This 1976 Alex Haley novel narrates a seven-generation story about his own family. It begins with the birth of West African Kunta Kinte, Haley's maternal great-great-great-great-grandfather, and ends with Haley's own research and dramatic discoveries about his genealogy. Because it purports to be the first African American text to definitively locate an African ancestor and because of two widely watched television miniseries—“Roots” (1977) and “Roots: The Next Generations” (1979)—loosely based on the novel, the book became an immensely popular cultural phenomenon. In 1977 Roots received a special citation Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Haley termed the narrative strategy in Roots “faction.” While Roots is based on what he claims is factual material, Haley fictionalizes and enhances the story, adding imagined dialogue and incidents to flesh out the story and relay the horrific nature of American slavery. The first half of the novel focuses on Kunta Kinte, his birth and often paradisical childhood in Juffure, his West African village, and his capture in 1767 and Middle Passage journey to Maryland and then Virginia where he is enslaved. Eventually, after several unsuccessful escapes (he ultimately had his foot amputated to stop him), Kunta Kinte, now renamed Toby, settles down and marries Bell, a domestic slave, and they have one daughter, Kizzy.
Kunta Kinte's ultimate legacy is his own story and culture, parts of which he conveys to his daughter. In the novel's second part, when Kizzy is sold off to a North Carolina slaver, she is able to pass on her father's narrative to her son, Chicken George, an accomplished gamecock trainer, who does the same with his children. After the Civil War, George's fourth child, Tom, a blacksmith, moves the family to Henning, Tennessee. Tom's youngest daughter Cynthia marries Will Palmer, whose daughter Bertha George marries Alex Haley's father, Simon Alexander Haley.
Perhaps the most compelling part of Roots is Haley's chronicle of his own search for his family's genealogy. Starting with his recollections of his grandmother Cynthia's family stories about an African ancestor, Haley tells of his relentless, ten-year search through various American and British genealogical archives, discussions with Africanist scholars, and dramatic journeys back to Gambia, where he learns from a griot the history of the Kinte family, especially the late-eighteenth-century disappearance of Kunta Kinte.
Almost from the beginning, Haley and Roots have been criticized for historical inaccuracy and plagiarism. Mark Ottaway, Willie Lee Rose, and Gary B. and Elizabeth Shown Mills have challenged, respectively, Haley's Gambian story, his historical accuracy, and his genealogical research. More troubling are the accusations of plagiarism by Margaret Walker and Harold Courlander. While Walker's suit was dismissed, Haley settled with Courlander for $500,000, admitting that parts of Courlander's The African (1967) inadvertently found their way into Roots.
Nevertheless, Roots provoked a renewed interest by many Americans in their own genealogy and instilled a new pride for African Americans about their African ancestry. It has also had a profound impact on the teaching of African American history.
Bibliography
- Willie Lee Rose, “An American Family,” New York Review of Books, 11 Nov. 1976, 3–4, 6.
- Mark Ottaway, “Doubts Raised over Story of the Big TV Slave Saga,” Sunday Times, 10 Apr. 1977, 1, 17, 21.
- Harold Courlander, “‘Roots’, ‘The African,’ and the Whiskey Jug Case,” Village Voice, 9 Apr. 1979, 33–35, 84–86.
- Gary B. and Elizabeth Shown Mills, “Roots and the New ‘Faction’: A Legitimate Tool for Clio?” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
89 (Jan. 1981): 1–26. - Philip Nobile, “Uncovering Roots,” Village Voice, 23 Feb. 1993, 31–38
Roger A. Berger
