Roots

Haley's Roots attempts to dispel two widespread and false notions about blacks: that there is no black history and that there is no black family life. In Roots, Haley traces his black heritage for seven generations to the 1750s in Africa. He thus dramatically shows the reader that there is indeed a black history: "Any individual's past," Haley says, "is the essence of the millions." To justify that there is such a history, however, is secondary to Haley's other goal: to show that there is black family life, and that family life has always been a fundamental concern of blacks.

In the "unspoiled" village of Kinte's birthplace, Juffure, society is tightly structured. The family is the basic unit of that society and engenders pride. There is normal developmental progression. Kinte's first name, Kunta, bestowed on him by his parents, links him with a previous generation, his grandfather. The institution of slavery, however, breaks up family structure, abolishes family pride, and fractures family life. Slaves are considered property to be bought and sold. They are handed names that do not reflect their lineage or context. The opportunity for normal societal growth does not exist. Matilda's expression of family unity—"We is family and we is gonna stay family"—reflects an attitude that one would probably find in eighteenth-century Juffure. Roots is a family story, although couched in the fight for freedom. Kunta Kinte and his descendants survive as a family in spite of obstacles of slavery and later of white racism. They become a symbol of all the blacks who had been sold into slavery. Unfortunately, the legacy of slavery lingers on in today's black community because normal family life such as that found in idyllic Juffure remains unrealized. The black family of today is still more fragmented than the family of other groups, although the desire and struggle go on.

The major theme that runs through Roots is the Afro-American quest for identity. Haley's contention that [one] "can never enslave somebody who knows who he is" serves as the fundamental rationale for the book. White masters in the South assumed that African slaves were nameless primitives devoid of culture and customs. It is an arrogant attempt to strip Kinte of his family and heritage when the white master on a whim renames Kinte "Toby," one small step in the deculturization of a race and a family, a step downward from freedom to slavery. Such cumulative degradation eventually causes Kinte to act and think like a slave to survive. Nevertheless, Kinte is determined to maintain his family identity by clinging to his Gambia clan name. With the sole purpose of preserving the past, Kinte hands down Africanisms—native African words, for example, ko for banjo—to his daughter, Kizzy. Preservation of the oral tradition establishes continuity and identity with their African origins.

The spirit of freedom also pervades the novel. Every chance that Kinte gets to seek his freedom he takes, but always fails in his escape attempts. The Fiddler saves to buy his freedom, but the price keeps escalating. Kinte's grandson, Chicken George, finally achieves the family freedom. The talk of freedom and independence in the colonies encourages everyone to think of freedom.

The idea of family, however, is more important to the central characters than freedom. In fact, the novel should really be classified a family story, a chronicle of seven generations from Kinte to Haley. Kinte chooses family over freedom when he is given the choice of maiming or castration. In her resistance of white intimidation, Matilda, Chicken George's wife, upholds the importance and value of maintaining family lines. This is the ultimate rejection of slavery, where no recognition was given to a slave as a feeling human being with human relationships.

The central character in Roots is Kunta Kinte, the forebear of seven generations of the Haley family on the maternal side. Kinte is "the African," born in the village of Juffure in 1750, and kidnapped at age seventeen by slavers when he was cutting a tree for wood to make a drum. Given the name Toby by his white master, Kinte insists, however, on being called Kin-tay because that is his clan name and he wants to retain his identification. Losing his true name means severing connection with his lineage in Africa. Kinte attempts four times to escape and is captured each time. The last time, he is given the choice of maiming (freedom-mobility) or castration (fertility). He chooses maiming and gives up freedom when half his foot is cut off, but keeps the ability to propagate and continue his clan. At a somewhat old thirty-nine, Kinte marries Bell, a feisty woman who furtively reads newspapers. (In the early 1800s in most areas of the South it was against the law to teach blacks to read.) A daughter is born to Bell and Kinte, and in keeping with family tradition they give her an African "Christian" name, Kizzy Waller. Just as the Griots in the eighteenth-century in Africa chronicled orally the Kinte tribe history, so Kinte passes down orally to his daughter Africanisms that help her identify with her African background. This oral tradition was kept alive when Haley's grand-mother and older aunts told Haley when he was a child the family legends of "the African." Kizzy learns to read and write and when she is a teenager, she forges a document for a boyfriend. This is a violation of an owner rule. The owner breaks up the family, taking Kizzy from Kinte and Bell and selling her to a Tom Lea. A planter and a trainer of gamecocks, Tom Lea has his way with Kizzy whenever he feels the urge, and Kizzy eventually becomes pregnant with the flamboyant "Chicken George," the Black Moses. The adult Chicken George—so-called because he becomes an expert on training game-cocks—secures his freedom and marries Matilda, a firm believer in family and stability. Tom Murray, their offspring becomes a blacksmith. He is imaginative and bold enough to circumvent a law that says no black may own a business in Tennessee by being an itinerant smithy.

During Haley's twelve-year search for his roots, he assembled a considerable amount of genealogical and historical facts about Africa, the South, and the Haley family. From his ancestral remembrances, Haley had specific names and dates as starting points. He studied maritime documents, missionary records, court records, census listings; and talked to many individuals: oral historians and old Griots and elderly relatives. Based on this material, Haley could have chosen to write a social document—a doctoral dissertation or a scholarly article—but the audience for a straightforward prose effort would have been quite limited and the impact minimal. Instead, Haley chose to tell the black experience from earliest times of what a people is "through an individual or family with whom a reader can identify in personal terms." What Haley did was to start with the facts and then make up the dialogue, emotions, and thoughts of the characters. The basic incidents in the novel are factually true. For example, the harrowing account of Kinte's journey in the hold of a slave ship is the type of experience endured by all kidnapped Africans sold to slavery. But Haley relived and heightened the incidents imaginatively to give dramatic impact. In short, he narrated and dramatized his material, and as a result reached a larger audience because people are more likely to be moved by what they see (drama) than by what they are told (essay). Haley blended fact and fiction, and the product is a chronological history of one man's family. Haley's remark, "any individual's past is the essence of millions" echoes Montaigne's "Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition." Roots is a humanized historical novel of universal appeal.

Over a hundred years earlier, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) dramatized the plight of the black slave and reached the hearts and conscience of millions. There are also narratives and autobiographies of slaves and ex-slaves that relate the black experience.

It has been charged and rebutted that Haley borrowed from Harold Courtlander's The African and Margaret Walker Alexander's Jubilee, novels about slave origins.

A Different Kind of Christmas (1988) is a fictional historical novel, whereas Haley's Roots is a nonfictional historical account of his family for several generations. The impact of Roots was based on the detailed verification of a black family's genealogy. A Different Kind of Christmas explores the developing conscience and inherent goodness of individual whites.

A Different Kind of Christmas is about the escape in the 1850s of a dozen slaves from a North Carolina plantation at Christmas. As a result, the escapees gain a valuable Christmas gift—freedom. In his one-hundred-page narrative, Haley contrasts two ways of life in mid-nineteenth century America: the closed society of plantation life in North Carolina, where the prosperity and well-being of white plantation owners exist at the expense of slaves; and the open society found in Philadelphia, where blacks are politically free and entitled to own their own businesses. As in Roots, Haley reiterates the injustice of slavery and also dispels myths about blacks. Even if slaves in some households in the South were well-treated, they were always considered only property, to be bought and sold like any commodity.

Haley gives credit to the work of Quakers, who as early as 1688 in Pennsylvania declared slavery unacceptable and protested "against the traffic of bodies of men and the treatment of men as cattle." Because of their hatred of slavery, many Quakers moved from the South to the North. Quakers who remained in the South refused to have slaves work their plantations. Still other Quakers, at great risk, established Underground Railroad centers in various sections of the North, particularly in Philadelphia, in order to bring slaves to freedom.

The central character of the novel is nineteen-year-old Fletcher Randall, an honor student in his second year at Princeton University. He is the privileged son of a plantation owner and senator in the North Carolina legislature. Fletcher is proud of the southern way of life, but at Princeton he endures verbal abuse from those opposed to slavery, whether northerners or southerners. Two Quaker fellow students, the Ellis brothers, invite him to visit their home in Philadelphia. During a tour of Philadelphia, Fletcher is astonished to learn that a prominent businessman is black and free, thus dispelling in his mind the myth that blacks can only do menial labor. One day he witnesses a protest rally against slavery that includes both black and white participants.

At the university, Fletcher's moral philosophy professor, Dr. Erick Lincoln, introduces him to the writings of the ex-slave Frederick Douglass, who wrote that "A government that cannot or does not protect … the humblest citizen in his right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness … should be reformed or overthrown without delay." The experiences in Philadelphia and the moral philosophy instruction help edge Fletcher to the realization that his assumptions about blacks and slavery are false, and he concludes that the practice of slavery in the South is morally untenable. Choosing conscience over family, Fletcher volunteers to assist the Underground Railroad and is assigned a mission to help slaves escape from his own family's plantation: "It was his twenty-first birthday, the day he became a man."

Fletcher's father, hot-headed and stubborn, represents the old order, the status quo of slavery. He blames "Yankees" for corrupting "well-raised native Southern whites" and believes that slaves are inferior and "by their very nature" if emancipated would not have the "faintest idea what to do with freedom." Mr. Fortas, a sailmaker, the prominent black businessman that Fletcher saw in Philadelphia, provides the counter-example to Senator Randall's prejudiced views.

Fletcher's mother, like the mother of the Ellis brothers, is gentle, loving, and concerned about her son. The novels of Sir Walter Scott are her favorite reading.

Harpin' John, a black servant, is a talented musician and a worthy individual. He is the designated "trusted conductor" who helps Fletcher effect the slaves' escape.

Despite a rather plain style, Haley succeeds in A Different Kind of Christmas in capturing the milieu, the moods, and the mores of America in the 1850s. Haley achieves suspense by having a number of obstacles for the central character to overcome before he is successful in effecting the escape of a dozen slaves. The characterizations border on the stereotypical: Fletcher Randall, his mother, and the Ellis brothers are all likeable figures, but they are also one-dimensional. Fletcher's father, Senator Randall, the typical closed-minded racist, is also one-dimensional.

A twelve-hour, eight segment, television version of Roots was aired on ABC Television January 23, 1977, about four months after publication of the book. Some segments were directed by David Greene, who had directed the recently aired and highly successful miniseries, Rich Man, Poor Man. Produced by David Wolper Pictures and budgeted at the then phenomenal amount of six million dollars, an estimated audience of 90,000,000 saw the last episode. Filmed in Georgia and Hollywood—an African village was reconstructed in Georgia—the film script was written from Haley's manuscript as he was finishing it for his publication deadline of October 1, 1976. The television version was sold to libraries as an educational film. LeVar Burton, a nineteen-year-old unknown, starred as the young Kunta Kinte, and was supported by Cicely Tyson, Edward Asner, Moses Gunn, Lorne Green, Ben Vereen, O. J. Simpson, Maya Angelou, and others.

The television version was nominated for an unprecedented thirty-seven Emmy awards and was chosen outstanding Dramatic Series of the 1976-1977 season. There was concern expressed, however, that the television version was too melodramatic and that there was a tendency to stereotype whites.

Two years later a sequel of fourteen hours based on the books Roots and The Search for Roots with a $16,000,000 budget followed: Roots, the Next Generations. James Earl Jones starred as Haley and Marlon Brando had a ten minute cameo part as George Lincoln Rockwell, for which he won an Emmy as Outstanding Supporting Actor.