BOOK: Roots - Alex Haley (1976)

Roots - Alex Haley

I have put off this commentary for too long.  I finished this 900+ page tome and felt like I had read an unspectacular family history, made powerful by the suffering of the people it describes.  I came to the book believing it was a classic, and there are passages of it that are so; I felt the descriptions of the cockfighting, for example, were as brilliant as Dickens describing a storm or Tolstoy's mowing scene in Anna Karenina.

Yet there were extensive passages that bugged me, beginning with the first 30 or so chapters describing the life of the Mandinka.  Everyone was good and honorable, life was troubled only when Allah did not send the seasonal rains on time or when animals attacked the goats.  News of pale skinned men dressed in odd clothing who stole people was alarming but too distant to be a constant worry.

This focus on Islam felt forced. The notion that whites were coming inland in small parties to capture one or two people at a time seemed like a bad business practice, hardly profitable and highly risky.

And then there is the famous story of Mr. Haley's alleged plagiarism of Harold Courlander's novel, The African, in which Mr. Courlander describes the Atlantic crossing of a slave ship.  There was a lawsuit and Mr. Haley settled before trial for over $600,000.

There are plenty more accusations of plagiarism and fiction (particularly, Mr. Haley's discovery of the Kunta Kinte's home village) leveled at this book, to which I am not going to link.  It is upsetting, unsettling, and taints one's reading of the work.

I started looking for problems with the text, how nearly all of the primary characters were good (if they were black) and noble and hard-working.  Some whites were good, some terrible, nearly all, until George Johnson (a mostly useless toss-in toward the end,) were completely trapped from effective acting by their own beliefs about the races and slavery.  This is about the only thing that rang true, except that obviously some whites were interested in the humanity and dignity of black people, though there is no reason to believe that any characters in the book would ever be exposed to such.

The endless use of the news device to relate "great moments in black history" was so contrived as to be laughable.  I kept expecting a public service tag to be appended to each of these sections.

But despite all of this, there is power in the book, undeniable power.  Mr. Haley revived genealogy for everyone, not just blacks.  The advent of the Internet and DNA fingerprinting will prove to re-revive the study.  Mr. Haley gave history to people that were defined by their former servitude.  He forced people to see these ancestral blacks as real human beings with their own thoughts and feelings.  Sure, we could read slave narratives, but most were written a century ago (at the time Roots was published) and the language, from a different time, keeps them from being popular.  The temporal distance also keeps them from that connectedness we feel when a contemporary is telling the "true" story of his family.

Roots is worth reading, but do not accept it at face value.  Read it as one would a novel.  The self-serving final chapters are a bit of drudgery to work through, as is the documentary description of life in the Gambia.  But there are plenty of rewards, too, descriptions of weddings, camp meetings, blacksmithing, and the aforementioned cockfighting are very well written.  The community of slave row is lively and real, too.  It's interesting to note that most of Mr. Haley's direct ancestors weren't field hands (Kizzy being the exception, but we only travel out there with her once or twice, and that's more for a look at baby George than for a description of the drudgery of plantation field work.)