Word: ancestors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Starting with fragmentary accounts of an African slave ancestor and a few African words which had been passed down to him through generations of family storytelling, Haley traced his lineage to a village in Gambia...
During this search, Haley made several trips to Africa and eventually interviewed a village story teller who described the disappearance of Haley's African ancestor. The ancestor had been kidnapped by slave traders in the middle of the 19th century...
...Sept. 29,1967, Alex Haley quietly celebrated a private bicentennial He stood on a wharf at Annapolis Md exactly 200 years to the day after his great-great-great-great grandfather stumbled off the deck of the slave ship Lord Ligonier at the same spot. His ancestor was Kunta Kinte, one of 98 "Negroes" who managed to survive the three-month trip from West Africa. The original consignment, "packed like spoons in a drawer " included 140 Africans. The one-third loss, Haley notes drily, was about average for an 18th century slave voyage...
...tradition begun by that distant ancestor Kunte Kinte, each child in the successive generations in Haley's family was told the family history, which by Haley's time had been pared down considerably. He remembers his grandmother referring to their ancestor, "the African," who called the banjo "ko," the river "Kamby Bolongo," and who was out chopping wood for a drum at the age of 16 when four white slave traders kidnapped him and brought him to the United States...
Haley's narrative of the three generations of slaves in his family, dating from 1767 to the Civil War, is as keen as his African chapters. To ensure an accurate depiction of his ancestor's crossing of the Atlantic in a slave ship, Haley took a freighter from Africa to the United States, climbing down into the ship's cold dark cargo hold to lie on the rough planks stripped down to his underwear. Kunta's initial difficulty understanding and respecting American-born blacks, the selling of his daughter to the owner of a distant plantation, rape...