In the fall of 1988, Toni Morrison earned the Melcher Book Award for her haunting novel Beloved. In her acceptance speech Morrison told the audience that a year after she finished Beloved it had become clearer to her why she had to write the book. “There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey and of those who did not make it,” Morrison said. “There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There’s no 300-foot tower. There’s no small bench by the road. There is not even a tree scored, an initial that I can visit or you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence or, better still, on the banks of the Mississippi. And because such a place doesn’t exist (that I know of), the book had to.”1 While Morrison was not the first to highlight the historical erasure of slavery, her remarks became a touchstone for the urgency and difficulty of commemorating the lives and legacies of enslaved people.
Morrison is undoubtedly one of the greatest authors in American history, but what if she overlooked the most influential commemoration of slavery in her lifetime?
What if Roots was the first national memorial to slavery? This suggestion is probably difficult for many people to accept. As this book has shown, Roots was an explicitly commercial production that appealed to mass audiences. The book and television miniseries told a story of slavery through historical fiction and melodrama, popular genres that are underappreciated by critics. Roots took on a serious subject, but it lacked the air of seriousness and solemnity we usually associate with memorials. For her part, Morrison described Roots as “backward.”2 Still, it matters that Roots encouraged more people to engage seriously with the history of slavery than anything before or since. Alex Haley made trade-offs in order to tell his family story through these commercial venues, but more traditional kinds of memorials—sculptures, plaques, benches, and museums—also require concessions and adjustments to appease different constituencies and sensibilities. Some readers might dismiss out of hand the notion that a story published by Doubleday or broadcast by ABC could be a memorial, but in a country dominated by commercial culture it should not be surprising that historical commemoration could come through mass-market publishing and broadcast television.
I float the idea of Roots as the first national memorial to slavery in order to highlight two reasons why Roots still matters today. First, one of the most important legacies of Roots is that the book and television series have provided a baseline from which to create and appreciate more nuanced and challenging treatments of slavery. For artists and scholars, Roots created space to approach the history of slavery from different angles, often in ways that explored the challenges of representing black history. Watts-based artist Edgar Arceneaux, for example, staged a 2002 installation called Rootlessness that included a copy of Haley’s Roots that Arceneaux had dipped into a sugary solution until the book crystallized.3 Even when artists make these connections less explicit, many gallery visitors, film and television viewers, and readers approach new representations of slavery with Roots in mind. Roots is a sort of lingua franca for representing slavery. This is one of the paramount reasons why mass commercial culture is valuable. For millions of people in the United States and internationally, Roots throws other representations of slavery into sharper relief.
Consider, for example, the allusions to the Middle Passage in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. “I am Beloved and she is mine,” begins a five-page chapter told from the perspective of the character/spirit who haunts the novel. The chapter evokes a slave ship and is written as a prose poem without punctuation. “All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching the man on my face is dead his face is not mine his mouth smells sweet but his eyes are locked.” The passage continues with references to urine (“morning water”) and vermin in the hold of the slave ship. “some who eat nasty themselves I do not eat the men without skin bring us their morning water to drink we have none at night I cannot see the dead man on my face daylight comes through the cracks and I can see his locked eyes I am not big small rats do not wait for us to sleep.”4 Regarding Beloved, Morrison said, “I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population—just as the characters were snatched from one place to another, from any place to any other, without preparation or defense.”5 Nowhere is this disorientation more pronounced than in this chapter of Beloved.
When I teach Beloved, many of my students have never heard of the Middle Passage. Some assume it is referring to the middle chapters of Morrison’s book or referring chronologically to a set of years between the start and end of slavery. These are smart students, they just have not been taught much about the history of slavery. This makes it really difficult for them to follow Beloved or to appreciate how Morrison’s book is also telling a story about the limitations of telling stories about slavery. I wished for these students that their high school history textbooks had discussed slavery in greater detail or that they had read or seen Roots. “Kunta wondered if he had gone mad,” is how Haley opens the slave ship section of his book. “Naked, chained, shackled, he awoke on his back between two other men in a pitch darkness full of steamy heat and sickening stink and a nightmarish bedlam of shrieking, weeping, praying, and vomiting. He could feel and smell his own vomit on his chest and belly. His whole body was one spasm of pain from the beatings he had received in the four days since his capture. But the place where the hot iron had been put between his shoulders hurt the worst.”6 Whether one prefers Haley’s realism or the prose poetry of Beloved, Morrison’s literary craftsmanship resonates more powerfully when compared to a familiar reference point like Roots.
Alex Haley went to great lengths to make his black characters respectable in terms of their sexual behavior. In the first version of the family history that Haley relayed to his agent, Haley’s original African ancestor (whom he later identified as Kunta Kinte) was described as fathering several children on several different plantations. By the time Haley developed the Kunta Kinte character in Roots, Kunta did not have sex until his late thirties, after he had married Belle, and he fathered only one child, Kizzy. For Haley, this revision challenged portrayals that circulated widely during and after slavery of black men as sexually aggressive and of black women as sexually promiscuous. This sexual modesty also reflected Haley’s personal views. “I just probably because of my background, have a private feeling that sex is something concerning two people in a room with the door closed, and so I’ve never cared for it much in literature,” Haley said. “I know when I was writing Roots . . . I wanted a book which would be written without any obscenity at all in it and which would not have a single explicit sex scene in it.”7
Much of Kara Walker’s artwork can be viewed as a rejection of this sentiment. Walker’s cut-paper silhouette murals make visible that which Haley and ABC worked so hard to keep hidden in Roots. Walker’s work is full of psychological perversions, desires, and fears, many of them sexual. In the room-sized panorama Slavery! Slavery! (1997), a white figure bows before a black woman perched on a fountain. Walker describes the scene this way: “A white man—something of a ‘Nigger lover’ bows at the feet of an all-giving black girl fountain. He farts his pleasure. Puffs of perfume and gas resemble speech bubbles. The base of the ‘fountain of you’ has a skull and a monkey. The fountain offers milk, blood, piss, spit or vomit. ‘Coffee, tea or me?’ Or from childhood water fountain games: ‘Coffee, tea, milkshake, pee?’”8 Just to the right of this image is a slave market scene where a trader engages in a sex act with the shackled black man he is buying or selling. Unlike Roots, Walker’s work is not focused on conferring historical personhood to enslaved black ancestors. Whereas Roots was deeply invested in getting audiences to see and appreciate specific black characters (e.g., Kunta Kinte, Kizzy, Chicken George) as noble, hardworking, and resilient, Walker’s work questions what it means to create a “positive” representation of black people.
Walker was eight years old when ABC broadcast Roots. “I don’t remember much of the story, but I know it was very important, we all watched it,” Walker recalled. “Everyone came into school—it was fourth grade—and started making fun of it. So it became just another joke.”9 Curator Hamza Walker (no relation) has described Kara Walker as being part of a generation of black artists who are “post-Roots.”10 While Walker approached Roots across a generation divide, her work finds much of its inspiration in visual and literary works like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone with the Wind, and Roots that have presented the history of slavery, the Civil War, and the South to mass audiences through what she calls “melodramatic” and “outrageous gestures.”11 Walker’s Camptown Ladies (1998) silhouette tableau, for example, alludes to the scene in Roots where Omoro Kinte holds baby Kunta toward the sky and declares, “Behold the only thing greater than yourself.” In Walker’s piece, a naked black woman with a large posterior akin to Sara Baartman (the nineteenth-century “Hottentot Venus”) holds aloft a baby who urinates into the mouth of a kneeling/praying white woman. “In Walker’s tableau, the ‘Hottentot Venus’ has become the African ancestor figure, signaling how the treatment of Baartman’s body was of a piece with the denigration of the bodies of Africans enslaved in the Americas,” literary scholar Arlene Keizer argues. “The rooted foot of the Hottentot Venus further emphasizes the connection to Haley’s popular representation of American slavery; in contrast to the white woman’s tiny foot, the black woman’s foot is enormous and almost indistinguishable from the earth beneath it. While recognizing the weight ascribed to African ancestry in ‘Roots,’ it is difficult for viewers to escape the playfulness and feeling of parody evoked by the re-imagination of roots and rootedness in Camptown Ladies.”12 Walker’s work asks viewers to think about what it means to create, view, and profit from representations of slavery. Understanding Haley’s romantic family history and the massive promotional campaign that made this story about slavery into a national phenomenon make Walker’s silhouettes stand out more sharply.
Roots’s most direct inspiration is Henry Louis Gates’s PBS genealogy shows African American Lives (2006–8) and Finding Your Roots (2012–16), which examine the family ancestry of celebrities. Gates described Roots as motivating his interest in genealogy. “You can say I had a severe case of Roots envy,” Gates said. “I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to . . . do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.”13 Gates found Haley’s story powerful despite its inaccuracies. “Most of us feel its highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village whence his ancestors sprang,” Gates said. “‘Roots’ is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone’s imagination.”14 On the one hand, Gates’s advocacy of DNA genetic testing is both an embrace of contemporary technology and, in light of the questions that plagued Haley’s research, a way to add scientific evidence to the study of black genealogy: “Alex Haley in a test tube,” as Gates put it.15 On the other hand, genetic testing is similar to Roots in that it relies on storytelling and belief to make disparate pieces of data meaningful. “While today’s popular genealogy television programs would lead us to believe that root-seekers take up wholesale the information provided to them by genetic ancestry tests and accept it unconditionally, something far more complex is at play,” sociologist Alondra Nelson argues. “Genetic genealogy tests are deemed reliable to the extent that they are useful for consumers’ myriad aims; for many, this involves strategically marshaling the data. Some use their genetic results as usable narratives that open up new avenues of social interaction and engagement.” Nelson describes how Roots piqued the interest of a generation of genealogists of African descent and how “racial composite testing had proved unsatisfactory to some root-seekers who want to re-create Alex Haley’s Roots journey in their own lives.”16
Almost every year brings some sort of popular culture reference to Alex Haley and Roots. From Robert Townsend’s joke about an “Epic Slaves” acting class in Hollywood Shuffle (1987) to the Chappelle Show’s parody of outtakes from the twenty-fifth anniversary DVD of Roots (2003), Roots remains a touchstone to reference what has and has not changed for black performers in Hollywood. Dozens of hip-hop artists have referenced Roots, including A Tribe Called Quest (the song “What?” in 1991: “What’s Alex Haley if it doesn’t have roots?”), Missy Elliot (the song “Work It” in 2002: “Kunta Kinte a slave again, no sir / Picture blacks saying, Oh yes’a massa / No!”), and Kendrick Lamar (the song “King Kunta” in 2015: “Now I run the game got the whole world talkin’, King Kunta / Everybody wanna cut the legs off him, Kunta”). Artists keep returning to Roots with the expectation that their audiences will understand, or be encouraged to learn about, the reference. Roots remains a generative story because it has been part of the national consciousness for generations of Americans.
The second reason why Roots still matters is that it is a cautionary story about the inevitability of progress. With the largest black cast in the history of commercial television, Roots seemed to herald new possibilities for black employment in television and for the possibility that more black-themed shows would cross over to white audiences. Four months after Roots, New York Amsterdam News reporter Phyllis Lu Simpson interviewed representatives from ABC, CBS, and NBC regarding whether there would be more black-themed shows or black actors in the fall lineup. Each network told Simpson there were no new black programs on deck, to which she asked, “Roots inspired nothing?”17 For television executives, Roots helped legitimize the miniseries format and led to several follow-up projects—Roots: The Next Generations (1979), Roots: The Gift (1988), and Alex Haley’s Queen (1993)—but did not convince executives of the profitability of black programming more broadly. Even producer David Wolper, one the most ardent boosters of Roots, did not believe Roots changed the industry. “I don’t think [Roots] changed race relations,” Wolper told an interviewer in 1998. “I think for a moment it had an impact. Did it help African American actors? No. A lot of them couldn’t get work even after Roots came on. Did more stories about African Americans show on television? No.”18 By these lights Roots should be remembered as television’s unfulfilled promise to reflect the diversity of the country.
Roots is also a cautionary story about the difficulties of speaking honestly about slavery in public forums. Since Roots no treatment of slavery has captured the public consciousness in the same way, and it is unlikely that anything ever will. Producer David Wolper joked that with so many channels now, “You couldn’t get a 71 share if you had the returning of the Lord.”19 Mass commercial culture, on rare occasions, encourages people to spend time thinking and talking about serious subjects. By making Roots, Alex Haley and many publishing and television professionals asked readers and viewers to see slavery as an American story.
As I finish writing this book, America is again struggling with how to memorialize slavery, how to talk about the history of racism in this country, and how to address the generational legacies of unfreedom. The lesson we can take from Roots and how quickly American culture moved on to the next phenomenon is that it takes consistent work to give these issues traction in public discourse. Scholars know much more about the histories of slavery and racism today than they did when Roots was published and broadcast. Within the academy we can work to make slavery a subject of inquiry for scholars outside of early American history and African American studies, we can produce resources to make recent scholarship available to high school teachers and students, and we can work beyond the classroom to motivate people to talk more, and more honestly, about the history of slavery. As media consumers we can push producers and publishers to make work that takes on serious subjects, such as Steve McQueen and John Ridley’s adaption of Solomon Northup’s narrative 12 Years a Slave (1853; 2013), BET’s miniseries based on Lawrence Hill’s novel The Book of Negroes (2007; 2015), and WGN’s Underground (2016). And we can adapt lessons from museums, such as the New York Historical Society’s Slavery in New York exhibit (2005), the Whitney Plantation Museum (opened in 2014), and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (opening in the fall of 2016), to tell local, national, and transnational stories about slavery. This moment of renewed attention to America’s original sin is important, but it is not guaranteed to last. The four decades since Roots have underscored how uncommon it is to have black actors, culture, and history featured in a mass commercial production and how difficult it is to speak honestly about slavery. If we appreciate the varied creative energies that went into making Roots, we can better understand what it takes to make Americans reckon with slavery and its legacies.