SOURCE: Blayney, Michael Steward. “Roots and the Noble Savage.” North Dakota Quarterly 54, no. 1 (winter 1986): 1-17.

[In the following essay, Blayney discusses similarities between the Roots portrayal of Africans and the portrayal of North Americans as the mythical “noble savage.”]

Time Magazine called it “Haley's Comet.” Black readers hailed it as the most important event in civil rights history since the 1965 march on Selma, Alabama. In January, 1977, Roots was proclaimed the most popular television program in the medium's history, with the last of eight consecutive episodes reaching an unprecedented 90,000,000 viewers. Roots attracted a larger audience than such all time favorites as Gone with the Wind and the 1977 Superbowl.¹ Spurred by the television success, Alex Haley's novel went into fourteen printings after its initial publication in October, 1976. During and after the nights it was telecast long lines formed outside bookstores displaying Roots. Those too impatient to wait broke into bookstores to obtain copies of the bestseller. Haley was instantly transformed from writer into celebrity. The author's appearance at book parties frequently produced mile-long lines. Haley was deluged with fan mail, and he reportedly received about one thousand letters per week. Meanwhile, the American Broadcasting Company announced plans to air Roots Two, a production for 1979 which concentrated on the adventures of Haley's ancestors since the Civil War.² Juffure, the village of Haley's famous African ancestor, Kunta Kinte, rapidly became a shrine for boatloads of tourists, and Gambian President Dawda Jwara declared the village a national monument. In South Africa, Roots threatened to spark an international incident when the white government there openly voiced its fears that the showing of Roots by the United States Information Service might provoke race riots. Meanwhile, the novel has been translated into twelve languages and made available to twenty-eight countries. The mini-series has been broadcast in thirty-two countries.³

Despite the frequent criticism of Roots as a shallow melodrama, it has been granted academic respectability in 276 colleges and universities which adopted the novel as a standard part of the curriculum in black history. At least one Afro-American history text boasts Alex Haley as its consultant.⁴ Clearly, Roots is a significant phenomenon in American popular culture.

The almost universal acclaim the broadcast of Roots received startled its creators. In producing a period piece of slavery from the slave's perspective, ABC executives took a high-risk gamble. They feared that white audiences might refuse to watch a twelve-hour drama in which whites were consistently portrayed as villains against a group of heroic blacks. One reason well-known television personalities like Lorne Greene and Edward Asner were given parts was to counter a possible negative white reaction.⁵ Despite its heavily charged racial theme, Roots enjoyed a popularity rare for any television presentation. While one can easily understand why blacks hailed Haley as a “savior,” Roots' popularity among its larger white audience requires further explanation.⁶ It seems likely that Roots failed to appreciably affect white attitudes, and perhaps no novel or television program could hope to accomplish such an enormous undertaking.

Why then did the Roots phenomenon succeed in capturing the white imagination? To better understand the appeals of Roots for white Americans, we should consider the noble savage, that long-held romantic image of the American Indian. From the time of the earliest American settlements, whites, when not viewing Indians as agents of Satan, have frequently perceived the red man as living in harmony with nature, possessing deep spiritual wisdom and extraordinary courage. By contrast, blacks have been pictured as either comic Sambos or fiendish devils in literature and popular culture. Even the recent departure from some of the more vicious stereotypes since the end of the Second World War has failed to produce a black hero the stature of Hiawatha or Chief Joseph.⁷ It was not until the publication of Roots that Africans and the descendants of Africans for the first time became heroes in the tradition of the noble savage. The concept of the noble African is central to an understanding of Roots' appeal to whites, because unintentionally, both novel and broadcast provided whites with a safe Negro. Just as popular treatment of the legendary noble red man fails to address the contemporary situation of native Americans, so Kunta Kinte was palatable to white audiences precisely because of his failure to remind whites of the plight of contemporary blacks.

From the first white contacts with the New World, the American Indian has been romanticized. Christopher Columbus viewed Indians as innocent, kind, intelligent, and generous. Rationalistic philosophers of the eighteenth century invented the term noble savage as part of a larger attack upon the Christian doctrine of the fall of man. For these European philosophers, the Indian became an idealized “child of nature,” not the savage fiend and child of the devil depicted by American frontiersmen.⁸ The noble savage experienced a primitive, unburdened existence in the wilderness free from tyrannical government and class distinctions. His simplicity enabled him to live in harmony with nature and with his fellows. He was articulate, intelligent, and handsome. Being freer than civilized man, the noble savage was also happier. He was a stranger to the greed, materialism, and pretense of white civilization.

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson praised the political system of American Indians as having very little external coercive power. Since laws of nature were part of their normal condition, man-made laws did not need to be imposed from without. Jefferson also admired Indians because their society possessed no artificial class distinctions, and he speculated on the possible racial amalgamation between Indians and whites. On the other hand, Jefferson opposed any future racial union between whites and blacks. For Jefferson, noble savages were found only in America.⁹ For white Americans like Jefferson, much of the Indian's nobility grew out of his integration with nature. Throughout the early years of discovery and settlement, many Americans perceived America in Edenic terms. In a similar way, Europeans portrayed the new world as a Garden of Eden, a paradise on earth. Those who held the garden image also tended to view the Indian as a noble savage.¹⁰

The noble Indian spoke with an eloquence and a wisdom few white men possessed. Chief Logan's famous speech to Lord Dunmore, for example, was used in McGuffey's fourth and fifth-grade readers in the 1850s and 1860s. The speech taught white children Christian ethics and further served to idealize the American Indian.¹¹

No early American writer popularized the myth of the noble savage more than James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper's Leatherstocking tales offered nineteenth century readers two types of Indians: the savage fiend and the noble savage. While in no way minimizing the importance of the Indian as the devil in Cooper's works, characters like Satanstoe, Uncas, Chingachgook, Hard-Heart, and Rivenoak all perpetuated the noble savage myth in the popular mind. Cooper gave his noble Indians physical beauty and a keen intelligence.¹² Like the slaves in Roots, Cooper's Indians looked backward to an earlier age of glory. As a species already vanishing, at least some Indians could be sentimentally regarded.¹³ The hero Chingachgook, for example, emerges as a “brave and just minded Delaware,” respected by his “fallen people.”¹⁴ White civilization's depravity ultimately corrupts Cooper's Indian. The white man brings firewater which disrupts the Indian's harmonious integration with nature.¹⁵

Unlike their image of the American Indian, the image of Africans held by whites was conceived in almost wholly negative terms. Sixteenth century Europeans likened Africans to the apes which inhabited the Dark Continent. For Elizabethan Englishmen, a fine line existed between black people and anthropoid apes like the chimpanzee (“orang-outangs”).¹⁶ Like apes, Africans were thought of as lewd, wanton savages devoid of humanity. Similarly, Europeans imagined Africa a hostile, forbidding place inhabited by dangerous animals and an appropriate home for uncivilized men. Unlike America, the black man's home was never seen in idyllic paradisic terms. The black man was a savage, without nobility and a Garden of Eden. Perhaps for these reasons, Negroes were therefore fit only for the ignominious burden of slavery.

Despite his eighteenth century rationalist convictions, Thomas Jefferson found it impossible to place blacks on the same level, either intellectually or physically, with whites. Jefferson rejected environmental arguments for the intellectual equality of the races. Jefferson reluctantly concluded that Africans were therefore incapable of future intellectual growth. He favored African colonization, not integration, as the most desirable alternative to slavery, and opposed any future racial union between blacks and whites. Jefferson attributed the peculiar body odor of blacks to their skin glands which secreted more, and to their kidneys, which secreted less than whites. Even on a purely aesthetic level, Jefferson chose red and white rather than black as nature's most beautiful colors.¹⁷

James Fenimore Cooper's novels juxtaposed blacks to Indians. In The Redskins, the Littlepages' English servant observes that “the nigger grows uglier and uglier every year, … while I do think sir, that the Indian grows 'andsomer and 'andsomer.”¹⁸ Cooper believed that the black's intellect was also inferior to the Indian's, and because Indians possessed an integrity and independence surpassing blacks, the two were never natural allies. The common enemy, the white man, in no way made for common interest between the two races. For Cooper, the lack of nobility in the black man's character meant he could never rise to the level of the noble savage. The Indian's death provided another source of nobility over the African, for even though the red man was destroyed physically, he endured spiritually while the black man merely survived on a physical level.¹⁹

White Americans during the nineteenth century often viewed the Negro as entertaining, but never as noble. Negroes figured largely in the popular culture of the early republic. The nineteenth century minstrel show, which accurately mirrored the common man's thinking, portrayed blacks as comic Sambo figures. The minstrel show served important cultural and psychological needs for their white audiences. Minstrels created “a ludicrous Northern Negro character that assured audience members that however confused, bewildered, and helpless they felt, someone was much worse off than they were.” Minstrel shows provided a non-threatening view of race at a time when race threatened the Union, while at the same time helping to justify racism.²⁰

In the twentieth century, a new form of popular culture, the motion picture, continued to deny black nobility. David Wark Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) was in many respects the first modern motion picture. This hundred-thousand dollar spectacle achieved unparalleled heights of screen realism. Griffith boasted “magnificent settings, gorgeous costumes, thousands of actors and smiles, tears and thrills.” In The Birth of a Nation the Negro was portrayed as a brute whose demonic instincts were unleashed with emancipation. Freedom for blacks during Reconstruction ended in tragedy as freedmen attempted to soil the purity of white womanhood. Only the dramatic intervention of the Ku Klux Klan at the film's climax saved the white South and reconciled the two sections.²¹

With the advent of the talkies, negative black stereotypes were heard as well as seen. Two popular types in the 1930s were “coons” and “Toms.”²² “Coons” were lazy, good for nothing and shiftless, and were constantly getting into trouble. The best known “coon” of the 1930s was Stefin Fetchit, who became the most successful Negro in Hollywood. Stefin Fetchit was laziness and ignorance personified. His performances followed in the tradition of the nineteenth century minstrel characters, for the characters he played lacked humanity, much less nobility.

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the most famous “Tom” of the era, frequently co-starred with Shirley Temple. Unlike Stefin Fetchit, “Uncle Billy” was well-mannered and always knew his place. Robinson delighted Shirley by dancing for her. He was both intelligent and reliable.²³ For white audiences, he represented a safe, if hardly noble, Negro.

By the end of the thirties the black Hollywood image underwent considerable improvement. Negro characters in Gone with the Wind (1939) were a far cry from those in Birth of a Nation. In Gone with the Wind Hattie McDaniel turned in an exceptionally strong performance as the mammy of the O'Hara household. As both counselor and manager, she was much more than a fawning servant. McDaniel became the first black to receive an Oscar, an honor which divided liberals, some of whom objected to her demeaning servant role. Yet even those who found her role demeaning found it difficult to criticize her Oscar.²⁴Gone with the Wind represented a turning point in which Negroes began to take more attractive roles in films. Like McDaniel, however, most continued in traditionally inferior roles.

Despite improvement during and following the Second World War, the black image in American film remained fundamentally dissimilar from white perceptions of Indians as noble savages.²⁵ War against a racist power necessitated opposition to racism at home. Typical of the improved image was Dooley Wilson as Sam, the piano player in Casablanca (1942). Following the war Home of the Brave (1949) became the first movie to attack white bigotry openly. In Lost Boundaries (1948) whites rejected a light-skinned Negro family that passes as white in a small New England community. Their race is finally discovered, and white friends turn against them until the town's minister persuades the community to accept the family.²⁶

In the 1950s and the 1960s individual stars and movies with racial themes won white audience approval, but none captured the white imagination like Roots. Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Richard Roundtree, and Pamela Greer enjoyed widespread popularity among whites,²⁷ but none of these stars performed in any motion picture whose popularity matched Roots.

Roots was the first popular treatment of the Negro which removed him from his American setting. The story of Roots begins with noble primitives in an African Eden, far removed from racial tensions. Africa, not America, assumes an idyllic character where prior to the coming of the evil white man, innocence and harmony prevailed. “The boys and girls alike scampered about as naked as young animals … all like Kunta, were growing fast, laughing and squealing as they ran around the giant trunk of the village baobab, played hide-and-seek, and scattered the dogs and the chickens into masses of fur and feathers.”²⁸

The child Kunta is at one with nature, chases rainbows and monkeys, and is nurtured by loving and wise parents. In the television version of Roots, Mandinka women in Kunta's village went about bare breasted. According to executive producer David Wolper, this was not only to achieve historical authenticity, but to create a “Garden-of-Eden” effect in which Africans lived innocently in harmony with nature.²⁹ Far from a “Dark Continent,” Haley describes Africa as a lush garden whose beauty is destroyed by the coming of white men. Years later, when Kunta is enslaved in America, his favorite spot on the Waller plantation is a place which reminds him of the African landscape. The Africans in Roots clearly possess superior moral character to whites. Haley makes clear that the source of this virtue is Africa. As the American wilderness provided the source of the Indian's nobility, so the African jungle bequeaths nobility of character to Africans. From childhood Kunta learns morality from his elders. All children in Juffure are required to ask any adult they meet, “Do you have peace?” Whereupon the adult replies, “Peace only.” Like Jefferson's Indians, Haley's Africans hold no social distinctions. Each child learns that in Juffure that everyone, regardless of age or rank, is equal to everyone else. All must therefore be treated with respect. The code of respect even extends to all animals of the jungle. Kunta also learns that to speak anything but the truth is unthinkable. It naturally follows that since “there never seemed any reason for him to lie, he never did” (20-21, 147).

The practice of human slavery by Africans does not trouble Haley, for slaves too, are treated with respect (52-55). African slaves were either the children of slaves or former enemies of a tribe captured in battle. In stark contrast to white slavery, all slaves of Juffure are respected by the community. Furthermore, since color never presented a barrier between master and slave, a slave might win his freedom by marrying into his master's family. No African slave could be sold unless he approved of his new master. Indeed, the Mandinka Empire was founded by a slave of noble character, a crippled general who led an army of runaway slaves. In contrast to the toubob's (white man's) slavery, Africans treat their slaves with a humaneness which befits the nobility of their culture.

Once Kunta Kinte is captured by the toubob and begins life as a slave, the character he learned as a boy remains his inspiration. An earlier African golden age, before his primitive and simple life in Juffure was disrupted, becomes Kunta's moral reference point for the rest of his life. Only by harking back to his African beginnings, his roots, does he avoid being corrupted from a noble African Mandinka warrior into a “nigger,” an African ignorant and cut off from his noble heritage. In the teledrama, resistance to slavery begins on the Lord Ligonier, the ship that takes Kunta away from paradise to America. The wrestler urges every man on board to learn the language of his neighbor and to “be as one village.” Female chastity is difficult to preserve on a slave ship. Fanta, a girl from Kunta's village, shocks him by revealing that she is no longer a maiden. Other maidens refuse to succumb to whites so easily. One slave woman on board commits suicide by jumping overboard rather than submitting to one of the white crew.³⁰ Another dimension of Kunta's noble African heritage is profound wisdom implanted in him as a child and young man, by village teachers and elders. Like the red man, integration with nature has made the African wise. Omoro, Kunta's father, teaches his son the lesson of caution when he learns Kunta has frightened away a leopard with a slingshot full of mud. After a good scolding Omoro explains to Kunta that the lesson of this encounter is never to charge a dangerous animal. The village Kintango, or teacher, who instructs the boys in manhood training, similarly imparts valuable lessons for life. Here too, Mandinka humanity is emphasized. The Kintango explains:

For a warrior, courage is not enough. The goal of war is to win; not to kill. It is impossible to kill an enemy. You may end a man's life, but his son is now your enemy. The Mandinka way is life and peace. … Strength and compassion are not antithetical but complimentary.³¹

Kunta brings these and other lessons to America. On the death of a slave on the Waller plantation, Kunta is reminded of the wisdom of his father when his grandmother died: “There could be no sorrow without happiness, no death without life” (358). Kunta considers explaining this to his wife, Bell, but since she has been “civilized” by American culture, he concludes she would not understand such profound wisdom.

Like the white settlers of North America, slave traders violently disrupted the harmonious relationship between the noble savage and nature. For Haley, an African corrupted becomes a “nigger” just as for Cooper an Indian without nobility becomes an ‘injun.”³² Thus, as a slave Kunta's only hope, his only inspiration, is Africa. Africa likewise remains the guiding light through the darkness of slavery for Kunta's descendants. The family's African roots are passed on from one generation to the next so they may know their true identity. Like noble Indians their true identity lies buried deep in the past, in a golden age long before white corruption. The story of Roots, the story of Haley's family, is thus a three hundred year struggle to keep the meaning of a noble past alive. Throughout both novel and drama, enough of noble African character triumphs over the Americanized “nigger” so that the family survives slavery, spiritually as well as physically.

When Kunta decides to escape from the Waller plantation, his initial impulse is to return to Africa. He tries to recall maps of Africa he saw as a boy and the great body of water which forms the unbridgeable gap between the ignominious life of slavery and the noble existence of a Mandinka warrior. Contemplating his escape, Kunta recalls the ancient legend of Sundiata, the great Mandinka hero who as a crippled slave (Kunta himself will shortly have a foot cut off by slave catchers) led a massive slave revolt which founded the Mandinka Empire (241-42).

Freedom is thus defined in terms of Africa. When Kunta attempts to escape, Haley describes “foliage so dense that in some places even his knife wasn't stout enough to clear a path,” and several times and after stopping to sharpen his knife “he suspected that the constant slashing at twigs, bushes, and vines had begun to sap his strength.” The closer Kunta comes toward freedom, the deeper and deeper into the forest (the jungle?) he plunged (619-20). Courage alone, however, was insufficient, for Kunta could not return to Africa and become a Mandinka warrior again. He was caught by the toubob and returned to the Waller plantation as a slave.

Later generations of Haley's family define freedom in African terms as well. White promises are usually received with doubt. The Murrays, for example, must see before they believe the Emancipation Proclamation. Chicken George, Kunta Kinte's grandson, when asked for a definition of freedom by his grandson, begins by telling the boy where the family came from. Tracing the generations back to the noble African, Kunta Kinte, Chicken George explains that only Africa and the times before slavery were truly free (241). As the white man brought death to Indians so he brought slavery to Africans. Like the noble Indian, the African's freedom is rooted in nature, in the wilderness and in a primitive and uncorrupted existence. For Haley, the golden age for the black man is the distant past, before whites intruded upon African paradise.

For slaves, a knowledge of their African ancestors becomes a new source of dignity and pride. In Juffure, names of noble forefathers are recited before Kunta Kinte is named. One line from the infant Kunta's lullaby takes pride in his being “named for a noble ancestor” (3, 6). The village Kintango lectures Kunta on the duty to honor his forefathers. On board the slave ship, Kunta envies slaves who have been thrown overboard, for they have gone to join their ancestors (180).

Kunta continues to assert his heritage in America by consistently rejecting the white man's religion. Even as a slave, Kunta seldom misses his evening prayer to Allah. Christianity holds little appeal for him. Kunta feels only contempt for white church services both because the congregation is at once both listless and overly emotional. Kunta also reasons that any god who demands the rite of baptism as the price of his favor is incredibly cruel, and he is mortified when his own daughter is baptized (207-08).

The birth and baptism of his first child only strengthens Kunta's resolve to resist the white man's power. Although delighted by the prospect of becoming a father, he is incensed at the prospect of his offspring playing with white children (337-38, 343-44, 340). Kunta first defies the master by naming his daughter Kizzy, thus giving her an African rather than a slave identity. Despite the debilitating experience of slavery, Africa's noble heritage now begins its inexorable passage into the future. Kunta observes all African birth rituals with Kizzy including letting the infant be the first to hear her name. He also presents Kizzy to the heavens, as he was presented, and in Mandinkan tells her: “Behold, the only thing greater than yourself!” Although Kunta is discouraged that Kizzy's African grandparents will never know her, he is reassured “in the knowledge that the blood of the Kintes, which had coursed down through the centuries like a mighty river, would continue to flow for still another generation” (375, 384-85).

Each succeeding generation passes on the knowledge of their African heritage to the next. Knowledge of their true heritage gives Kunta Kinte's descendants the necessary strength of character to resist the cruelties and indignities of slavery. Kunta teaches Kizzy not only African words and the stories he learned as a child, but instills in her the pride of knowing who she is—the daughter of a noble Mandinka warrior. Kizzy's son, Chicken George, likewise passes on the heritage to his offspring. The story of Kunta's enslavement by the toubob, the African words and the knowledge that the family is descended from strong, courageous African tribesmen help them to survive slavery. Tom Murray, who represents the last generation in the story, continues the tradition by telling the story of the noble African to his children.³³ Without the previous knowledge of noble ancestors, however, most slaves remain “niggers.” Kunta and his descendants have contempt for blacks who willingly do the white man's bidding. Clearly, the reason slaves act like slaves is that they have lost touch with Africa:

Kunta couldn't fathom what had happened to so destroy their minds that they acted like goats and monkeys. Perhaps it was because they had been born in this place rather than in Africa, because the only home they had ever known were the toubob's huts of logs glued together with mud and swine bristles … no matter how long he stayed with them, Kunta vowed never to become like them, and each night his mind would go exploring again into ways to escape from this despised land.

(220)

These blacks lack the nobility of character which comes from a realization of being descended from the noble African. To Kunta, the slaves “looked as Africans looked but clearly they were not of Africa.” They were like a lost tribe in the wilderness of America. They were pagans, and even ate the meat of the pig (201-02, 211). Kunta must, of course, develop some friendships with other slaves. He becomes a good friend of Fiddler and marries Bell, but inwardly he is aware he can never really be one of them any more than they can be like him. He must remain an African until the day he dies. Kunta vows that “his dignity must become as a shield between him and all those who called themselves ‘niggers.’ How ignorant of themselves they were; they knew nothing of their ancestors, as he had been taught from boyhood” (306-07).

The marked contrast between the slave and the noble African is later seen in Kizzy's love affair with Sam. Sam's master is willing to buy Kizzy from her master, Tom Moore, so the couple might marry, but their relationship grows tense when Kizzy protests Sam's obsequiousness toward whites. All is in readiness until after Kizzy and Sam return late from a visit to Kunta Kinte's grave. Sam's master becomes furious. After Sam's master threatens to make Sam a field hand, the slave literally begs on his knees before Massa Bennett. This is too much for the daughter of Kunta Kinte; the marriage is off. Later Kizzy tells Chicken George: “Sam was not like us.”³⁴ The gulf between slave and noble African thus continues generation after generation.

Roots not only dealt with niggers and noble Africans but with whites as well. Throughout the entire drama and novel, all white characters, with one exception, are villains worthy of the most crude nineteenth century melodrama.³⁵ Whites represent evil because through slavery they have destroyed the noble African and in his place bred a race of “niggers.” Kunta discovers white treachery early when he learns that the toubob often betray their black accomplices after Africans are enslaved. For Haley, the crime of slavery corrupted African tribes by offering money to some to sell other Africans. Since in Roots the African is by nature good, he is easily disarmed by white treachery. Juffure's Kintango tells the young Kunta:

Greed and treason—these are the things toubob has given us in exchange for those he has stolen away. … Even worse than toubob's money is that he lies for nothing and he cheats with method, as naturally as he breathes. That's what gives him the advantage over us … [Kunta asked] “Will toubob ever change?” “That will be … when the river flows backward!”

(121)

Whites are consistently pictured as ugly as compared with Africans. The whites on the deck of the slave ship, for example, “looked even paler and more horrible to Kunta than they did below. With faces pitted with the pock marks of disease, scarred from knives, a hand, eye or limb missing, and many were toothless, and their skin the color of the swine” (219). In Roots, white men constantly lust after black women. When Kunta sees toubob women, he understands why whites prefer Africans. The noble African finds white women ugly to the point of revulsion. Kunta also believes whites have a peculiar, offensive odor, and at times he even has difficulty in seeing whites as human beings (192, 200, 289). Throughout Roots, whites lack both the nobility of mind and the grace of body of Africans.

Although Indians play no central role in Roots' plot, Haley briefly considers them at two points in the novel. In both instances, the common experience of the two peoples is stressed. In the first instance, we are informed that the Fiddler, escaping after his former master mysteriously drowns, “Hid out with the Injuns 'til I figured it was safe to leave an' git here to Virginia an' keep on fiddlin'.” Fiddler praises the extraordinary hunting and scouting abilities of the red men with whom he lived. Although Fiddler readily admits that “some Injuns hates niggers,” what is more significant are the marked similarities between the red man and black man. Fiddler understands that the manner in which Indian mothers carry their babies is identical to the method of African mothers. Fiddler believes that the experience of African and Indian with the white man has been identical. “Y'all Africans and Injuns made de same mistake—lettin' white folks into where you live. You offered him to eat an' sleep, then first thing you know he kickin' you out or lockin' you up!” (270).

The second reference to the Indian occurs much later when blacks profess even more sympathy for the American Indian. On one of his frequent trips with the massa, Chicken George learns that the chief of the Seminoles, Osceola, accompanied by his Negro wife, has led a war against whites, in Florida. Osceola, whose army recruited escaped slaves to attack the United States Army, thus becomes a symbol of courageous rebellion for Haley's blacks. The implication is that the renegade chief is every bit as heroic as Kunta Kinte (537).

Later, Chicken George learns the federal government has decided to drive all Indians west of the Mississippi River. Again, blacks express sympathy for the red man and none more eloquently than a slave named Uncle Pompey:

“Dat's what Indians gittin' for lettin' in white folks in this country in de firs' place, … Whole heap o' folks, 'cludin me til I got grown, ain't knowed at firs' weren't nobody in this country but Indians … jes mindin' dey own business. Den here come li'l ol' boat o' white folks a-wavin' an' grinnin'! ‘Hey, y'all red mens! How 'bout let us come catch a bit an' a nap 'mongst y'all an' les be friends?’ Huh! I betcha nowdays dem Indians wish day's made dat boat look lide a porcupine wid dey arrows!”

(537-38)

In Roots, both the blacks and the native Americans face a common white enemy which give them a common experience. Believers in the noble savage myth like Cooper stressed differences between red men and black men. Haley, a believer in the noble African, could not help but see fundamental similarities.

The new image of the Negro presented in Roots represents an important turning point in the history of American popular culture. Gone were not only the previous stereotypes of “tom” and “coon” but more recent integrationist heroes like Sidney Poitier. They were replaced by the noble African—a new hero whose courage and purity of heart came from the African bush in much the same fashion that the American wilderness inspired the noble red man. Kunta Kinte resembles characters like Uncas and Chingachgook more than any previous black characters. His African heritage, his roots, set him apart from both his fellow slaves and his white oppressors. The memory of the simple, virtuous and free life Kunta experienced in Africa becomes a kind of golden age for the American Negro and provides Kunta's descendants with the self-respect to withstand the brutalities of the peculiar institution. In time, they too become noble Africans rather than “niggers.”

Many hailed Roots as a tonic for improving race relations, but it is highly doubtful that either the television program or the book altered white perception of blacks in the slightest. How then does one explain Roots' overwhelming popularity among whites? Perhaps producer Wolper provided a clue in a recent interview in which he saw the program as building a positive black self-image:

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? There is more … courage in that family than in all the Black stories I saw in the sixties. I hate to tell you that, but that is my opinion about it. I think it's Alex's too. I saw blacks fighting back—I saw every generation refusing to give up their African heritage within that piece no matter how much the white man tried to drive it out of them.³⁶

If this theme made an impression on blacks, why not on whites? Wolper correctly saw Roots as a child of the seventies. The emotional letdown of the sixties coupled with a growing disillusionment with the efficacy of politics might help to explain why a story set in the distant past might have great appeal. In Roots, a white audience despised villainous slaveholders and wept for slaves. The slave trade has been abolished; the Civil War's bitter legacy is largely forgotten; even the racial violence of the 1960s has faded from the popular mind. Like Cooper's novels, Roots looked backward for its inspiration. Just as whites could afford to admire Indians after the red man was safely placed on reservations, so Roots introduced whites to a black man who in no way threatened the whites, a safe Negro. White audiences enjoyed Roots because it never raised troublesome questions like bussing or black unemployment. Because whites never felt threatened by the noble Africans in Roots, they enjoyed the drama despite the portrayal of blacks as morally superior characters to whites.

Recent interest in the history and culture of the American Indian provides an illuminating parallel to the Roots phenomenon. Vine Deloria, Jr., has aptly noted that most white Americans are more sympathetic toward Indians of the last century than toward contemporary native Americans. Deloria ironically notes that at the same time Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was selling 20,000 copies a week, Indians in Washington State were divested of their fishing rights on the Nisqually River.³⁷ Deloria concludes that the Indians Americans most love are those who no longer exist.

Deloria seems almost to anticipate Roots by suggesting how absurd this schizophrenic image would seem when applied to the recent history of the civil rights movement. Suppose, says Deloria, that all of Martin Luther King's efforts to combat segregation were met by whites interested only in slavery and the culture of African tribes in the 1300s. Deloria's scenario continues with King losing support while Bury My Heart at Jamestown receives wide acclaim, and the descendants of slaves become overnight celebrities.³⁸

Deloria drew the parallel to show how the Indian movement is handicapped, but Roots has made him a prophet. By focusing on the distant past and by introducing an entirely safe black character, Haley's work provided a safe discharge for white guilt. Roots thus fit in perfectly with the mood of the seventies. Roots has frequently but incorrectly been compared to Uncle Tom's Cabin.³⁹ Harriet Beecher Stowe addressed herself to the most burning contemporary issue of her time. A book comparable to Uncle Tom's Cabin today would arouse interest in a contemporary theme like reservation life or black unemployment. A better comparison might well be drawn between Roots and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, although Brown's work is respectable history rather than “faction.”

The saga of Alex Haley's ancestors became the most popular presentation in the history of television not because it inspired black pride (although this may have certainly been the case) but because it struck a responsive chord in its ninety per cent white audience. Furthermore, Roots was a child of the seventies because its sentimental treatment of the family shifted attention away from political concerns toward heroic feats of individual characters.⁴⁰ Because the noble African, like the noble Indian before him, was extinct, white viewers felt free to sympathize and even identify with a set of non-white heroes. White sympathy for contemporary blacks, however, remains low. This is certainly not to indict Roots or any other piece of entertainment for its failure to cure racism, but merely to suggest possible reasons for Roots' overwhelming popularity. Witness the same kind of dichotomous thinking in the prevalence of country club anti-Semitism alongside unswerving American support for Israel. One might well lament how little white attitudes toward blacks have changed since the days of the minstrel show and D. W. Griffith. Roots again demonstrates the persistent tendency for whites to look upon racial minorities in abstract, stereotypic terms, rather than as complicated human beings.

Notes

1. “Why Roots Hit Home,” Time (February 14, 1977), 69-71. David L. Wolper, The Inside Story of TV's “Roots” (Warner Books Inc.: New York, 1978), 143.

2. Wolper, Inside Story, 131-33.

3. Wolper, Inside Story, 168. John Darnton, “‘Roots’ Village Grows into Gambian Mecca,” (New York Times, April 14, 1977), 12. “Roots in South Africa,” Newsweek (May 15, 1978), 3.

4. Time critic Richard Schickel, for example, called the television production “Mandingo for Middlebrows.” See “Why Roots Hit Home,” Time (February 14, 1977), 70-71. The Afro-American history text is an anthology edited by Mildred Bain and Erwin Lewis, From Freedom to Freedom: African Roots in American Soil (New York: Random House, 1977).

5. Wolper, Inside Story, 56-57.

6. This is not to say that whites did not watch Roots for other reasons. Roots sent many whites, as well as blacks, off in search of their ancestors. Since the Roots phenomenon, interest in genealogy has markedly increased. Recently, the Mormon Church recognized Haley's role in reviving genealogical interest, and Brigham Young University awarded the author an honorary doctorate.

7. Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World: American Culture, The Formative Years (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 15-16; Hoxie N. Fairchild, The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928). Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935), Ch. 1.

8. For a good description of “the savage fiend,” see Jones, O Strange New World, 51-61, 171-73; and Louise K. Barnett, The Ignoble Savage.

9. William Peden, ed., Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955); Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 174 ff.

10. Jones, O Strange New World, 18-19. Fairchild, Noble Savage, 6.

11. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), 75; Fairchild, Noble Savage, 452.

12. Kay Seymour House, Cooper's Americans (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), 71 ff; James Fenimore Cooper, The Works of James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969). Cooper imputes great wisdom to the Delawares. One will not, he says, “find them running into a strange camp with their eyes shut.” Works, The Deerslayer, 232. On the physical beauty of Indian women see Works, The Deerslayer, 96.

13. Roy Harvey Pearce, “Civilization and Savagism: The World of the Leatherstocking Tales” in Leatherstocking and the Critics, ed. Warren S. Walker (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1958), 62-64.

14. Cooper, Works, Deerslayer, 15.

15. Cooper, Works, The Last of the Mohicans, 18.

16. Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 24-32. When Englishmen made their first African contacts they were amazed to discover tailless apes which walked about like men. The creature they call the “orang-outang” was actually the chimpanzee, which was prevalent in those areas of western Africa where the slave trade flourished.

17. For a more detailed explanation of Jefferson's prejudices, see Jordan, White Over Black, 436-40.

18. Cooper, Works, The Redskins, 307.

19. House, Cooper's Americans, 71, 85.

20. Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 272.

21. Daniel J. Leab, From Sambo to Superspade (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 61; David Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, and Bucks (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 10-14. The technical excellence of the film incensed black critics all the more. For the black reaction see Thomas Cripps, “The Reaction of the Negro to the Film Birth of a Nation” (The Historian, May, 1963), 344-62; and “Fighting a Vicious Film” (Boston: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1915).

22. I have taken this typology from Bogle, Toms, who sees the black characters in films largely in terms of white stereotypes, 39-41, 42-43.

23. Bogle, Toms, 42-50.

24. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 361-64.

25. The change is discussed in Edward Mapp, Blacks in American Films (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1972), 29-33.

26. Cripps, Slow Fade, 370-73; Mapp, Blacks, 37; Bogle, Toms, 147-48.

27. The stars of the fifties and the sixties and their films are discussed in Leab, From Sambo to Superspade, 197-263.

28. Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976), 8. Subsequent references will appear in the text.

29. The televised drama differed considerably from Haley's novel. In the novel, the adventures of Kunta Kinte and his descendants comprise the entire plot. The novel is told from the black man's perspective throughout. The book is also more concerned with Kunta, who because of his African experiences more nearly approximates the noble African than any of his descendants. Because of these differences, I have used David Wolper and Quincy Troupe, The Inside Story of TV's “Roots” (New York: Warner Books, 1978) as a reference for the television program. The volume contains a synopsis of each televised episode as well as lengthy quotations from the lines of important characters. Characters in both the novel and the drama show marked similarities to earlier treatments of the noble savage in American fiction.

30. Wolper, Inside Story, 219-22. One might well argue that race roles have come full circle here. In Birth of a Nation, a white maiden who is chased to the edge of a cliff by a lustful black prefers suicide to defilement. For a thoughtful discussion of the sexual overtones of Griffith's spectacular, see Bogle, Toms, 12-14.

31. Quoted in Wolper, Inside Story, 212.

32. An “injun” was a disguised white man who, to hide an unworthy or illegal purpose, dressed like an Indian. An Indian, however, never felt the need to hide his face. Although a “nigger” is a black man, it is the white man who corrupts the noble African.

33. Haley, 454-55, 446, 510, 517. Wolper, Inside Story, 242, 630.

34. Quoted in Wolper, Inside Story, 236-37.

35. The single exception is Ol' George, who, along with his wife, seeks refuge with the Murrays during the Civil War. He is never a strong character. Matilda gives him his nickname because of his youth and naivety. Although he considers the black family his friends, he is a comic personality. His decency hardly compensates for centuries of mistreatment at the hands of stronger white characters.

36. Wolper, Inside Story, 174.

37. Vine Deloria, Jr., God is Red (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1973), 49.

38. Deloria, 46-47.

39. Meg Greenfield, “Uncle Tom's Roots,” Newsweek (February 14, 1977), 100.

40. The black family has not only been romanticized on television but in the scholarly community as well. See for example, Dan T. Carter's review of Herbert G. Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York; Pantheon Books, 1976) in “Moonlight, Magnolias, and Collard Greens: Black History and the New Romanticism,” Reviews in American History (June, 1977), 167-73.