CHAPTER SIX

Reading Roots

Alex Haley’s Roots is three stories in one book. The first quarter of the book describes Kunta Kinte’s childhood in the Gambia, his capture, and his forced journey to America aboard the Lord Ligonier. This story of an African Eden and forced exile from it is followed by four hundred pages of family history, stretching across seven generations from Kunta Kinte’s arrival in America in 1767 to Haley’s birth in 1921. Finally, the book’s last twenty pages tell the story of Haley’s search for his roots, a story he told hundreds of times in lectures. Roots is a long and uneven book, but these three stories gave readers and critics plenty to enjoy, analyze, and debate.

Roots made Kunta Kinte the most famous African in American history. The long first section of Haley’s epic family history takes place in the small Gambian village of Juffure, where Kunta Kinte was born and lived as a free person for sixteen years. “The reason I devoted the first 126 pages of the book to Kunta’s life in Africa, which some critics found both long and boring, was that so little has been known up to now in the West, by white or black, about the depth and richness of African culture, which I happen to think we can all learn something from,” Haley said.1 Creating this vision of Kunta’s childhood in Africa became an overwhelming obsession for Haley. “I spent two years just researching and digging out actual facts of African cultural life—ceremonies, implements, etc., everything I could find on the subject,” Haley said. “But, when I finished, I had this unwieldy mass of material and I had to come up with some way of organizing it. I made a notebook for each of the 16 years that Kunta had spent in Africa, then separated the information I had gathered in terms of the age at which Kunta would have been exposed to it. This ordered the material and gave the early part of the book a feeling of authenticity, validity.”²

Some reviewers criticized Haley for idealizing life in eighteenth-century Juffure, Gambia, and Africa. “That the real Juffure of two hundred years ago was anything like the pastoral village Haley describes is not possible,” historian Willie Lee Rose wrote in the New York Review of Books. “Whatever bucolic character Juffure may have today, it was in the eighteenth century a busy trading center, inhabited by possibly as many as 3,000 people.”³ The Gambian officials who facilitated Haley’s research in the country told the author about this colonial history, but the author chose to portray the Gambia as an African Eden. “I, we, need a place called Eden,” Haley said. “My people need a Plymouth Rock.”⁴ Haley wanted Kunta Kinte’s childhood in Juffure to serve as a symbolic beginning for all African Americans. “In the case of blacks, there just simply hasn’t been anything like a valid history of the family culture, love and compassion,” Haley said. “History talked about the slaves amorphously, as a body of people who endured this and that. . . . [My hope is] that this story of our people can help alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winner.”5

In creating an idyllic image of Kunta Kinte’s life in Juffure, Haley hoped to displace the racist images of Africa he had seen in his youth. “I thought of Africa as being pretty much the way it had been depicted in the movies,” Haley said. “My far-off relatives were there, dancing and waving spears and raising hell while Johnny Weissmuller swung through the trees.”⁶ Like millions of filmgoers, Haley learned about Africa from the Tarzan and Jungle Jim films, which starred former Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller. “All of us, black and white, who are over 20 years of age thought of Tarzan or Jungle Jim as our concept of Africa,” Haley argued.⁷ Haley carried these childhood movie memories into adulthood and saw his book as an opportunity to tell a different story about Africa. After Roots had broken publishing and television ratings records, Haley said, “The thing I am proudest of is that [Roots] helped replace the prevailing African image of Tarzan with that of Kunta Kinte, which is more appropriate and accurate.”⁸ Roger Wilkins, a black civil rights activist, journalist, and historian, welcomed this new view of Africa. “My parents, as typical college-educated Americans, did not know enough of Africa or of slavery to protect me from the overwhelming shame that I felt because of the misinformation that washed over this culture,” Wilkins wrote. “Just as the revolution in black consciousness removed many of those shackles in the late sixties, the story of Kunta Kinte filled blacks at all levels with great pride and chased the shame.”⁹ Acclaimed writer Maya Angelou agreed that Roots challenged long-held stereotypes of Africa. “For centuries, we (all Americans) were led to believe that Africa was a country belonging to wild animals, where naked, primitive human beings spent their time either climbing trees, leading safaris, or eating each other; and, although we denied the teaching publicly, we at least half-believed the description,” Angelou wrote. “Then Alex Haley’s ‘Roots’ burst upon the national consciousness. Using the formidable work as lens, for the first time we were able to see Africans at home (on the continent) and abroad (three hundred years and thousands of miles removed to the United States, South America, the Caribbean, Nova Scotia) as simply human beings caught in the clutches of circumstances over which they had little and often no control.”10

In addition to replacing racist popular culture’s visions of Africa, Haley wanted readers to know Kunta Kinte as a free member of a family and community who loved him. “I wanted to plant Kunta’s roots so deep, as I told the story of his life from birth to capture, that the wrench of his being torn from the soil of his homeland would be as heartbreaking for the reader as it was for me,” Haley said.¹¹ Haley needed Kunta Kinte to be the patriarch for his family history, but the family story Haley heard in Gambia did not flesh out Kunta Kinte as a person. Gambian storyteller Kebba Fofana Kinte told Haley who Kunta Kinte’s parents and siblings were and when he disappeared from the village, but for Roots to work Haley needed Kunta Kinte to be more than a name on a family tree.

In the lengthy Africa section of Roots, Haley asked readers to share his experience of creating Kunta Kinte. “The reader literally shared his birth. . . . We became beguiled by him as we shared his journey through life,” Haley said. “When I say ‘we,’ I mean I was as beguiled as anyone else in recounting the story of his life. There were many times when I would catch myself at the typewriter or with pen in hand, feeling as though I were standing off somewhere at the edge of the village watching Kunta doing the things I was writing about at the time.”¹² Haley described writing about Kunta’s enslavement in similar terms. “When [Kunta] finally was captured, I felt as though I had been hit in the head with a two-by-four,” Haley said. “In fact, I was so broken up over his capture, that I quit writing for several weeks.”13 With Kunta’s capture, Haley said, “slavery ceased to be impersonal. Indeed, it became highly personal to millions of readers who identified with him in human terms, very much as I did.”¹⁴

By devoting the first third of Roots to Kunta Kinte’s life, Haley achieved the difficult task of making his book work as a specific story about one family’s journey through slavery, as a representative story about black enslavement and survival, and, most broadly, as a generalizable story about coming to America. Doubleday’s advertising for Roots emphasized this mix of specific black experiences and universal themes. “Twelve years ago, Alex Haley went searching for answers to questions we all ask,” a book advertisement read. “Who am I? Where did I come from? Who were my ancestors? The quest was more difficult for him than it would be for most Americans: his ancestors arrived in this country neither on the Mayflower nor in steerage, but in chains.”¹⁵ Doubleday and Haley welcomed readers to see Roots as a generalizable story of a family’s journey to America. “Searching for his roots, Alex Haley helps us discover our own,” Doubleday’s advertising promised. Indeed, Roots benefited from and contributed to a groundswell in interest in genealogy in the 1970s. How-to genealogy books like Ethel Williams’s Know Your Ancestors (1968), Gilbert Doane’s Searching for Your Ancestors (1973), Val Greenwood’s The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy (1974), and Suzanne Hilton’s Who Do You Think You Are? Digging for Your Family Roots (1976) preceded Haley’s, while Dan Rottenberg’s Finding Our Father: A Guidebook to Jewish Genealogy (1977) and Charles Blockson’s Black Genealogy (1977) came out shortly after Roots. Literary scholar Louis Rubin described Roots as producing “a kind of national vogue for root-grubbing.” Rubin joked, “I have no doubt that a minimum of one dozen New York publishing houses have since commissioned journalists to return to the jungles of such faraway places as Esthonia, the Orkney Islands, and the Schwartzwald and search out the peregrinations and former penal conditions of their forebears.”16 Newsweek’s July 4, 1977, cover picked up this theme with the headline “Everybody’s Search for Roots.” While Doubleday and Haley pitched Roots as a universal family story, everyone who picked up Roots knew that Haley’s farthest-back person would be captured and transported to United States on a slave ship. While readers could enjoy Haley’s “Saga of an American Family” without grappling with the horrible magnitude of slavery, Roots made it clear that the process of becoming American for black people was categorically different from that for European immigrants.

While Haley was not the first author to root the history of black Americans in Africa or to tell an uplifting story of a family’s survival during and after slavery, Roots had far more support from the commercial publishing industry (and later television) than previous works of black history. Doubleday’s extensive promotion of Haley’s book and the book’s physical size (it is 587 pages long) helped establish Roots as an important work that should be on the bookshelf in every black home. “For the first time in our history, there is a perfect gift for every child past the age of 10 years,” Jim Cleaver wrote in the Los Angeles Sentinel, a leading black newspaper, just before Christmas in 1976. “Of course, the ‘perfect gift’ to which we refer is a book entitled ‘Roots.’”¹⁷ Cleaver continued, “The past several years have seen this society evolve into a newly discovered kind of consciousness about blackness. There have been all kinds of groups formed that relate to the ‘black awareness’ aspect of our community. But never before has such a chronicle about the evolution of the African from freeman to slave to freeman been written.”18 A reviewer in the Atlanta Daily World, the city’s largest black newspaper, praised Roots in similar terms. “Haley’s book ‘Roots’ adds some dignity to our existence in America,” Charles Price wrote. “This is not because of the skillfulness of his writing or the novelty of the events that he writes about, but rather because he has taken the time to treat the experiences of blacks as human experiences.”¹⁹ Chuck Stone, a black journalist and scholar, looked to classical history to find an adequate comparison for Haley’s epic work. “For its literary gracefulness, Roots, the book, will stand in solitary preeminence, distinguished by its narrative sweep, historical detail, and eloquent craftsmanship,” Stone wrote. “Alex Haley is the Thucydides of our day, interpreting the Black Diaspora as majestically as the Greek historian catalogues the Peloponnesian War.”²⁰

Roots also became part of ongoing debates about black families, much closer at hand than ancient Greece. The year after Haley signed the contract for Before This Anger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration, wrote the government report The Black Family: A Case for National Action (1965). Moynihan argued that black urban families were deeply troubled. “There is no one Negro problem,” Moynihan wrote. “There is no one solution. Nonetheless, at the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure. Once or twice removed, it will be found to be the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or antisocial behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation.” Moynihan argued that this black family instability started in slavery: “It was by destroying the Negro family under slavery that white America broke the will of the Negro people.”21 The Moynihan Report influenced political and scholarly debates regarding black families for decades and prompted historian Herbert Gutman to research and write The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (1976), which argued that slave marriages and two-parent households were much more common than Moynihan or previous scholars of slavery had suggested.²²

Haley never explicitly discussed the Moynihan Report, but in his lectures and interviews before and after the publication of Roots Haley argued that American families of all races were not as strong as they once had been. “It seems that this country today is afflicted by rootlessness,” Haley said. “We are a young country, brash, we have all this technology and it seems we are rapidly drawing away from our sense of heritage. We’re drawing away from old people. Since the ’60s, it has come to be fashionable to be irreverent toward older people.”²³ Haley blamed television and other media for much of this detachment, even as he was busy consulting on the television adaptation of Roots. “It used to be, before television and radio, families’ entertainment tended to be gathering in the home and listening to the old people talk,” Haley said. “Now kids don’t have time to listen to old people say ‘boo.’ . . . Television came along and there was no more talking.”²⁴ While Haley had lived in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles and traveled broadly, Henning, Tennessee, remained his frame of reference for the golden age of family and community life. “In the 40 or so years since I grew up in Henning, the family has been shrinking and drifting apart,” Haley said in an interview with Playboy. “As America has moved from the country to the city, from huge, messy old homes echoing with the noise of three generations to closet-sized, $400-a-month apartments for swinging singles eating TV dinners alone in 600-unit high-rises; from sitting on front porches, listening to grandmothers tell family stories like the ones I heard, to sitting in suburban rec rooms with baby sitters while Mom and Dad go out.” Haley said he did not want to “run down” urban and suburban America or “romanticize” the rural past but argued that “there’s no question that somewhere along the way between then and now, we’ve lost something very precious: a sense of community, which is nothing more than a congregation of families.”25 Haley advocated a traditional view of family that would have resonated with supporters of the Moynihan Report. Like Gutman’s book, though, Haley’s Roots looked to the era of slavery to find an example of a stable black family.

In the process of celebrating the strength and resilience of black families, Roots also unsettled long-held myths about benevolent plantation “families” where slave masters supposedly cared for their slaves like children. Among the thousands of letters Haley received, some came from whites who tried to reconcile their own family histories and views of slavery with Roots. “I think we all needed to be told what the slaves suffered during these inhuman years,” a white reader from suburban Seattle wrote. “I am 41 years old and just a year ago, I found, in tracing my own roots that my great, great, great grandfather, Nathaniel Owens of Green Co., Kentucky, had slaves on his plantation. In the year 1830, he had 29 slaves. I discussed this with my father, and was told Nathaniel Owens was good to his slaves, and when they were freed, they didn’t want to leave him.” After asking Haley if the sprinter and Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens was a descendant of Nathaniel Owens, the reader confessed that she was still trying to come to terms with slavery as part of her family’s history. “Mr. Haley, I want to tell you I was shocked that any ancestors of mine had slaves,” she wrote. “None of your ancestors were involved with mine, but the slaves belonging to Nathaniel must’ve suffered the same things before he bought them. I hope he was good to them, as I’ve been told. Just the same I would humbly like to apologize to those people for whatever they suffered. So to those people, I now, 148 years later say, I am sorry.”26 Many reviewers attributed the success of Roots to “white guilt,” but this and similar letters speak to more interesting and complicated feelings. If Roots gave black Americans a vision of a black family’s history they could find empowering and inspiring, the book encouraged some white Americans to see slavery as part of their own family’s history. These engagements were messy, though they could be productive. Nathaniel Owens’s descendant, for example, clung to the idea of a benevolent slave master even as she apologized.

Haley understood that most white Americans held distorted views of slavery shaped by a powerful mix of popular culture fables like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, history textbooks that downplayed slavery or romanticized the antebellum South, and family stories. A reader from Shreveport, for example, wrote to Haley to say that she and her husband felt “real compassion with the slaves” in his book but were “deeply disturbed” that all the slave owners were depicted “as cruel and viewing their slaves as little more than cattle.” In contrast, she wrote, “Our family owned a plantation in Florien, Louisiana from the 1700’s through the time of the Civil War. In the cemetery is the grave of the original owner. At his feet is the grave of a negro slave. The slave requested to be buried at his master’s feet.”²⁷ Haley encountered these anecdotes rationalizing slavery over and over again. “People had such a mythological view of slavery and what it involved,” Haley said. “Those who offer that argument seek to defend the long-prevailing image of benevolent masters. But no matter how good the master may have been it did not change the status of his slaves.”28 More than just upsetting the view of benevolent plantation families, Haley made it clear that slave owners populate the family trees of many white Americans. Roots, more than other books during the 1970s genealogy renaissance, made it clear that family histories are not always celebratory.

Roots attacked the mythological view of slavery with “faction” rather than footnotes. “Since I wasn’t yet around when most of the story occurred,” Haley wrote in Roots, “by far most of the dialogue and most of the incidents are of necessity a novelized amalgam of what I know took place together with what my researching led me to plausibly feel took place.”²⁹ Elsewhere Haley said, “Call it ‘faction,’ if you like, or heightened history, or fiction based on the lives of real people.”³⁰

Haley’s approach to writing “faction” made many critics uneasy. “Roots is a hybrid work,” literary critic Arnold Rampersad wrote. “It links the detective skills of a superior investigative reporter to the powers of a would-be fiction writer, and the product is a work of extremely uneven texture but unquestionable final success.” Rampersad argued that Haley simply did not possess the creative writing skills to do justice to the fictional potential of Roots. “The solemnity of the basic theme of Roots also cannot obscure the fact that the Afro-American novel is too accomplished in its basic skills for Roots to pass as a well wrought novel or romance,” Rampersad argued. “Technically, the work is so innocent of fictive ingenuity that it seldom surpasses the standards of the most popular of historical romances.”³¹ Historian Willie Lee Rose raised similar concerns from a different disciplinary perspective. “The problem of characterizing the individual people of so many generations, of making more than a score of persons come alive in the special circumstances of two vastly different cultures, and over a span of two centuries, challenges Haley the artist, and taxes Haley the historian,” Rose wrote. “There are long sections in the book that will cause the historian to call Roots fiction, when literary critics may prefer to call it history rather than judge it as art. For Roots is long and ambitious, and all of its parts are not as good as the best parts.”32 New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt argued that despite Haley’s attempt to mix fact and fiction, Roots “all reads like fiction, and very conventional fiction at that.”³³ Lehmann-Haupt described the last section of Roots, where Haley details his search for his ancestors, as the book’s most remarkable passage. “It is here that we are finally convinced that the dramatic family-chronicle Mr. Haley has told is not the novel that it appears, but actual history,” Lehmann-Haupt wrote, before suggesting that Haley would have been better served by writing an autobiography about his search rather than a novelized history. “By writing ‘Roots’ Mr. Haley has done something merely ordinary,” Lehmann-Haupt argued, “whereas by laying the groundwork to write it—by tracing his heritage back to its African roots and thereby providing a concrete example to those millions of American blacks whose true names remain unknown—he has done something extraordinary.”³⁴

Haley’s blend of fact and fiction received more attention after the London Times published a story in April 1977 by travel journalist Mark Ottaway raising questions about Haley’s research in the Gambia. Ottaway visited the Gambia, spoke with Gambian archivist and historian Bakari Sidibe, and wrote that “the vital link in Haley’s claim to have traced his ancestry to Kunta Kinte and Juffure was provided by a man of notorious unreliability who knew in advance what Haley wanted to hear and who subsequently gave a totally different version of the tale.”35 Ottaway noted several other inconsistencies with Haley’s research, and his story received international attention.

The New York Times asked a number of prominent historians to weigh in on the Roots controversy. Many were unmoved by the issues with Haley’s research but were careful to note that Roots was not the work of a professional historian. “It’s a work of fiction,” Harvard historian Bernard Baylin said. “And its importance is as a work of fiction and a very powerful one. I don’t think its importance rests on whether or not such and such a ship was in such and such a place. I don’t give a damn if they don’t find the ship he names. It’s a powerful book for other reasons altogether. This account is the author’s perception of the meaning of slavery, and the account is one of sensibility. I don’t think it turns on details. It turns on a state of mind, and there’s no documentation of that.” Yale’s Edmund Morgan, whose 1975 book American Slavery, American Freedom influenced a generation of scholarship, argued that “errors about the location of the village are not very important—nobody will deny there was a slave trade.” Ultimately, Morgan suggested, Roots is “a statement of someone’s search for an identity. It would seem to me to retain a good deal of impact no matter how many mistakes the man has made. In any genealogy there are bound to be a number of mistakes. . . . If they can prove willful mistakes, I guess I wouldn’t draw very many conclusions, because I don’t think the book will have a great impact on historians anyway.” Robert Fogel, author of Time on the Cross, a controversial economic history of slavery, also offered qualified praise of Haley. “I thought Roots was the best historical novel ever written on slavery, and I say that not to demean it, because a first-rate historical novel can frequently give you a better sense of historical knowledge than carefully researched history,” Fogel said. “I never applied to it the standards I would have if it had been written by C. Vann Woodward or Oscar Handlin.” Harvard’s Oscar Handlin thought his fellow historians were being too easy on Haley and Roots. “A fraud’s a fraud,” Handlin said. “Most historians are cowardly about reviewing history books. The whole idea of being factual about material has gone out the window. Historians are reluctant—cowardly—about calling attention to factual errors when the general theme is in the right direction. That goes for foreign policy, for race and for this book. I think it’s a disgrace.”36

Other scholars argued that myth had always been a part of historical storytelling. “The problem is we all need certain myths about the past, and one must remember how much in the myths about the Pilgrims or the immigrants coming here has been reversed,” Yale’s David Davis said.³⁷ Warren Roberts, director of the Museum of African Art, was more vociferous in his defense of Haley, comparing Roots favorably to Arnold Toynbee’s twelve-volume A Study of History (1934–61). “If Haley’s source for the African part of his history ‘was,’ as Ottaway writes, ‘a man of notorious unreliability who probably knew beforehand what Haley wanted to hear,’ the result is far less inaccurate than Toynbee’s with his gigantic omissions of entire eras and civilizations,” Roberts wrote. “If some of Haley’s roots are myths (‘working hypotheses’), they are far more valuable for purposes of achieving human understanding at this transient stage of history-writing than the myths they are supplanting.”³⁸

C. Eric Lincoln, a black scholar and friend of Haley, said he had heard other academics put down Roots “because it’s not history” but suggested that Haley’s skill was in capturing a larger “cultural truth.” Haley was “a genius in having the imagination which enabled him to create characters that make the truth live,” Lincoln argued. “Here you have this vast expanse of history, this vast experience that nobody thought important enough to record, and Alex is able to take the outlines, which is all that is available to him, and to give those outlines meaning by the creation of characters . . . by the creation of situations which makes of a blank period of American history a living experience.”39 Washington Post reviewer Robert Maynard agreed that Roots had to be evaluated as a story told to a mass commercial readership rather than by typical academic criteria. “I picked [Roots] up in suspicion and put it down so overcome by the power of the narrative that my first reaction was to wonder how much it mattered whether every detail of Haley’s lineage had been precisely established,” Maynard wrote. “I would have preferred a book loaded with footnotes and other documentation, but that is not this book. . . . What is surprising to me now is how much less important that documentation became as I moved through the story of seven generations of a family.”⁴⁰ Thomas Lask, writing in the New York Times, concurred. “For those unnumbered readers who never touch a historical monograph or peruse the charts and statistics of an article in an abstruse journal,” Lask wrote, “‘Roots’ will remain the most meaningful account of the black experience in America.”⁴¹ Roots reached hundreds of thousands more readers than academic treatments of slavery or black history, and C. Eric Lincoln suspected that academic critics of Roots were jealous of the book’s success. “I don’t care what the academics say,” Lincoln concluded. “I challenge the academics to go out and to do as well.”⁴²

Award committees were also unsure how to categorize Haley’s book. Both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award gave Roots special awards rather than putting the book in the fiction or nonfiction categories. “We didn’t care whether it was history or fiction, or a personal confession,” said Richard Baker, the head of the Pulitzer Prize Board. “It deserved a special award.”43 Ken McCormick, one of Haley’s editors at Doubleday, wrote to congratulate the author on the National Book Award. McCormick described the award as “a very nice tribute to you” but noted, “I think there is something pretty sad in a set of categories that can’t adjust itself to your extraordinary book.”⁴⁴

For his part, Haley spoke frequently about how he created his particular brand of “faction.” “I wrote ‘Roots’ as a novel from the point of view of the characters,” Haley said.⁴⁵ As Haley and his research assistant George Sims amassed boxes of research material on different historical periods and subjects, Haley tried to keep in mind that “there was so much that [the characters] couldn’t know” about the eras in which they were living or how the nation’s and family’s histories would unfold. Haley liked to tell a story about jazz musician Miles Davis to illustrate what it meant to become engrossed in creative work. “Miles said he got so full of music that when he was on the subway to go from Julliard to downtown to play with [Charlie Parker], when the subway door would . . . squeak, his mind involuntarily would catch the key, whatever note it squeaked in,” Haley said. “And then his fingers would just involuntary twitch into that trumpet-key position, and all this would happen unconsciously with him.” Haley said he felt a similar sense of creative embodiment with Roots. “I got that way with this book, in phases of it. Where I was writing parts, I WAS the people, I wasn’t me, I WAS THEM.”⁴⁶ As with so much of Roots, Haley also traced his storytelling techniques back to conversations with his family elders. Cousin Georgia “talked of the people on the porch as if they weren’t dead, but just had gone off-stage behind the curtains,” Haley said. “It was ambiguous and vague, yet supremely charging.”⁴⁷

Haley came to embrace the idea that history was a set of competing interpretations. In notes prepared in response to the Ottaway controversy, Haley’s wrote, “There is no set, fixed history. History is—what A writes; what B writes; and what really happened—which will never be known.”48 Elsewhere, Haley jotted notes to remind interviewers and audiences that the Western canon was full of mythical characters created from real historical figures. “There was a real Hamlet, there was a real Johann Faust,” Haley wrote in his notebook, “but the world knows Shakespeare’s mythological Hamlet, Goethe’s Faust.”⁴⁹ Haley elaborated on his conception of history in a 1979 interview. “The popular concept is if a book is labeled history, it is supposed to be true solid substance material of what was,” Haley said. “That’s not true. It can’t be true. How does somebody know what happened all that time. . . . You can go in any great library you want to go to and pick out five different books on the subject of the Battle of Manassas, the first battle of the Civil War, and you will get five variations or versions about that same battle. All this is saying is that history is not constant. How can it be?”⁵⁰

Despite all of the hand-wringing over Roots as “faction,” Haley’s book was shaped less by his sense of how to write historical fiction than by his desire to make all the stories he gathered and created fit together neatly. While it is not always clear in Roots where Haley is drawing from archival documents, oral traditions, published secondary sources, or his imagination, the book never veers from the straight line it draws from Kunta Kinte’s birth in 1750s’ Gambia to Haley’s researching of Roots in the 1970s. If Haley toyed with the boundaries between fact and fiction and came to see all history as interpretive, he was dogmatic about keeping the story going as steady as a heartbeat from generation to generation. Many readers loved the steadiness of Haley’s narrative and found it moving, even when they knew in advance how the story would turn out. “I was deeply involved with your narrative,” a reader from Arkansas wrote. “I remained dry-eyed throughout, until . . . well, it was silly, really. I knew it was coming. I’ve read several of your interviews, and knew why I had bought the book, so you tell me why it happened. . . . Page 564, end of Chapter 117: ‘The baby boy, six weeks old, was me.’ I started to cry. He’s done it! I practically shouted. He’s really, actually gone and done it!”51 Few authors have moved hundreds of thousands of readers to tears, and this emotional impact, more than a complex narrative or literary masterpiece, was what Haley sought to produce.

Figure 13. Haley signing copies of Roots at mall in Los Angeles, 1977. Bettmann/Corbis/AP Images.

Haley’s plentiful notes, letters, and drafts offer tantalizing hints of the people, incidents, and themes that did not fit his orderly vision for Roots. In his unpublished manuscript “My Search for Roots,” Haley described a woman, Old Sister Dinti, whom he had known as a boy in Henning, Tennessee. “She had actually been a slave, and to prove it she would let anybody, including us boys, push their hands up her bare back under her blouse to feel for themselves the hard raised welts that still remained from the beatings she had gotten as a young slave girl,” Haley wrote.

Old Sister Dinti liked having us feel her back as much as we were thrilled by the mystery of it, for it opened the door to her talking about what the slaves ate, what they wore, and how they were mistreated and in return would play tricks on their massas, mistresses, and overseers. I remember a kind of wonder at her presence. As I worked on Roots I began to feel on my own back the welts of her youth as the tactile memory of them returned to my fingers when I read of whipping after whipping and saw the early photographs of the skin of slaves, pictures where in brutal clarity I saw the criss-crossed scars raised as high above the smooth flesh as the whips had cut deep into it.52

This story is a more compelling meditation on the embodied nature of history and memory than anything that appears in Roots. Haley describes touching Old Sister Dinti’s scars as a sensuous gateway to learning about slavery, both in terms of the physical brutality enslaved people endured and the everyday lives they led. This story paints an intimate image of history being written on, and told through, a woman’s body. Haley’s memory of Old Sister Dinti makes it even more frustrating that the female characters in Roots are so woefully underdeveloped.

Haley also recounted feeling haunted as he wrote Roots. “Sometimes I would feel as if I was going crazy or something,” he wrote. “Not really ghosts, they seemed fleshed in some ephemeral way, but translucent.” When he reached the later generations in his story, Haley recalled, “I began to experience the most eerie sensation that I was about to be born. Prior to this when I got to those whom I actually had known I had the feeling they were right there in the room with me, sitting in chairs watching, with no eye or face movements.”53 In public, Haley presented his journeys into the past as emotionally uplifting, but his private notes suggest that writing Roots was also emotionally troubling. James Baldwin sent Haley a letter in the late 1960s that noted, cryptically, “You and I have very different [writing] styles: mine has hysteria which can’t be hidden, yours is the species of hysteria which must be hidden.”⁵⁴ What I think Baldwin meant is that Haley, in his public persona and writing style, studiously avoided going off message or delving into the darker and more unsettling aspects of his story. Haley presented genealogy and history as sources of uplift and nourishment for black people and all Americans. He knew that the past could also be a scary place, but he kept these unnerving aspects hidden.

Other traces in Haley’s archives talk of death, murder, and suicide in ways that are not represented in Roots. “Sometimes my Grandma would stand my hair on end, telling in a hushed voice of the revenge that angry slaves would take on their masters,” Haley wrote in “My Search for Roots.” “I learned how embittered old black mammy nurses stuck long darning needles into the heads of massa’s infants, and then wailed louder than anyone else beside the small graves during the funerals.” Haley retold a lot of stories from his grandmother in his lectures and interviews, but never this one. His notes include a quotation from slave ship captain Thomas Phillips about slaves jumping overboard into the ocean and a page labeled “Suicidal Slaves” that cited a story from a plantation overseer about slaves who, “setting their faces toward Africa, would march down into the water, singing as they marched, till recalled to their senses only by the drowning of some of the party.”55 The theme of Roots was the strength of Haley’s ancestors to survive in America, but the lives and deaths of other enslaved people haunt the margins of Roots. What happened to the other 139 Africans who unwillingly boarded the Lord Ligonier at Fort James en route to America? The shipping records showed Haley that forty-two enslaved people died on the voyage, but what were their stories? And what were the stories of those who survived?

If Haley were a different kind of writer he could have made these numerous gaps, erasures, and hauntings part of his story. This probably would have improved the long-term critical reputation of Roots and made it easier to take the work seriously alongside books like Kindred (1979), Beloved (1987), and Middle Passage (1990) that told stories about slavery while also reflecting on the challenges and implications of telling such stories. One can lament that Haley did not possess the literary talent and imagination of Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, or Charles Johnson (few, of course, do), but we should not underestimate how difficult it was to write a book that millions of people wanted to buy and read, especially a book about slavery. Haley’s sense of the mass market was as keen as any writer’s, and this, combined with his own desire to fashion a neat and linear narrative, determined the composition of Roots.

Two great figures in American and African American letters, Maya Angelou and James Baldwin, viewed Roots as more of an open-ended and challenging story. “The book and television dramatization of it clarify how America’s largest minority came to these shores,” Angelou wrote. “In the face of today’s racial and class strife, I don’t believe that any modern black writer would work 12 years only to answer the perennial questions ‘Why am I here?’ and ‘How did I come so lonely to this place?’ I believe, rather, that Haley has given us the subsequent question: ‘Admitting all that has gone before, admitting our duplicity, our complicity and our greed, what do we, all Americans, do next?’”56 Baldwin also saw Roots as a story whose ending had yet to be written. After Kunta Kinte is kidnapped and brought to America, Baldwin wrote, “It can be said that we know the rest of the story—how it turned out, so to speak, but frankly, I don’t think that we do know the rest of the story. It hasn’t turned out yet, which is the rage and pain and danger of this country. 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.”⁵⁷