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This book, having been televised, is now too well-known to require any extensive summarising. Briefly, as a boy in Tennessee, Haley heard his grandmother and great aunts telling time and time again of how his great-great-great-great-grandfather, Kunta Kinte, had been captured in Africa, shipped to the United States and sold into slavery. He had attempted to escape four times in spite of increasingly savage beatings, and finally had the front of his foot chopped off by slave catchers. Later he married and told his one daughter of his capture, and taught her some mandinka words.
It seems that the story in its passage through subsequent generations inevitably lost some of its vital force. This is not to deny that, for those generations, it retained great importance and much living meaning. Perhaps it was that social changes, especially after the emancipation of the slaves, were too great. Perhaps too the admixture of white blood (it was common for slave owners to rape their slave women) had led Kinte's descendants to feel separated by defilement from their African origins. At any rate the story became a history of past events, far from dead, but far from fully alive.
It is Haley's achievement that he has regenerated it—or fostered its coming to life within himself. He has Kunta's father say ‘There are three sorts of people in a village: those that can be seen, the spirits of the ancestors and those not yet born.’ And his last surviving relative of his grandmother's generation, to whom he had confided his quest at the outset, had said, ‘Yo’ sweet grandma an’ all of’em—dey up dere watchin you’ (p. 571). (She died at the very hour that he entered for the first time Kunta's village in the Gambia.) So Haley, too, came to feel. He has said that in writing of Kunta and Kunta's descendants he felt in very great direct communion with them, almost as though he and they were carrying on a dialogue. And as he reached those generationally closer to him he had the strange feeling that