In 1988, there was a made-for-TV movie based on the 1977 TV mini-series Roots, which starred four actors who would later go on to play in different Star Trek series: Levar Burton, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew, and Tim Russ.

This has little to do with my post, but even if you have nothing to say about Roots, you can talk about Star Trek! Although as the comments on Liz’s post reveal, there are many who watched the original 1977 Roots mini-series who did not read Alex Haley’s book, so perhaps television is a pathway into the topic after all.

Reading the book in company with Liz and Bill was great for so many reasons, not least of which being that they inspired me to keep moving (they both started and finished before I did!). It’s not that the storytelling lags, only that it’s an expansive story (Bill gives a great sense of the generational sprawl of the story here) and it contains all the stuff of life (Liz describes both the challenging and rewarding aspects that await readers).

Back to TV then, when I was young enough to fall asleep on the couch while Roots played on the screen. When Levar Burton’s career was established with his 1977 role as Kunta Kinte, which aired the year after Alex Haley’s book was published. After a dozen years of research, which Haley outlines in some detail, in the 30th-anniversary paperback edition.

In the 1960s, conducting that kind of investigation would have required much more than typing into a search engine or logging into a university database. It’s an impressive feat. But even more fascinating is that Haley was not satisfied with dates and locations, with records of sale and addresses for his ancestors. (The comments on Bill’s post contain an interesting discussion about the debate over truth and fact, fiction and history.)

Haley sought to inhabit his ancestors’ experiences. He gained entrance to the bowels of a ship, travelling on open water, and spent a series of nights there, stripped down—in order to approximate the temperature and conditions—so he could recreate, imagine, their experience.

But even more importantly, he uses techniques that fiction writers rely on, to share that with readers in a way that is sensorily and scenically rich, so that readers (later, viewers) can participate in that process too.

In “Haley’s Comet” by Michael Eric Dyson, Dyson explains that Roots is “…one of the nation’s seminal texts. It affected events far beyond its pages and was a literary North Star that guided us through the long midnight of slavery’s haunting presence.”

Haley’s patriarch is Kunta Kinte, and just as Haley seeks his own place in history, Kunta recognizes his own place in the world, while he is safe with his family, in The Gambia.

“But Kunta had never truly understood until now that this man was his father’s father, that Omoro had known him as he knew Omoro, that Grandma Yaisa was Omoro’s mother as Binta was his own. Some day, he too would find a woman such as Binta to bear him a son of his own. And that son, in turn…”

It’s relatable. Many of us will remember the way in which (perhaps the moment in which!) we came to understand that our parents had once been children, who had had their own parents. And as Kunta’s understanding broadens in other ways, his world widens, and he moves steadily towards adulthood:

“And sometimes Kunta would even dream that he was traveling with his uncles to all the strange places, that he was talking with the people who looked and acted and lived so differently from the Mandinkas. He had only to hear the names of his uncles and his heart would quicken.”

Even as a boy, he longs for adventure. Simultaneously, he fears the threats, recognized in and represented by the toubob, the white Europeans, who kidnap the young and able-bodied to steal them away:

“Toubab could never do this without help from our own people. Mandinkas, Fulas, Wolofs, Jolas—none of The Gambia’s tribes is without its slatee traitors. As a child I saw these slatees beating those like themselves to walk faster for the toubob!”

As a young man, Kunta observes slavery in the context of his own culture, and some of this is what readers might anticipate: “He saw slaves charging their masters with cruelty, or with providing unsuitable food or lodgings, or with taking more than their half share of what the slaves’ work had produced. Masters, in turn, accused slaves of cheating by hiding some of their produce, or of insufficient work, or of deliberately braking farm tools.”

In other ways, Kunta’s observations of slavery in Africa differ from what readers would expect. For instance, when he “saw the Council weigh carefully the evidence in these cases, along with each person’s past record in the village, and it was not uncommon for some slaves’ reputations to be better than their masters’!”

A few years later, Kunta experiences slavery first-hand, having been stolen and taken across the water. His experiences burden the narrative appropriately. The novel’s first quarter in Africa moves very quickly, Kunta’s excitement over new responsibilities and “discoveries”—as he moves from boyhood to manhood—propel readers forward. Then, fifty pages are devoted to the passage over the water.

So, we have Kunta’s parents’ story and his birth, childhood and youth in two hundred pages, and fifty pages dedicated to the middle passage journey, which likely took a couple of months. Haley’s not fancy, when it comes to language or structure, but he does practice literary trickery to make sure readers feel the grit and bloody parts of his story. And to allow us to experience time with Kunta, in one way, so that we can experience it differently as the generations pass, in another way.

“It seemed to him that for moons without end, all that he had known was being tracked and attacked and captured and chained.”

Even more remarkable than Kunta’s suffering, however, is his resistance.

Colonial narratives typically discount the rich history of the peoples they conquer (any ideas about the Mandinkas being uncivilized, Haley swiftly dispels) and promote the idea that the conquered not only recognized but valued the benefits of colonization (Kunta is having none of this and there are many on the ship with him who share his determination and many other stories of escapes from plantations too).

Equally remarkable is the depiction of Kunta’s descendants participating in another system of cruelty and enslavement: the cock-fighting (which both Bill and Liz have included in their posts).

The arbitrary delineation of lives that matter and lives that do not matter—this is intended to be uncomfortable reading. It forces us all to examine how we may be powerless in one facet of our lives but, in other situations, we are participants wielding power against the powerless. A talent for selecting and grooming successful birds translates into power for Kunta’s descendants, but it relies on the subjugation of “lesser” lives.

These patterns continue today. Contemporary discussions about policing and monitoring remind us that modern police forces grew out of the patrols by white men who “protected” plantation property, which we observe in the novel as the population of enslaved individuals increases and the perceived risk to landowners’ safety rises alongside.

Many other tensions and conflicts erupt and persist too: the evolution of hierarchies within enslaved communities (e.g. field hands and house servants) in contrast with the complex relationship with lower-class, homeless, and jobless white people (i.e. individuals who lacked security, but were not disenfranchised). And prejudicial colourism endures: “…Charity was a considerably lighter mulatto than George; in fact, she had the tan skin that very black people liked to call ‘high yaller.’”

Borders are blurred. Kunta “still found it difficult to think of toubob as actual human beings” but he also feels woefully understood by other enslaved people who are angry, impatient, or fearful of Kunta’s African language and customs. One of his descendants admires music that mimics songs he’s heard growing up amidst the enslaved on the plantation “…songs s’posed to sound like us, but dey was writ by a Massa Stephen Foster.”

One plantation owner loses everything and his standard of living falls beneath that of the people he once enslaved on his plantation. Meanwhile, there’s Frederick Douglas in his nice suit, touring and commanding large audiences: “Dey says people gathers by de hunneds anywhere he speak, an’ he done writ a book an ‘even start up a newspaper.”

Dyson’s essay reminds us that many have not, even yet, in 2004, when it appeared with the new edition of Alex Haley’s Roots, recognized the nature and value of the role that enslaved men, women and children played in building up the nation that colonists established (on the homelands of indigenous people, not overlooked in Haley’s account).

Almost twenty years later, it’s interesting to consider his observation, in the context of the disagreement sparked by Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project and whether/how slavery should be taught in American schools, to students of varying ages.

“But Haley helped us to resist that seductive lie with a tonic splash of colorful truth: that the nation had yet to successfully negotiate its perilous ties to an institution that built white prosperity while crushing black opportunity.”

This is just one of the ways in which it seems as though Alex Haley’s Roots spirals outward. I was expecting this to feel like an important story; I wasn’t expecting it to be an engaging read. Nor was I expecting his female characters to be as compelling as the male. How quickly we forget that there have been other racial reckonings, other insistences that women’s stories be equally valued, other acknowledgments that exploitative systems nourish other exploitative systems.

#1976Club—Karen and Simon–thanks for nudging this monstrous tome off the shelf and wedging it into my stack.