Roots
What is the book Roots about?
Is Roots based on a true story?
Why was Roots controversial?
Roots is a book by American writer Alex Haley, published in 1976, that combines history and fiction to chronicle the experiences of Haley’s ancestors, beginning in 18th-century Africa. A runaway best-seller that propelled many Americans, especially African Americans, to research their own family roots, it was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize and adapted into a wildly successful television miniseries in 1977.
- Title: Roots: The Saga of an American Family
- Author: Alex Haley
- Published: August 17, 1976
- Genre: Nonfiction novel
- Language: English
- Famous quote: “Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days up-river from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a man-child was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.”
Inspired by stories recounted by his maternal grandmother, Cynthia Murray Palmer of Henning, Tennessee, Haley spent 12 years tracing the saga of seven generations of his family, beginning with Kunta Kinte, his ancestor from The Gambia who had been enslaved and brought to America in 1767. Through oral tradition, the descendants of Kunta Kinte kept alive the tales of their forebears across generations.
Summary and characters
The coming-of-age of Kunta Kinte
The book begins in 1750 with the birth of Kunta Kinte, the first-born child of Omoro and Binta Kinte. The Kinte family belongs to the Mandinka tribe and lives in Juffure, a village in The Gambia. Kunta’s name is chosen in honor of his grandfather Kairaba Kunta Kinte, the village holy man, who had come to The Gambia from Mauritania and saved the people of Juffure from a famine.
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As Kunta grows up, he learns the traditions of his village and his people. Their food, clothing, homes, music, dancing, beliefs, and mores are all described in painstaking detail. From the village arafang (teacher), he learns about his family’s history—the Kinte men were blacksmiths, and the women were makers of pots and weavers of cloth. Occasionally, Kunta hears about people in other villages who have disappeared; most of them were kidnapped by the toubob (white Europeans) and their slatees (Black African slave traders). Omoro and Binta’s family eventually grows to include three more sons: Lamin, Suwadu, and Madi.
When he is 15, Kunta undergoes an initiation into manhood that involves being taken into the forest with other boys and staying there for months as a group of elders puts them through tests of strength, cunning, and bravery. When Kunta returns to his village, he is rewarded with his own hut built by his father.
The kidnapping and enslavement of Kunta Kinte
One day, when he is 17, Kunta goes alone to the forest with his dog to chop down a tree for a new drum. While searching for the perfect tree, he is ambushed by two toubob and two slatees, who kidnap him. They take him to a ship, where he is chained up belowdeck with more than a hundred captured men of different tribes. As the ship sails across the Atlantic, the conditions belowdeck are so cramped, wretched, and brutal that many of the men become sick and die. They are regularly beaten and are forced to lie in their own filth for much of the journey. At times they are taken abovedeck, where the ship’s crew washes them with seawater, which aggravates their wounds, and commands them to dance and sing for the crew’s entertainment. The captured Africans include a small number of women and children.
Kunta survives the journey and arrives in the American colonies, in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1767. Sold at a slave auction and brought to a tobacco plantation in Virginia, he is given the name Toby, which he refuses to answer to. Several times Kunta tries to escape but is hunted down and recaptured each time. After his fourth attempt, slave catchers threaten to castrate him and instead cut off part of his right foot. Kunta is then taken to Dr. William Waller, the brother of Kunta’s enslaver. The doctor treats Kunta’s foot, which has become infected, and Kunta is nursed and fed by the doctor’s enslaved cook, Bell. As his foot heals, he remains at the plantation of “Massa Waller,” which has better conditions than his brother’s plantation did. Eventually, Kunta is sold to Massa Waller.
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Initially, Kunta neither understands nor trusts the other enslaved people on either plantation, believing that they are complicit with the toubob. He is also disgusted that these Black people have “no knowledge whatsoever of who they were and where they’d come from.” Gradually, he recognizes that they have ways of secretly communicating with each other and defying the toubob and that they share some customs with their African ancestors, such as braiding their hair and dancing and singing to celebrate the harvest.
Much of Kunta’s education about slavery comes from another newcomer to Massa Waller’s plantation: an enslaved musician named Fiddler. Like Kunta, Fiddler is brought to the plantation to recover from an injury—a broken hand. Talkative, wise, and wily, he teaches Kunta English and tells him about the complicated rules and harsh realities of plantation life and slavery. Kunta comes to view Fiddler as similar to the griot (oral historian) in his home village. In the meantime, Kunta replaces the plantation’s gardener and later becomes Massa Waller’s driver.
“Alex Haley’s taking us back through time to the village of his ancestors is an act of faith and courage, but this book is also an act of love, and it is this which makes it haunting.” —James Baldwin, The New York Times, 1976
The descendants of Kunta Kinte
Eventually, Kunta marries Bell. The story continues through major historical events, including the American Revolution, the Civil War, and Emancipation, as witnessed by Kunta, Bell, and their progeny. With the birth of each new descendant, the family’s lineage is orally passed down. Kunta and Bell’s descendants are:
- Kizzy: Kunta and Bell’s daughter, who is treated well as a child and enjoys a friendship with Massa Waller’s niece, Missy Anne, until she is sold at age 16 to Tom Lea, a cruel and abusive chicken farmer in North Carolina
- Chicken George: Kizzy’s son born of rape by Tom Lea, who apprentices George to old “Uncle Mingo” to train the farm’s roosters for cockfighting; a philanderer with a clever mind and a penchant for flamboyant clothing, he is sent to train roosters in England to pay off one of Tom Lea’s many debts, but he eventually gains his freedom
- Matilda: George’s deeply religious wife, with whom he has eight children; after George is sent to England, Tom Lea sells Matilda and her children to the Murrays, former shopkeepers who have recently bought a tobacco plantation in another county of North Carolina
- Cynthia Murray: Tom and Irene’s youngest child and the maternal grandmother of Alex Haley; she marries Will Palmer, a successful lumber businessman in Henning
- Bertha Palmer: Will and Cynthia’s daughter, who becomes the first member of the family to go to college and marries Simon Haley, a former railroad porter, World War I veteran, and college professor
- Alex Haley: Simon and Bertha’s eldest son and the author of Roots
Alex Haley’s quest for his roots
The end of the book details the author’s own genealogical quest. Haley recounts that he spent part of his childhood in Henning, where he heard stories about his heritage from his grandmother and great-aunts. Their tales traced the family’s lineage to an African ancestor who insisted on being called by his birth name of “Kin-tay” instead of “Toby,” the name given to him by his enslavers in America.
Haley describes years of research spent visiting archives and poring over census records. In consultation with linguists, who identified the origins of words Haley had heard his grandmother and great-aunts use, he is able to trace his mother’s lineage back to the West African village of Juffure in The Gambia, where a griot describes to him the mid-18th-century kidnapping of his ancestor, Kunta Kinte. His quest is as emotional and enriching as it is exhausting. He writes,
There is an expression called “the peak experience”—that which emotionally, nothing in your life ever transcends. I’ve had mine, that first day in the back country of black West Africa.
As part of his research, he books passage on a freighter traveling from West Africa to the United States, and each night of his journey he sleeps in the ship’s cargo hold to better imagine the grueling and brutal experience of Kunta and other Africans who were imprisoned belowdeck during the Middle Passage.
Background and reception
Before Roots Haley served 20 years in the U.S. Coast Guard (1939–59), after which he found success as a journalist, writing for such publications as Reader’s Digest and Playboy. In 1965 he published The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which drew from his Playboy interviews with the Black Muslim leader. About this time he began researching his family’s history, eventually conceiving of a book that would be a “Black Gone with the Wind,” in reference to Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 historical novel about the Civil War. Haley’s book, however, would dive much deeper into American history than Mitchell’s work had.
The saga of Haley’s family took him 12 years to complete. Haley published several articles about his research in various publications and an excerpt in Reader’s Digest before Roots: The Saga of an American Family appeared in book form in August 1976. It sold 1.5 million copies within seven months and topped The New York Times’ nonfiction best-seller list for 22 weeks.
In a Times review, James Baldwin wrote of the book’s opening scenes in 18th-century Juffure, “In the re-creation of this time and place, Haley succeeds beautifully where many have failed.” He added,
“Roots” is a study of continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one—the action of love, or the effect of the absence of love, in time. It suggests, with great power, how each of us, however unconsciously, can’t but be the vehicle of the history which has produced us.
Controversies and legacy
“I stand by Roots as a symbol of the fate of my people.” —Alex Haley, 1977
After the publication of Roots, investigations of Haley’s methods and attempts to duplicate his research cast serious doubts on the accuracy of his story. A pivotal character—the griot who knew the name Kunta Kinte—proved to be a fraud. For his part, Haley admitted near the end of his book that his saga was partly fictional, noting that many scenes were “a novelized amalgam of what I knew took place together with what my researching led me to plausibly feel took place.” In an interview with the London Sunday Times in 1977, he said, “But in the end, I felt I could only write what I was told. Neither you nor I know exactly what happened. But I stand by Roots as a symbol of the fate of my people.”
Roots was also the subject of two plagiarism suits, one of which, involving poet Margaret Walker and her 1966 novel Jubilee, was dismissed. The other suit, brought by Harold Courlander, who claimed that Haley plagiarized passages of his 1967 novel The African, was settled out of court. Haley stated that the similarities were unintentional, blameing a miscommunication with a research assistant who provided him with material that was not properly cited.
The success of Roots precipitated a nationwide resurgence of interest in all phases of genealogical research. African Americans who had been cut off from their origins and whose heritage seemed untraceable were inspired to attempt to fill in the gaps in their own family histories. Despite its faults, the book retains its emotional impact and its significance for African American literature.
Adaptations
Roots was adapted for television as an eight-episode miniseries in 1977. Premiering in January that year, it became one of the most widely viewed programs in the history of American television. Audiences were so riveted by the story of Kunta Kinte and his descendants that restaurants, bars, and theaters were virtually empty of customers as people stayed glued to their TV sets at home.
The all-star cast included LeVar Burton (as young Kunta), John Amos (as older Kunta), Cicely Tyson (Binta), Louis Gossett, Jr. (Fiddler), Madge Sinclair (Bell), Leslie Uggams (Kizzy), Ben Vereen (Chicken George), and Olivia Cole (Matilda). Also among the cast were Maya Angelou, Ed Asner, Robert Reed, Richard Roundtree, Scatman Crothers, O.J. Simpson, Lorne Greene, Lloyd Bridges, and Burl Ives.
Roots received an astounding 37 Emmy Award nominations and won 8, including acting Emmys for Gossett, Cole, and Asner. Acknowledging the series’ source material and its impact in his acceptance speech, Gossett said, “I would like to thank all of my roots, from the Gossetts that came from Africa to Georgia, South Carolina, and all the way up to New York.”
A successful sequel was broadcast in February 1979 as Roots: The Next Generations. Another TV adaptation of the novel debuted in 2016.