Thirty years ago, Doubleday published a book written by Alex Haley called ROOTS. Nearly everyone read the book and watched the TV mini-series. African Americans from the Pacific to the Atlantic and all points in between revisited their own “roots”: interviewing great-aunts; poring over microfilm (no ancestry.com then!) and squinting to make out spidery handwriting on 19th century documents. We wanted to know. Who are we? Where did we come from? On whose shoulders do we stand?

When I was a child, my great-grandfather presided over the Thanksgiving table, assisted by my grandfather, who carved the turkey, and served by my father and mother. If I behaved myself (which I often didn’t), I was allowed to stay up past my bedtime and listen to the grown folks’ conversation. It was the late fifties and we were colored then. They talked about the NAACP and discussed articles in The Crisis and what Mrs. So-and-So down the street was doing. And later, if I was still awake, I heard family stories, too: the “mountain man” grandfather who smoked a cheroot pipe; the grandmother who gathered herbs and plants to make medicines. I wish I’d asked more questions but I didn’t.

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