Roots: The Saga of an American Family

  Bertha said calmly, “Sorry we didn’t write. We wanted to bring you a surprise present—” She handed to Cynthia the blanketed bundle in her arms. Her heart pounding, and with Will gazing incredulously over her shoulder, Cynthia pulled back the blanket’s top fold—revealing a round brown face....

  The baby boy, six weeks old, was me.

  CHAPTER 118

  I used to be told later by Dad, laughing in recalling that night of big surprise as he loved to do, “Seemed I’d nearly lost a son a little while there—” Dad declared Grandpa Will Palmer walked around and lifted me out of Grandma’s arms “and without a word took you out to the yard and around the rear of the house somewhere. Why, he must have stayed gone I believe as long as half an hour” before returning, “with Cynthia, Bertha, or me saying not a word to him of it, either, I guess for one reason just because he was Will Palmer, and the other thing was all of us knew how badly for many years he’d wanted to have a son to raise—I guess in your being Bertha’s boy, you’d become it.”

  After a week or so, Dad went back alone to Ithaca, leaving Mama and me in Henning; they had decided it would be better while he finished pushing for his master’s degree. Grandpa and Grandma proceeded to just about adopt me as their own—especially Grandpa.

  Even before I could talk, Grandma would say years later, he would carry me in his arms, down to the lumber company, where he built a crib to put me in while he took care of business. After I had learned to walk, we would go together downtown, me taking three steps to each of his, my small fist tightly grasped about his extended left forefinger. Looming over me like a black, tall, strong tree, Grandpa would stop and chat with people we met along the way. Grandpa taught me to look anyone right in their eyes, to speak to them clearly and politely. Sometimes people exclaimed how well raised I was and how fine I was growing up. “Well, I guess he’ll do,” Grandpa would respond.

  Down at the W. E. Palmer Lumber Company, he would let me play around among the big stacks of oak, cedar, pine, and hickory, all in planks of different lengths and widths, and with their mingling of good smells, and I would imagine myself involved in all kinds of exciting adventures, almost always in faraway times or places. And sometimes Grandpa would let me sit in his office in his big, high-backed swivel chair with his green-visored eyeshade on my head, swiveling around and back and forth until I’d get so dizzy my head seemed to keep going after I’d stopped. I enjoyed myself anywhere I ever went with Grandpa.

  Then, when I was going on five, he died. I was so hysterical that Dr. Dillard had to give me a glass of something milky to make me sleep that night. But before I did, I remember drowsily glimpsing many people, black and white, gathering in a ragged line along the dusty road that ran nearby the house, all of their heads bowed, the women wearing headscarves, the men holding their hats in their hands. For the next several days, it seemed to me as if everybody in the world was crying.

  Dad, who had by now nearly completed his master’s thesis, came home from Cornell to take over the lumber mill, as Mama started teaching in our local school. Having loved Grandpa so deeply myself, and having seen Grandma’s terrible grief, she and I soon became extremely close, and there weren’t many places she went that she didn’t take me along with her.

  I suppose it was somehow to try to fill the void of Grandpa’s absence that now during each springtime, Grandma began to invite various ones among the Murray family female relatives to spend some, if not all, of the summers with us. Averaging in her age range, the late forties and early fifties, they came from exotic-sounding places to me, such as Dyersburg, Tennessee; Inkster, Michigan; St. Louis and Kansas City—and they had names like Aunt Plus, Aunt Liz, Aunt Till, Aunt Viney, and Cousin Georgia. With the supper dishes washed, they all would go out on the front porch and sit in cane-bottomed rocking chairs, and I would be among them and sort of scrunch myself down behind the white-painted rocker holding Grandma. The time would be just about as the dusk was deepening into the night, with the lightning bugs flickering on and off around the honeysuckle vines, and every evening I can remember, unless there was some local priority gossip, always they would talk about the same things—snatches and patches of what later I’d learn was the long, cumulative family narrative that had been passed down across the generations.

  It was the talk, I knew, that always had generated my only memories of any open friction between Mama and Grandma. Grandma would get on that subject sometimes without her older women summer guests there, and Mama always before long would abruptly snap something like, “Oh, Maw, I wish you’d stop all that old-timey slavery stuff, it’s entirely embarrassing!” Grandma would snap right back, “If you don’t care who and where you come from, well, I does!” And they might go around avoiding speaking to each other for a whole day, maybe even longer.

  But anyway, I know I gained my initial impression that whatever Grandma and the other graying ladies talked about was something that went a very long way back when one or another of them would be recalling something of girlhood and suddenly thrusting a finger down toward me say, “I wasn’t any bigger’n this here young’un!” The very idea that anyone as old and wrinkled as they had once been my age strained my comprehension. But as I say, it was this that caused me to realize that the things they were discussing must have happened a very long time ago.

  Being just a little boy, I couldn’t really follow most of what they said. I didn’t know what an “ol’ massa” or an “ol’ missis” was; I didn’t know what a “plantation” was, though it seemed something resembling a farm. But slowly, from hearing the stories each passing summer, I began to recognize frequently repeated names among the people they talked about and to remember things they told about those people. The farthest-back person they ever talked about was a man they called “the African,” whom they always said had been brought to this country on a ship to some place that they pronounced “’Naplis.” They said he was bought off this ship by a “Massa John Waller,” who had a plantation in a place called “Spotsylvania County, Virginia.” They would tell how the African kept trying to escape, and how on the fourth effort he had the misfortune to be captured by two white professional slave catchers, who apparently decided to make an example of him. This African was given the choice either of being castrated or having a foot cut off, and—“thanks to Jesus, or we wouldn’t be here tellin’ it”—the African chose his foot. I couldn’t figure out why white folks would do anything as mean and low-down as that.

  But this African’s life, the old ladies said, had been saved by Massa John’s brother, a Dr. William Waller, who was so mad about the entirely unnecessary maiming that he bought the African for his own plantation. Though now the African was crippled, he could do limited work, and the doctor assigned him in the vegetable garden. That was how it happened that this particular African was kept on one plantation for quite a long time—in a time when slaves, especially male slaves, were sold back and forth so much that slave children grew up often without even knowledge of who their parents were.

  Grandma and the others said that Africans fresh off slave ships were given some name by their massas. In this particular African’s case the name was “Toby.” But they said anytime any of the other slaves called him that, he would strenuously rebuff them, declaring that his name was “Kin-tay.”

  Hobbling about, doing his gardening work, then later becoming his massa’s buggy-driver, “Toby”—or “Kin-tay”—met and eventually mated with a woman slave there whom Grandma and the other ladies called “Bell, the big-house cook.” They had a little girl who was given the name “Kizzy.” When she was around four to five years old, her African father began to take her by the hand and lead her around, whenever he got the chance, pointing out different things to her and repeating to her their names in his own native tongue. He would point at a guitar, for example, and say something that sounded like “ko.” Or he would point at the river than ran near the plantation—actually the Mattaponi River—and say what sounded like “Kamby Bolongo,” alo
ng with many more things and sounds. As Kizzy grew older, and her African father learned English better, he began telling her stories about himself, his people, and his homeland—and how he was taken away from it. He said that he had been out in the forest not far from his village, chopping wood to make a drum, when he had been surprised by four men, overwhelmed, and kidnaped into slavery.

  When Kizzy was sixteen years old, Grandma Palmer and the other Murray family ladies said, she was sold away to a new master named Tom Lea, who owned a smaller plantation in North Carolina. And it was on this plantation that Kizzy gave birth to a boy, whose father was Tom Lea, who gave the boy the name of George.

  When George got around four or five years old, his mother began to tell him her African father’s sounds and stories, until he came to know them well. Then when George got to be the age of twelve, I learned there on Grandma’s front porch, he was apprenticed to an old “Uncle Mingo,” who trained the master’s fighting gamecocks, and by the midteens, the youth had earned such a reputation as a gamecock trainer that he’d been given by others the nickname he’d take to his grave: “Chicken George.”

  Chicken George when around eighteen met and mated with a slave girl named Matilda, who in time bore him eight children. With each new child’s birth, said Grandma and the others, Chicken George would gather his family within their slave cabin, telling them afresh about their African great-grandfather named “Kin-tay,” who called a guitar a “ko,” a river in Virginia “Kamby Bolongo,” and other sounds for other things, and who had said he was chopping wood to make a drum when he was captured into slavery.

  The eight children grew up, took mates, and had their own children. The fourth son, Tom, was a blacksmith when he was sold along with the rest of his family to a “Massa Murray,” who owned a tobacco plantation in Alamance County, North Carolina. There, Tom met and mated with a half-Indian slave girl named Irene, who came from the plantation of a “Massa Holt,” who owned a cotton mill. Irene eventually also bore eight children, and with each new birth, Tom continued the tradition his father, Chicken George, had begun, gathering his family around the hearth and telling them about their African great-great-grandfather and all those descending from him.

  Of that second set of eight children, the youngest was a little girl named Cynthia, who was two years old when her father, Tom, and grandfather, Chicken George, led a wagon train of recently freed slaves westward to Henning, Tennessee, where Cynthia met and at the age of twenty-two married Will Palmer.

  When I had been thoroughly immersed in listening to accounts of all those people unseen who had lived away back yonder, invariably it would astonish me when the long narrative finally got down to Cynthia . . . and there I sat looking right at Grandma! As well as Aunt Viney, Aunt Matilda, and Aunt Liz, who had ridden right along with Grandma—her older sisters—in the wagon train.

  I was there at Grandma’s in Henning until two younger brothers had been born, George in 1925, then Julius in 1929. Dad sold the lumber company for Grandma, and moved now into being a professor of agriculture with Mama and we three boys living wherever he taught, the longest period being at A&M College at Normal, Alabama, where I was in some class a morning in 1931 and someone came with a message for me to hurry home, and I did, hearing Dad’s great wracking sobs as I burst into the door. Mama—who had been sick off and on since we had left Henning—lay in their bed, dying. She was thirty-six.

  Every summer, George, Julius, and I spent in Henning with Grandma. Noticeably something of her old spirit seemed to have gone, along with both Grandpa and Mama. People passing would greet her in her white-painted rocker there on the front porch, “Sister Cynthy, how’s you doin’?” and she generally would answer them, “Jes’ settin’—”

  After two years, Dad married again, to a colleague professor who was named Zeona Hatcher, from Columbus, Ohio, where she had gotten her master’s degree at Ohio State University. She busied herself with the further raising and training of we three rapidly growing boys, then she gave us a sister named Lois.

  I had finished a second year in college and at seventeen years of age enlisted into the U. S. Coast Guard as a messboy when World War II happened. On my cargo-ammunition ship plying the Southwest Pacific, I stumbled onto the long road that has taken me finally to the writing of this Roots.

  At sea sometimes as long as three months, our crew’s really most incessant fighting wasn’t of enemy aerial bombers or submarines, but our fighting of sheer boredom. At Dad’s insistence, I’d learned to type in high school, and my most precious shipboard possession was my portable typewriter. I wrote letters to everyone I could think of. And I read every book in the ship’s small library or that was owned and loaned by shipmates; from boyhood, I’d loved reading, especially stories of adventure. Having read everything on board a third time, I guess simply in frustration I decided I’d try writing some stories myself. The idea that one could roll a blank sheet of paper into a typewriter and write something on it that other people would care to read challenged, intrigued, exhilarated me—and does to this day. I don’t know what else motivated and sustained me through trying to write, every single night, seven nights a week—mailing off my efforts to magazines and collecting literally hundreds of their rejection slips—across the next eight years before my first story was bought.

  After the war, with one or another editor accepting a story now or then, the U. S. Coast Guard’s hierarchy created for me a new rating—“journalist.” Writing every hour I could, I got published more; finally in 1959 at age thirty-seven, I’d been in the service for twenty years, making me eligible to retire, which I did, determined to try now for a new career as a full-time writer.

  At first I sold some articles to men’s adventure magazines, mostly about historic maritime dramas, because I love the sea. Then Reader’s Digest began giving me assignments to write mostly biographical stories of people who’d had dramatic experiences or lived exciting lives.

  Then, in 1962, I happened to record a conversation with famous jazz trumpeter Miles Davis that became the first of the “Playboy Interviews.” Among my subsequent interview subjects was the then-Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X. A publisher reading the interview asked for a book portraying his life. Malcolm X asked me to work with him as his collaborator, and I did. The next year was mostly spent intensively interviewing him, then the next year in actually writing The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which, as he had predicted, he hadn’t lived to read, for he was assassinated about two weeks after the manuscript was finished.

  Soon, a magazine sent me on an assignment to London. Between appointments, utterly fascinated with a wealth of history everywhere, I missed scarcely a guided tour anywhere within London’s area during the next several days. Poking about one day in the British Museum, I found myself looking at something I’d heard of vaguely: the Rosetta Stone. I don’t know why, it just about entranced me. I got a book there in the museum library to learn more about it.

  Discovered in the Nile delta, I learned, the stone’s face had chiseled into it three separate texts: one in known Greek characters, the second in a then-unknown set of characters, the third in the ancient hieroglyphics, which it had been assumed no one ever would be able to translate. But a French scholar, Jean Champollion, successively matched, character for character, both the unknown text and the hieroglyphics with the known Greek text, and he offered a thesis that the texts read the same. Essentially, he had cracked the mystery of the previously undeciphered hieroglyphics in which much of mankind’s earliest history was recorded.

  The key that had unlocked a door into the past fascinated me. I seemed to feel it had some special personal significance, but I couldn’t imagine what. It was on a plane returning to the United States when an idea hit me. Using language chiseled into stone, the French scholar had deciphered a historic unknown by matching it with that which was known. That presented me a rough analogy: In the oral history that Grandma, Aunt Liz, Aunt Plus, Cousin Georgia, and the others had always told on the boyhoo
d Henning front porch, I had an unknown quotient in those strange words or sounds passed on by the African. I got to thinking about them: “Kin-tay,” he had said, was his name. “Ko” he had called a guitar. “Kamby Bolongo” he had called a river in Virginia. They were mostly sharp, angular sounds, with k predominating. These sounds probably had undergone some changes across the generations of being passed down, yet unquestionably they represented phonetic snatches of whatever was the specific tongue spoken by my African ancestor who was a family legend. My plane from London was circling to land at New York with me wondering: What specific African tongue was it? Was there any way in the world that maybe I could find out?

  CHAPTER 119

  Now over thirty years later the sole surviving one of the old ladies who had talked the family narrative on the Henning front porch was the youngest among them, Cousin Georgia Anderson. Grandma was gone, and all of the others too. In her eighties now, Cousin Georgia lived with her son and daughter, Floyd Anderson and Bea Neely, at 1200 Everett Avenue, Kansas City, Kansas. I hadn’t seen her since my frequent visits there of a few years before, then to offer what help I could to my politically oriented brother, George. Successively out of the U. S. Army Air Force, Morehouse College, then the University of Arkansas Law School, George was hotly campaigning to become a Kansas state senator. The night of his victory party, laughter flourished that actually why he’d won was . . . Cousin Georgia. Having repetitively heard her campaign director son, Floyd, tell people of George’s widely recognized integrity, our beloved gray, bent, feisty Cousin Georgia had taken to the local sidewalks. Rapping her walking cane at people’s doors, she had thrust before their startled faces a picture of her grandnephew candidate, declaring, “Dat boy got mo’’teggity dan you can shake a stick at!”