While he was in Gambia, Haley also learned about the old men called griots, who could still be found in the country’s most isolated regions. Routinely trained for a period of 40 to 50 years, and were virtual working genealogies. Through these men, each village was able to preserve its own history, the story of its founding, the records of marriage, births, and deaths, and tales of extraordinary individuals. Many of the griots, Haley was told, could recite their story for as long as three days without once repeating themselves. Upon his return to the United States, Haley began to reflect on the significance of what he had learned. With their joyful insistent gossiping about the pasts he was slowly beginning to realize his grandmother and her sisters had, in a very real sense, served as griots for the Palmer clan, preserving in their memory the American half of the story line that had been broken when his ancestors, Kinte, was stolen from his home almost 200 years earlier. Somewhere, perhaps, there was an African griot that could help him put the two stories together again. But where. Haley still did not know the answer when he returned from Africa.

Within a few weeks, Haley received a registered letter from Gambia. He was thrilled to learn that a griot had been located who might be able to help him. By now, however, the $5,000 from Doubleday was long gone, and Haley did not simply have the money to return to Africa. Broke and desperate, but determined somehow to make a trip; Haley approached the owners of Reader’s Digest, Lila and De Witt Wallace. Years earlier, when he was just beginning his career as writer, Lila Wallace had told Haley to call on her if he ever needed help. If there ever was to be such a time, Haley reasoned, this was it. He explained his situation to the wealthy publisher, and shortly after his visit he received a letter informing him that Reader’s Digest would provide him with $300 a month for a year in addition to any reasonable necessary travel expenses related to his current project.

Haley was completely unprepared for what he found there. Without much as a word, the villagers immediately began to surround him, staring intensely at his face and his clothing. A kind of visceral surging or churning sensation started up deep inside me, he later remembered. Bewildered, I was wondering what on earth was this, then in a little while it was rather as if some forces of realization rolled in on me. Many times in my life I had been in crowds of people, but never where everyone was jet black. Unbeknownst to Haley at the time, the villagers, none of whom had ever before seen a black American, were having a similarly disorienting experience.

Suddenly, the griot appeared among the crowd. He was a small, intense man dressed in a traditional white robe and wearing a tight pillbox hat. After the two men had been introduced by the interpreters and Haley’s business there had been explained, the griot sat on the ground in front of his guest and began to speak slowly but deliberately, in an eerie, trance like state.

Sitting quietly among the villagers, Haley heard what seem like any endless list of tribal births, marriages, and deaths in the Kinte family. Remembering he had heard that griots sometimes recited up to three days at a time, he began to fear that he might never hear the information he was seeking. Then two hours into his presentation, the griot began to tell the tales of a man named Omoro Kinte who had four sons. About the time the king’s soldiers came the old man recited as Haley suddenly caught his breath the oldest of these sons, Kunta, went away from his village to chop wood and he was never seen again.

Haley later described the griot’s revelation as the most powerful moment of his life. “ I sat as if I were carved of stone,” he remembered of his initial response to the story of Kunta Kinteh. “ My blood seemed to have congealed. This man whose life time had been in this back country African Village had no way in the world to know that he had just echoed what I had heard all through my boyhood years on my grandma’s front porch in Henning, Tennessee of an African who always had insisted that his name was ‘Kintay’ who had called a guitar a ‘Ko’ and a river within the state of Virginia, ‘Kamby Bolongo’ and who had been kidnapped into slavery not far from his village, chopping wood to make himself a drum.

The next afternoon, Haley was back in the United States, crouched difficulty at a desk in the Maryland of records shifting through endless microfilm rolls of the Maryland Gazette for the year 1767, his tired eyes came across an advertisement in the October 1 edition JUST IMPORTED, in the ship Lord Ligonier Capt Davies, from the River Gambia, in Africa, and to be sold by the subscribers, in Annapolis, for cash, or good bills of exchange on Wednesday the 7th October next, A Cargo of CHOICE HEALTHLY SLAVES

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