Roots Alex Haley Quotes

Is this how you repay my goodness--with badness?” cried the boy. “Of course,” said the crocodile out of the corner of his mouth. “That is the way of the world.

He meant you no harm?" said Omoro. "He acted very friendly," said the old man, "but the cat always eats the mouse it plats with.

Through this flesh, which is us, we are you, and you are us!

I was weeping for all of history's incredible atrocities against fellowmen, which seems to be mankind's greatest flaw...

Kerabe?

Praise be to Allah for one long lost from us whom Allah has returned.

Fact, I specks his mammy hatched him!

And yet had not a pagan the right to be a pagan?

Hattie

He thought that it was impossible for a massa to perceive that being owned by anyone could never be enjoyable.

Jabon Sallah,

Carrying little Kunta in his strong arms, he walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the heavens, and said softly, “Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee.” (Behold—the only thing greater than yourself.)

Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.

You can't be nobody's frien' an' slave both." "How come, Pappy?" "'Cause friend's don't own one 'nother.

Let me tell you something: I am a man.

You can't be nobody's frien' an' slave both." "How come, Pappy?" "'Cause friend's don't own one 'nother.

Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee.

Somehow his praying and his studying made it all right to mix with them. That way, it seemed to him he could remain himself without having to remain by himself.

kafo.

The first time he had taken the massa to one of these "high-falutin' to-dos," as Bell called them, Kunta had been all but overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: awe, indignation, envy, contempt, fascination, revulsion—but most of all a deep loneliness and melancholy from which it took him almost a week to recover. He couldn't believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn't live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it's possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother's milk made possible the life of privilege they led.

So Dad has joined the others up there. I feel that they do watch and guide, and I also feel that they join me in the hope that this story of our people can help alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners.

Cato

Toumani,

He wondered if she also knew how strange and sad he found it to hear her talking--as so many others did--about 'usn's',' and acting as if se owned the plantation she lived on instead of the other way around.

wuolo

And there was a lot of exclaiming about some Massa Patrick Henry having cried out, 'Give me liberty or give me death!' Kunta liked that, but he couldn't understand how somebody white could say it; white folks looked pretty free to him.

nightly boiling and then cooling a broth of freshly pounded fudano leaves in which she soaked her feat -and the pale palms of her hands- to an inky blackness. When Kunta asked his mother she told him to run along. So he asked his father, who told him, "The more blackness a woman has the more beautiful she is.

Mingo went toward his cabin, but turning at the door, he looked back at George. “Hear me, boy! You thinks you’s sump’n special wid massa, but nothin’ don’t make no difference to mad, scared white folks! Don’t you be no fool an’ slip off nowhere till this blow over, you hear me? I mean don’t!

Find the good and praise it.

Whole heap o’ folks, ’cludin’ me till I got grown, ain’t knowed at firs’ weren’t nobody in dis country but Indians, fishin’ an’ huntin’ an’ fightin’ one ’nother, jes’ mindin’ dey own business. Den here come l’il ol’ boat o’ white folks a-wavin’ an’ grinnin’. ‘Hey, y’all red mens! How ’bout let us come catch a bite an’ a nap ’mongst y’all an’ le’s be friends!’ Huh! I betcha nowdays dem Indians wish dey’s made dat boat look like a porcupine wid dey arrows!

Sleepless late that night, his mind still tumbling with conflicts, he recalled something Omoro had said once when Kunta had refused to let go of a choice mango after Lamin begged for a bite: “When you clench your fist, no one can put anything in your hand, nor can your hand pick up anything.

It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn’t live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it’s possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother’s milk made possible the life of privilege they led.

he found himself pondering what it must be like not to belong to someone. What would it feel like to be “free”? It must not be all that good or Massa Lea, like most whites, wouldn’t hate free blacks so much. But then he remembered what a free black woman who had sold him some white lightning in Greensboro had told him once. “Every one us free show y’all plantation niggers livin’ proof dat jes’ bein’ a nigger don’ mean you have to be no slave. Yo’ massa don’ never want you thinkin’ nothin’ ’bout dat.” During

He came cripping slowly back up the driveway - when an African remembrance flashed into his mind, and near the front of the house he bent down and started peering around. Determining the clearest prints that Kizzy's bare feet had left in the dust, scooping up the double handful containing those footprints, he went rushing toward the cabin: The ancient forefathers said that precious dust kept in some safe place would insure Kizzy's return to where she made the footprints. He burst through the cabin's open door, his eyes sweeping the room and falling upon his gourd on a shelf containing his pebbles. Springing over there, in the instant before opening his cupped hands to drop in the dirt, suddenly he knew the truth: His Kizzy was gone; she would not return. He would never see his Kizzy again. His face contorting, Kunta flung his dust toward the cabin's roof. Tears bursting, from his eyes, snatching his heavy gourd up high over his head, his mouth wide in a soundless scream, he hurled the gourd down with all his strength, and it shattered against the packed-Earth floor, his 662 pebbles representing each month of his 55 rains flying out, ricocheting wildly in all directions.

Whatever you set out to do, it can be done; just be patient and stay focused!

Surrounded by them, she would growl, “Let me tell a story . . . ” “Please!” the children would chorus, wriggling in anticipation. And she would begin in the way that all Mandinka storytellers began: “At this certain time, in this certain village, lived this certain person.” It was a small boy, she said, of about their rains, who walked to the riverbank one day and found a crocodile trapped in a net. “Help me!” the crocodile cried out. “You’ll kill me!” cried the boy. “No! Come nearer!” said the crocodile. So the boy went up to the crocodile—and instantly was seized by the teeth in that long mouth. “Is this how you repay my goodness—with badness?” cried the boy. “Of course,” said the crocodile out of the corner of his mouth. “That is the way of the world.” The boy refused to believe that, so the crocodile agreed not to swallow him without getting an opinion from the first three witnesses to pass by. First was an old donkey. When the boy asked his opinion, the donkey said, “Now that I’m old and can no longer work, my master has driven me out for the leopards to get me!” “See?” said the crocodile. Next to pass by was an old horse, who had the same opinion. “See?” said the crocodile. Then along came a plump rabbit who said, “Well, I can’t give a good opinion without seeing this matter as it happened from the beginning.” Grumbling, the crocodile opened his mouth to tell him—and the boy jumped out to safety on the riverbank. “Do you like crocodile meat?” asked the rabbit. The boy said yes. “And do your parents?” He said yes again. “Then here is a crocodile ready for the pot.” The boy ran off and returned with the men of the village, who helped him to kill the crocodile. But they brought with them a wuolo dog, which chased and caught and killed the rabbit, too. “So the crocodile was right,” said Nyo Boto. “It is the way of the world that goodness is often repaid with badness. This is what I have told you as a story.” “May you be blessed, have strength and prosper!” said the children gratefully.

As a book, Gertie grapples with the lingering legacies of slavery, the noxious institution which had only been prohibited a generation before her birth. Her paternal grandmother and great-grandmother were born into slavery. They attempt to raise Gertie to have the mentality of a slave, but the young child will rebel at every turn. In many ways, the book can be read as a riposte to Alex Haley’s acclaimed Roots, but told from a female point of view.

The same subversion of power by truth is evident in the way in which Luke begins his account of Jesus of Nazareth. Luke is at pains to put his readers on notice that this is no ordinary history. He has an angel anticipate cousin John by saying, “with the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him” (1:17). He has Gabriel declare that “nothing will be impossible with God” (1:37). He offers us an alternative genealogy that refuses the royal recital of Matthew and provides a list of the uncredentialed, rather like Roots by Alex Haley that traces a genealogy that the plantation masters never suspected (Luke 3:23–38).6 In the midst of this playful subversion, Luke has John go public in the empire. He does so by locating the reader amid all the recognized totems of power:

Contrary to the “myths to live by” created by Alex Haley and others, Africans were by no means the innocents portrayed in Roots, baffled as to why white men were coming in and taking their people away in chains. On the contrary, the region of West Africa from which Kunte Kinte supposedly came was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent—before, during, and after the white man arrived. It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere.

Not since Alex Haley’s Roots has there been a history of equal literary quality where the writing surmounts the rhythmic soul of fiction, where the writer’s voice sings a song of redemptive glory as true as Faulkner’s southern cantatas.

At the 1988 American Heart Association conference, a Black hypertension researcher said African Americans had higher hypertension rates because only those able to retain high levels of salt survived consuming the salt water of the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage. “I’ve bounced this off a number of colleagues and…it seems certainly plausible,” Clarence Grim told swooning reporters. Plausibility became proof, and the slavery/hypertension thesis received the red carpet in the cardiovascular community in the 1990s. Grim did not arrive at the thesis in his research lab. It came to him as he read Roots by Alex Haley. Who needs scientific proof when a biological racial distinction can be imagined by reading fiction? By reading the Bible? —