Born in Ithaca, New York, in 1921, Alex Haley was raised in Henning, Tennessee, by his maternal grandmother. Haley heard stories during his childhood about his heritage from his grandmother and from other elderly female relatives. As a young adult he joined the Coast Guard, and when he left the service he landed a job writing biographical stories for Reader's Digest, a journal that would eventually sponsor some of the research and travel that made Roots possible.
Life in Juffure. Roots begins with the mid-eighteenth century birth of Haley's ancestor, Kunta Kinte, in the small village of Juffure in the Gambia, a land in West Africa. The Gambia stretches along a narrow fertile belt (295 miles in length and between 15 and 30 miles wide) on both sides of the Gambia River. In modern times the continent's smallest nation, the Gambia abuts the Atlantic Ocean on the west, while its other three sides border Senegal. Juffure is situated more than 100 miles upstream from the mouth of the Gambia River. Daily life for residents in Juffure had, by the time when Haley visited there in the 1970s, changed little since 1750; lack of modern conveniences such as telephone service and electricity had preserved traditional ways of life there more easily than in cities, although items such as Western-style clothing and portable radios were not uncommon.
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