SOURCE: Taylor, Helen. “Everybody's Search for Roots: Alex Haley and the Black and White Atlantic.” In Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens, pp. 63-90. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Taylor traces numerous effects of Roots on American popular culture, academic black studies programs, and Southern identity.]

Gone With the Wind created, and perpetuated, a white myth of the South for international readers and audiences throughout the century. In the bicentennial year, 1976, however, a work appeared that looked set to sweep Scarlett, Rhett, and their faithful Mammy into historical oblivion. Alex Haley's autobiography, Roots, was quickly dubbed “the black Gone With the Wind,” its author hailed as a new national hero.¹ The book, filmed immediately for television, brought to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic a new awareness of black heritage, genealogy, and pride. Over the next thirty years, however, the halo slipped, Haley was discredited in certain quarters, and serious questions were raised about the mythic qualities of the book and the heroic status of its author. This chapter follows the progress of Roots over those decades and recounts both a transatlantic and circum-Atlantic tale.

Roots begins in the year 1750 and records the story of the original ancestor of former Coast Guard journalist Alex Haley. Kunta Kinte, a Gambian Mandinka warrior, is captured into slavery and taken to the American South, where he becomes the first of a long line culminating in Alex, his brothers, and his sister. The book records the horrors of the Middle Passage, the cruelties and deprivations of slavery, the separation of families, economic and sexual exploitation, the rise of abolitionist fervor, secession, the Civil War, the emancipation of slaves, and gradually a new prosperity for what became the Haley family. The main story ends with Alex's grandfather hanging up his sign, in 1893, “W. E. Palmer Lumber Company,” and his wife giving birth two years later to Alex's grandmother Bertha. The final chapter records, in abbreviated form, the successful professional careers of Alex and his siblings, as well as an account of his journey to Africa to hear about his “roots” from the Gambian griot.

Roots was an instant success. Its advance print run of 200,000 sold out at once; 1.5 million hardback copies were sold in the first eighteen months, and millions have sold since. The novel was translated into at least thirty-three languages and distributed in twenty-eight countries. Among many major awards, it won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. By the mid-1980s, 276 colleges and universities had adopted the book for black history curricula; it was popularly recognized as a sort of black family Bible.

In January 1977, the twelve-hour television miniseries was broadcast over eight consecutive evenings on ABC-TV to record American audiences. ABC research estimated that 130 million viewers saw some part of the series; virtually three-quarters of the TV audience watched the eighth (final) part. (The previous record was set by the first broadcast of Gone With the Wind in November 1976, which attracted 65 percent of the audience.) The huge success of the TV series (in Britain as well as in the United States) was both astonishing to all concerned and seen by some as a major cultural event. “Haley's Comet,” Time magazine called it; black readers claimed it was the most important civil rights event since the 1965 Selma, Alabama, march. In Britain, reporting on the impact of the first U.S. broadcasts, the Daily Express (3 February 1977) referred to the way “30 million Americans fought blizzards, ice and fellow commuters to be home in time for Roots,” and the Daily Mail reported the cancellation of night school courses, a huge drop in restaurant business, and the emptying of bars and hospital wards. In the Sunday Telegraph (30 January 1977) the series was described as “the most traumatic event in the nation's broadcasting since Orson Welles's ‘War of the Worlds’ produced panic in the 1930s.” Audience figures were all the more amazing because 90 percent of the TV audience was white. Indeed, Roots became the film trade's dream “crossover”: a feature that appealed to the urban black mass market as well as the majority white audiences. The TV series won 145 different awards, including 9 Emmys.²

Roots enjoyed huge commercial and popular spin-offs. Fifty cities declared “Roots Weeks”; the governor of Tennessee (Haley's home state) proclaimed 19-21 May 1977 “Alex Haley Days”; and the Gambian government pronounced Kunta Kinte's home in Juffure a national shrine and began to market “Roots trips.” T-shirts, plaques, and “Roots music” recordings appeared; “Root-tracing kits” with imitation parchment genealogical charts became the rage (among whites as well as blacks). Schools were sent supplementary materials to use with the book and show, and colleges gave students credit for simply watching the miniseries. New black babies were named Kunta Kinte and Kizzy, after the show's main protagonists. In Eddie Murphy's successful comedy Coming to America (1988), HRH Akeem (Murphy) entered a barber's shop and was proclaimed by the barber “a Kunta Kinte”—an authentic African.

Haley himself became a folk hero. Letters arrived from all over the world addressed to “Alex Haley, ‘Roots,’ America.” He was said to be the third most admired black man among black American youth (after Muhammad Ali and Stevie Wonder). In the prestigious “Black One Hundred,” a list of the most influential blacks, Haley is listed above major writers James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. He was invited to meet presidents and crowned heads, to front TV commercials, and to speak on talk shows, at prestigious lecture venues, and at autograph parties. There were keys given by many U.S. cities, special citations from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and profiles galore in magazines and newspapers. Two black colleges, Fisk and Lane, placed him on their boards, and dozens of publishers and hundreds of individuals sent him manuscripts for endorsement and patronage. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, to commemorate Roots' twentieth birthday, a vast statue of the writer was unveiled.

The (mainly white) critics who have enthused most about Roots have made large, often extravagant claims for it. Despite a damning indictment of its literary style, writing in 1979, Leslie Fiedler recognized the cultural significance of the book and TV series. Noting that Kunta Kinte had become a household name, he said, “With Roots, a Black American succeeded for the first time in modifying the mythology of Black-White relations for the majority audience” (a majority that was, of course, white), and he goes on to argue how unlikely it might have seemed that this book, “like Mrs. Stowe's, [would] be ‘read equally in the parlor, the kitchen and the nursery,’ but be condensed in the Reader's Digest and assigned in every classroom in the land.”³ Almost a decade later, Harold Courlander (who had by then won a plagiarism suit against Haley) noted: “Roots continues to be read and quoted, is found everywhere on library shelves, is a cornerstone of various Black studies programs. … In short, the book has an established place in contemporary American literature and will be spoken of, no doubt, for some time to come.”⁴ Historian Willie Lee Rose described Roots simply as “the most astounding cultural event of the American Bicentennial.”⁵

Roots must be the only nonreligious text to have achieved such universal success and endorsement. Gone With the Wind has outsold it but rarely found itself on a school or college syllabus, praised by political leaders or judges. This smash hit made its author a multimillionaire, national black hero, and international roving ambassador. For African Americans, deprived for centuries of their ancestral homes and families, enslaved and exploited, denied basic human and civil rights, including the right to literacy, this book offered a fresh perspective on their history, genealogy, and community.

ROOTS, NOT ROUTES

The word roots recurs in many a discussion of the South and its meanings. A word traditionally associated with southerners' tendency to stay in the same place, to focus on and value a family and home, during the twentieth century it has become a term of nostalgia and desire. Critic John Egerton believes the South shares with the rest of the nation, since World War II, a lost sense of rootedness that has produced “a steady erosion of the sense of place, of community, of belonging.”⁶ For others, that very sense of roots and connections (however eroded they may be within a new postindustrial region) is precisely what the nation looks to the South to represent and uphold.

On the other hand, within postcolonial discourse, the word has developed reactionary connotations. As I discussed in chapter 1, “routes” rather than “roots” have been identified as the most meaningful way of configuring the contemporary world. Defining “the Black Atlantic,” Paul Gilroy focuses on cultural exchange and flow rather than origins and fixed, pure identities. For him, the ship's voyage is the perfect metaphor for hybrid black Atlantic identities and relationships. A voyaging ship was a productive and imaginative way out of a rather narrow Afrocentrism, a way of seeing crisscross movements of black people—through physical journeys as well as cultural and political exchanges—as a means of looking afresh at questions of nationality, identity, and historical memory. Slaves who traveled from Africa to America via the Middle Passage, black slaves in British ports, Harlem Renaissance writers, intellectuals and jazz musicians who traveled to London and Paris (often to settle)—all were shaped by and helped shape a black Atlantic consciousness and memory. Origins were impure and mixed; the interesting questions were those of process rather than point of departure, diasporic circulation rather than starting points and roots. “Roots” were associated with reactionary and nostalgic forces.

This all makes sense, until one focuses on Haley's Roots, the postwar, postcolonial text that most successfully foregrounded the historical struggles and present dilemmas of African Americans and—by analogy—displaced and rootless blacks everywhere. Roots took the ship's voyage as one of its central themes and metaphors, not of hybrid exchanges but of diasporic peoples' loss of, and need for, origins. This work, about the routes of one family and indeed one man, Haley himself, argues passionately for the need to discover roots, to locate and celebrate origins, to find the single identifying moment for black identity. It is an unashamedly Afrocentric vision, leading American blacks back to a Rousseauesque vision of original purity and innocence, to the Paradise Lost of one of their earliest societies. Luckily for Haley, its somewhat lukewarm working title, Before This Anger, was changed by shrewd editors to the more resonant and mythic final name.

In the 1870s, the writer Albion W. Tourgée had reflected on the black freedman: “The white man traces his ancestry back for generations, knows whence they came, where they lived, and guesses what they did. To the American Negro the past is only darkness replete with unimaginable horrors. Ancestors he has none.”⁷ More than a century later, Toni Morrison remarked that in America the past is always either absent or romanticized. Slavery, so much of the world's past, has been erased from memory; that institution that had “broke[n] the world in half” had made blacks the first truly modern people. Her own much acclaimed novel Beloved (1987) was intended to return slavery to the heart of Afro-America's political and literary culture. “Slavery wasn't in the literature at all,” she said. “We have to re-inhabit those people.”⁸Beloved is certainly the most harrowing, profound, and brilliant study of slavery, but it is unfair to claim that this subject did not exist in the literature. It is true that the most famous, notorious novel about slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), had been written by a northern white woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Morrison may have been suggesting that there was no adequate literary treatment, especially by an African American. However, in many different kinds of discourse through the twentieth century, notably through autobiographies by writers such as Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, novels such as Ernest J. Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986), and essays by Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, there were concerted attempts to begin to trace, and root, ancestors and to rescue the past from those nameless horrors. In a few notable works—Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966) and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982)—the terrible, inadequately recorded and much mythified story of slavery and its aftermath were reexplored imaginatively and reexamined from a strongly feminist perspective.

However, the only work to achieve huge popular sales, appeal to a vast global multiracial market, and command large peak-time audiences on television was Roots. Published in a year when the whole nation was trying to heal wounds and emerge whole and unified, and even elected President Carter from the Deep South to confirm that process, Roots became a myth in its own right. The ripples were felt as far as India and Australia. Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer, judge of the Supreme Court of India, said: “The dignity of a race is restored when its roots are known … and that explains how Gandhi in India could resist the imperial rulers with knowledge of our strength and sustenance from our roots. The Discovery of India by Nehru was prompted by the same urge to trace one's roots which induced Alex Haley to research the Black Americans' roots.”⁹ In an article about the opening of an Australian museum dedicated to the British convicts from which many Australians are descended, the Observer (16 July 1995) described a “Roots-style voyage of genealogical discovery.” After Haley's death, the Reverend Jesse Jackson said simply, “He lit up the long night of slavery. He gave our grandparents personhood. He gave Roots to the rootless.”¹⁰

BRITAIN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE

The impact of this single work reverberated across the Atlantic. Until relatively recently, African American culture was recognized in Britain almost entirely through black music and sports, with the occasional film star such as Sidney Poitier thrown in for good measure. Of course, black and white intellectuals had long had links, from the Harlem Renaissance onward, with black thinkers and artists; but they were in a small minority. In the late 1970s, however, a new popular enthusiasm began to develop for African American literary culture. Until then, the occasional British intellectual (black or white) might have read imported copies of Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). But during the eighties and nineties, general readers and school and college students alike took with enthusiasm to writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou—even, perhaps, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin (though living contemporary male writers have been relatively neglected). Steven Spielberg's film of The Color Purple (1985) was as huge a hit in Britain as in the States, and his controversial Amistad (1997) is a major example of a 1990s vogue for film treatments of slavery. African American experience and cultural forms have come to signify a certain kind of exotic and exciting marginality, one that has added a new dimension to the British love affair with the States. And since most of those cultural producers come from the South, or at least write about the South, southern history, and southern people, a significantly different perspective is added to British cultural associations with that mythic site.

Many reasons may be adduced for this. Teachers in British schools who now have power over curriculum choices came to maturity in the 1960s, when civil rights and black consciousness produced charismatic leaders—from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to Coretta Scott King and Angela Davis—whose words and actions resounded through that decade. Editors of new, small, feminist, Third World, and left-wing publishing houses shared that formation and quickly realized how popular and lucrative reprints of African American texts could be. Indeed, in their seventies and eighties heyday, the two main British feminist presses were kept afloat largely by their two biggest-selling authors—Maya Angelou for Virago, Alice Walker for the Women's Press. The Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple; Spielberg's hit film version; the Nobel Prize for literature for Toni Morrison; the much acclaimed television series shown in Britain in the late 1980s, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965; the new evidence of a conspiracy to murder Martin Luther King; the films of Spike Lee and the controversies over rap music; the 1990s media spectacle of the Clarence Thomas sexual harassment hearing, the O. J. Simpson trial, the rise, fall, and rise of Mayor Marion Barry: these and more created a climate of intense interest in all things African American.

And at the beginning of this new wave was Alex Haley's Roots. Published at a moment when the eyes of the world were focused on the United States' celebrations of its two-hundred-year-old democracy, it was the first African American book to be a British best-seller, to be serialized in the conservative newspaper the Daily Express, and to attract mass audiences for its 1977 weekly television screenings. This was probably the first time an African American cultural product other than music, boxing, or athletics was discussed in the British home, classroom, and hair salon. This single work, conventional in form, uneven in literary quality, aimed at a middlebrow Reader's Digest market, precipitated a transnational interest in and awareness of the history of slavery that has paved the way for greater works and more challenging versions of that history.

“THE GRIOT FROM TENNESSEE”

Alex Haley played his legendary role well to an admiring international audience.

I acknowledge immense debt to the griots of Africa—where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground. The griots symbolize how all human ancestry goes back to some place, and some time, where there was no writing. Then, the memories and the mouths of ancient elders was [sic] the only way that early histories of mankind got passed along … for all of us today to know who we are.

With these words, he concluded his acknowledgments page. The tribute to the African griots he paid here, and in the final chapters of the book—not to mention at countless lectures and interviews after publication—was paid back to him by selected African American critics. For instance, his biographer, Mary Siebert McCauley, entitled her study “Alex Haley, a Southern Griot.”¹¹ In an issue of the Black Scholar published only months after the first transmission of the television miniseries black columnist Chuck Stone praised Haley for producing, as he had intended, “the symbol [sic] saga of all of us of African ancestry.” Calling him “the griot from Tennessee,” he praised Haley for “painstakingly unraveling the umbilical cord that had stretched a tortured distance from Africa to America.”¹² For many critics and millions of readers and TV viewers, Haley unraveled that umbilical cord by using his own family's story, and his griotlike powers, to link the preliterate African past to his own literary, professional present via the terrible saga of slavery. The griots passed stories on orally, “for all of us today to know who we are.” Haley, as befitted a contemporary figure who was the culmination of centuries of oppression and resistance, slavery and freedom, gave his story massive prepublicity circulation on campus lecture tours and in popular journals.

Already a race hero for his ghost authorship of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Haley welcomed claims made for the vast symbolic importance of Roots for his race and nation. Although usually regarded as a novel, it was published originally as nonfiction, supporting Haley's apparently thoroughly researched claims that the book told the true story of his ancestors, traced back to the Mandinka tribe of Juffure, the Gambia. This was no tale found in books; it was a culmination of an epic quest. Haley had heard fragments of it first at his grandmother's knee in Henning, Tennessee, and had subsequently traveled the world, interviewing people, seeking sources, and eventually being led to an old African griot who revealed the name of his original ancestor Kunta Kinte.

The problem with this romantic account is that it has been disputed by several distinguished historians and journalists, who have challenged Haley's version of events, research methods, and source material. The first skeptical account came only months after the book's British publication, on 10 April 1977, in an article entitled “Tangled Roots,” by a British Sunday Times journalist, Mark Ottaway, who had investigated Haley's sources in Gambia. This has been followed by many since.

Haley was in good company. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thomas Dixon, and Margaret Mitchell had all felt forced to establish their authorial credibility. Harriet Beecher Stowe provided her critics with a Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), citing all the sources on which she had drawn for the novel, to prove she did not merely have a gothic imagination (though a century later Ishmael Reed would accuse her, in Flight to Canada [1976], of stealing material from slave narrator Josiah Henson). Thomas Dixon offered to hire a committee from the American Historical Association and then pay a thousand dollars to anyone who could prove an error in his fictional celebration of the Ku Klux Klan, The Clansman (1905). Margaret Mitchell wrote thousands of letters to readers and critics that refute, with scholarly reference, claims of historical errors in Gone With the Wind (1936). Haley always promised to publish My Search for Roots to establish his sources; he never did, though the two-hundred-page manuscript is in his papers at the University of Tennessee. Unlike his predecessors, however, he faced serious and lingering charges that have never been satisfactorily refuted.

First of all, many historians and literary critics found Roots wanting in historical accuracy and believable characterization and dialogue. Leslie Fiedler took Haley to task for creating a Kunta Kinte who is suspiciously like Malcolm X, whose autobiography Haley had written; for euphemizing Africa(ns) and vilifying the American South (erners); for obfuscating the polygamous sexuality of Muslim Mandinkas and, unbelievably, keeping Kunta Kinte a virgin until the age of thirty-nine; and finally, for presenting sexual passion always as evil and thus with considerable salaciousness. In the Black Scholar, five black intellectuals attacked the TV version as “A Modern Minstrel Show,” “an electronic orgy in white guilt,” and “an electronic Uncle Tom's Cabin.”¹³ Critics on the left condemned it for presenting Juffure as “a chocolate-box version of [blacks'] history,” the Gambian village “looking a little too much like ‘Club Mediterranean’” or “Avalon.” Its very commercial success and popularity (particularly with white readers and audiences) suggested a lack of political integrity in an author who was courted by Reader's Digest and commercial television companies. It is interesting to compare Haley's fate with that of later writer Alice Walker, who was attacked by African American intellectuals because of her (albeit uneasy) collaboration with blockbuster film director Steven Spielberg.¹⁴

To this day, Roots is ignored by most serious African American critics and writers; in studies of African American autobiographical, historical, and fictional writing, it is either absent or consigned to a grudging mention or footnote.¹⁵ The soft-focused idealization of Africa and African ancestors, the extremely patriarchal tone and character of the families depicted, the Horatio Alger-like story of enslaved poverty to bourgeois success, and the sentimental, even utopian ending to a complex story all go some way to explain why scholars rarely discuss the work. But they are not the main reason.

PLAGIARISM, INVENTIONS, AND INACCURACIES

Of greater seriousness are the plagiarism charges laid against Roots, two of which resulted in court cases. In 1977, Margaret Walker took Haley to court alleging he had copied his plotting from her novel Jubilee; the case was dismissed. In a BBC program, Walker told her interviewer that Haley had used her and fooled people. Claiming she would have won her case had her publisher backed her, she called Roots “a great hoax and fraud compounded on all American people.” In 1978, white novelist and folklorist Harold Courlander and his publisher, Crown, accused Haley of copying roughly eighty passages from Courlander's novel The Slave (1967). Haley maintained to a skeptical judge that he had never heard of The Slave but that strangers had given him notes as he went round the country lecturing. The night before Judge Ward delivered his decision after the five-week trial, Haley capitulated, signed a statement to acknowledge the inclusion of some of Courlander's material in Roots, paid a hefty sum of ＄650,000, and managed to escape public disgrace. On 4 July 1989, the Voice reported that Haley was facing a further court case, this time from Emma Lee Davis Paul, an African American woman who had grown up in the Deep South and claimed that her work The Bold Truth was “lifted” for Roots. Haley might well have argued—but significantly did not—that he was part of an intertextually rich black tradition. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has pointed out: “Many Black authors read and revise one another, address similar themes, and repeat the cultural and linguistic codes of a common symbolic geography.”¹⁶ It seems that Haley was reluctant to see himself as part of a black continuum (even if it might have let him off a few hooks). Perhaps he wanted to stand alone, to receive acclaim as the one writer who had uniquely told the story of his whole race. Perhaps he clung to his belief that the story of others was being told through him and that “plagiarism” was thus irrelevant.

It has been no easy matter for journalists and critics on either side of the Atlantic to raise questions about Haley's integrity in relation to Roots. Charges of racism are easily laid against any white writer who challenges the authenticity of Roots, in view of the work's importance to African American pride and heritage. Mark Ottaway, the British journalist who wrote the first skeptical article, recounts an uneasy history with the work and Haley himself. He was visiting Gambia, by invitation of an airline, just before Roots was to be published and televised in Britain. A seasoned investigative journalist (of the famed Sunday Times “Insight” team), he read the book on the plane and, once arrived in Gambia, smelled a few proverbial rats. Using Gambian archives, British colonial records, the Lloyd's shipping register, and interviews with the national archivist, Ottaway discovered a great many discrepancies in Haley's account of the area. The greatest discrepancy was the historical inaccuracy of Haley's depiction of Juffure as an isolated village: “Far from being a remote Eden untouched by white civilization, the real Juffure was a white trading post surrounded by white colonialisation. … Insofar as the inhabitants of Juffure were involved in slave trading it was not as victims but as collaborators with the whites, helping them capture slaves from further up the river.”¹⁷ The other major discovery made by Ottaway was one potentially more embarrassing for Haley: the fact that the so-called griot who revealed to him so movingly that Kunta Kinte was his ancestor was no griot and was in fact a well-known Gambian playboy, drummer, and opportunist who told the African American writer what he wanted to hear about his lineage.

In the article, Ottaway quotes replies made by Haley to questions he posed about his discoveries. Haley never refuted any of his points but argued instead for the “symbolic truth” of his story. He is quoted as saying: “This book is also symbolic. I know Juffure was a British trading post and my portrait of the village bears no resemblance to the way it was. But the portrait I gave was true of nearly all the other villages in Gambia. I, we, need a place called Eden. My people need a Pilgrim's Rock.” In a Sunday Times reader's letter responding critically to Ottaway's article, Ms. Dagnija Innus brushed aside the historical inaccuracies: “Haley has, as was his purpose, given his people their Eden … their Pilgrim's Rock. All the research you may care to undertake into the facts cannot remove that fact.”¹⁸ Haley attacked Ottaway for demeaning his research (focusing on the short length of the journalist's sojourn in Gambia). He sought and was granted the right of reply in the Sunday Times; he never availed himself of this. Ottaway found the whole business disturbing, especially when hearing Haley denouncing him on the radio and receiving critical reviews from all sides of the political spectrum that appeared motivated by racism. He did not take the matter further. In a letter to me, he admitted, “Frankly, I found my brush with racism sufficiently upsetting to wish to leave the can of worms where it was.”¹⁹

CRITICAL ATTACKS AND SILENCES

It was many years later, after Alex Haley's death in 1992, that an American journalist took up the baton and delivered an even more devastating blow to Haley's reputation and integrity. This time, the article appeared first in the New York paper the Village Voice and then was reprinted in an abridged version in the very Sunday Times that had featured Mark Ottaway's piece some sixteen years earlier. Investigative journalist Philip Nobile who, of course, knew Ottaway's article, had followed the court cases and reputation of Haley over many years. He claimed that the cases already cited (Walker, Courlander, and others) were by no means the only plagiarisms, and he threw in for good measure other works Haley admitted to copying—Travels of Mungo Park as well as Shirley Graham's The Story of Phillis Wheatley. Nobile's explanation was that Haley (as he euphemistically put it) “was a writer of modest talents, as a number of editors would say, who required enormous editorial support,” the manuscript extensively revised, rewritten, and probably partly written by editor Murray Fisher.

He went on to say that, although Haley's authorship was questionable, the accuracy of his historical research, the authenticity of his reports of trips to the Gambia, and the revelatory discovery of the griot (so movingly described in the book's final chapter), indeed the veracity of the ancestral lineage he claimed for himself, were all thrown into severe doubt by the researches, questions, and discoveries of historians, journalists, and critics who checked his sources and interviewed his editors, collaborators, and friends. These included distinguished figures such as southern historian Willie Lee Rose, Harvard professor Oscar Handlin, and British journalist Mark Ottaway, as well as Nobile himself, a prize-winning journalist known for his literary detective and antiracist publications. Also listed were genealogists Elizabeth Shown Mills and Gary Mills, the latter of whom writes in support of the white supremacist Southern League, a body that would doubtless find considerable pleasure in exposing Roots as fraudulent. Nobile claimed that those who had bothered to examine Haley's research materials (especially audiotapes) in the Alex Haley Papers, opened in February 1993, shortly after his death, discovered so many distortions, inaccuracies, and bogus research claims that there was only one possible conclusion: “Haley invented 200 years of family history. All of Haley's ripping yarns about his search for Kunta Kinte and his 10-year struggle to write Roots were part of an elegant and complex make-it-up-as-you-go-along scam.”²⁰ He repeated many of these charges, and added more, in a BBC TV program broadcast in Britain in 1997.²¹

So have the revelations damaged Haley's reputation? Hardly at all. Despite the plagiarism cases; the articles by Willie Lee Rose (1976), Mark Ottaway (1977), Gary Mills and Elizabeth Shown Mills (1981), and Nobile (1993); and Haley's death, which might have opened a few more minds and mouths, his position as revered writer and chronicler of his race's history remains intact. And there are surprising silences surrounding Haley and his famous work. Few critics of southern writing bother to discuss Roots at all, and even when they do, there is no mention of the controversy.²² Philip Nobile, who might have expected to receive considerable feedback on his 1993 article and 1997 BBC documentary, met a wall of silence. No one seriously disputed his facts; many people, African American as well as white, privately told him they accepted his conclusions but did not wish to take them further. The Pulitzer Committee has never discussed whether to withdraw its 1977 prize from Haley; Nobile believes that its all-white male composition at the time makes the current mixed-race and -gender committee especially sensitive. The BBC program will not be broadcast in the States, and it is said that such an explosive program, fully airing the controversies surrounding Haley and his work, could never have been made there; even in Britain its findings made little stir. It seems that Washington Post editor and 1977 Pulitzer Committee member Ben Bradlee's words still apply: “Nobody wanted his ass.”²³

THE BLACK GONE WITH THE WIND

Another reason for critical unease with the work lay in its populist affinities with other well-known, best-selling works set in the plantation South. Many commentators, black and white, have noted the irresistibility of the antebellum South and slavery as subjects for popular fiction and film. Writing in 1978-79, both Leslie Fiedler and Willie Lee Rose located Roots as the culminating text in a line that began with Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and continued with Thomas Dixon's trilogy, especially The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Of the four, Fiedler argues: “Rooted in demonic dreams of race, sex and violence which have long haunted us Americans, they determine our views of the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan, the enslavement and liberation of American Blacks, thus constituting a myth of our history unequalled in scope or resonance by any work of High Literature.”²⁴ Rose sees the group in similar terms: “They have given a vocabulary to American mythologies and demonologies that is generally understood at home and abroad.”²⁵

Roots is rarely seen as unique; most critics recognize its origins in earlier plantation epics. Afrocentric critics were unhappy about its formal and narrative links with Gone With the Wind and also with its willingness to simplify and modify African experience and cultural forms within a Western vernacular literary tradition.²⁶ Apart from its obvious affiliation with Mitchell's novel, Joseph R. Millichap calls it “a contemporary Uncle Tom's Cabin,” and Time called the TV version “middle-of-the-road Mandingo.”²⁷ Fiedler noted that Roots, like its famous predecessor, was accepted by the majority audience as “a new, revised secular scripture leading to its rejection by literary critics.”²⁸ It may be that Haley's rejection by cultural critics, especially black critics who might have been expected to welcome it (however reservedly), stems both from its huge popularity with the majority white audience and from its association with a series of texts known for their patronizing, racist, or exploitative presentation of black history and experience.²⁹

In a different context, Toni Morrison speaks of the problem of the slave narrative's relationship to the white “master narrative.” Acknowledging the popularity of the narratives and their importance in influencing abolitionists and converting antiabolitionists, she concludes: “The slave's own narrative, while freeing the narrator in many ways, did not destroy the master narrative. The master narrative could make any number of adjustments to keep itself intact.”³⁰ If one turns to Roots, it is possible to justify Morrison's pessimism. Jack Temple Kirby believed that Roots had “administered the coup de grace to Margaret Mitchell's ghost” and that no one would be able to “resuscit[ate] … the Grand Old South from now on.”³¹ A brief look, though, at the endless repremieres, rescreenings, media coverage, sequel and spoof novels, and TV miniseries of Gone With the Wind, not to mention such series as Beulah Land and North and South, suggests that Morrison's point about the master narrative's adjustments stands firm. In popular mythology, Roots has been received as a response to and rejection of the plantation epic saga, but it has not supplanted it. It has adopted and adapted the rules of the genre so that it may legitimately be read as the black Gone With the Wind: a family saga, a survival and success epic, with a structure that begins in an Eden-like innocent, formal, and ordered society (Juffure—the equivalent of the plantation novel's “glorious days before the War”) and proceeds to the Paradise Lost of the Middle Passage and enslavement (for which, read the Civil War and loss of the plantation), followed by gradual restitution of black pride, self-worth, and economic and social order (read redemption of white supremacy). Working within the terms of the master narrative, it could be argued that Haley does not seem to have escaped its structure, parameters, and thus ideological power.

And if this is true of Roots, it is doubly so of the sequel Haley began before his death and that was completed by David Stevens, who also wrote the TV miniseries screenplay.³²Alex Haley's Queen: The Story of an American Family purported to recount the story of Haley's father's line, as Roots had his mother's. Apparently written by Stevens from boxes of Haley's notes and conversations with him over years, the book traced the Haley line to a white ancestor in eighteenth-century Ireland, whose anti-British son flees to the New World and becomes a kindly slave owner and friend of President Andrew Jackson. In a fortuitously complementary manner to Roots, Haley senior turns out to have come from mixed-race stock, love child of one of Tennessee's first planters and sturdiest female slaves, and thus to combine some key elements of southern history missing from the earlier work: for instance, miscegenation, slave women's specific experiences, and the figure of the tragic mulatta. Even more doubts are cast over Haley's veracity when it appears that his maternal and paternal ancestors between them covered the full spectrum of slave and postemancipation experiences.

AFRICAN AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND HALEY THE GRIOT

For a derivative and in many ways pedestrian account, Roots received extraordinary international acclaim, large readership and viewing figures, and intertextual circulations. Some published accounts of Roots, as well as the critical silences, imply that its enthusiastic reader-viewers are a quiescent mass of disempowered consumers who have passively bought this commodity from a white-dominated cultural industry interested only in profit. This reductionist view refuses to explain the enormous appeal of Roots to a wide variety of consumers of most ages, races, genders, and nationalities, who have actively used Roots as a cultural resource to generate a variety of (often contradictory) meanings and pleasures. This is surely what John Fiske calls a “producerly” text—an accessible book and TV series that may be understood within the dominant ideology but that, containing limitations, gaps, and contradictory voices, is open and amenable to popular production.³³ It must also be seen (as I argue about Maya Angelou, in chapter 6) in the context of the powerfully reciprocal relationship that exists between African American writers and their black and white audiences.

Roots operates intertextually within the generic codes of the plantation epic master narrative. But this is not all. It is also a kind of autobiography, implicitly for the most part, then, for the final three chapters, explicitly so. (The last line of chapter 117, which has recorded the birth of a boy to Bertha and Simon, reveals, “The baby boy, six weeks old, was me” [615].) It is curious that, of all the genres Haley and his publishers claimed for the work (faction, nonfiction, part historical fiction), at no point did they name it after that most characteristically African American form, autobiography. As Selwyn R. Cudjoe points out:

The Afro-American autobiographical statement is the most Afro-American of all Afro-American literary pursuits. … [It] remains the quintessential literary genre for capturing the cadences of the Afro-American being, revealing its deepest aspirations and tracing the evolution of the Afro-American psyche under the impact of slavery and modern U.S. imperialism.³⁴

As Cudjoe and many others suggest, black autobiography is not read as personal statement or exploration but as communal expression of a collective experience and unconscious. Toni Morrison gives one of the clearest statements: “The autobiographical form is classic in Black American or Afro-American literature because it provided an instance in which a writer could be representative, could say, ‘My single solitary and individual life is like the lives of the tribe; it differs in these specific ways, but it is a balanced life because it is both solitary and representative.’”³⁵ The complications often experienced by writers around this notion of representativeness are demonstrated by Ernest J. Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Although it was published as a fictional autobiography, many readers believed it to be a real memoir. A Newsweek editor, asking Gaines for a photograph of Jane, was shocked to learn she was fictional, not real, though in fact Miss Pittman was inspired by the writer's real Aunt Augustine.³⁶

Roots shares many characteristics of African American autobiography. Much of the narrative follows the themes of slave narrative (the aboriginal autobiography). It follows the trajectory of those “deliverance” narratives that Henry Louis Gates Jr. claims were most common in early African American autobiography, and it shares the “captivity narrative” (with its pattern of bondage, flight, and freedom) that James Olney claims is the prototype of American autobiography by women and minorities. It covers that thematic triad common to southern black autobiography, from Olaudah Equiano and Booker T. Washington to Malcolm X: literacy, identity, and freedom. It also follows one man who—like Frederick Douglass and other male slave narrators—becomes epic hero and race representative bearing eye/I witness to the sufferings and fortitude of the race. Like many earlier African American autobiographies, it is written with simple clarity, in order to be both didactic and inspirational. The book ends with an account of the funeral of Alex Haley's father, attended by “members of the seventh generation from Kunta Kinte.” Haley hopes “that this story of our people can help to alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners” (639).

And, as I have already argued, like slave narrators of the mid-nineteenth century, Roots's author had to go on the defensive over authorship. Following in the slave narrators' footsteps, Haley toured the country telling his story to delighted and awe-struck audiences (on campuses rather than in abolitionist groups). Unlike those narratives, Haley's work was not published with many printed endorsements of white editors and abolitionists; on the other hand, it was produced with the heavy financial and moral backing, and continuing loyal support, of white patrons with international clout, such as Reader's Digest and Playboy.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., writing of the way in which “African American writing arose as a response to allegations of its absence,” focused strongly on black voice as “a voice of deliverance from the deafening discursive silence which an enlightened Europe cited as proof of the absence of the African's humanity.” In five of the earliest eighteenth-century slave narratives, he noted the repeated figure of the voice in the text (mainly the trope of the talking book, usually a Bible read aloud by a white master), which proved to the slave his own silenced and negated humanity. In order to challenge the “received correlation between silence and Blackness,” the slave has “the urgent need to make the text speak, the process by which the slave marked his distance from the master.”³⁷ This voice was one of deliverance and redemption, signifying a new order for the black.

A “CALL AND RESPONSE” EPIC

In Haley's Roots, the griot performs this function of offering the voice of deliverance and redemption. In the book's final chapter, the writer recounts his meeting with the griot, who recites for him the ancestral history of the Kinte clan “as it had been passed along orally down across centuries from the forefathers' time” (629). Significantly, it was recited “as if a scroll were being read.” Haley, moved deeply that this was his ancestors' story, bawled, feeling as if he was “weeping for all of history's incredible atrocities against fellowmen,” and then got on the plane and decided to write a book (632-633) This book, not just an account of his ancestral history, “would automatically also be a symbolic saga of all African-descent people.” The relationship here between the spoken word, the printed text (“scroll” and book), and the uncontrolled bawling bear out Gates's point that “the very face of the race … was contingent upon the recording of the Black voice.”³⁸ Or, as Toni Morrison says, “To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the Black a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body.”³⁹

It should be recalled that Roots was published fortuitously in the bicentennial year (many years later than its publisher's deadlines required), with a dedication in its frontispiece: “as a birthday offering to my country within which most of Roots happened.” The symbolic importance of such timely “participation in the dominant cultural body” cannot be exaggerated. It should also be recalled that Haley, while researching his family history, had spent many years on the lecture circuit, acquiring a considerable reputation as a storyteller and race chronicler. Speaking of Haley's “monologue” to campus audiences, Michael Kirkhorn says: “Through his lecturing, Haley has created an oral tradition of his own. The story of his ancestry is so intimately Haley's own story that Kunta Kinte seems almost his contemporary; bits of the narrative are threaded through his conversation.”⁴⁰ In recent years, the African American oral tradition has been at the forefront of critical writing. The modes of oral communication developed by slaves who were forbidden to read and write—work song, group secular, spiritual, field holler, folk tale, blues song—have been understood as crucial formations of black literary culture. Houston A. Baker Jr. reminds us of the first definition of vernacular: “adj: Of a slave.”⁴¹ The key element in this oral culture is “call and response,” or “antiphony,” in which the African American poet is empowered (like a black preacher) by the response he receives from his people. Call and response, according to Henry Louis Gates Jr., reenacts “the drama of finding authority through communal voice.”⁴² Toni Morrison echoes this when she speaks of black fiction needing to have “the ability to be both print and oral literature … so that the stories can be read in silence, of course, but one should be able to hear them as well.” For her, of primary importance is “the affective and participatory relationship between the artist or the speaker and the audience.”⁴³

With Alex Haley and Roots, this relationship of call and response has been extraordinary. The success of the work, on the lecture circuit, in literary form, and on TV, and the lasting fame of its writer are surely models of that “communal voice,” that “affective and participatory relationship” to which black writers and critics aspire. Whether or not Haley's Gambian griot was a cynical trickster exploiting a gullible black American, or a knowing colluder in a convenient myth, the fact is that Haley himself became the closest anyone has ever come to being an African American griot.

Even allowing for her romanticization of his quest, Mary Siebert McCauley's biographical study offers insights into Haley's persuasive and seductive ability to secure white patronage and finances, arouse enormous prepublicity excitement about his project, and then sell it and himself, ensuring his own personal wealth and international fame. Haley revered the African griots as living archives of oral history, and he emulated their techniques. After charming at a party the cofounder of Reader's Digest, he was invited to speak to her editors. McCauley describes the meeting: “Haley with his soft, accented Tennessee baritone voice, and with his low-key, boy-like shyness played griot for three hours as the editors listened spellbound.”⁴⁴ When he recounted, in lecture hall or interview, the dramatic experience of spending ten nights lying in his underwear on a rough board in the cargo hold of a ship sailing from Liberia to the United States, to empathize fully with Kunta Kinte's sufferings (an apocryphal story, according to some critics), he described the despairing contemplation of suicide at his inability to identify with his ancestor. “Just a millimeter from dropping into the sea,” he heard voices from nowhere calming him; he reports that these were the voices of his ancestors telling him to go on with his quest and his writing. This story ends with Haley returning to his ship stateroom and bursting into “a paroxysm of tears that lasted three or four hours.”⁴⁵ This visceral response is characteristic of a man who believed he was “a conduit” for a story that was willed by his ancestors and his God. Although he denied comparing Roots with the Bible, he certainly saw himself as part of a great oral tradition that includes Homer's Odyssey and the Bible. And, most significantly in terms of American culture, he identified himself as a southern storyteller. Referring to the South as “one of the richest areas in the country for stories,” he asked rhetorically, “What's more generic to the South than the old folks sitting on the porch telling stories?”⁴⁶

Indeed, the whole story of his search for roots, involving extravagant amounts of international travel, false trails, sudden revelations, self-dramatizing epiphanies, and moments of profound despair and great euphoria, itself constitutes a modern epic tale. Haley constructed himself as both epic hero and African American griot, whose “quest” (a word he and McCauley use repeatedly) came to symbolize that of all black America, indeed the whole of multiracial America at bicentennial time. Against the weight of this, reinforced by Haley's carefully orchestrated lectures anticipating and following publication, magazine articles, and international promotional trips, is it any wonder that the accusations of historical and factual inaccuracies, plagiarisms, and stylistic lumpenness have fallen on stony ground? Haley the griot provided a powerful link between ancient bard and contemporary rapper. As Willie Lee Rose said, “Roots had gone where grass roots are, and on some things the general public does not care for an expert opinion.”⁴⁷

SLAVERY, RACE, AND AFRICA: THE BLACK AND WHITE ATLANTIC

Experts have offered carefully euphemistic opinions. During the 1997 BBC exposé, a notable journalist, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, argued that since there was such a dearth of information about African American history, and because artists who tackled the subject had to bear a huge burden of responsibility, there was “room for licence here”; after all, Roots had “awakened the sleeping psyche of generations … who had been portrayed by and large as victims.” Henrik Clarke, a teacher of African history, also defended the work to a television audience: “For people short of heroes, sometimes we take the best we can get and sometimes exaggerate them a little beyond what they deserve to be. We don't always expect other people to understand this who have excess of heroes and excess of achievers.” So, either through defenses of this kind or through their silences, African American intellectuals have—for the time being—secured Haley's reputation and the longevity of his work. Roots has been largely let off the critical hook; it seems racist to elaborate on the book's use of stock characters, stilted dialogue, plantation novel stereotypes, and history-by-numbers, as well as the miniseries's tired Hollywood clichés and idealized treatment of Gambian and slave family life. Since as both literary and televisual work it has many aesthetic weaknesses and resorts to the most conventional of formal qualities, it is easy to dismiss as facile fodder for a mass audience that knew little and cared less about African American and southern history. And yet the story it tells, and the clear, simple direction it follows, can be said to chart and invite political, social, and racial identification and resistance, albeit registered at a personal, familial level. Its autobiographical call-and-response structure (clumsy and sentimental as it is) does address us as active thinking citizens, whatever our color or nationality.

The story of slavery—in Toni Morrison's memorable phrase, “not a story to pass on”—has been passed on by a man who opportunely exploited the fascination Americans have for black oral culture, the southern storytelling tradition, the stock plantation epic, and the family-and-success saga. In a year when America was looking backward and forward, eager for new versions of its history and myths for its future, Haley the griot, the right man in the right place at the right time with the right product, gave it what it wanted. The existence and constant circulation of Roots (and Queen) undoubtedly opened doors to other African American artists, scriptwriters, and filmmakers responding to a national and international thirst for narratives about black life and culture. Haley's voice—on the lecture circuit, in the autobiographical nonfiction/fiction, and via the medium of TV—spoke in the first person (albeit imperfectly and unreliably) to huge audiences on behalf of a still largely silenced race.

However, in terms of thinking through representations of slavery, race, and Africa itself, does this griot's grassroots text offer a radical or conservative agenda for African Americans and other readers and viewers? Roots is imbued with an Afrocentric vision that has been culturally dominant since the 1960s. Afrocentrism, or what Toni Morrison calls American Africanism, has been seen as “a cultural and ethnic awareness [African Americans] have collectively constructed for [themselves] over hundreds of years … a cultural umbilical cord connecting [them] with Africa.”⁴⁸ Alex Haley himself, speaking to Mary Seibert McCauley, traced his search for roots to the early 1960s and talked about blackness. “‘Black is beautiful.’ … [When I finished Malcolm X,] I began to hear about this whole exotic Africa thing and Africa as the motherland which had that sense about it, a sense of ancestry really in the sense of being the symbol source of Black people.”⁴⁹ The emphasis throughout Roots is on establishing where the characters and author came from and celebrating the strong ties and especially familial links across continents and between generations of African Americans. This is curious in view of the fact that both book and TV series record a catalog of family and generational ruptures and discontinuities and that it is now clear Haley was economical with the truth in relation to his own genealogical “quest.”

AN “AUTHORITARIAN PASTORAL PATRIARCHY”

Although Haley's search for his own roots was a protracted one, dependent on establishing a complex series of links between his grandmother in Tennessee and the Gambian village where he claims to have found his ancestral tribe, it slid quickly into something “typical” to all African Americans and thus the story of all. Haley said of Roots: “[It was] right out of my grandmother's mouth, and it turned out that what was coming out of her mouth is the story of all of us.”⁵⁰ He was happy to share his ancestor: “Now because of Roots many Blacks have said that Kunta Kinte, my forebear, has become their ancestor. And why not? Ancestrally every black person has the same pattern.”⁵¹ Confusingly, too, not just blacks. Haley goes on to say that all of us, black, brown, white, and yellow, share “a desire to make this symbolic journey back to the touchstone of our family.” His assertion was certainly correct in that one major consequence of the work's success was a huge rise in the number of people of all backgrounds making genealogical searches for their own roots.⁵² National news magazines ran stories on how to research the family tree; letters and applications to use the National Archives soared. Gambian tourism began to explode, as African Americans traveled to Africa to find their roots.⁵³Newsweek's cover story on that symbolic date 4 July 1977 was “Everybody's Search for Roots.”

This roots-mania was focused specifically on family history, as queries at the National Archives demonstrate, and the emphasis on family appears to have drowned out other major themes. The miniseries producer, David Wolper asked: “Do you really think that the image of Blacks fighting on the streets is more progressive than a strong, powerful family image of a Black family held together in love, honor and courage?”⁵⁴ Michael Blayney described Roots as “a child of the seventies” in the way its sentimental treatment of the family deflected attention from political concerns “toward heroic feats of individual characters,” allowing white as well as black sympathy with the extinct “noble African.” David A. Gerber underlined this interpretation of Roots as backward-looking, conservative text in his emphasis on its concern with family and—at a time of massive destabilization of family life—emphasis on “the triumph or survival of family ties amidst those forces which threaten them.” In discussing the rise of the postmodern heritage industry, David Harvey argued that

the preoccupation with identity, with personal and collective roots, has become far more pervasive since the early 1970s because of widespread insecurity in labour markets, in technological mixes, credit systems, and the like. … The television series Roots … sparked a wave of family history research and interest throughout the whole Western world.⁵⁵

He went on to note the irony that tradition is now “preserved by being commodified and marketed as such. The search for roots ends up at worst being produced and marketed as an image, as a simulacrum or pastiche.”⁵⁶

Haley's avowed intent was to bring people together, to speak of universals—and to do this through the family. In a Playboy article in March 1979 he argued, “I think that we as people—and I am talking about the world—badly need uplifting. We all have lineage and forefathers.”⁵⁷ His book would offer “uplift,” and furthermore he would go against the tendencies of the day and avoid “the use of obscenity and what [he'd] like to call corpuscular sex in writing” (i.e., no explicit sex scenes). Compare the endings of Malcolm X and Roots to observe the softened tone of the later work: in Malcolm, the final consideration is of X's role as “demagogue” and his pleasure at the thought he may die having helped “to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America.”⁵⁸ At the conclusion of Roots, Haley wallows in sentimental reflection on his “Dad” and all his ancestors who now “watch and guide” “up there.”⁵⁹

This emphasis on continuity through the family was praised by critics. James Baldwin, reviewing Roots in 1976, called it “a study of continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom or helps to liberate the coming one.”⁶⁰ Cornel West, though never mentioning Roots, argued that such emphasis was a radical necessity for the black community, whose very survival is at stake. For him, black Americans' foremothers and forefathers created “powerful buffers to ward off the nihilistic threat, to equip Black folk with cultural armor to beat back the demons of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness”; these were primarily religious and civic institutions sustaining “familial and communal networks of support.” West claimed that these networks had broken down irretrievably, replaced by the dominating cultural industries, and he argued for a new “politics of conversion” through a “love ethic.” The example he cited was Beloved, but it seems to me Roots is a better example of this “politics of conversion” at work—its accessibility and popular impact have been undeniably greater than the infinitely more complex and brilliant later novels.⁶¹

However, without reference to Roots, British critic Paul Gilroy usefully challenged what he calls “Americocentric obsession with family.” He objected to the pervasive symbolic projection of “race” as kinship and the fact that black Americans see the family as “the approved, natural site where ethnicity and racial culture are reproduced.”⁶² Arguing that this idea of black nationalism is dissociated from the politics of contemporary Africa, judging racial authenticity instead by “restored access to original African forms and codes,” he saw those definitions of authenticity as defined by ideas about nurturance, family, fixed gender roles, and generational responsibilities. In his view, this “authoritarian pastoral patriarchy” leads to an interpretation of black politics and social life as a crisis solely of black masculinity that can be solved only by instituting forms of masculinity and male authority. Such forms resist more diverse, indeed feminist, symbols of political agency and change and kinds of antiphony that move away from cultural roots (fixed places and families) to cultural routes (flows of black popular culture, best exemplified for him in musical performance culminating in hip-hop).

This argument is useful in rethinking the whole plantation novel tradition, from the conservative and white supremacist epics of The Clansman and Gone With the Wind through to Beulah Land, the novels of Frank Yerby, and indeed Roots and its sequel, Queen. In relation to Haley's best-sellers, this reading leads us to see the focus on male-dominated family, and Muslim familial continuity rather than racial fragmentation and discontinuity, as reinforcing a nostalgic and historically soft-focus patriarchal Afrocentrism, damaging for any radical African American and black Atlantic agenda. The “authoritarian pastoral patriarchy” of Juffure, translated as it is to America through the tormented figure of Kunta Kinte, whose threatened masculinity is the key problem of his enslavement, may be read as celebrating a very restricted patriarchal version of idealized black social and family community. Haley the African American griot offered a bland, universalized, sentimental version of America's racial past that obfuscated religious and national differences and thus allowed everyone to dig for roots. This may well account for the work's huge popular multiracial, international success. It allowed European reader-viewers to revel in this saga of specifically American slavery and race history and to decry American racism and injustices, while also feeling that Haley's own triumphant success reassuringly suggests the smooth progress of his race. It enabled white British readers and audiences to weep their way through this story while resisting, until very recently, the recognition of a black Atlantic agenda that foregrounds the central British role in the slave trade and the nation's shabby national agenda on race. It also explains why Haley and his Roots are now regarded as culturally dubious by many historians and journalists and indeed a considerable embarrassment to key African American intellectuals.

SO, SHOULD WE CELEBRATE ROOTS?

Yet, in terms of a black and white Atlantic and a transatlantic flow of cultural exchanges, it is hard to dismiss Roots as having served a merely conservative cultural purpose. If we think of the lasting, if somewhat tired, heritage of Gone With the Wind, which has kept alive an ideologically more dubious image of the black and white South, it is churlish not to celebrate the success of a work that offered an alternative version of southern history and a countermyth of slavery. America had long needed a black Gone With the Wind, especially at bicentennial time, when the nation was being redefined and rededicated. In that first decade after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, Roots was the ideal text, capturing the national imagination with its populist, upbeat narrative and style and its epic celebration of black pride, identity, and community. Other African American writers, such as Frank Yerby, Margaret Walker, Ishmael Reed, and Ernest Gaines, had produced works on the plantation theme, but Haley alone shared with his white predecessors Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thomas Dixon, and Margaret Mitchell a capacity to create a new myth for his times, and one that challenged and shifted—even if it could not overturn—the terms of that master narrative.

The iconic status of Roots gave a global audience a very different South, albeit one conservatively located in patriarchal American Africanism. It gave the American nation and the circum-Atlantic world a very southern fascination with, and flair for, genealogy and ancestral roots. And reparation, too: in 1998, Louisiana Cajun lawyer Walter Perrin issued a legal challenge to the British government, demanding an apology for the “ethnic cleansing” of French Acadians from Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1755. A fellow Cajun said, “I watched the re-run of Alex Haley's Roots on TV. I thought: hey what about my people?”⁶³ As Alice Walker said of the recirculations of her own family history: “We have the capability to connect to absolutely everyone and everything, and, in fact, we are all connected. … I discover that my family is like any other family in the world of our same class. When I write about my family, about things from the South, the people of China say, ‘Why, this is very Chinese.’”⁶⁴

Finally, Haley's family and community were black, with whites pushed to the margins and often shown in demonic (albeit caricatured) light. The ruptures and discontinuities of “his” ancestral line were demonstrably driven by the economics and politics of a slave system that was shown to be a shameful blot on American democracy and world history. In terms of recording, and giving imaginative life to, the long circum-Atlantic history of slavery, Roots deserves its success. Whether Alex Haley himself should be revered and celebrated is perhaps a different matter.

Notes

1. Quote from Willie Lee Rose, Race and Region in American Historical Fiction: Four Episodes in Popular Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 4; Alex Haley, Roots (1976; London: Hutchinson, 1977).

2. Joseph R. Millichap, “Television Movies,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 940; Michael Steward Blayney, “Roots and the Noble Savage,” North Dakota Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1986): 1; Bob Knight, “ABC Miniseries Shatters Records,” Variety, 2 February 1977, page unknown.

3. Leslie Fiedler, The Inadvertent Epic: From “Uncle Tom's Cabin” to “Roots” (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 71 and 72.

4. Harold Courlander, “Kunta Kinte's Struggle to Be African,” Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture 47, no. 4 (1986): 294.

5. Rose, Race and Region in American Historical Fiction, 5.

6. John Egerton, The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), xx.

7. L. Moody Simms Jr., “Albion W. Tourgée on the Fictional Use of the Post-Civil War South,” Southern Studies 17 (1978): 405-406, quoted in Robert O. Stephens, The Family Saga in the South: Generations and Destinies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 141.

8. Paul Gilroy, “Living Memory: A Meeting with Toni Morrison,” in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent's Tail, 1993), 178-179.

9. Judith Mudd, “Returning a Theft of Identity: This is Also Me: Two Indian Views of Roots,” Indian Journal of American Studies 10 (July 1980): 50.

10. Quoted in Murray Fisher, “In Memoriam: Alex Haley,” Playboy, 1 July 1992, 161.

11. Mary Siebert McCauley, “Alex Haley, a Southern Griot: A Literary Biography” (Ph.D. diss., George Peabody College for Teachers of Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, 1983).

12. Chuck Stone, “Roots: An Electronic Orgy in White Guilt,” Black Scholar 8 (May 1977): 40.

13. Black Scholar 8 (May 1977): 36-42.

14. Alice Walker, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult: A Meditation on Life, Spirit, Art, and the Making of the Film “The Color Purple” Ten Years Later (New York: Scribner, 1996).

15. A strong exception to this is a good discussion of the text in Stephens, Family Saga in the South, especially chap. 5.

16. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 101.

17. Mark Ottaway, “Tangled Roots,” Sunday Times, 10 April 1977, 17.

18. Sunday Times, 17 April 1977, 14.

19. Mark Ottaway to author, 2 February 1995.

20. Philip Nobile, “Uncovering Roots,” Village Voice, 23 February 1993, 32.

21. Bookmark: The Roots of Alex Haley, BBC2, 13 September 1997, dir. James Kent.

22. For instance, the authoritative, painstakingly compiled Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, edited by Wilson and Ferris (1989) includes approximately a dozen references to Haley and Roots without a whisper of the controversies surrounding it. None of the major African American literary critics (Henry Louis Gates Jr., Houston A. Baker Jr., Toni Morrison, bell hooks, or Hazel V. Carby) even cites the man, book, or phenomenon. He is excluded from the authoritative Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997). Maya Angelou and Michele Wallace make the odd reference to Haley (Angelou made her name by appearing in Roots; see chapter 6), but curiously, in an important collection of essays edited by Gina Dent, Black Popular Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), in which one might expect at least a mention, Haley is absent. He is the subject of various essays but never of a major scholarly project by an influential African American critic. David Shirley's study of Haley, in the “Black Americans of Achievement” series, is a largely descriptive account of Haley's life and career, and although it contains a short chapter titled “Backlash,” referring to controversies surrounding Haley's use of literary sources and his subsequent wealth, it is primarily (as its series title would suggest) hagiographical. Computer and library searches have yielded a surprisingly small amount of published material on the subject. David Shirley's biography is one of only two; the other is an unpublished Ph.D thesis.

23. Nobile, “Uncovering Roots,” 36.

24. Fiedler, Inadvertent Epic, 17.

25. Rose, Race and Region in American Historical Fiction, 2-3.

26. See Paul Gilroy, “A Dialogue with bell hooks,” in Small Acts, 208-209, on the silence of black nationalists on black popular culture: “To talk about popular culture, one has to confront the whole ‘contamination’ of supposedly pure African forms. Africa provided the critical substance for that process of mutation and adaptation we call creolization. The serious study of Black popular culture affirms that admixture in some way” (209).

27. Millichap, “Television Movies,” 940; Christopher P. Geist, “Roots,” in Wilson and Ferris, Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 972.

28. Fiedler, Inadvertent Epic, 62.

29. As Edward D. C. Campbell has argued, by the 1970s, in films and TV programs featuring blacks (Mandingo [1975], Drum [1976], the final episode of Roots [1977]), “Uncle Tom had become Nat Turner”; see The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 172. The fictional passive slave was replaced by representations of a real, violent revolting slave who owed no allegiance to white society. Other TV movies with a southern plantation theme had appeared in the 1970s. The year 1974 saw the adaptation of Ernest Galnes's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Cicely Tyson, who played Jane, also appeared four years later in a TV movie about black emancipationist Harriet Tubman, A Woman Called Moses (1978; Tyson also had a part in Roots). Freedom Road (1979) was a thin copy of Roots starring Muhammad Ali, and the moonlight-and-magnolias Beulah Land appeared in 1980. Roots itself was followed in 1979 by Roots II: The Next Generation, a twelve-hour miniseries, and Palmerston, U.S.A. (1980), a series based on Haley's youth in Henning, Tennessee.

30. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 50-51.

31. Jack Temple Kirby, Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 170.

32. Alex Haley and David Stevens, Alex Haley's Queen: The Story of an American Family (New York: William Morrow, 1993).

33. John Fiske, Reading the Popular (London: Routledge, 1989), 107.

34. Selwyn R. Cudjoe, “Maya Angelou and the Autobiographical Statement,” in Black Women Writers: Arguments and Interviews, ed. Marl Evans (London: Pluto, 1985), 6.

35. Toni Morrison in Evans, Black Women Writers, 339.

36. Ernest J. Gaines, “Miss Jane and I,” Callaloo 1 (1978): 23, quoted in Stephens, Family Saga in the South, 155.

37. Gates, Loose Canons, 62 and 63.

38. Ibid., 63.

39. Toni Morrison in Evans, Black Women Writers, 339.

40. Michael Kirkhorn, “A Saga of Slavery That Made the Actors Weep,” New York Times, 29 June 1976.

41. Houston A. Baker Jr., frontispiece to Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

42. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Black Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Methuen, 1984), 19.

43. Toni Morrison in Evans, Black Women Writers, 341.

44. McCauley, Alex Haley, a Southern Griot, 114.

45. Ibid., 212.

46. Ibid., 204.

47. Rose, Race and Region in American Historical Fiction, 6.

48. American Africanism is defined as “the denotative and connotative Blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people,” in Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 6-7; Manning Marable, in Dent, Black Popular Culture, 295.

49. McCauley, Interview with Alex Haley, 15 May, 1981, in Alex Haley, p.110.

50. McCauley, interview with Alex Haley, 17 July 1982, in “Alex Haley,” 212.

51. McCauley, interview with Alex Haley, 15 May 1981, in “Alex Haley,” 176.

52. One might suggest that this was a way in which Haley helped southernize the nation. During the conference, “The Configuration of Race in the South,” Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, September 1995, Paul Gaston remarked that he had arrived in Virginia thirty-eight years previously and asked what people did there; he was told, “They go climbing about the family tree.” Haley's success gave a new fashion to the whole nation for climbing that tree.

53. The BBC2 Bookmark program, The Roots of Alex Haley, featured considerable footage of black American tourists taking the Haley family “Roots Tour” of Gambia, wearing Western dress and carrying camcorders, welcomed by villagers to whom they reiterated, “We've come home.”

54. Quoted in Blayney, “Roots and the Noble Savage,” 13.

55. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 87.

56. Ibid., 303.

57. McCauley, “Alex Haley,” 179.

58. Alex Haley (with the assistance of), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965; London: Hutchinson, 1966), 501.

59. Haley, Roots, 639.

60. McCauley, “Alex Haley,” 173.

61. Cornel West, “Nihilism in Black America,” in Dent, Black Popular Culture, 40 and 43.

62. Paul Gilroy, “It's a Family Affair,” in Dent, Black Popular Culture, 310, 307.

63. Ed Vulliamy, “Fire in the Blood on the Bayou,” Observer, 8 February 1998, 11.

64. Walker, Same River Twice, 200-201.