Roots: The Saga of an American Family: The Biography in Focus

ROOTS FAMILY TREE Kunta Kinte (b.1750) + Bell ǀ Kizzy (b, 1790) + (Master Tom Lea) ǀ Chicken George (b.1806) + Matilda ǀ Tom (b, 1833) + Irene ǀ Cynthia (b, 1863/4?) + Will Parker ǀ Bertha (b. 1895) + Simon Haley ǀ Alex Haley (b. 1921)

by Alex Haley

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The Biography in Focus

The plot. In 1750 a boy is born in the village of Juffure, located four days upriver from the coast of the Gambia in West Africa. The infant is given the name Kunta Kinte. Kunta spends the first seventeen years of his life in Juffure, where he is surrounded by his parents, grandmother, three brothers and the extended family of the tribe. During his youth, he is taught African tribal customs and rituals as he receives an African education, which includes lessons in hunting and the Islamic religion.

One day when Kunta is seventeen, he goes downstream to chop wood to make a drum. Here he is captured by slave traders who put him on a ship headed for the American colonies. The male slaves are beaten, made to lay naked on wooden boards, and shackled together in pairs. Many die on the voyage from ill treatment and from dysentery. Kunta arrives in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1767, and is purchased by "Massa" John Waller, who owns a plantation in Spotsyl-vania County, Virginia. Kunta cannot reconcile himself to his fate and tries to run away several times. On his fourth attempt, he is caught by professional slave-hunters and is given the choice of punishment: castration or amputation of one of his feet. He chooses the latter. "Massa" John's brother, Dr. William Waller, is appalled by the inhumane action of his brother. He helps Kunta recover and then buys him, assigning him to tend the vegetable garden, a relatively easy job for the maimed man.

On Dr. Waller's plantation, Kunta Kinte meets and marries a slave woman named Bell and they have a daughter named Kizzy in 1790. Kizzy grows up hearing about her father's life and his African heritage. When she is sixteen, she helps a young male slave, with whom she is in love, run away. The Underground Railroad, a network of safe places where runaway slaves can rest as they flee northward, has been launched in earnest by then; Kizzy's young man has heard that certain white people will help him escape. Unfortunately he is caught and she admits to the crime of having drawn him an escape map. Dr. Waller punishes Kizzy by selling her on the slave market, separating the family forever.

Kizzy is bought by Tom Lea, a violent man who owns a small plantation in North Carolina. He rapes her and in 1806 she bears him a son named George. George grows up listening to his mother's stories of his grandfather, Kunta Kinte. Like his father/master, George enjoys chicken fighting and earns the nickname "Chicken George"; Tom Lea and his son develop a fairly close relationship over the years, and George accompanies him on his gambling junkets. In 1827 Chicken George marries Matilda, who bears him eight children. With the birth of each child, Chicken George gathers his family around the slave cabin and tells them the story of Kunta Kinte. Shortly after the birth of George and Matilda's third son in 1831, Master Lea learns of Nat Turner's Rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in which revolting slaves murdered 55 whites, and in his fury he rifles through the meager belongings of every one of his slaves, destroying what little they have in his search for concealed weapons. Shortly thereafter, Matilda and Chicken George decide to scrape and save to buy the freedom of the entire family.

When George and Matilda's fourth son, Tom, is apprenticed as a teenager to a blacksmith on another plantation, he comes into contact with news from the North. At Thanksgiving dinner, he tells his family about former slaves who had bought their freedom, and of the improved lives of free blacks in the North. In particular he tells them about Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, blacks who gave public lectures about the evils of slavery, lectures attended by white people opposed to slavery. Chicken George tells Tom about his plan to buy the freedom of the family, and Tom agrees to help by saving all his earnings for the next fifteen years.

In 1856 Tom Lea goes bankrupt, having lost a bet on his chickens. To pay his debt to an English lord, Lea sends Chicken George to England with the victorious Englishman. Matilda and her children are meanwhile sold to the kindly "Massa" Murray, who owns a tobacco plantation in Alamance County, North Carolina. Tom, Matilda's and George's fourth son, becomes a blacksmith and in 1857 marries a half-Indian slave named Irene. Because white men patronize Tom's smithy, he frequently hears news about what is happening in the nation. The Civil War is approaching, and rumors of war abound. One day, Chicken George arrives back unexpectedly; he has just received his freedom and the family is reunited. However, the euphoria does not last long-the sheriff discovers that George is free and informs Murray of a North Carolina law that a free black can remain only sixty days in the state, or face re-enslavement. Everyone is unwilling for the only free member of their family to be re-enslaved, so Chicken George leaves once again.

In 1860, the Murray slaves hear that Lincoln has been elected president and, shortly thereafter, that North Carolina has seceded from the Union. On April 12, 1861, war breaks out between the North and South, and the slaves begin a long anxious period of waiting to see which side will emerge victorious. In 1863 they hear that Lincoln has signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all the slaves in rebel territory, and they rejoice. Over the next months, however, it becomes obvious that the Proclamation will not have much effect upon their lives, and it is not until 1865, when the South surrenders, that they actually achieve liberation. The Mur-rays offer to partition the plantation and let their former slaves sharecrop. They accept the arrangement for a time. Chicken George again returns, bearing news that Henning, Tennessee, is a hospitable place, and the family moves there.

The family prospers in their new home, and Tom and Irene's good fortune is capped when their youngest daughter, Cynthia, marries a promising young lumber company owner. In 1895, Cynthia and Will have a daughter named Bertha, who grows up to marry Simon Haley in 1920. Alex Haley is born in 1921. The long tale of this child's roots ends with the death of his father, Simon.

Black autobiography. The autobiography has been a favored form of literary expression in African American culture; slave narratives of the nineteenth century-such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (both covered in Literature and Its Times) helped establish this powerful literary tradition. Roots, though a fictionalized account, fits into this genre. The roots sought in the work are those of the writer, who in his effort to unearth his family's history also attempts to deepen his self-knowledge. In this last respect, the work achieves similarities with efforts of other minority groups during the 1960s and 1970s to discover themselves, to better establish their own identities through an examination of their heritage. It builds on an already well-established genre, the African American biography.

The trials of Kunta Kinte form the first part of Roots, just as the slave narrative marks the first epoch of black biography and autobiography. Meant to be a social document, and to convey the horrors of slavery to white Northerners insulated from seeing it firsthand, the classic slave narrative takes the moral high ground against slavery, appealing to the Christian goodness of the white readership and condemning the slaveowner for betraying the virtues he claims to possess.

A secondary movement in black writing, arising at the turn of the twentieth century, explores the contradictions of living in a society that had officially abolished slavery but remained virulently racist. Prime examples of this second generation of black autobiography include Richard Wright's Black Boy (1945; also covered in Literature and Its Times), and Chester Himes's The Quality of Hurt (1972) and My Life of Absurdity (1976).

The mid-1960s brought yet another wave of black autobiography, as black activists told the story of the civil rights movement and the more militant branches of black activism. Most influential among this generation of black autobiographies are James Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965; also covered in Literature and Its Times), both of which helped prompt other black Americans to write their own stories, as Haley did his.

Sources. According to Alex Haley, Roots was directly inspired by his family's oral history, which led him on a twelve-year search to uncover its details. Haley is quoted as saying, "To the best of my knowledge and my effort, every lineage statement within Roots is either from my African or American families' carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents" (Roots, p. 686). In a New York Times interview on September 26, 1976, Haley wanted to call his book a "faction," a term that has been defined as a literary social document resulting from intense research that presents facts in history through fictional dialogue.

Reception. Though critics found literary and historical flaws in Roots, they praised it as the "most important civil rights event since the 1965 march on Selma" (Bryfonski, p. 206). Some questioned Haley's accuracy; according to the historians Mills and Mills, for example, "those same plantation records, wills, and census cited by Mr. Haley not only fail to document his story, but they contradict each and every pre-Civil War statement of Afro American lineage in Roots!" (Mills and Mills, p. 6). In an article in the New York Times (April 10, 1977), Haley conceded that Roots has dozens of errors; his purpose, though, was not to write a history but a work of fiction based upon factual events. Other critics faulted the limited treatment of Haley's more recent ancestors-113 of the book's 120 chapters deal with pre-Reconstruction events, and little attention is paid to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Nevertheless, Roots was roundly commended. A review in Library Journal asserted, "A brief review cannot do justice to the power of this book" (Samudio, p. 489). Haley received special citations from both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize committees for his work.

Roots was transformed into an acclaimed and widely seen twelve-hour television miniseries broadcast in 1977. This greatly enhanced the book's reputation and by the end of that year, 2 million copies had been sold. Its popularity among blacks was connected to a mutual concern at the time. As Haley explained, many of them were searching, as he had been, for a cultural history with which to identify.