Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976). Summary and Description

Roots: The Saga of an American Family was highly anticipated and immensely popular at the time of its publication. The two popular miniseries it spawned became some of the most-watched television programs of all time, with more than half of the American populace seeing at least one episode of the saga. Roots reached a diverse racial audience and inspired many to learn about their ancestry.

The American genealogy craze that swept the country after Roots was published was widely attributed to Haley’s work. Roots dramatized an often-neglected chapter in America’s history and inspired many African Americans to connect with their long-lost African ancestry. Wrapped within the profound story of one family’s difficult journey from freedom to slavery and eventual return to freedom, Roots revealed the complexities of African-American identity to a national audience and helped revitalize the dialogue on race.

Set in Gambia, West Africa, and the southern United States from 1750 to 1967, the novel begins in a small African village named Juffure with the birth of a son, Kunta, to Omoro and Binta Kinte. Kunta, a Mandinka warrior, is captured and taken on a British slave ship to Annapolis, Maryland. The book records the horrors of the Middle Passage, the cruelties and deprivations of slavery, the breakup of families, economic and sexual exploitation, the rise of abolitionist engagement, the Civil War, emancipation, and eventually the prosperity of the Haley family.

The first part of Roots is a bildungsroman—a story of Kunta’s passage from innocent adolescence to adulthood. Kunta flourishes in Juffure, learning of his place in the world through the stories of his elders, eventually assuming the responsibility of tending to his father’s goats and attending school. This development of Kunta into an adult, a future Mandinka warrior, is interrupted by his tragic capture and enslavement. Gathering wood in the forest near his village so that he can make a new drum, Kunta is abducted and placed on a slave ship bound for America.

Bought in Annapolis by John Waller, who gives him the name Toby and takes him back to his plantation to work, Kunta tries to escape four times before he is horrifically punished: forced to choose between having one of his feet amputated and castration, Kunta chooses the former, disfigured for the rest of his life. After being bought by his brother, the physician William Waller, Kunta falls in love with Bell, the household’s cook, as she helps him recover. Since he can no longer escape, Kunta drives the doctor around in his carriage. In the course of his travels with Waller, Kunta hears of news from abroad, most notably of Toussaint Louverture’s slave revolt in Haiti, which bolsters Kunta’s rebellious spirit. Haley, using the news Kunta receives as a narrative device, writes of other historical personages, interjecting corrective accounts of what the founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton thought about slavery.

Told by a third-person narrator, the novel focuses primarily on Kunta, Haley’s most fully developed character. Yet the use of third-person narration enables the reader to see the development of other, minor characters, such as Kizzy (the daughter of Kunta and Bell); her clever and resourceful son, Chicken George; and Tom Murray (George’s son). Although Bell (Kunta’s future wife) and his complacent friend, the fiddler, are one-dimensional or “flat” characters, they provide points of view that differ from that of Kunta, who never fully acquiesces to authority. With other characters, Haley provides readers with poignant psychological portraits. For example, when Kizzy (the daughter of Kunta and Bell) is sold away from the Waller plantation, the narrative follows her, recording her actions and thoughts on the Lea plantation, consequently showing the emotional and psychological effects of separation and environment. Using this device, the narrative moves from generation to generation, from Kunta Kinte to the author’s mother, Bertha Palmer Haley.

Roots details the African-American search for identity while lamenting the loss of African culture. The patriarchal Muslim society in which Kunta Kinte would have thrived has been irrevocably taken from him. By following Kunta’s journey, the reader witnesses the horrors of the Middle Passage, feels the disorientation of being plucked from one’s homeland and thrust into an alien world, and experiences the confining spaces left to those of other cultures as they painfully struggle to assert their own traditions in the face of coerced assimilation. Forced to live in a radically different culture and denied the most basic of human rights, Kunta must come to terms with his new subservient place in the world, a place filled with pain and humiliation. Victimized by the institution of slavery, which denies his status as a human being, Kunta is considered chattel, often treated worse than the animals he once tended. As are the majority of slaves, Kunta is treated as a child and has no control over his own life.

Haley’s belief that one “can never enslave somebody who knows who he is” animates the novel. Thus, the quest for freedom and the search for identity help give the epic story continuity: As does Kunta, the first four generations persevere in the face of adversity, embracing the belief that someday they will be free. Thus, Chicken George refuses to relinquish his dream of saving his family from servitude. As he grows older, Chicken George becomes the apprentice to Uncle Mingo, quickly mastering the art of training gamecocks. Often absent, George is not a faithful husband, but he is a loving father, who, despite his infidelity, lives for his family. Planning to buy their freedom with money he has saved from cockfighting, he loses it all when Tom Lea—with George’s consent—bets too much. Forced to travel to England and work for Lord John Russell, George eventually returns to find that his family has been sold. Lea grants him freedom, however, and George recovers his family at the Murray plantation.

Roots deals with fundamental human rights, setting human dignity as a foil against the institution of slavery. The novel speaks proudly to African Americans, offering a story of hope while proffering Africa as a source of historical continuity, a place of origins. Since few have genealogical or historical records of their ancestry, Roots continues to inspire African Americans to reconnect with their African forebears. Haley explains that he assumed this task in part because he recognized how fortunate his family was when compared to many other African-American families, whose “roots” have been irrevocably severed. Near the end of the novel, Haley intrudes as a first-person narrator; doing so enables him to outline the novel’s purpose and serve as a mediating presence affecting how the novel is interpreted. Haley’s character, ruminating near the end of novel, reveals the grand vision the author had for Roots:

Flying homeward from Dakar, I decided to write a book. My own ancestors would automatically also be a symbolic saga of all African-descent people—who are without exception the seeds of someone like Kunta who was born and grew up in some black African village, someone who was captured and chained down in one of those slave ships that sailed them across the same ocean, into some succession of plantations, and since then a struggle for freedom.

With this comment, it becomes apparent that the narrator envisions himself as a modern-day griot, narrating the history of his culture for the benefit of all African Americans. Haley, the author and narrator, hopes Roots will instill a sense of regaining the past a sense of cultural awareness that will make for a tolerable present and enable African Americans to envision a promise-filled future.

For Discussion or Writing
1. One of the significant themes of Roots is Haley’s quest to discover his genealogy by traveling back to Africa; in a tireless effort to connect his African and American identities, he spent 12 years researching his long-lost African ancestry. How do you think Haley’s perception of himself as an African American changed after discovering his genealogical African tribe? What emotional and psychological effects do you think it had on him?

2. Roots details how individual family members are sold without regard for emotional needs, psychological effects, or familial ties. What are the repercussions that the characters face when these ties are broken? How can we ever justify the breaking of a family bond?

3. Song of Solomon (1977), Toni Morrison’s lyrical novel, recounts the story of a black man searching for his ancestry, his connection with the past. Read the novel, compare, and contrast the theme of lost identity with Haley’s Roots.

4. Read the folktale collected in The People Could Fly by Virginia Hamilton and then write an essay that discusses the cultural and psychological relevance of flying Africans in the lives of slaves. Why did many believe this myth? How does the oral tradition contribute to the story’s legacy and magic?

5. Compare Haley’s use of the myth of the people who could fly with Toni Morrison’s use of the same myth in Song of Solomon. How are the two similar; how do they differ? Why would both authors use this same story?