Lisa Drew handed Haley the copyedited manuscript of Roots on January 23, 1976. Promising to return it with the editor’s queries answered a week later, Haley left with the manuscript and settled into the Commodore Hotel in New York, where in the next two weeks he rewrote the last 183 pages. When he returned the manuscript, it was misplaced in the Doubleday building for a few days. The delay was long enough that the now frantic Lisa Drew did not let Haley see the galley proofs: “I was frankly frightened of risking having him rewrite any more at that point.” Doubleday was working to get the book out several months before the airing of the Roots television series, which, to great relief at Doubleday, was soon postponed until early 1977. This meant that that Haley could travel to promote the book in the fall of 1976.1
Though Roots was advertised as a book that covered seven generations of Haley’s family, it turned out to be far more about slavery than it was about freedom. Over his long years of writing the book, Haley’s dominant concern was establishing his African past. He saw that as his greatest contribution to black American history. The book’s focus also reflected the disproportionate time he had spent on researching and writing about the African and Middle Passage experiences. By the time he got to writing about the family members born after Chicken George’s time—the last four generations—he had to hammer out the remainder in about two months. The ending feels rushed, because the writing of it was rushed. Haley planned to dwell on his family’s post–Civil War experience in a separate book.2
Haley’s attachment to Kunta Kinte overwhelms his interest in other characters and dominates the book. He devoted years of research to creating an idyllic origin for his family in the unspoiled African environment. Kunta’s mother, Binta, and father, Omoro, are perfect parents—well born, wise, and loving—symbols for the original natal family of every black American. Kunta is the African hero, fearless at every turn, until he chooses a peaceful life on the plantation over futile and probably fatal rebellion. He contradicts in every way the archetype of Sambo that Stanley Elkins had presented and that had gained so much attention in the 1960s.
Kunta was the second great hero Haley had created on the page. Kunta and Malcolm X both were examples of fierce, independent, and manly characters, and together they formed a new and cherished archetype for black Americans—and, indeed, for many whites. Haley grappled with issues of identity in writing about Malcolm and then Kunta, and the two may have been proxies, on a subconscious level, for the existential struggles of Haley’s own life. The autobiographical impulse takes over Roots at the end, when Haley narrates his visit to Juffure.3
Though the book flows gracefully for at least the first half, Haley frequently tried to tell the reader too much. He relied on slaves’ speeches in dialect to narrate the history of race in American history. Their conversations delivered background information on a variety of important historical topics—the death of a president, the invention of the cotton gin—but the means by which slaves acquired knowledge was not always clear, or it was relayed through means that seem contrived. Haley had gathered a vast amount of historical knowledge, and he did not always resist the impulse to show what he knew.
Roots emphasized the patriarchal authority in Haley’s family. Each main male character—Kunta, Chicken George, Tom Murray, Will Palmer, Simon Haley, and Alex—directed the action in the narrative more than the women. Haley’s men were proud of their heritage and high social standing. They understood how society worked and acquired skills and, some of them, education. Among the women, only Kunta’s American-born daughter, Kizzy, emerged as a multidimensional character, but once her master raped her, the book’s focus shifted to her son, George. Bell, Kizzy, and Cynthia Palmer had crucial roles in keeping the family stories, but so did the men. The other female characters operated mostly as props for strong, decisive male characters. As Haley portrayed them, slave women in the United States were overly absorbed with whites’ lives and passive about slaves’ interests, while the men took responsibility for lifting the race.4
Haley’s portrayal of slave women as passive stands out because it contradicts much of the writing about American slavery since Roots. It also opposed the image of slave women that came down from slave narratives. It may have been that the particular pieces of evidence Haley encountered led him in that direction. But because Roots was so much a product of his imagination, it had to have resulted to some extent from his own attitude toward women. Notwithstanding his lifelong appreciation for his grandmother and others among his older female kin, he doubted his natal mother’s affection for him, and he knew his stepmother did not like him. He had gone through two marriages that ended in protracted and bitter divorces. If time spent with his daughters is an indication, he appears not to have been strongly attached to them. He was charming to women with whom he worked, but he seemed to respect more the views of male colleagues. He spoke proudly of his father, Simon, his brother George, and his colleagues in the publishing business. He admired the integrity of Malcolm X. Did personal or psychological instincts about women shape his interpretations of the past? The evidence is only suggestive.
But there is no doubt that Haley was determined to develop the theme of the strength of black families. He suggested that over the generations, his family had turned chaos into order, lack of education into accomplishment, and trauma into triumph. Each generation accomplished something vital to the survival of the family. Roots captured black slave families’ vulnerability under the constant threat of being sold away from one another, but Haley also showed those families’ resilience. Kizzy was sold away from her parents, but in her new dwelling, older slaves who had also been robbed of family members created a nurturing community for her to find solace. Kizzy’s son, Chicken George, was separated from his family for many years but still managed to lead his children through war and Emancipation and, ultimately, to some security in Tennessee. As a family story, Roots has a happy ending, and that accounted for much of its popularity.5
Haley’s portrayal of patriarchal power in a black family appealed to many blacks because of a decade-long debate about the plight of black families in the United States. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration, had prepared a report on black poverty in which he suggested that, despite the great gains of the civil rights movement, African Americans as a group were not progressing economically. In The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Moynihan wrote that the “the Negro family, battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble.” A black child was eight times more likely than a white to be born out of wedlock; the number of black children supported by welfare was rising rapidly, black male unemployment was going up, and there were three times as many female-headed households among blacks as whites. Moynihan listed the historical circumstances—slavery, white supremacy, migration to cities—that accounted for the differences, but still he characterized the black family as a “tangle of pathology capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world.” He observed that black men had been emasculated, which Haley contradicted with his creation of strong male characters. A white psychologist spoke for many activists and academics when he denounced Moynihan for “blaming the victim.” Moynihan said privately, “Obviously one can no longer address oneself to the subject of the Negro family.”6 But, in fact, that was what Alex Haley had done—addressed himself to the black family—with a compelling account of family strength and survival.
At exactly the same time that Roots appeared, Herbert G. Gutman of the City University of New York answered the Moynihan report with The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925, which argued that, while black families did not mirror the structure of white families, they had remained intact through slavery and Emancipation and into the first generation of migration to northern cities. The family was the slaves’ salvation through those terrible times. The breakdown that Moynihan described occurred after blacks had been oppressed in urban ghettos for two generations.
Gutman’s work was part of a fundamental reinterpretation of American slavery taking place during the last years of Haley’s writing of Roots. In 1972 John Blassingame of Yale University published The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, which argued that historians of slavery had depended too much on the records of planters to depict slaves’ lives. Blassingame used slave narratives to create a portrait of insulated and self-affirming slave communities. He also acknowledged the importance of the family to slaves. “However frequently the family was broken it was primarily responsible for the slave’s ability to survive on the plantation without becoming totally dependent on and submissive to his master.”7 In 1974 Eugene Genovese of the University of Rochester also relied heavily on black sources to create Roll, Jordan, Roll, a study that placed heavy emphasis on the sustaining power of slave religion. Genovese concluded that slaves were active in pressing for their own well-being.
It is not clear that Haley was familiar with the work of Gutman, Blassingame, or Genovese, though surely, if he knew of them, he had opportunities to review the works of the latter two before he finished Roots. If he was not familiar with any of these academic works, Haley should be credited for his intuition in addressing the same question that these professors, and American scholars in general, had been grappling with for two decades by 1976. In the face of an inhumane and immoral system, how had African Americans survived slavery and moved forward in freedom toward a better life? Haley’s answer shared many themes with scholars’ responses—and was far more influential.
The most significant contribution of Roots to society was the one that Haley had identified all along: with this work, he had recovered the black American’s African past. Since the nineteenth century, a few blacks had attempted from time to time to recapture their heritage in Africa, but with the emergence of postcolonial nations on the continent in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the rise of black nationalism in the United States after 1965, a more popular and sustained curiosity about blacks’ African origins had emerged. Now a black American’s history did not begin on a plantation in the South but reached much further back.8
* * *
Both Haley and Doubleday insisted that the book was nonfiction. The book jacket mentioned the stories Haley had heard as a child and then called the writer’s research “an astonishing feat of genealogical detection” in which he “discovered not only the name of ‘the African’ . . . but the precise location of Juffure, the very village in The Gambia . . . from which he was abducted in 1767 at the age of sixteen and taken on the Lord Ligonier to Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter.” The book jacket claimed not only that Haley had recovered his family’s past but that, “as the first black American writer to trace his origins back to their roots, he has told the story of 25,000,000 Americans of African descent. He has rediscovered for an entire people a rich cultural heritage that slavery took away from them, along with their identities.”9 Though Haley warned against reading the book strictly as objective history, Doubleday’s advertising it so emphatically as historical truth opened the book to intense scrutiny.
Asked later if Roots was a work of fiction or nonfiction, Lisa Drew said that while there were fictional elements in the book—particularly the made-up dialogues among slaves, the main thrust of which were historically true—“the life of the African . . . the slave ship crossings, the conditions on those ships [were] pretty universally true.” Drew had one clear reason for using the nonfiction label: “I was terribly afraid if we called this book fiction, although it had fiction elements in it, the people who are not sympathetic to the viewpoint of the book would use that as an excuse to say . . . this is fiction and it is all made up and it didn’t happen that way.” In 1978 her colleague Ken McCormick said that he considered the book fiction but that in 1976 he had deferred to Drew. Despite her frustrations in dealing with Haley, Drew was devoted to him personally and may have deferred to his judgment. It is unlikely, however, that she made the determination on her own to call the book nonfiction. At thirty-six she was still a relatively junior editor at Doubleday.10
Haley and Doubleday might have offered a stronger defense of the historical accuracy of Roots. Haley used the neologism “faction,” a blend of historical information and imagined thoughts and conversations. They might have drawn an analogy to the New Journalism that had emerged in the mid-1960s and was popularized by such high-profile writers as Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Norman Mailer. Talese, a former New York Times reporter, claimed that New Journalism often read like fiction but was more reliable because it sought a “larger truth than is possible through the mere compilation of verifiable facts, the use of direct quotations, and adherence to the rigid organizational style of the older form.” Wolfe loved the new genre because it was now possible “in nonfiction, in journalism, to use any literary device.” Capote believed that “a factual piece of work could explore whole new dimensions in writing that would have a double effect fiction does not have—the every fact of its being true, every word of its [sic] true, would add a double contribution of strength and impact.” Capote had already weathered criticism of the method for a decade.11
The insistence on categorizing Roots simply as nonfiction was a mistake. Some passages of the book were based on Haley’s guessing about facts and eliding evidence. By the early 1970s, when he had already drafted and edited the African section of Roots, abundant historical evidence contradicted his depiction of Juffure as a kind of Eden. He had been advised that his dating of Kunta Kinte’s life was based on doubtful information. Bakary Sidibe, the Gambian national archivist, sent Haley a letter on May 30, 1973, expressing his doubts about Fofana’s reliability: “His young days were spent more in sowing wild oats than in studying.” He had been a drummer, for which the Mandinka word is jalli, which can also mean “griot.” Sidibe said that “by birth and his own views he is not a griot but [an] Imam.” Fofana had learned his stories from other elders, with whom he often sat in the village. Moreover, Sidibe told Haley that Kebba Fofana was now giving a different account of the history of Kunta Kinte, saying that Kunta was imprisoned at James Island for seven years. Sidibe had also interviewed a griot of the Kinte clan and several of its elders and heard different accounts of Kunte Kinte’s genealogy, all of which seemed to locate him several generations later in time than Haley had placed him. Haley chose to disregard Sidibe’s information.12
When challenged about the veracity of Roots, Haley usually responded by talking about his twelve years of research and extensive travel to study archives on three continents. But by admitting that some parts of the book were fictional and using the unfortunate term “faction” to name his genre, he had undermined his claims of historicity. Haley could have defused much later criticism by saying that the village from which Kunta came was the writer’s own mythic creation, one that he believed showed the probable character of his ancestor’s place of origin. There was ample evidence from the family story to place Kunta in a Mandinka village in the region of the Gambia. The Kinte clan was centered farther up the Gambia River and away from the heavy European presence at Juffure. Indeed, it would have been better to give the village a name other than Juffure. Instead of tying himself precisely to 1767 as the time of Kunta’s capture and departure, he could have approximated the dates. The power of Roots ultimately lay not in its adherence to historical fact but in its being a new story of blacks’ past that included African origins. The book was not competing with empirical studies for the attention of the popular mind but with myths about slavery established by works of pure fiction.
* * *
Roots came at an opportune moment in American life. The year 1976 was taken up with continuous, public celebrations of the nation’s bicentennial. In 1975 President Gerald Ford had appointed Haley to the Bicentennial Advisory Council, and Haley announced to a reporter his intention “to make certain nobody overlooks what blacks did to make this country.” And although he did not say so, he wanted to make sure nobody overlooked his forthcoming book. Haley felt that blacks were not going to be excited about celebrating the anniversary. The typical response might be, “Wow, great, we were slaves in 1776.” A fair rendering of the past would note that the South “was built on the back of slaves’ labor,” but popular history of the country had “obscured, and in some cases eliminated the role of blacks.” But Haley diplomatically concluded that “we are marking an historic birthday. In so doing, we’re saying who we are. After life and health, the most important thing any living being needs is a sense of security, a sense of pride.” Giving that to blacks was Haley’s personal mission. In an effort to place Roots firmly within the patriotic spirit of the moment, he wrote this dedication for the book: “Just by chance [Roots] is being published in the Bicentennial Year of the United States. So I dedicate Roots as a birthday offering to my country within which most of Roots happened.” The historian Willie Lee Rose concluded that Roots was “the most astounding cultural event of the American Bicentennial.” Almost forty years later, that superlative still seems about right.13
Roots also appeared in the midst of the 1976 presidential campaign, in which the Democrat Jimmy Carter challenged President Ford. Carter’s open embrace of his southern origins brought an outpouring of media attention to the changes in race relations in the South as a result of the civil rights movement. One observer noted that Carter campaigned “consciously in the context of his family, his town, his region, his religion, his past.”14 If that was true for the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, it was doubly so for the author of the other big success from the South in 1976, Alex Haley. The griot from Tennessee spoke in a deliberate, distinctive drawl—different from Carter’s but equally identifiable as southern. Each was openly proud of his southern background and appreciative of his southern culture. Each chose to believe that southern human relations were better than they had seemed during the harsh conflicts of the 1960s. The poet James Dickey, recently thrust into national celebrity with the movie production of his southern horror novel Deliverance, pronounced that the “southernization” of America would cancel the nation’s hypocrisy and impose new simplicity and caring. It was a prophecy that Haley, who had long idealized his Tennessee childhood, could believe.15
Roots had in fact caught a big wave of Americans’ new absorption with their origins. Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers had appeared at the same time as Roots and was widely celebrated for recovering the history of America’s Eastern European Jews. Newsweek reported that genealogical research, once the province of aristocrats, had now “turned ethnic,” as new generations looked back on family experience. Marcus Hansen, a historian of American immigration, wrote, “What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember.” Another student of immigrants said that a “destruction of memories” had been part of the American assimilation—“assimilate or perish” had been a virtual command. Responding to the black pride movement, other ethnic groups began to explore their own backgrounds. Movements for ethnic awareness had arisen in the 1970s among Poles, Lithuanians, and Italians.16
Roots resonated with oppressed peoples outside the United States. Justice V. R. Krishna, judge of the Supreme Court of India, wrote that “the dignity of a race is restored when its roots are known.” Mahatma Gandhi was able to resist British imperialism, Krishna said, on the basis of “knowledge of our strength and sustenance from our roots.” The Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru had been prompted by the same desire to find his origins when he wrote The Discovery of India, a book that helped millions of Indians reimagine their past.17
* * *
In September 1976 Haley began a month of promotional events that took him to nineteen major cities. He did scores of interviews, and he was masterful at them. A Washington Post reporter described him as leaning back and smoking steadily while he spoke slowly in a soft baritone with a Tennessee accent. “I had always wondered what a million-dollar author was like,” Haley told Publishers Weekly. “Now I’ve met two of them, Arthur Hailey and Harold Robbins, and it seems I’ll be one myself. . . . The main thing is to be free, and that’s something I’ve always wanted to be.” The interviewer inevitably asked how much of the book was verifiable fact and how much was made up, and in his response Haley wandered a bit. “All the major incidents are true, the details are as accurate as very heavy research can make them, the names and dates are real, but obviously when it comes to dialogue, and people’s emotions and thoughts, I had to make things up. It’s heightened history, or fiction based on real people’s lives.”18
Roots appeared in a season of strong nonfiction works. There were several books about Watergate and John Toland’s biography Hitler, also a Doubleday book, which at more than a thousand pages was even longer than Roots. Book prices were rising, going up by almost 12 percent in 1975. At $12.50, Roots was one of the most expensive—as well as one of the longest—books on the New York Times best-seller list. Roots began at number five on the general nonfiction list in early October. It was second on the list by November 14, 1976, and the following week, it surpassed Gail Sheehy’s self-help book Passages to become number one.19
Many of the reviews of Roots were ecstatic. The Los Angeles Times echoed the Roots jacket copy in calling the book a “fascinating detective story.” James Baldwin’s review in the New York Times found no fault and much significance to attach to his old friend’s book. Baldwin’s constant theme had always been the depravity of American race relations, and he thought Roots helped address it. “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.” Baldwin identified in Roots the stark contrast between the African dream and the American nightmare. “The density of the African social setting eventually gives way to the shrill incoherence of the American one.” The book, for Baldwin, was a study of “how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one.” Christopher Lehman-Haupt’s review in the Times declared that the book read like “very conventional fiction” but that Haley’s extraordinary tracing of his family heritage more than compensated for the ordinariness of the prose. Lehman-Haupt speculated that the main achievement of Roots was that its author had created a metaphor “for the vague awareness felt by most American blacks that they are somehow descended from people who were abducted from Africa. . . . It is as if he were saying that he knew he was real but didn’t really believe it until he discovered corroborating evidence.”20
Newsweek’s reviewer, P. D. Zimmerman, offered the first criticism. He liked “the passion of Haley’s narrative, the sweep of its concept and its wealth of largely neglected material,” but he was emphatic that Haley and the publisher were not acknowledging the extent of the book’s fictional elements: “Even a cursory reading of the book makes clear the invention of countless incidents.” Still, despite a “pulpy style,” the book gave “a valuable sense of what the black community lost in its acculturation to a slave society.”21
Willie Lee Rose of Johns Hopkins University, writing in the New York Review of Books, thought Haley’s opening, with its emphasis on African life, was “beautifully realized,” an artistic rendering of an idealized place that reflected the author’s mastery of African anthropology. But she insisted that the account was historically incorrect, especially in the pastoral character it gave to Juffure. Rose’s colleague Philip Curtin had just published a book on the slave trade in Africa that revealed the ways that European traders had drastically altered the environment and social relations of Juffure. (In 1967 Jan Vansina had consulted Curtin about the African words that Haley had heard growing up, but Haley did not interact directly with Curtin.) In the eighteenth century Juffure was a trading center inhabited by three thousand people, and it was the seat of Ndanco Sono, king of Niumi, who controlled access to the upper Gambia River and in 1767 was at war with British and French traders. Rose surmised that “it is inconceivable at any time, but particularly under these circumstances, that two white men should have dared to come ashore in the vicinity of Juffure to capture Kunta Kinte, even in the company of two Africans, as Haley describes it.” Rose conceded that placing Kunta Kinte in a Garden of Eden could suggest a larger truth about African origins that “outdistances any historical fact,” for “myth pursues its truth largely outside the realm of reality.” A historian of slavery and the American South, Rose found other errors that she said “chip away at the verisimilitude of central matters in which it is important to have full faith.” There were anachronisms: cotton was not grown in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, when Kunta Kinte was supposed to have lived there; wire fencing did not exist for another century; and the terms for poor whites, “cracker” and “red-neck,” came much later.22
Rose’s review was the most critical so far, and Haley called her. “Why are you being so hard on me, Willie Lee?” he asked. Then he made a plea, perhaps suggested by the review. “I was just trying to give my people a myth to live by.”23
* * *
Roots fell into a tradition of treatments of American race and slavery that worked together to form what the literary critic Leslie Fiedler called a “popular epic,” a tradition that had gone unperceived among intellectuals until Haley’s work appeared. The other books were Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots (and its thematic echo, The Clansman), and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. In 1979 Fiedler defined this “popular epic” as being “rooted in demonic dreams of race, sex and violence which have long haunted us Americans,” and that determined the people’s historical understandings of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, emancipation, and the Ku Klux Klan. Like all leading critics of American letters, Fiedler had earlier dismissed the first three books of the popular epic, but now he said that, with Roots, these books advanced a historical myth “unequalled in scope or resonance by any work of High Literature.” At exactly the same time, and apparently not influenced by Fiedler, Willie Lee Rose concurred. These four books had given “a vocabulary to American mythologies and demonologies that is generally understood at home and abroad.” Each of the four books had clear didactic purposes: Stowe taught the evil of slavery, Dixon illustrated what he saw as the mistakes of emancipation and Reconstruction, Mitchell portrayed the degradation of southerners in the Civil War. All four were success stories. Haley’s family was “victorious over slavery,” Stowe’s Uncle Tom won a spiritual victory over his oppressors, and Dixon and Mitchell had seen to southern whites’ successful recapture of their region from carpetbaggers and evil blacks. Haley wanted blacks to have “a Garden of Eden and Innocence to look back upon,” and he imagined one in Juffure.24
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the nineteenth century’s most famous American novel and Stowe its greatest celebrity among writers. She made a strong statement against slavery, gave a defense of black character, and influenced the sectional crisis of the 1850s. Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the United States, in both the North and the South, and perhaps a million in Great Britain. Beaten to the point of death by two black slave drivers, Uncle Tom whispers to a white boy: “I loves every creatur’, every whar!—it’s nothing but love! . . . what a thing ’tis to be a Christian!” It was read by millions of Americans at all ages, including the young, for several generations. “Of course, I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Malcolm X said. “In fact, I believe that’s the only novel I have ever read since I started serious reading.” Malcolm, like most young black men in the 1960s, rejected the loving, Christian Uncle Tom in favor of the emerging “bad nigger” archetype of which Malcolm was a model. Still, the book had helped shape his understanding of the black past. No one had been more dismissive of the novel than James Baldwin, who detested its self-righteousness and sentimentality. But Fiedler now wrote that Stowe “invented American Blacks for the imagination of the whole world.” She created three black archetypes: Uncle Tom, the long-suffering and ever-forgiving Christian slave; Eliza, the heroic mother who escapes slavery; and Topsy, the foolish slave girl. Added to those was Simon Legree, the evil white slave owner and rapist. Over the next century, the three black characters became, Fiedler thought, “for better or worse, models, archetypal grids through which we perceived the Negroes around us, and they perceive themselves.”25
The next influential and popular interpretation delivered an opposite message. Thomas Dixon Jr.’s novel The Leopard’s Spots, published in 1902, sold millions of copies. In 1901 Dixon had seen a stage production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the message of which incensed him, and in sixty days he wrote Leopard’s Spots and sent it to Doubleday, Page and Company. In the novel, an all-knowing preacher warns a racially naïve young white man: “The beginning of Negro equality as a vital fact is the beginning of the end of this nation’s life. There is enough negro blood here to make mulatto the whole Republic.” In 1905 Dixon reprised the message in The Clansman—an anti-Negro melodrama of Reconstruction focused on black soldiers’ sexual assault of white southern women. Dixon’s black archetype is the soldier-rapist Gus, who violates a virginal white maiden and drives her to suicide. The newly formed Ku Klux Klan then lynches Gus. Dixon’s book provoked considerable outrage. He was called “the high priest of lawlessness, the prophet of anarchy,” and a provocateur of “enmity between race and race.”26
Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind was a publishing phenomenon, selling a million copies within a year and more than twenty million by the time Roots appeared. It was the fastest-selling novel in history. The book offered a view of slaves as happy, simple, and mostly harmless. With the exception of Scarlett’s nurse, Mammy, the blacks portrayed in it were not complex characters. Fiedler argued that Mammy was really Uncle Tom redone, “the Great Black Mother of us all.” In his autobiography, Malcolm X recalled seeing the film version of Gone with the Wind in Mason, Michigan. “I was the only Negro in the theatre,” he said, “and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug.” (As Prissy, McQueen played a character much like Topsy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.) Gone with the Wind’s portrayal of Civil War Atlanta was accurate, whereas its depiction of Reconstruction-era Georgia follows the themes of Dixon’s work. The lives of black characters in the book were peripheral to the melodrama, but because Gone with the Wind was such a huge event in American popular culture, its interpretation of reality influenced American popular thought for several generations after it appeared.27
Roots was a complete revision of the myths inherent in the popular epic up until then. The historian Jack Temple Kirby thought it had turned Gone With the Wind “inside out,” by making whites two-dimensional characters, “widgets in a cruel system,” while blacks were “vivid and memorable.” The British scholar Helen Taylor thought Roots provided a mythology of heroic blacks so compelling that it would be treated as a kind of “Black Family Bible.” Fiedler thought Haley’s greatest contribution to the popular epic was Kunta Kinte, “an unreconstructed Noble African.” Dismissing questions about the authenticity of Kunta, Fiedler said he was “less a portrait of Haley’s first American ancestor, legendary or real, than of Malcolm X as Haley perceived him.” Both Kunta and Malcolm were “inverted Racist[s], convinced that all Whites not only invariably do evil to all Blacks, but that they have an offensive odor, and are properly classified not as human but as toubob, ‘devils,’ who must be resisted unto death.” By the time Roots appeared, The Autobiography of Malcolm X had sold six million copies, and Malcolm was a heroic figure for many Americans. To make Kunta so heroic, Haley had to depart from historical realism. He barely acknowledged the role of black Africans in the slave trade, leaving whites entirely responsible for its brutality. Fiedler scoffed at Haley’s handling of the sexual aspects of the popular epic. Haley made no mention of Mandinka polygamy, and he kept Kunta a virgin until he was thirty-nine—choices that strained the credulity of his narrative but were possibly analogous to the life of Malcolm, who claimed to have been celibate for twelve years.28
Roots surely recast the popular epic for American whites. Most blacks had already rejected the contributions to it from Stowe, Dixon, and Mitchell, and they overwhelmingly embraced Roots. But most of Haley’s audience was made up of whites, and he affected millions of them. Ninety-nine percent of the letters Haley received from the Reader’s Digest condensed version of Roots were from whites, nearly all of them testifying to the book’s profound effect on their thinking.29
Roots opened readers to a broader empathy with the slave’s experience. Charles Todd, a folklorist at Hamilton College and the man mainly responsible for bringing Haley on the school’s faculty, had assigned Uncle Tom’s Cabin to students, and during the 1960s and early 1970s, black students dismissed the book. Some refused to turn in papers on it, and one woman threw the book at Todd’s feet and stomped from the class. Often, black students refused to speak about the novel at all, and at other times, discussions of it “reached near riot proportions.” But under the influence of Roots, students became more understanding of Tom. “One must put the book in the context of its time,” many students now said. “Those who talk of ‘Tomming’ have missed the point.” In 1976 one black student compared Uncle Tom to Kunta Kinte, pointing out that his accommodating manner was just a means of survival.30
The power of the popular epic created by these novels depended on their transference to other cultural media. Fiedler wrote that what distinguished all popular art from high art was its ability to move from one medium to another. Hundreds of theatrical presentations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin toured the United States and the world for at least two generations after the novel appeared. Thomas Dixon was only one of millions who first acquired an understanding of the popular epic of race from an Uncle Tom play; millions were similarly affected by the treatment of The Clansman in The Birth of a Nation. Even more acquired a view of slavery and race from Gone with the Wind. But the biggest crowd yet would have their views shaped by the televised version of Roots.31