And the way these blacks moved their bodies was also identical. No less so was the way these blacks laughed when they were among themselves—with their whole bodies, just like the people of Juffure.