These people quickly filtered closely around me in kind of a horseshoe design with me at the base. If I had put up my hands I would have touched the nearest ones on either side. There were about three, four deep all around. The first thing that hit me was the intensity of the way they were staring at me. The eyes just raped. The foreheads were forward in the intensity of the staring. It was an uncomfortable feeling. While this was happening there began to occur inside me a kind of feeling as if something was turgid, rolling, surging around. I had this eerie feeling that I knew inside why it was happening and what it was about, but consciously I could not identify what had me so upset. After a while it began to roll in: it was rather like a gale force wind that you couldn’t see but it just rolled in and hit you – bam! It was enough to knock you down. I suddenly realized what upset me so was that I was looking at a crowd of people and for the first time in my life every one of them was jet black. I was standing there rather rocked by that, and in the way that we tend to do if we are discomforted, we drop our glance. I remember dropping my glance, and my glance falling on my own hand, my own complexion, in context with their complexion. Now there came rolling in another surging gale force that hit me perhaps harder than the first one. A feeling of guilt, a feeling rather of being hybrid, a feeling of being the impure among the pure.

The old man suddenly left the interpreters, walked away, and the people quickly filtered away from me to the old man. They began talking in an animated, high metallic Mandinka tongue. One of the interpreters, A.B.C. Salla, whispered in my ear and the significance of what he whispered probably got me as much as all the rest of it collectively. He said, “They stare at you so because they have never seen a black American.” What hit me was they were not looking at Alex Haley, writer, they didn’t know who he was, they couldn’t care less. What they saw was a symbol of twenty-five million black Americans whom they had never seen. It was just an awesome thing to realize that someone had thrust that kind of symbolism upon me. There’s a language that’s universal, a language of gestures, noises, inflections, expressions. Somehow looking at them, hearing them, though I couldn’t understand a syllable, I knew what they were talking about. I somehow knew they were trying to arrive at a consensus of how they collectively felt about me as a symbol of all the millions of us over here whom they never had seen. There came a time when the old man quickly turned. He walked right through the people, he walked right past three interpreters, he walked right up to me, looking piercingly into my eyes and spoke in Mandinka, as if instinctively he felt I should be able to understand it. The translation came from the side. The way they collectively saw me, the symbol of all the millions of black people here whom they never had seen was, “Yes, 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.” That was the way they saw it.

The old man, the griot, the oral historian, Kebba Kanga Fofana, seventy-three rains of age (their way of saying seventy-three years, one rainy season a year), began to tell me the ancestral history of the Kinte clan as it had been told down the centuries, from the times of the forefathers. It was as if a scroll was being read. It wasn’t just talk as we talk. It was a very formal occasion. The people became mouse quiet, rigid. The old man sat in a chair and when he would speak he would come up forward, his body would grow rigid, the cords in his neck stood out and he spoke words as though they were physical objects coming out of his mouth.