Returning To My Roots

 

A heartwarming (and humbling) thing now happens whenever I visit Mount Waddy Primary School. The children want to pat and hug me!

When Alex Haley first published his international best seller, ROOTS, in 1974, he included a chronicle of having visited his ancestor Kunta Kinte's African village of Juffure in 1967, exactly 200 years after his great-great-great-great-grandfather Kunta arrived in Annapolis, Maryland to be sold as a slave.

As Haley sailed down the Gambia River, alert villagers lined up along its banks, welcoming him by chanting, "Meester Kinte! Meester Kinte!" Then, when Haley stepped onto dry land, he was astonished as several young mothers began thrusting their babies at him until he had embraced perhaps a dozen wriggling little ones.

A year later, a Harvard professor explained: "You were participating in the oldest ceremony of humankind, the Laying On of Hands. (It means) 'We are you, and you are us.'"

That was never truer than at Mount Waddy. I have long believed that these schoolchildren and I are one and the same. Their young faces are all brown and beautiful, all soft as rose petals, all wreathed in smiles so bright that they appear lit from within. Luminous. Utterly saturated with happiness, hope and promise. They understand the concept of a Foundation. They now also understand the concept of a future. Theirs.

Because children see clearly what stands in the flesh before them, they logically give me the credit for transforming their lives. But when they are older, they will know the secret truth - that my grandfather Melbourne is really the one responsible. I have merely become the bridge that connects them, just as Alex Haley was the bridge between his long-lost ancestor, kindnapped and sold as chattel in 1767, and his villagers' jubilant descendants. My grandfather's hard work and noble, unforgettable philosophies will flower again and again inside these children's hearts and minds. His influence will resurrect, over and over, generation after generation. He will be them. They will be him. He will live forever. 

 

 


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