ROOTS

If you are of a certain age and were anywhere near the United States in early 1977, you probably remember the bona fide social phenomenon that was the first airing of the miniseries Roots. For a week in late January, across the country, Roots parties were the rage, while across all media a national conversation began on the always uncomfortable question of slavery and its contribution to America’s course and character.

At the same time, Roots, the book, continued to fly off the shelves, a bestseller with more substance than most. Published in August 1976, nicely timed for a bicentennial year, Roots had already touched off a genealogy craze. Its author, Reader’s Digest senior editor Alex Haley, professed to be a little surprised at his book’s quick success, but there was nothing quick about its making. For a decade, Haley said, he had been making false and true starts on bits and pieces of an oral history that his grandmother had related to him back home in Tennessee, a history that worked its way across fields and rivers to the ocean, and thence to a mighty river. There Haley’s 120-chapter epic begins: “Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a man-child was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.” That man-child would be named Kunta, in honor of his Mauritania-born grandfather. Soon he would bear another name, and only memories of that place. Roots, billed as a “genealogical novel,” was an earthy book. It was also unsparing in its depictions of slavery. The 30th anniversary edition (apparently commemorating the show, not the original book), published on May 22 by Vanguard Press, carries a talk given by Haley to his Reader’s Digest colleagues in which he describes crossing the Atlantic by freighter. “I couldn’t tell the captain, who was such a nice man, nor [the] mate what I wanted to do because they wouldn’t allow me to do it,” he recalls, the project in question being to spend nights down to the hold lying atop a board to approximate Kunta Kinte’s journey across the Middle Passage, one that, Haley was careful to specify, lasted “two months, three weeks, two days.” The experiment didn’t last long—but long enough for Haley to feel suicidal, to say nothing of doubtful about writing his book in the first place.

He did write it, though, and Roots went on to make history as a phenomenon of publishing, media, and popular culture, setting off a wave of interest in books about America’s many pasts. (Would there have been an Angela’s Ashes without Roots? Perhaps—but perhaps not.) It also touched off controversies, as books about any past will, not only because goodly portions of the book were borrowed from at least one other book, but also because Haley’s genealogies did not always add up, at least to scholarly satisfaction. Haley, who died in 1992, can no longer respond to those ongoing discussions, but it is to the good that his “genealogical novel,” so long in the making, is still around to spur them in the first place.