Alex Haley · 1976 · global

Alex Haley's monumental 1976 saga, tracing seven generations of his family from an African village to the American South and back. It opens with Kunta Kinte, born in Gambia, seized by slavers and carried across the Middle Passage in chains, and follows his descendants through bondage, emancipation, and migration, down to Haley himself, who journeys to Africa to recover the name his ancestor never forgot. The route crosses the Atlantic and the American South across two centuries.

1. 1
   Juffure

   In the village of Juffure on the Gambia River, the young Mandinka Kunta Kinte is seized by slavers while gathering wood, and torn from everything he has known.

2. 2
   Annapolis

   After the horrors of the Middle Passage, the slave ship reaches Annapolis, where Kunta is sold into bondage in a strange and brutal new world.

3. 3
   Spotsylvania

   On a Virginia plantation Kunta labours and resists, clinging to his language and his name even as he is renamed Toby, and fathers a daughter, Kizzy, to whom he passes the memory of Africa.

4. 4
   Alamance County

   Sold away to North Carolina, Kizzy and her son Chicken George keep the family's story alive through generations of slavery, handing down the African words like an heirloom.

5. 5
   Henning

   After emancipation the family makes its way west to Henning, Tennessee, where they build free lives, and where, generations on, a boy named Alex listens to his grandmother tell of the African called Kunta Kinte.

6. 6
   Juffure

   Grown, Haley follows the thread of the old words back across the ocean to Juffure itself, where a griot recites the family's history and the long-broken circle is closed.