ROOTS
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Book Description
When still a boy in Henning, TN, Alex Haley's grandmother used to tell stories about their family--stories that went back to
her grandparents &
their grandparents, down thru the generations all the way to a man she called "the African." She said he'd lived across the ocean near what he called the "
Kamby Bolongo" & had been out in the forest chopping wood to make ...
MoreWhen still a boy in Henning, TN, Alex Haley's grandmother used to tell stories about their family--stories that went back to her grandparents & their grandparents, down thru the generations all the way to a man she called "the African." She said he'd lived across the ocean near what he called the "Kamby Bolongo" & had been out in the forest chopping wood to make a drum when he was set upon by four men, beaten, chained & dragged aboard a slave ship bound for Colonial America.
Vividly remembering the stories after he grew up & became a writer, Haley began to search for documentation to authenticate the narrative. It took 10 years & a half a million miles of travel across three continents to find it, but finally, in an astonishing feat of genealogical detective work, he discovered not only the name of the African--Kunta Kinte--but the location of Juffure, the very village in The Gambia, W. Africa, from which he was abducted in 1767 at the age of 16 & taken on the Lord Ligonier to Maryland & sold to a Virginia planter.
Haley has talked in Juffure with his own African 6th cousins. On 9/29/67, he stood on the dock in Annapolis where his great-great-great-great-grandfather was taken ashore on 9/29/1767. Now he's written the two-century drama of Kunta Kinte & the six generations who came after him--slaves & freedmen, farmers & blacksmiths, lumber mill workers & Pullman porters, lawyers & architects--& one author. But Haley has done more than recapture the history of his own family. As the 1st black American writer to trace his origins back to their roots, he has told the story of 25,000,000 Americans of African descent. He's rediscovered for an entire people a rich cultural heritage that slavery took from them, along with their names & their identities. But Roots speaks, finally, not just to blacks, or to whites, but to all people everywhere, for the story it tells is one of the most eloquent testimonials ever written to the indomitability of the human spirit.
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