[In the following essay, Crawford reviews Roots.]

“The end of the American artist's pilgrimage to Europe is the discovery of America,” Leslie Fiedler writes. So, too, the American artist's pilgrimage (if he is black) to Africa: after 12 years of research and half a million miles of travel, Alex Haley has discovered an America that is feasting on his book [Roots] and has devoured a television adaptation as well. Haley thus finds himself an Instant Celebrity, that most American form of notoriety and one which, I suspect, leaves him feeling most ambivalent. For the mission—there is no other word—he undertook over a decade ago was an intensely personal one, so personal in fact that his closeness to the subject accounts for the strength of Roots—a work of decidedly mixed parts—as well as for its weakness.

This astonishingly resourceful account of the “lost tribe of a great black family” (Haley's own) opens with the birth and young manhood of Kunta Kinte, who in the year 1676 was abducted while chopping wood in his native West Africa and shipped on the Lord Ligonier to “'Naplis,” Maryland where he was sold into slavery for ＄850 at the age of seventeen.

Taken to Spotsylvania County, Virginia and renamed Toby, he repeatedly tries to escape, only to have a foot chopped off by professional slave-catchers (“patyrollers”). He marries an American slave and fathers a daughter, Kizzy, whom he entertains with tales of their African genesis, calling the river “Kamby Bolongo,” a guitar “ko,” and himself not Toby but “Kunta Kinte.” At 15, Kizzy is raped by a new Massa, an ambitious North Carolina cracker, and gives birth to a mulatto son, called Chicken George. Following Kizzy's example, George tells his own son, Tom, of his great-grandfather from Africa who performed African “voodoo.” After the Civil War, a mature Tom moves his family to Henning, Tennessee where he becomes a gifted blacksmith and his daughter marries a lumber-yard owner so prosperous he can afford to send his daughter—the author's mother—to college. And nowhere down this tortured lineage is the story of Kunta Kinte allowed to be forgotten. Even as the author sat on his grandmother's porch as a child, he too was regaled with stories of “the African,” who, he was made to understand, was the father of them all.

As a young journalist, Haley became fascinated with this family history and, sifting through court records, family Bibles, legal deeds, and shipping logs, allowed himself eventually to be led back to Africa. There, in the village of Juffure, in the Gambia, he listened to a wizened griot whose narrative at last made reference to “the African” himself, “the eldest of these four sons, Kunta, who went away from his village to chop wood … and was never seen again.”

What follows, unfortunately, is Haley's account of this, his Satori in Africa, his “peak experience.” The Gambian natives realize—it dawns on the author—that he is one of them, “one of those,” the griot says, “who are in exile in that place called America.”

Haley, it is distressing to learn, truly believes that he has been, well, Called—that everything in his life to date had led him back to the Gambia. Convinced that the very characters in Roots—Kunta, Kizzy, Chicken George, and the rest—are “up there watchin',” he becomes a man possessed. And the book suffers for it. Laboring to fashion a prose which properly conveys the solemnity of his quest, he churns out a barrage of what at times approaches a sort of jitney Miltonian rhetoric.

The result is solemn indeed—and humorless, too. When Haley is not manufacturing pomposities, he lapses into jargon (he refers to one of Chicken George's “most richly warming life experiences”) or cliché (he describes the North and South as “locked together like stags in mortal combat”). Worse yet, he peoples the book with an all-too-predictable cast of “lusting Massas,” wailing mammies, and squealing pickaninnies for which Haley owes more to Frank Yerby and Kyle Onstott, I suspect, than to 12 years of research.

Still, there is much to like in this book, even to admire, despite the fact that its noble intent outshines its execution. One can perhaps forgive Haley his zeal, for the real story may lie between the lines: that of the quest itself, an account of which Haley is presently writing. In the forthcoming book, let us hope that Haley the journalist restrains Haley the family man.