“‘You ain’t got nobody but me. And mah head is ole and tilted towards the grave. Neither can you stand alone by yo’self. De thought uh you bein’ kicked around from pillar tuh post is uh hurtin’ thing. Every tear your drop squeezes a cup uh blood outa mah heart. Ah got tuh try and do for you befo’ mah head is cold.’

A sobbing sigh burst out of Janie. The old woman answered her with little soothing pats of the hand.

‘You know, honey, us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways…’” (p. 15-16)

Nanny expresses here why she wants so much for Janie to have protection through marriage—because she and Janie are “colored folks [who are] branches without roots:”

And this is the position that you and I are in here in America. Formerly we could be identified by the names we wore when we came here. When we were first brought here, we had different names. When we were first brought here, we had a different language. And these names and this language identified the culture that we were brought from, the land that we were brought from. In identifying that, we were able to point towards what we had produced, our net worth. But once our names were taken and our language was taken and our identity was destroyed and our roots were cut off with no history, we became like a stump, something dead, a twig over here in the Western Hemisphere. Anybody could step on us, trample upon us, or burn us, and there would be nothing that we could do about it.

-Malcolm X on Afro-American History

Nanny and Janie are “without roots” not because those roots don’t exist, but because they have been cut off...how might you begin to trace those roots on or off the page?

(you might consider this recent article in the New York Times—an account of one particular African-American community as it uncovers its history)