Roots: The Saga of an American Family
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 First edition cover |
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| Author | Alex Haley |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Autobiographical novel |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Released | 17 August 1976 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 704 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-385-03787-2 (first edition, hardback) |
Roots: The Saga of an American Family is a novel written by Alex Haley and first published in 1976. It was adapted into a hugely popular, 12-hour television miniseries, also called Roots, in 1977, and a 14-hour sequel, Roots: The Next Generations, in 1979.
Contents |
[edit] Plot introduction
Brought up on the stories of his elderly female relatives -- including his Grandmother Cynthia, who was emancipated from slavery with her family in 1865 -- Alex Haley purported to have traced his family history back to "the African," Kunta Kinte, captured by slave traders in 1767. For generations, each of Kunta's enslaved descendants passed down an oral history of Kunta's experiences as a free man in Gambia, along with the African words he taught them. Haley researched African village customs, slave-trading and the history of Blacks in America -- as well as made a personal visit to the griot (oral historian) of his ancestor's African village -- to produce this colorful rendering of his family's history from the mid-eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth century.
[edit] Plot summary
The action begins with the birth of Kunta Kinte in 1750 to a Mandinka tribesman in the village of Juffure, The Gambia. The author liberally uses many African words to describe the everyday life of this Muslim community, which sees young boys like Kunta being groomed to manhood with lessons of hunting, protecting their families, and subscribing to codes of honor under the strict supervision of village elders.
Several years later, Kunta hears vague talk about "toubob" (white people) who have been spotted in the jungles nearby. Tribesmen are disappearing from other villages, never to be seen again. At the age of 16, while Kunta is on sentry duty and looking for wood with which to fashion a drum, he is ambushed by four slave catchers. Although he fights back, he is no match for them, and is chained and hauled off to a ship for the beginning of a horrifying sea voyage. On the journey, he finds that the Mandinka warrior, Kintango, who trained him to manhood has also been captured. Kintango provides Kunta with much verbal support. Kintango later dies in the revolt.
Chained to each other and to their beds in the dark, dank hold, the slaves lie in their own excrement and become violently ill. Once or twice a week, the whites bring them up to the deck in chains in order to clean the hold. On one such occasion, the slaves, who have managed to communicate with each other despite the many different languages they speak, conspire to overthrow the whites. The revolt is quashed by the white sailors, but an outbreak of vomiting, fever, and diarrhea wipes out one third of the Black captives and half of the whites. This attrition rate was typical for slave ships of the time.
At a slave auction, Kunta is bought for $850 by John Waller of Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Given the name "Toby" and assigned to work as a field laborer on Massa Waller's plantation, Kunta attempts to escape four times over the next four years and is punished, each time more severely. Unlike the American-born blacks on the plantation, who have not been taught to read or write and are treated more like children than adults, Kunta can read, write, and speak fluent Arabic, and is angered by his forced enslavement. On his fourth escape attempt, slave catchers chop off half of Kunta's right foot so that he cannot escape anymore. Incensed by the attack, John Waller's brother, Dr. William Waller, buys Kunta from his brother and allows him to be nursed back to health by his "big house" cook, Belle. A warmhearted, American-born slave, Belle patiently nurtures a relationship with the tall, brooding African at the same time.
Kunta works for several years as Dr. Waller's gardener and later his wagon-driver before he finally plucks up the courage to ask Belle to marry him. She does, and the two have a baby at a rather advanced age. Kunta insists that the child be named Kizzy, an African name, rather than Mary, the name Belle would have preferred.
In Kizzy, Kunta invests all his efforts to remind his daughter that she is the scion of a proud, free people. He teaches her many African words and patiently repeats to her the story of his capture and sale, a story that she will pass down to his grandchildren and great-grandchildren in turn.
At the age of six, Kizzy becomes good friends with Dr. Waller's niece, Missy -- to her parents' dismay. As time goes on, Kizzy grows less close to her parents and more attached to Missy, who treats her as her personal plaything. Through Missy, Kizzy also learns how to read. This proves to be her undoing, for ten years later, Kizzy falls in love with a male slave from the plantation. When she confides to him that she knows how to read and write, he implores her to forge papers for him so he can escape, and she does. The following day, soldiers who have caught, tortured and killed the runaway slave come to Dr. Waller’s plantation and wrench Kizzy away from her parents. She is dragged away to a slave auction, never to see her parents again.
Kizzy is auctioned off to a disreputable slave owner in North Carolina named Tom Lea. On Kizzy's first night at his plantation, her drunken master makes crude sexual advances to her. When she refuses to have sex with him, he brutally rapes her in the barn and then drops a quarter in a jar next to her bed as thanks for her services. He continues to abuse her several times a week, leaving her a coin each time, until she is five months pregnant. She gives birth to a son whom her master insists on giving a European name, not an African one. The baby is named George.
When George is born, Kizzy, who is only 17, is horrified to see that his skin is light-colored, not ebony black like her own. Her shame is intense. The other slaves at the Lea plantation advise her to forget about the father, although Massa Lea continues to visit her frequently at night. The continual abuse drives Kizzy to depression. But when Massa Lea finally leaves her alone two years later, Kizzy bonds to the other slaves and tends to her son as lovingly as she would a child born to her out of love rather than rape.
George is raised like a typical field hand. In his spare time, he enjoys hanging around the gamecock pen and Uncle Mingo, the gamecock raiser, who brings in a tidy sum for Massa Lea each year in cockfighting revenues. George instantly takes an attraction to the fighting roosters because of their noble stature. Later he becomes apprenticed to Uncle Mingo and proves himself a quick learner in feeding, capturing, cleaning, and fighting gamecocks, earning himself the nickname, "Chicken George."
After George starts full-time rooster duty, there is a noticeable improvement in Massa Lea’s winnings. Chicken George attends his first cockfight at the age of 15. As the years pass, he continues to go to tournaments and backyard fights, wins money, and saves it in order to buy freedom for himself and his family. He and Massa Lea become very close. Much of the time, Massa treats Chicken George like a partner, not as a slave, thanks to the latter's skill with the gamecocks.
At the age of 18, Chicken George encourages Massa Lea to buy a slave girl named Matilda so George can marry her. Matilda gives birth to a large family of eight children, whom she keeps together even after Chicken George is sent to England for six years after Massa Lea loses everything he has in a cockfight against an Englishman.
In the meantime, his third son, Tom, a blacksmith, marries a half-Indian slave girl named Irene, who also gives birth to eight children. Their youngest child, Cynthia, is Alex Haley's grandmother.
Bolstered by Massa Lea's promise that he will receive his freedom when he returns, Chicken George does come back and gets his certificate of freedom, although he must escape to Canada to preserve it. After the American Civil War, Chicken George and his family are reunited and they move to Tennessee to start a new life as free men and women, continuing to share the stories that their great-ancestor Kunta Kinte had his daughter commit to memory so many years before.
[edit] Characters in "Roots"
- Kunta Kinte – original protagonist: a young man of the Mandinka people, grows up in the Gambia before being captured and enslaved. Renamed "Toby"
- Master John Waller – plantation owner who buys Kunta (called John Reynolds in the TV series)
- Dr. William Waller – doctor of medicine and John's brother: buys Kunta from him (called William Reynolds in the TV series)
- Belle Waller – cook to the doctor who Kinte marries (called Belle Reynolds in the TV series)
- Kizzy Waller – daughter of Kinte and Belle (called Kizzy Reynolds in the TV series)
- Missy Anne – Dr. Waller's niece (secretly his daughter whom he conceived with his brother's wife)
- Tom Lea – slave owner in North Carolina to whom Kizzy is sold (called Tom Moore in the TV series)
- George Lea – son to Kizzy and her brutal new owner, he is called "Chicken George" (called George Moore in the TV series)
- Matilda – who George marries
- Tom Murray – son of Chicken George and Matilda (called Tom Harvey in the TV series)
- Cynthia – the youngest of Tom and Irene's eight children (grand daughter of Chicken George)
- Bertha – one of Cynthia's children; mother of Alex Haley
- Simon Alexander Haley – Cornell University professor and husband of Bertha; father of Alex Haley
- Alex Haley – author of the book and central character for last 30 pages; great-great-great-great-grandson (6 generations) of Kunta Kinte
[edit] Literary significance and criticism
Haley earned a Pulitzer Prize special award in 1977 for Roots, and the television miniseries garnered many awards, including nine Emmys and a Peabody. Haley's fame was marred, however, by charges of plagiarism. After one trial, in which he admitted that large passages of Roots were copied from The African by Harold Courlander, Haley was permitted to settle out-of-court for $650,000.[1] Haley claimed that the appropriation of Courlander's passages had been unintentional.[2] In 1988, Margaret Walker also sued Haley, claiming that Roots violated the copyright for her novel Jubilee. That case was dismissed by the court.
Additionally, the veracity of those aspects of the story which Haley claimed to be true has also been challenged.[3] Although Haley acknowledged the novel was primarily a work of fiction, he did claim that his actual ancestor was Kunta Kinte, an African taken from the village of Juffure in what is now The Gambia. According to Haley, Kunta Kinte was sold into slavery where he was given the name Toby and, while in the service of a slavemaster named John Waller, went on to have a daughter named Kizzy, Haley's great-great-great grandmother. Haley also claimed to have identified the specific slave ship and its specific voyage that transported Kunta Kinte from Africa to North America in 1767.
However, noted genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills and the African-Americanist historian Gary B. Mills revisited Haley's research and concluded that those claims of Haley's were not true.[4][5] According to the Millses, the slave named Toby who was owned by John Waller could be definitively shown to have been in North America as early as 1762. They further said that Toby died years prior to the supposed date of birth of Kizzy. There have also been suggestions that the griot in Juffure, who, during Haley's visit there, confirmed the tale of the disappearance of Kunta Kinte, had been coached to relate such a story.[6][7]
Although a friend of Haley's, Harvard University professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of general editors the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, has acknowledged the doubts about Haley's claims, saying, "Most of us feel it's highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village whence his ancestors sprang. Roots is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone's imagination."[8]
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
Roots was made into a hugely popular television miniseries that aired over eight consecutive nights in January 1977. ABC network television executives chose to "dump" the series into a string of airings rather than space out the broadcasts, because they were uncertain how the public would respond to the controversial, racially-charged themes of the show. However, the series garnered enormous ratings and became an overnight sensation. Approximately 130 million Americans tuned in at some time during the eight broadcasts. The concluding episode was rated as the third most watched telecast of all time by the Nielsen corporation.
The cast of the miniseries included LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte, Leslie Uggams as Kizzy and Ben Vereen as Chicken George. {Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs starred as Kizzy's first love}. A 14-hour sequel, Roots: The Next Generations, aired in 1979, featuring the leading African-American actors of the day. In 1988, a two-hour made-for-TV movie, Roots: The Gift, aired. Based on characters from the book, it starred LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte and Kate Mulgrew as Hattie, the female leader of a group of slave catchers.
[edit] Release details
- 1976, USA, Doubleday Books (ISBN 0-385-03787-2), Pub date 12 September 1976, hardback (First edition)
- 1977, UK, Hutchinson (ISBN 0-09-129680-3), Pub date ? April 1977, hardback
- 1978, UK, Picador (ISBN 0-330-25301-8), Pub date 14 April 1978, paperback
- 1980, USA, Bantam Books (ISBN 0-685-01405-3), Pub date ? November 1980, paperback (Teacher's guide)
- 1982, UK, GK Hall (ISBN 0-8161-6639-0), Pub date ? December 1982, hardback
- 1985, USA, Vintage (ISBN 0-09-952200-4), Pub date ? May 1985, paperback
- 1992, USA, Bantam Doubleday Dell (ISBN 0-440-17464-3), Pub date 31 December 1992, paperback
- 1994, USA, Vintage (ISBN 0-09-936281-3), Pub date 21 January 1994, paperback
- 1999, USA, Rebound by Sagebrush (ISBN 0-8085-1103-3), Pub date ? October 1999, hardback (Library edition)
- 2000, USA, Wings (ISBN 0-517-20860-1), Pub date ? September 2000, hardback
- 2006, USA, Buccaneer Books (ISBN 1-56849-471-8), Pub date 30 August 2006, hardback
[edit] Notes
- ^ Fein, Esther B.. "Book Notes", The New York Times, March 3, 1993.
- ^ Crowley, Anne S.. "Research Help Supplies Backbone for Haley's Book", Chicago Tribune, October 24, 1985.
- ^ Nobile, Phillip. "Alex Haley's Hoax", The Village Voice, February 23, 1993
- ^ Mills, Gary B. and Elizabeth Shown Mills. "Roots and the New 'Faction': A Legitimate Tool for CLIO?", Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, January, 1981
- ^ Mills, Gary B. and Elizabeth Shown Mills. "The Genealogist's Assessment of Alex Haley's Roots", National Genealogical Society Quarterly, March, 1984
- ^ MacDonald, Edgar. "A Twig Atop Running Water -- Griot History", Virginia Genealogical Society Newsletter, July/August, 1991
- ^ The Roots of Alex Haley. Documentary. Directed by James Kent. BBC Bookmark, 1996
- ^ Beam, Alex. "The Prize Fight Over Alex Haley's Tangled 'Roots'", Boston Globe, October 30, 1998
