SOURCE: Skaggs, Merrill Maguire. “Roots: A New Black Myth.” Southern Quarterly 17, no. 1 (fall 1978): 42-50.

[In the following essay, Skaggs compares Roots with Richard Wright's Native Son.]

The extreme popularity of Alex Haley's Roots, a book which seemed to reshape the literary image of blacks, suggests that the public was ready to reverse a whole cluster of attitudes toward black Americans, and to view blacks exactly as the book demanded. But, as William James remarked, “The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. … New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. … The point … to observe particularly is the part played by older truths. … Their influence is absolutely controlling.”¹

Probably no truths illustrate James's observation better than literary ones. But no recent, and apparently revolutionary, new view of a literary subject provides an apter single illustration of James's principle than does Roots. One must ask what the relationship is between Haley's new vision and the older American literary stereotypes it replaces. If Haley presents a new perspective on American blacks which is forceful enough to reverse familiar cultural assumptions, he nevertheless does so within an American cultural context. What are some of the older American cultural assumptions in which these roots are planted?

The first task is to identify the new elements in Haley's depiction of black life. The easiest way to do so is to compare Roots with Richard Wright's now classic Native Son. The two provide polar images of American blacks. One guesses first that the unparalleled popularity of Roots—both as book and as television special—might be explained by its ability to replace Wright's older and more threatening vision. Wright's Bigger Thomas is an enraged, murderous, and self-destructive victim. Haley's blacks present altogether more positive and more hopeful images. The eagerness with which the American public has welcomed Haley's new definition argues our need for a more comfortable way of viewing the black male. What I would like to examine here are some of the implications of Haley's new vision, first by outlining the stereotypic elements Haley establishes in his book, then by discussing the mythic purposes his book serves, and finally by suggesting some consequences of this more recent vision.

First we must realize that the importance of Roots does not depend upon its historical accuracy. Details about Haley's depiction of the African slave trade have been questioned by both American and British historians, particularly his presenting white men entering the bush to search for black captives. The initial kidnapping was done by blacks, we have been reminded, since whites were far too visible, clumsy, and therefore vulnerable, to dare to enter the African countryside. Roots has also been attacked for inaccuracies about Virginian agriculture, Haley's having the wrong crops growing in the wrong parts of Virginia, or cultivated in the wrong manner. More important, Haley's account of life in a Mandinka village has been called too idyllic.

The appeal of Roots, lies, however, not in the veracity of its historical details but in its elaboration of an heroic, male-centered myth about American blacks. I mean by myth, of course, a coherent set of beliefs or attitudes which shape perceptions and organizations of chaotic information. As myth, the book may be as crucial to a future understanding of American culture as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Gone With the Wind once were. In fact, Roots invites comparison to both those novels in two respects: first, for its extraordinary readability which makes its audience wide and gives it great power as a shaper of opinion and prejudice; and second, for the qualities which make it vulnerable to academic criticism, particularly its reduction of the complex to the simple.

When in his introduction Haley describes the careful structuring of his story line, he calls attention to the fact that half of this study of seven generations concerns the family's founder, Kunta Kinte. Haley's first concern is to describe the dignified self-sufficient, sorely tried, manly progenitor of his typical American black family. He takes extraordinary care with this figure, for Kunta must serve both as the founder of a race and as archetypal hero. In shaping the details of Kunta's life, Haley not only fashions a figure who fits the requirements of myth; he also systematically reverses virtually all of the negative traits associated with an American black male stereotype.

The first sentence of the book begins the mythifying process: “Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.”² Here Haley locates his future hero at a particular place and time and gives him a specific ancestry and parentage. No longer must the self-conscious American black simply start his own story, as best he can, in an alien country and a hostile culture. His genealogy is restored to him. More important, the first sentence signals the birth of a male child, for Haley's myth will glorify maleness. For the purposes of this new myth, an American black no longer need trace his line back through his mother, as was the practice in slavery days. The first thing Haley does is to put back the father and provide the patronymic, the full name of the son.

Kunta is not only an eagerly awaited child but also a first son—the child who traditionally inherits his father's kingdom. In addition to occupying this favored place in the family hierarchy, he has a carefully chosen name which will help him bring “credit and pride and many children to his family, to his village, to his tribe” (p. 3). Kunta exists not merely for the future, however, but also as a scion of the past's “distinguished lineage” (p. 3). He can boast, in fact, a particularly distinguished ancestry, for he descends directly from the hero who once saved Juffure from famine. In addition, he is part of a Mandinka empire first founded by a “slave general.” He is born into a village ruled by a council of elders and into a culture characterized by elaborate, traditional male patterns of authority. In spite of contrary village customs, however, Kunta is also supplied with a singularly fond and nurturing father. He responds by walking early—a sign of his personal strength and a promise of future exceptional physical skill. The child, in fact, comes to embody the best characteristics of his tradition, for “the dignity and self-command that his mother had taught him were the proudest traits of the Mandinka tribe” (p. 21). That tribe encourages his personal excellence and also transmits its folk wisdom through such maxims as “goodness is often repaid with badness” (p. 9). To this common sense is added formal education; for learning, reading, and writing are considered essential for Mandinka males (p. 24). In short, to Kunta Haley attributes everything American slaves were assumed to lack—a nurturing father, a cultural tradition, a proud family heritage, an honored social rank, a complex idea of social structure, a thorough education, and an exceptional personal pride.

As a mythic hero must, Kunta also represents the group whose best characteristics he illustrates. Thus “he had two selves—one within him, and the other, larger self in all those whose blood and lives he shared” (p. 99). We follow Kunta Kinte through the kafos, or age groups, of his early years and find that he shared with other boys the common struggles and overcomes the common hurdles of growing up. Though some readers find this section of Roots tedious, its details clearly establish the fact that Kunta's experience represents the common experience of his tribe.

The crucial ingredient of that context which Haley develops for his myth, however, is again its extraordinary emphasis on maleness. While manhood training in Juffure is “terrifying” (p. 40), to fail it is to remain a child (p. 88). No male who remains a child is allowed to marry. Mandinka men learn to identify themselves with fearlessness and honesty, knowledge and expertness. They also learn systematically to dissociate themselves from women, especially from their mothers. Thus “no men helped their wives” (p. 31), and “a woman was absolutely never allowed to disrespect a man” (p. 62). Kunta himself asserts his manhood by ordering his mother around—a gesture we are told she responds to with amused pleasure. Unless a wife in this culture can present “a strong counterargument,” a dissatisfied husband—with the permission of the council of elders—can divorce her simply by setting any three of her possessions outside her hut and saying, “I divorce you!” (p. 138). However circumscribing this world may have been for females, therefore, it is certainly a world which insists on male dignity and power. To prepare him for the authority he will eventually inherit, in fact, Kunta's father Omoro takes him while he is still a lad on a trip to the very borders of his world. When he later arrives on American shores to meet his destiny and found his dynasty, Kunta Kinte has a degree of sophistication, training for leadership, and proven merit rarely associated with slaves.

But the necessary fall or defining ordeal of a mythic hero cannot be imposed on him by forces over which he has no control. It must be triggered by factors within the defined world in order to be dealt with by a mythic system. A helpless, unwitting victim cannot be heroic. If he is to serve as archetypal model, Kunta Kinte's tragic fall must proceed from flaws within himself. The foreshadowing of his fate has been introduced by references to “black Slatee helpers” who capture slaves for the “toubob” and to the fact that “nine boys from Juffure had been taken” (p. 28). When Kunta is himself captured and taken away, it is because he has forgotten his lessons and has impulsively wandered alone into the bush, to look for wood for a drum. Kunta Kinte is thus captured and unwillingly descends—as the mythic hero must—into hell.

Haley's graphic descriptions of a slave ship's horrors evoke hell as overwhelmingly as any twentieth-century rendition has ever done. But the mythic motif of the descent into hell is part of a larger pattern involving separation, initiation, and return. For a mythic action to be complete, the hero must return from the other shore with the information his tribe needs of his soul's harrowings.

This pattern, I think, explains what is otherwise a rather puzzling ending to Roots. It answers the question, why doesn't the book end as soon as Haley can mention his own birth? The hero must return from the underworld, from the voyage, from hell. And that is what Haley himself symbolically does for Kunta Kinte when he goes, as Kunta Kinte's unbroken and unbowed descendant, back to Juffure. The fulfillment of the pattern is celebrated in Juffure's mosque when worshippers chant, “Praise be to Allah for one long lost from us whom Allah has returned” (p. 680). The psychological pattern is also completed for Haley when word of his arrival spreads to other villages and when his jeep is subsequently surrounded by happy children shrieking, “Meester Kinte! Meester Kinte!” (p. 681). He himself bursts into tears at this moment, he tells us, for he experiences in his own person Kinte's symbolic welcome home. The dark historic journey is over; its truths can be publicly acknowledged.

Before the happy ending, however, Haley must trace the intervening five generations which separate him from Kunta Kinte and must alter this myth to fit an American form. The need proves tricky to fulfill, though Haley's talents appear equal to it. One problem, of course, is that the part of Haley's story which occurs on these shores must be told within a fairly familiar historical context. To relate his family to the country's history, Haley devises one of his cleverest stratagems: house servants who are supposed to see nothing, hear nothing, and know nothing that would displease their masters surreptitiously listen to dinner table conversations and secretly read discarded newspapers. Thus at great personal peril they glean precious information about current events, which they then share in the slave quarters. In this way Haley makes plausible the slaves' knowledge of such figures as Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. He also arouses curiosity about other facts the slaves may have managed to learn. Through slave discussions, Haley can interpret historical events while he makes the historical facts seem fresh and interesting.

Before the personal, family or national history can proceed, however, Haley must redefine Kinte in order to make possible his survival as a slave. For the qualities a slave needed to flourish are in many ways opposite those needed by a Mandinka warrior. Initially, Kunta Kinte's disgust with the social practices he sees in Virginia establishes that this slave has fallen not only to a deprived caste but also into a degraded culture. When his fourth attempt to escape ends with mutilation, with slave catchers chopping off a foot to prevent future running, Kunta at age nineteen must learn that any life is preferable to no-life and that life might appropriately be defended through stratagems to which a Mandinka tribesman would not stoop. The lesson is long and painful, but through it all Kunta manages to preserve the dignity which makes him stand out as an exceptional personality. Like Joseph of Hebrew myth, in fact, he rises to a position of trust and importance in his master's house, because of his superior talents. Finally, he marries and fathers the baby girl Kizzy, who will transmit his line. Through this section of the chronicle, Haley continues to stress the ways in which Kunta Kinte reverses stereotypic assumptions about slaves: Kunta never truckles for favor or wheedles sycophantically; and he never descends to sexual promiscuity. When he marries at the age of 37 he is a virgin. Further, his marriage furnishes a way for Haley to make his family myth available to the widest number of American blacks; for we learn that Bell, Kunta's wife has had by a previous marriage two children who have been sold away from her. Thus any American black whose family line is still to be traced can posit a personal connection to the heroic family through Bell's lost children.

Bell herself is characterized as a mate appropriate to a heroic protagonist. In Bell, Kunta weds the most powerful black figure on his plantation, who herself can read and who can manipulate her master when it is convenient to do so. Haley insists (with dubious artistic success) that Kunta, if a slave, is still the slave of the best possible family—the Wallers, of English aristocratic stock, who distinguish themselves by their rigid code of honor. Finally, Kunta's courtship of Bell—and therefore his steps to establish a new and significant family—begins as the new American nation begins, at the time of the Revolution. Later, Bell's mourning over the death of the old gardener becomes both literal and symbolic mourning over the “daddy I ain't never seed” (p. 355). Haley tolls John Donne's bell as his mourners realize any death is partly their own, for they represent humanity.

Haley's narrative continues to ring with mythic overtones as each succeeding generation proves itself, in one way or another, to be characterized by the exceptional. Though her talents bring on family separation and disaster, Kunta's daughter Kizzy is reared in the big house, treated as a special pet, and educated beyond her station. After she forges a pass for her lover, then is caught and sold away to a master who rapes and impregnates her, her baby George quickly distinguishes himself by his clever tricks and amusing antics. George grows up to be his white father's highly trained lieutenant, entrusted with raising and training fighting cocks. Because of this interest George first travels to England and then returns to amass enough money to buy land for his family in Tennessee. George—a very troublesome figure for Haley because of his white blood, his foppery, and his sexual promiscuity—eventually cleanses the family line by marrying the blackest field hand who ever refused his sexual advances. And Matilda, George's wife, eventually delivers seven or eight children, the third or fourth (the numbers are confusing here) of which is Tom, Haley's great-grandfather. Great-grandfather Tom reembodies Mandinka traits, for he is a talented blacksmith. He eventually leads a family caravan which arrives in 17 wagons, to the “promised land” of Hennig, Tennessee. There Tom circumvents local customs forbidding blacks to establish a business and devises a mobile blacksmith's wagon by which he plies his trade so cleverly that his services are in demand and he is bothered by whites no more. His daughter marries Will Palmer, who makes a small fortune in western Tennessee's first black-owned lumber company. Palmer's daughter, in turn, marries a scholar headed for Cornell, in a lavish wedding which is the first social event in town to be attended by both races. That daughter leaves the Palmer's ten-room house with her student and eventually returns to present her delighted parents with her new baby—little Alex.

Through all the genealogical twists and turns, then, and whether as a slave family or a free family, each generation of Haley's forebears distinguishes itself. All prove worthy descendants of that initial heroic progenitor, Kunta Kinte. It is no wonder that this story is read with such satisfaction by so many. Haley's last sentence expresses the hope 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.” But his history is no exception. For Haley's family are winners to a man. And that is one of the most striking implications of this saga—that they are winners to a man.

In his stirring family history, Haley first excludes losers from the story and then equates winning with maleness. He further defines maleness in terms of the most traditional and familiarly macho American sexual stereotypes. His males control themselves, their families, and sooner or later, their enemies. Apparently this version of black history is what our culture wants most now. Such a view relieves the anxieties caused by Bigger Thomases and the white and black guilts caused by slavery. Those accomplishments are very gratifying. To construct this new, revisionist version of black history, however, Haley must downplay the losers of his story—who are often the women. So the focus shifts away from raped and degraded Kizzy almost as soon as Chicken George is born to replace her. It shifts so far away from George's wife Matilda, who bears and rears all of George's children alone, that we are totally unprepared to understand the briefly mentioned circumstances of her death: when Matilda's son Tom forbids one of his daughters to marry a mulatto, Matilda grows so violently angry that she dies of a stroke. Here is surely a scene from which passionate literature could be made; but these are not the passions Haley is interested in exploring. Even Irene, Tom's potentially intriguing wife, who can engineer her own marriage to another family's slave whenever and wherever she pleases, becomes, after marrying Tom, merely a charming female with a talent for decoration. The necessarily intervening females between Tom and Haley remain shadowy figures mentioned to account for a bloodline.

Despite his epic attempts to introduce a heroic male myth with which to describe black Americans positively, then, Haley leaves out half the horror and grief and agony which are part of this American story—the female part. Thus the most obvious consequence of developing, in so traditional a manner, a heroic black male myth is to present concomitantly an image of black females as passive, pliant, cooperative, supportive and historically irrelevant. This image of the female, white or black, is perhaps the most familiar American myth, the oldest “truth” of all. One can but hope that once his positive male image is secure, so talented a writer as Alex Haley will turn to face the actual and disturbing female story.

Notes

1. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), pp. 60-61.

2. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1976. Hereafter page numbers appear in the text.