Word: slaving
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...Sept. 29,1967, Alex Haley quietly celebrated a private bicentennial He stood on a wharf at Annapolis Md exactly 200 years to the day after his great-great-great-great grandfather stumbled off the deck of the slave ship Lord Ligonier at the same spot. His ancestor was Kunta Kinte, one of 98 "Negroes" who managed to survive the three-month trip from West Africa. The original consignment, "packed like spoons in a drawer " included 140 Africans. The one-third loss, Haley notes drily, was about average for an 18th century slave voyage...
Ironically, the general is the slave of his own power, unable to control its con-sequences or the mechanisms that set it in motion. Even his casual remarks are interpreted by his police as orders to kill. And, he is at the mercy of time, nature and death like anyone else. In the end, death comes and calls him by a name not his own, but he responds. Faced with the mortality he tried to deny, he finally recognizes another uncontrollable force--love...
...family history, which by Haley's time had been pared down considerably. He remembers his grandmother referring to their ancestor, "the African," who called the banjo "ko," the river "Kamby Bolongo," and who was out chopping wood for a drum at the age of 16 when four white slave traders kidnapped him and brought him to the United States...
Haley's narrative of the three generations of slaves in his family, dating from 1767 to the Civil War, is as keen as his African chapters. To ensure an accurate depiction of his ancestor's crossing of the Atlantic in a slave ship, Haley took a freighter from Africa to the United States, climbing down into the ship's cold dark cargo hold to lie on the rough planks stripped down to his underwear. Kunta's initial difficulty understanding and respecting American-born blacks, the selling of his daughter to the owner of a distant plantation, rape...
...father's father was born a slave somewhere near Savannah, Ga. My mother's father was the son of a white undertaker and his mulatto concubine in a small town in North Carolina...