Now the thing was where, what, how could I pursue those strange phonetic sounds that it was always said our African ancestor had spoken. It seemed obvious that I had to reach as wide a range of actual Africans as I possibly could, simply because so many different tribal tongues are spoken in Africa. There in New York City, I began doing what seemed logical: I began arriving at the United Nations around quitting time; the elevators were spilling out people who were thronging through the lobby on their way home. It wasn’t hard to spot the Africans, and every one I was able to stop, I’d tell my sounds to. Within a couple of weeks, I guess I had stopped about two dozen Africans, each of whom had given me a quick look, a quick listen, and then took off. I can’t say I blame them—me trying to communicate some African sounds in a Tennessee accent.
Increasingly frustrated, I had a long talk with George Sims, with whom I’d grown up in Henning, and who is a master researcher. After a few days, George brought me a list of about a dozen people academically renowned for their knowledge of African linguistics. One whose background intrigued me quickly was a Belgian Dr. Jan Vansina. After study at the University of London’s School of African and Oriental Studies, he had done his early work living in African villages and written a book called
La Tradition Orale.
I telephoned Dr. Vansina where he now taught at the University of Wisconsin, and he gave me an appointment to see him. It was a Wednesday morning that I flew to Madison, Wisconsin, motivated by my intense curiosity about some strange
phonetic sounds . . . and with no dream in this world of what was about to start happening....
That evening in the Vansinas’ living room, I told him every syllable I could remember of the family narrative heard since little boyhood—recently buttressed by Cousin Georgia in Kansas City. Dr. Vansina, after listening intently throughout, then began asking me questions. Being an oral historian, he was particularly interested in the physical transmission of the narrative down across generations.
We talked so late that he invited me to spend the night, and the next morning Dr. Vansina, with a very serious expression on his face, said, “I wanted to sleep on it. The ramifications of phonetic sounds preserved down across your family’s generations can be immense.” He said that he had been on the phone with a colleague Africanist, Dr. Philip Curtin; they both felt certain that the sounds I’d conveyed to him were from the “Mandinka” tongue. I’d never heard that word; he told me that it was the language spoken by the Mandingo people. Then he guess translated certain of the sounds. One of them probably meant cow or cattle, another probably meant the baobab tree, generic in West Africa. The word
ko,
he said, could refer to the
kora,
one of the Mandingo people’s oldest stringed instruments, made of a halved large dried gourd covered with goatskin, with a long neck, and twenty-one strings with a bridge. An enslaved Mandingo might relate the
kora
visually to some among the types of stringed instruments that U.S. slaves had.
The most involved sound I had heard and brought was Kamby Bolongo, my ancestor’s sound to his daughter Kizzy as he had pointed to the Mattaponi River in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Dr. Vansina said that without question,
bolongo
meant, in the Mandinka tongue, a moving water, as a river, preceded by “Kamby,” it could indicate the Gambia River.
I’d never heard of it.
An incident happened that would build my feeling—especially as more uncanny things occurred—that, yes, they were up there watchin’ ...
I was asked to speak at a seminar held at Utica College, Utica, New York. Walking down a hallway with the professor who had invited me, I said I’d just flown in from Washington and why I’d been there. “The Gambia? If I’m not mistaken, someone mentioned recently that an outstanding student from that country is over at Hamilton.”
The old, distinguished Hamilton College was maybe a half hour’s drive away, in Clinton, New York. Before I could finish asking, a Professor Charles Todd said, “You’re talking about Ebou Manga.” Consulting a course roster, he told me where I could find him in an agricultural economics class. Ebou Manga was small of build, with careful eyes, a reserved manner, and black as soot. He tentatively confirmed my sounds, clearly startled to have heard me uttering them. Was Mandinka his home tongue? “No, although I am familiar with it.” He was a Wolof, he said. In his dormitory room, I told him about my quest. We left for The Gambia at the end of the following week.
Arriving in Dakar, Senegal, the next morning, we caught a light plane to small Yundum Airport in The Gambia. In a passenger van, we rode into the capital city of Banjul (then Bathurst). Ebou and his father, Alhaji Manga—Gambians are mostly Moslem—assembled a small group of men knowledgeable in their small country’s history, who met with me in the lounge of the Atlantic Hotel. As I had told Dr. Vansina in Wisconsin, I told these men the family narrative that had come down across the generations. I told them in a reverse progression, backward from Grandma through Tom, Chicken George, then Kizzy saying how her African father insisted to other slaves that his name was “Kin-tay,” and repetitively told her phonetic sounds identifying various
things, along with stories such as that he had been attacked and seized while not far from his village, chopping wood.
When I had finished, they said almost with wry amusement, “Well, of course ‘Kamby Bolongo’ would mean Gambia River; anyone would know that.” I told them hotly that no, a great many people
wouldn’t
know it! Then they showed a much greater interest that my 1760s ancestor had insisted his name was “Kin-tay.” “Our country’s oldest villages tend to be named for the families that settled those villages centuries ago,” they said. Sending for a map, pointing, they said, “Look, here is the village of Kinte-Kundah. And not too far from it, the village of Kinte-Kundah Janneh-Ya.”
Then they told me something of which I’d never have dreamed: of very old men, called
griots,
still to be found in the older backcountry villages, men who were in effect living, walking archives of oral history. A senior
griot
would be a man usually in his late sixties or early seventies; below him would be progressively younger
griots—
and apprenticing boys, so a boy would be exposed to those
griots’
particular line of narrative for forty or fifty years before he could qualify as a senior
griot,
who told on special occasions the centuries-old histories of villages, of clans, of families, of great heroes. Throughout the whole of black Africa such oral chronicles had been handed down since the time of the ancient forefathers, I was informed, and there were certain legendary
griots
who could narrate facets of African history literally for as long as three days without ever repeating themselves.
Seeing how astounded I was, these Gambian men reminded me that every living person ancestrally goes back to some time and some place where no writing existed; and then human memories and mouths and ears were the only ways those human beings could store and relay information. They said that we who live in the Western culture are so conditioned to the “crutch of print” that few among us comprehend what a trained memory is capable of.
Since my forefather had said his name was “Kin-tay”—properly spelled “Kinte,” they said—and since the Kinte clan was old and well known in The Gambia, they promised to do what they could to find a
griot
who might be able to assist my search.
Back in the United States, I began devouring books on African history. It grew quickly into some kind of obsession to correct my ignorance concerning the earth’s second-largest continent. It embarrasses me to this day that up to then my images about Africa had been largely derived or inferred from Tarzan movies and my very little authentic knowledge had come from only occasional leafings through the
National Geographic
. All of a sudden now, after reading all day, I’d sit on the edge of my bed at night studying a map of Africa, memorizing the different countries’ relative positions and the principal waters where slave ships had operated.
After some weeks, a registered letter came from The Gambia; it suggested that when possible, I should come back. But by now I was stony broke—especially because I’d been investing very little of my time in writing.
Once at a
Reader’s Digest
lawn party, cofounder Mrs. Dewit Wallace had told me how much she liked an “Unforgettable Character” I had written—about a tough old seadog cook who had once been my boss in the U. S. Coast Guard—and before leaving, Mrs. Wallace volunteered that I should let her know if I ever needed some help. Now I wrote to Mrs. Wallace a rather embarrassed letter, briefly telling her the compulsive quest I’d gotten myself into. She asked some editors to meet with me and see what they felt, and invited to lunch with them, I talked about nonstop for nearly three hours. Shortly afterward, a letter told me that the
Reader’s Digest
would provide me with a three-hundred-dollar monthly check for one year, and plus that—my really vital need—“reasonable necessary travel expenses.”
I again visited Cousin Georgia in Kansas City—something had urged me to do so, and I found her quite ill. But she was thrilled to hear both what I had learned and what I hoped to learn. She wished me Godspeed, and I flew then to Africa.
The same men with whom I had previously talked told me now in a rather matter-of-fact manner that they had caused word to be put out in the back country, and that a
griot
very knowledgeable of the Kinte clan had indeed been found—his name, they said, was “Kebba Kanji Fofana.” I was ready to have a fit. “Where
is
he?” They looked at me oddly. “He’s in his village.”
I discovered that if I intended to see this
griot
, I was going to have to do something I’d never have dreamed I’d ever be doing—organizing what seemed, at least to me then, a kind of minisafari! It took me three days of negotiating through unaccustomed endless African palaver finally to hire a launch to get upriver; to rent a lorry and a Land-Rover to take supplies by a roundabout land route; to hire finally a total of fourteen people, including three interpreters and four musicians, who had told me that the old
griots
in the back country wouldn’t talk without music in the background.
In the launch
Baddibu
, vibrating up the wide, swift “Kamby Bolongo,” I felt queasily, uncomfortably alien. Did they all have me appraised as merely another pith helmet? Finally ahead was James Island, for two centuries the site of a fort over which England and France waged war back and forth for the ideal vantage point to trade in slaves. Asking if we might land there awhile, I trudged amid the crumbling ruins yet guarded by ghostly cannon. Picturing in my mind the kinds of atrocities that would have happened there, I felt as if I would like to go flailing an ax back through that facet of black Africa’s history. Without luck I tried to find for myself some symbol remnant of an ancient chain, but I took a chunk of mortar and a brick. In the next minutes before we returned to
the
Baddibu
, I just gazed up and down that river that my ancestor had named for his daughter far across the Atlantic Ocean in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Then we went on, and upon arriving at a little village called Albreda, we put ashore, our destination now on foot the yet smaller village of Juffure, where the men had been told that this
griot
lived.
There is an expression called “the peak experience”—that which emotionally, nothing in your life ever transcends. I’ve had mine, that first day in the back country of black West Africa.
When we got within sight of Juffure, the children who were playing outside gave the alert, and the people came flocking from their huts. It’s a village of only about seventy people. Like most backcountry villages, it was still very much as it was two hundred years ago, with its circular mud houses and their conical thatched roofs! Among the people as they gathered was a small man wearing an off white robe, a pillbox hat over an aquiline-featured black face, and about him was an aura of “somebodiness” until I knew he was the man we had come to see and hear.
As the three interpreters left our party to converge upon him, the seventy-odd other villagers gathered closely around me, in a kind of horseshoe pattern, three or four deep all around; had I stuck out my arms, my fingers would have touched the nearest ones on either side. They were all staring at me. The eyes just raked me. Their foreheads were furrowed with their very intensity of staring. A kind of visceral surging or a churning sensation started up deep inside me; bewildered, I was wondering what on earth was this ... then in a little while it was rather as if some full-gale force of realization rolled in on me: Many times in my life I had been among crowds of people, but never where
every one was jet black!
Rocked emotionally, my eyes dropped downward as we tend to do when we’re uncertain, insecure, and my glance fell upon my
own hands’ brown complexion. This time more quickly than before, and even harder, another gale-force emotion hit me: I felt myself some variety of a hybrid ... I felt somehow impure among the pure; it was a terribly shaming feeling. About then, abruptly the old man left the interpreters. The people immediately also left me now to go crowding about him.
One of my interpreters came up quickly and whispered in my ears, “They stare at you so much because they have never here seen a black American.” When I grasped the significance, I believe that hit me harder than what had already happened. They hadn’t been looking at me as an individual, but I represented in their eyes a symbol of the twenty-five millions of us black people whom they had never seen, who lived beyond an ocean.
The people were clustered thickly about the old man, all of them intermittently flicking glances toward me as they talked animatedly in their Mandinka tongue. After a while, the old man turned, walked briskly through the people, past my three interpreters, and right up to me. His eyes piercing into mine, seeming to feel I should understand his Mandinka, he expressed what they had all decided they
felt
concerning those unseen millions of us who lived in those places that had been slave ships’ destinations—and the translation came: “We have been told by the forefathers that there are many of us from this place who are in exile in that place called America—and in other places.”