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Roots: The Saga of an American Family
ByAlex Haley

New York, Doubleday, 1976. 688 pp. $12.50

When historians of American popular culture someday review the decade of the '70s they certainly will have to pause at the year 1977 in order to explain the phenomenon of Roots, Alex Haley's "factional" account of his fmaily history. Already Roots has been canonized into the category of special cultural event by the bestowal of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

In the first few weeks following publication, the book sold so well that bookstores were hard pressed to keep it stocked; and this, long before the paperback appeared. Sales were, of course, swollen by a vast number of television viewers who watched the home-screen adaptation of Roots which rated the largest TV audience of all time. Hundreds of post-morten interviews attempted to answer the question, "Why the impact of Roots?" In the process, this made it an even bigger media event. Roots now comes in record albums, T-shirts, and jokes; and untold numbers of black Americans have grown tired of repeating their opinions of Roots mostly to white questioners.

Alex Haley, collaborator with Malcolm X on the latter's classic Autobiography, received hard earned fame and fortune for the twelve years of labor which he put into researching and writing the story of Kunta Kinte and his descendents. The amazing success of Roots was detailed in lengthy cover stories in the news weeklies and the swell of acclaim was not even slowed by law suits over alleged plagiarism and a critical "expose" article in Britain calling into question the credibility of Haley's African informants.

To be sure, the book and especially the television program have been criticized for historical inaccuracy, for stereotypical characterization, and for the distortion of commercialization. There is, it seems to me, truth to all these accusations, but somehow they seem mild and even unimportant in the face of the fact of Roots. The book's major flaw is a curious disjunction between fact and fiction. Haley does not alwasy succeed in actualizing his theory of "faction" in the pages of his narrative. The problem is his awkward attempt to introduce bits and pieces of Afro-American history into the narrative by means of the slave grapevine. For example on two successive pages of Chapter 56, Haley has the slaves discussing Crispus Attuck's death at the Boston Massacre and George Leile's foundation of an African Baptist church in Savannah, Georgia. The question is not whether the slaves on a Virginia plantation could have known about these distant events as

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quickly as they do in the book, but how necessary they are to Haley's narrative.

The incidents are included to serve as date markers for chronology, to illustrate the fact that slaves had more sources of information than whites suspected, and to include lessons on black history. But in effect they stand out like loose threads left unwoven into the main fabric of Haley's story. The television mini-series, rushed through production, was little better than most of the fare we have grown accustomed to on prime time, but it did have some affecting and effective moments. The pity is that it could have been so much better and still have attracted a huge audience.

Criticism pales, however, in the face of the enormous impact of the phenomenon. Why the impact? In part, the popularity of Roots was due to the media which regularly turns sport contests, movies, and concerts into "events" of national important-but only in part. Roots transcends the characterization of media event because of the particular power and authenticity of Haley's own quest which assumed for him a religious quality. Haley has frequently described in lectures, on talk shows, and in the book itself, the journey which led him from Henning, Tennessee, where he first heard the story of Kunta Kinte from his grandmother to a small village on the River Gambia in West Africa, where the story came full circle. Haley's telling of this story is spellbinding and moving, especially for black audiences, because it speaks of a past lost and regained, of a history of suffering, endurance, and transcendence.

Every people has need of a sense of a past, a link with history which gives identify in the present and inspiration for the future, but this need has been especially acute for black Americans who were told they had no past except primitive barbarism in Africa nad fortunate enslavement in America.

The power of Roots lies in the fact that it makes imaginatively real for blacks (and whites)the historic identity of Afro-Americans. It is not as if black Americans, after the civil rights, and black pride movements of the '60s, knew nothing of black history. But Roots embodies that knowledge and gives it the impact of myth through the successful quest of one black American to trace his roots back through slavery to Africa. Haley himself had this sense of embodying millions of black Americans as he stood in the village of his ancestors and listened to a griot complete for him his own history and so, in a sense, his own identity.

For Haley, the success of his quest was not simply fortuitous, but in some mysterious way miraculous, as if he had been particularly led by a destiny watched over the old folks, his grandmother, and her sisters, whom he heard as a boy telling and retelling the family story. The link, forged by story in most cultures, between the old and the young, the past and the future is a valuable social function which is increasingly rare in our society where the old are segregated from the

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young and where mobility destroys a sense of rootedness. The appeal then of Roots is precisely that it is a "saga of an American family," of a very old American family, in this country for over two hundred years, a saga whose existence depended upon the need of one generation after another to tell and to hear who they were and from where they came.

Albert J. Raboteau
Afro-American Studies
Univeristy of California
Berkeley, California