I don’t remember it actually happening. I don’t remember anyone giving an order, but those seventy people formed a ring around me, moving counter-clockwise, chanting, loudly, softly, loudly, softly, their bodies were close together, the physical action was like drum majorettes with their high knee action. You got the feeling they were an undulating mass of people moving around. I’m standing in the middle like an Adam in the desert. I don’t know how I felt; how could you feel at a thing like that? I remember looking at the first lady who broke from that circle (there were about a dozen ladies who had little infant children slung across their backs), and she with a scowl on this jet black face, her bare feet slapping against the hard earth, came charging in towards me. She took her baby and roughly thrust it out. The gesture said, ‘Take it!’ and I took the baby and I clasped it, at which point she snatched it away and another lady, another baby, and I guess I had clasped about a dozen babies in about two minutes. It would be almost two years later at Harvard when Dr. Jerome Bruner told me, you were participating in one of the oldest ceremonies of humankind called ‘the laying on of hands’ that in their way they were saying to you, ‘through this flesh which is us, we are you, and you are us’. There were many, many other things that happened in that village that day, but I was particularly struck with the enormity of the fact that they were dealing with me and seeing me in the perspective of, for them, the symbol of twenty-five million black people in this country whom they never had seen. They took me into their mosque. They prayed in Arabic which I couldn’t understand. Later the crux of the prayer was translated, ‘Praise be to Allah for one long lost from us whom Allah has returned.’ That was the way they saw that.

When it was possible to leave, since we’d come by water, I wanted to go out over the land. My five senses had become muted, truncated. They didn’t work right. If I wanted to feel something I would have to squeeze to register the sense of feeling. Things were misty. I didn’t hear well. I would become aware the driver sitting right by me was almost shouting something and I just hadn’t heard him up to that point. I began now, as we drove out over the back country road, with drums distantly heard around, to see in my mind’s eye, as if it were being projected somehow on a film, a screen almost, rough, ragged, out of focus, almost a portrayal of what I had studied so, so much about: the background of us as a people, the way that ancestrally we who are in this country were brought out of Africa.

The late Alex Haley is best known as the co-author of “Autobiography of Malcolm X” (1965) and author of “Roots: The Saga of an American Family” (1976).