He’d speak a sentence or so, he would go limp, relax, and the translation would come. Out of this man’s head came spilling lineage details incredible to behold. Two, three centuries back. Who married whom, who had what children, what children married whom and their children, and so forth, just unbelievable. I was struck not only by the profusion of details, but also by the biblical pattern of the way they expressed it. It would be something like: ‘and so and so took as a wife so and so and begat and begat and begat’, and he’d name their mates and their children, and so forth. When they would date things it was not with calendar dates, but they would date things with physical events, such as, ‘in the year of the big water he slew a water buffalo’, the year of the big water referring to a flood. If you wanted to know the date calendar-wise you had to find when that flood occurred.

I can strip out of the hours that I heard of the history of the Kinte clan (my forefather had said his name was Kin-tay), the immediate vertical essence of it, leaving out all the details of the brothers and the cousins and the other marriages and so forth. The griot, Kebba Kanga Fofana, said that the Kinte clan had been begun in a country called Old Mali. Traditionally the Kinte men were blacksmiths who had conquered ire. The women were potters and weavers. A branch of the clan had moved into the country called Mauretania. It was from the country of Mauretania that a son of the clan, whose name was Kairaba Kunta Kinte (he was a Marabout, which is to say a holy man of the Moslem faith), came down into the country called the Gambia. He went first to a village called Pakali n’Ding. He stayed there for a while. He went next to a village called Jiffarong; thence he went to a village called Juffure. In the village of Juffure the young Marabout Kairaba Kunta Kinte took his first wife, a Mandinka maiden whose name was Sireng. By her he begat two sons whose names were Janneh and Saloum. Then he took a second wife; her name, Yaisa. By Yaisa he begat a son whose name was Omoro. Those three sons grew up in the village of Juffure until they came of age. The Elder two, Janneh and Saloum, went away and started a new village called Kinte-Kundah Janneh-Ya. It is there today and literally translated means ‘The Home of Janneh Kinte’. The youngest son, Omoro, stayed in the village until he had thirty rains, and then he took a wife, a Mandinka maiden, her name Binta Kebba. By Binta Kebba, roughly between 1750 and 1760, Omoro Kinte begat four sons, whose names were Kunta, Lamin, Suwadu and Madi.

By the time he got down to that level of the family, the griot had talked for probably five hours. He had stopped maybe fifty times in the course of that narrative and a translation came into me. Then a translation came as all the others had come, calmly, and it began, “About the time the king’s soldiers came.” That was one of those time-fixing references. Later in England, in British Parliamentary records, I went feverishly searching to find out what he was talking about, because I had to have the calendar date. But now in back country Africa, the griot Kebba Kanga Fofana, the oral historian, was telling the story as it had come down for centuries from the time of the forefathers of the Kinte clan. “About the time the king’s soldiers came, the eldest of these four sons, Kunta, went away from this village to chop wood and was seen never again.” He went on with his story.

I sat there as if I was carved out of rock. Goose-pimples came out on me I guess the size of marbles. He just had no way in the world to know that he had told me that which meshed with what I’d heard on the front porch in Henning, Tennessee, from grandma, from Cousin Georgia, from Aunt Liz, from Cousin Plus, all the other old ladies who sat there on that porch. I managed to get myself together enough to pull out my notebook, which had in it what grandma had always said. I got the interpreter Salla and showed it to him and he got rather agitated, and he went to the old man, and he got agitated, and the old man went to the people and they got agitated.