Kunta Kinte was born circa 1750 in the Mandinka village of Jufureh, in the Gambia. He was raised in a Muslim family. One day in 1767, while Kunta was searching for wood to make a drum for his younger brother, four men chased him, surrounded him, and took him captive. Kunta awoke to find himself blindfolded, gagged, bound, and a prisoner. He and others were put on the slave ship the Lord Ligonier for a four-month Middle Passage voyage to North America.
Kunta survived the trip to Maryland and was sold to John Waller (Reynolds in the 1977 miniseries), a Virginia plantation owner in Spotsylvania County, who renamed him Toby (named by John’s wife Elizabeth in the 2016 remake). He rejected the name imposed upon him by his owners and refused to speak to others. After being recaptured during the last of his four escape attempts, the slave catchers gave him a choice: he would be castrated or have his right foot cut off. He chose to have his foot cut off, and the men cut off the front half of his right foot. As the years passed, Kunta, now owned by John’s brother Dr. William Waller, resigned himself to his fate and became more open and sociable with his fellow slaves, while never forgetting his identity and origin.
Kunta married an enslaved woman named Bell Waller and they had a daughter named Kizzy (Keisa, in Mandinka), which in Kunta’s native language means “to stay put”, to protect her from being sold away. When Kizzy was in her late teens, she was sold away to North Carolina when William Waller discovered that she had written a fake traveling pass for an enslaved young man, Noah, with whom she was in love. She had been taught to read and write secretly by Missy Anne, the niece of the plantation owner. Her new owner, Thomas Lea (Moore in the 1977 miniseries), immediately raped her. He fathered her only child, whom he named George after his first slave (or after his own father, according to the 2016 miniseries). George spent his life with the tag “Chicken George”, because of his assigned duties of tending to his master’s cockfighting birds.
Kizzy never learns her parents’ fate. She spends the remainder of her life as a field hand on the Lea plantation in North Carolina. According to the 1977 miniseries, Kizzy is taken back to visit the Reynolds plantation later in life. She discovers that her mother was sold off to another plantation and that her father died of a broken heart two years later, in 1822. She finds his grave, on which she crosses out his slave name Toby and writes his real name Kunta Kinte instead.
