SOURCE: Miller, R. Baxter. “Kneeling at the Fireplace: Black Vulcan-ROOTS and the Double Artificer.” MELUS 9, no. 1 (spring 1982): 73-84.

[In the following essay, Miller traces parallels in Roots between the mythological Roman Vulcan, patron of arts and crafts, and the character of Kunta Kinte, craftsman and himself a mythical character to generations of his descendants.]

Most reviewers of Roots have overlooked Alex Haley's allusions to Vulcan.¹ L. D. Reddick,² a Temple University historian, observes instead that the book is a literary masterpiece, although the literary critic Larry King³ believes the book is more skillfully conceived than well-written. Still Haley does recreate the type of the Greek god Hephaestus and the Roman Vulcan who is the patron of the arts and crafts.⁴ Re-placing the type in African and Afro-American culture, Haley portrays educators such as the kintango, the trainer of men, and the marabout, the man of religion, as well as some oilers, polishers, and carvers. Through the figures of the painter, blacksmith, and firemarker, he directly suggests classical myth. But ultimately he stresses the storyteller, oral historian, and writer. His reader probably associates the basic pattern with the mythical Daedalus, sculptor and artisan of wood, who creates on earth as the god Hephaestus-Vulcan does in Heaven.⁵ In The Mythology of Greece and Italy, Thomas Keightley writes: “Hephaestus must have been regarded originally as simply the fire-god, a view of his character which we find even in the Ilias [sic]. Fire being the great agent in reducing and working the metals, the fire-god naturally became an artist.”⁶ Haley's imagery of wood, cloth, and metal supports the general typology. His process of writing signifies most the craftsman and the creator.

When Kunta Kinte kneels at the fireplace and spells out Arabic words, the book achieves a mythic climax and a philosophical depth. Wordmaking marks the creative center in the dramatic fiction. As powerful speakers, Nyoto Boto, the kintango, and Jujali N'jai first foreshadow the lettered Kunta, who expresses his humane skill as woodcarver and blacksmith as well. Then the writer Haley and the mason Tom, Kunta's great grandson, form the denouement of the fiction and respectively relive Kunta's verbal and artistic inclinations. Finally, Kunta undergoes a dramatic reversal in cultural perception, which places both him and Haley in the literary tradition of the Afro-American.

The craftsman Kunta Kinte is central to the plot. In 1767 slaveholders took him from his village of Juffure in Gambia, West Africa and slipped him aboard the Lord Ligonier to Maryland, where they eventually arranged for his purchase by a Virginia planter. In presenting Kunta and the six generations after him, Roots is mythic, and it suggests theoretical distinctions as well. While history objectively records the past, at least ideally, myth distills the spirit from the past. Reason sustains history, but ritual and intuitive truth support fable. Even myth, however, has verisimilitude, since it verifies the proposition of Good to Evil, as well as the relationship between society and self. Because myth seeks to reconcile reason with sense, history and myth differ in degree more than in kind.

Nyo Boto, the storyteller, foreshadows both Kunta and Haley, as wordmaking therefore frames the other crafts. When the reader first meets three-year old Kunta, some hunters with small antelopes and gazelles surround the child, as do clumsy bushfowl. Waterholes have dried up, and the game has moved to the deep forest. Needing strength for their new harvest, the villagers sacrifice five goats and two bullocks so that Allah might spare His people from starvation. When rains begin, light breezes turn to small winds, and by hoeing the softened earth, farmers prepare for seeding in long straight rows. After breakfast their wives, dressed in traditional fertility costumes, go to the furrowed fields where the planters' voices rise and fall. Hopefully, the earthnuts in these wives' bowls will take seed and grow. Binta, Kunta's mother, plants onions, yams, cassava, and tomatoes while Kunta plays under the eyes of several old grandmothers who keep the first kofo. Growing fast, these children under five laugh and squeal, play hide and seek, and scatter dogs as well as chickens into masses of fur and feathers. Despite their youth, they scramble to sit still and quiet when an older grandmother promises a story:

he [Kunta] felt that the best story-teller of all was the beloved, mysterious and peculiar Nyo Boto. Baldheaded, deeply wrinkled, as Black as the bottom of a cooking pot, with her long lemongrass-root chewstick sticking out like an insect's feeler between the few teeth she had left—which were deep orange from the countless kolar nuts she had gnawed on—old Nyo Boto would settle herself with much grunting on her low stool. Though she acted gruff, the children knew that she loved them as if they were her own, which she claimed they all were.⁷

As the children anticipate her tale, she begins according to Mandika custom, thereby making clear the artificer's spheres. “At this certain time [temporality], in this certain village [situation and space] lived this certain person [being and identity] (p. 7).” In her story a small boy finds a crocodile trapped in a net. Fearing that the animal will kill him, he at first withdraws, but kindness moves him to help. When the crocodile has seized him, the boy asks, “Is this how you repay my goodness—with badness?” The crocodile replies, “of course … that is the way of the world.” Because the boy disagrees, the crocodile concedes to postpone swallowing him before getting the opinions of the first three passers-by. Having outlived his usefulness to his master, a donkey upholds the crocodile, as does an old horse which experienced a similar fate. A rabbit, however, insists on hearing the whole story before judging, and the boy jumps out when the crocodile opens its mouth to speak. In turn the rabbit suggests that the boy's family eat the crocodile, but the hunters who return bring a dog that kills the rabbit. At the end Nyo Boto reinforces her didacticism: “the crocodile was right … It is the way of the world that goodness is often repaid with badness” (p. 8). The informed reader likely knows about the Africans who, after inviting in the white visitors, awoke the next morning to find themselves in chains. Boto's story therefore implies her continent and the lost inhabitants, including the current descendants in Afro-America, forcibly exiled. Her tale complements her role as weaver and her type as artist. She firmly unifies Kunta's first initiation into manhood with Haley's eventual intrusion as narrator. Kunta's kintango or teacher later advises his young men to fight mock battles and to remember their personal obligations to achieve the common good. Always, he says, they should leave their enemies a path for escape, so that these enemies will fight less ferociously. Mainly the students must remember:

that during any wars, neither enemy should ever do any harm to any traveling marabouts, griots, or blacksmiths, for an angered marabout could bring down the displeasure of Allah; an angered griot could use his eloquent tongue to stir the enemy army to greater savagery; and an enraged blacksmith could make or repair weapons for the enemy.

(p. 85)

The marabout is the man of religion; the griot is the oral historian; and the blacksmith is the molder of iron. Whatever his function, one honors the craftsman, since art represents the highest human skill. Robert Graves writes in Greek Myths: “That the Smith-god hobbles is a tradition found in regions as far apart as West Africa and Scandinavia; in primitive times smiths may have been purposely lamed to prevent them from running off and joining enemy tribes.”⁸ When Kuiali N'jai, a well-known griot, visits the jujure he is older than any other one Kunta has seen and so old as to make the kintango seem young. After a gesticulation to make the young men sit in a semi-circle, the griot begins: “in due time, each young man would know that special part of the forefather's history in the finest and fullest detail, just as it had been told to his father and his father's father. And the day would come when that boy would become a man and have sons to whom he would tell those stories so that events of the distant past would forever live (p. 87)”. Late into the night the griot thrills his listeners who hasten down their meals. He tells about the empire of Benin before the toubob or white man, and he observes the even earlier kingdom of Songhai as well as the ancestral kingdom of Ghana. As wordmaker and oral historian, he binds all listeners with the cultural past: “‘But even Ghana was not the richest kingdom … the very richest, the very oldest of them all was the kingdom of ancient Mali! Like the other empires, Mali had its cities, its farmers, its artisans, its blacksmiths, tanners, dyers, and weavers … There is not a marabout, not a teacher in the smallest village, whose knowledge has not come at least in part from Timbuktu’” (p. 88). Here and elsewhere Haley associates age, wisdom, and time with metalwork, woodwork, and weaving. The process of making suggests timelessness and therefore divinity. The Council of Elders sits under a baobab, where its members seem almost “carved from the same wood” (p. 114), and the god Vulcan appears almost to have created them.

The climax concerning the craftsman recurs during Kunta's courtship with Bell, long after his survival in the middle passage and his indoctrination into slavery. Concerning Vulcan's wife, Charles Mills Gayley says: “according to the Iliad [sic] and Hesiod's Theogony [sic] she is Aglaia, the youngest of the Graces; but in the Odyssey it [she] is Venus.”⁹ Haley's myth succeeds because Kunta's craft depends less upon brutality than upon love. When thinking about Bell, Kunta oils and polishes a buggy. He considers her disgusting habit of smoking a pipe and the sexually lewd dancing that emphasizes her posterior. Her tongue, he thinks, is worse than old Nyo Boto's, and this analogy brings remembrance: “the old men in Juffure who carved things from wood such as the knee-high slab of hickory on which he was sitting. He thought how carefully they would first select and then study some thoroughly seasoned piece of wood before they would ever touch it with their adzes and their knives” (p. 266). Sending beetles on the underside scurrying, Kunta turns over a hickory block and taps it with a piece of iron. Clandestinely rolling this forgotten wood to his hut, he chips away with a hatchet. The tool recalls the ax that chopped off half of his foot. Like Vulcan, Kunta is partially lame—a “figurative suggestion, perhaps, of the flickering, unsteady nature of fire.” As Thomas Keightley explains:

The deities of Olympus are usually represented as endowed with perfect beauty and vigor, and yet here is one of them [Vulcan] to whom is ascribed a physical defect of no small magnitude—the want of the power of free and independent motion. Nowhere then does the necessity of regarding the gods as mere personification more appear than in this remarkable instance. On all other theories the difficulty seems inexplicable; while, if we regard Hephaestos as the fire-god, i.e., as the fire, a simple and obvious solution presents itself. Fire as compared with air and water is fixed and stationary, incapable of advancing or even of sustaining itself without the aid of other substances.¹⁰

Three theories for Vulcan's lameness exist. According to the first, he was born deformed, and according to the second, he was born so ugly that his mother threw him from heaven. In the third version, Jupiter hurls the younger god from heaven for interfering in the father's marital affairs.¹¹

Returning to the courtship, one finds that Kunta represents Vulcan's ambivalence and Vulcan's sublimation of cruelty into aesthetic form. When Kunta lost his foot, Bell restored him to life, and sustained him. With a hammer and wood chisel he now digs out a mortar's inside, then begins to carve with a knife. In a week the nimbleness of his fingers surprises even him, since for more than twenty years he has not watched the old men carving in Juffure. Having created the mortar, he finds a hickory limb that has straightness and arm-length. By candlelight he studies the wood; in his mind he was “seeing the mortar and pestle that Omoroo [his father] had carved for Binta [his mother] who had worn it slick with many grindings of her corn” (p. 266). To make his pestle, Kunta smooths the upper part of a handle. He scrapes first with a file, then a knife, and finally a piece of glass. Unable to face Bell he leaves the pestle and mortar on the kitchen steps at the big house. When she finally coaxes him to dinner, he has never been alone in a home with any woman other than his mother or grandmother. Beautified by a small bed of flowers, Bell's cabin is the biggest and newest on the plantation. Instead of a single room with one window, hers has two of each. There Kunta finds “mud-chinked logs” and “a chimney of homemade bricks that widened down from the roof to her large fireplace, alongside which hung her cooking utensils” (p. 271). Eventually Bell asks him to sit in a rocking chair near the fireplace. Having accepted this invitation, he tries to show casualness in discomfort. When she observes the unlit fireplace, he leaps from his chair, since creative work soothes him. Striking a flint strongly against an iron piece, he lights a fluffy cotton ball that Bell has placed beneath “fat” sticks, which in turn underlie oak logs. The eating utensils recall the carving tools of Juffure that for Kunta lie in the past, and the logs reinforce the baobab that overhung the Council of Elders. Flint and iron do more than suggest the love of Bell and Kunta, a created fire, because the images develop the theme of their rebirth into the role of Maker. Earlier, the stories of Nyo Boto and Kujali N'jai united young listeners with old speakers. As with the kintango, who served his society, no particular class had a monopoly on the craftsman. But Bell lives in the big cabin that represents the house slave. In the form of these two lovers, the artisan who was once communal has now become individualistic and elitist.

Mental slavery shadows even the mythical world. Because Bell has been good to him, Kunta wants to make for her something special. Going to “Massa John's” one day, he stops to pick some flowers. With rushes split into fine pieces, some inner white cornhusks, he plaits an intricately bold mandika design. Although his undertaking requires several days, the project eventually surpasses Kunta's expectations. When at Bell's for supper, he presents this gift to his hostess who first disappears into the bedroom and shortly afterwards returns with a pair of finely knitted woolen socks—one “with a half foot, the front part filled with soft woolen cushion” (p. 273). As sexual and cultural foils, Kunta and Bell complement each other. Often feeling superior, she secures the news of town and county more quickly than does he. She learns first that Benjamin Rush, a white doctor in New Orleans, freed his black assistant, James Derham, who had become Rush's medical peer. Only after perplexity does Kunta discover that she can read and write. Several weeks later he decides to relieve his irritation by showing her that he and Africans have their own traditions and that they did not simply climb down from trees, as acculturated Blacks and their masters suppose. Kunta has served as oiler, polisher, and woodcarver—as Nyo Boto entertained and as Kujali N'jai inspired—but now his roles merge into the single one of educated man: “So very casually one evening after supper, he knelt down before the cabin's fireplace and raked a pile of ashes out onto the hearth, then used his hands to flatten and smooth them out. With Bell watching curiously, he then took a slender whittled stick from his pocket and proceeded to scratch into the ashes his name in Arabic characters” (p. 280). When Bell questions him about his training, he tells her that all the children in his village learned to write with pens made of “hollowed dried grass stalks and ink of water mixed with crushed potblack” (p. 280). Soon she encourages him to give the objects in their home the African names, and he responds table, meso; chair, sirango; black iron pot, kalero; candle, kandio; burlap, boto; dried gourd, mirango; basket, sinsingo; bed, larango; pillow, kunglarang; window, janerango; roof, kankarango. Through this imagery Kunta celebrates African art forms. The window that he describes looks out upon the invisible air, and the dried gourd evokes the complementary one of water. Between these two is the fireplace, an image which constantly recurs. The wood that burns anticipates fire, even as water through contrast reinforces the same fire. But most important are words, the fire of inspiration, the forms of cultured memory.

One comes therefore to the double image of maker. First are those artisans, storytellers, teachers, and oral historians remembered and second, is the writer Haley, whose craft restores their image. The movement marks the denouement in the dramatic fiction. Does Haley's craft rival that of the others? One's response depends largely upon the last hundred and eleven pages. David Gerber says the family represented here is atypical:

It is true that over the centuries his [Haley's] ancestors … have been relatively privileged in Africa, substantial farmers and descendents of a much revered holy man; as American slaves, artisans, servants, and a gamekeeper, and as free people, landowning farmers, substantial businessmen, teachers, college professors and now in the case of Haley and his brothers, a government official, an architect, and a millionaire writer. Such facts do strain his publisher's claim that Roots is the story of 25,000,000 Americans of African descent, and certainly white devotees of Roots need to be reminded that the American system has not worked as well for most Black people.¹²

For Gerber the book should show that Western expansion and capitalism exploited and brutalized villages such as Juffure.¹³ In the eighteenth century, Willie Lee Rose adds, Juffure was less an obscure village than a busy trading center that 3,000 people inhabit and the chief city of Ndanco Sono, the powerful king of Nomi, who tightly controlled charges as well as comings and goings on the Gambia River. Kunta would have seen so much cotton in Alabama, he says, during 1850 and not in Spotsylvania County during 1767. Fencing, according to the reading, antedates Haley's setting by almost a century and okra was little known in Virginia. “Cracker” or “redneck” then had little currency.¹⁴ Although Gerber and Rose desire more historical accuracy, Larry King looks for more literary talent, since Roots merely retells the plot of numerous slave narratives.¹⁵ Haley rarely “invokes” the slaves so as to “bring fresh anger and compassion surging to the heart.”¹⁶ L. D. Reddick, on the contrary, senses politics: “It [Roots] is deliberately not a Black book. It's title is not Home to Africa or even Black Roots. Its dedication is not to “my people” but to “my country” … It is, thus, not obviously very specially ‘ours’; rather, it is, as somebody said, a ‘book for mankind.’ Let's debate it: is this what one must do—especially in these ‘backlashing times’”? ¹⁷ Thomas Lask, however, says that Roots persuades by its “ordering” of detail rather than by its force of argument.”¹⁸

Even without reading such comments, one realizes that Haley the politician weakens Haley the mythmaker. First begun as an African epic, the book ends as an American one, and it hardly resolves either the conflict between the two kinds or the central conflict in Afro-American culture. Through Kunta and others, Haley hardly confronts what W. E. B. Du Bois calls the double consciousness of Black America. Where the narrator and he differ, the one imaginative and the other real, political conservatism infringes upon Kunta's mythical world. But in rearranging history, the writer needs to maintain the symbolic meaning. His myth of Vulcan, which partially transforms reality, must remain typically true.

Returned to the historical world, Haley must keep the mythical vision, but Kunta Kinte passes from Roots. Despite such weaknesses Haley sustains the myth in the last eighty-five pages by portraying Tom, Kunta's great grandson, and by becoming the final, and intrusive, narrator. When Edwin Holt, owner of a cotton mill hears about Tom's fine iron work, Holt's wife sketches a design for decorative window grills. The family hopes that Tom can soon make and install these pieces in the Holt home at Locust Grove. Mrs. Holt wants a trellis amply covered with vines and leaves, a task that requires two months because the house has many windows. Tom does the lap-welding of four precut iron bars into window-sized rectangles and forces hot white rods through sets of steel-reducing dies, the result being long rods as thin as ivy and honeysuckle. Sometimes the Murrays, his masters, or eight to ten visitors come to watch. While

plying his craft, he thought how blessed he was that all people seemed even to expect being ignored by blacksmiths engrossed in what they were doing. He reflected upon how most slave men who brought him their massas' repairing jobs usually seemed either morose, or they big-talked among other slaves about the shop. But if any white people appeared, in the instant, all of the slaves grinned, shuffled, and otherwise began acting the clown, as in fact Tom often previously had felt embarrassed to conclude privately of his own derby-wearing, bombastic-talking father, Chicken George.

(p. 502)

Unlike the earlier artisans, Tom represents the contradictions in Black intellectual history, where Booker T. Washington believed that self help would liberate Blacks, and the early W. E. B. DuBois said that a talented tenth would do so. Later Alain Locke dreamed that the artists of the Harlem Renaissance could institute social change. Bringing Haley's myth of Vulcan up to 1982, however, creates serious problems, especially since the writer overlooks the 1950s and 1960s. Today, what must be the Black artist's role? How much should craft serve the individual, the society, the racial community, and the self? Haley answers by infusing his mythical image with the complexity, paradox, and irresolution of the Black thinker and the Black artist. Tom skillfully performs a craft. He heats and reheats iron pieces of inch-squares, hammers them into thin sheets, and cuts out heart shaped patterns. With delicate care, he pumps his homemade bellows and spot-welds leafy contours to grilled windows. Completing his tasks, he meets and falls in love with Irene, a fellow slave who is frank and honest. Believing that they should never marry while separate masters own them, she encourages him to have his master Murray buy her.

That night, lying abed, Tom began to see in his mind's eye how he was going to make for her a rose of iron. In a trip to the county seat he must buy only a small bar of the finest newly wrought iron. He must closely study a rose, how its stem and base were joined, how the petals spread, each curving outward in its own way … how to heat the iron bar to just the orange redness for its quickest hammering to the wafer thinness from which he would trim the rose petals' patterns that once reheated and tenderly, lovingly shaped, would be dipped into brine mixed with oil, insuring her rose petals' delicate temper.

(p. 508)

Here the mind creates beauty before the hands do.

Through Tom, however, Haley has still lowered the book from the level where myth subordinates history to that where history subordinates myth. In order to know about the Civil War, Tom must call a white man aside, and he secures other information while horseshoeing for the Confederacy. On New Year's day in 1863 Tom's mother and Chicken George's wife, Mathilda, must similarly learn about the Emancipation Proclamation from a white rider on horseback. White customers tell Tom about the fall of Charleston, Grant's taking Richmond, and Lee's surrender in 1865. Tom can only listen to history whereas Kujali N'jai and Kunta, had recreated it through memory.

Haley, the intrusive narrator, is the final Vulcan. At seventeen he enlisted in the U. S. Navy, and here he attempts to write the story of Kunta and Bell as skillfully as Nyo Boto told fables. But he emphasizes industry where she stressed humanism: “The idea that one could roll a blank sheet of paper into a typewriter and write something on it that other people would care to read” (my emphasis, p. 569). Eventually a magazine assignment leads Haley to London where, looking around in the British museum, he stares at the Rosetta Stone.

Discovered in the Nile delta, I learned, the stone's face had chiseled into it three separate texts: one in known Greek characters, the second in a then-unknown set of characters, the third in the ancient hieroglyphics, which it had been assumed no one ever would be able to translate. But a French scholar, Jean Champollion, successively matched, character for character, both the unknown text and the hieroglyphics with the known Greek text, and he offered a thesis that the texts read the same … In the oral history that Grandma, Aunt Liz, Aunt Plus, Cousin Georgia, and the others had always told on the boyhood Henning front porch, I had an unknown quotient in those strange words or sounds passed on by the African.

(p. 570)

Stone and craft complement each other because both express eternality. Although the first is a form, the second is a process. Inert stone illustrates potential, but craft represents an attempt to create. Although stone suggests stasis, craft often fulfills the desire for fictional existences. Roots dramatically reverses itself from Kunta's drum to Haley's stone. In Journal of Ethnic Studies David Gerber says that Americans responded to Roots because they are experiencing a “profound sense of drift as their nation's historic ‘exceptionalism’ slowly gives way to an America that is just another (if vastly more powerful and hence more dangerous) secular state … insecurities felt in the personal realm of family.”¹⁹ Appropriately in distaste, Kunta has angrily scattered his life's pebbles in the wind. Writes M. L. Franz:

While the human being is as different as possible from a stone, yet man's innermost center is in a strange and special way akin … the stone symbolizes what is perhaps the simplest and deepest experience … something eternal when he [man] feels immortal and unalterable … some of the alchemists dimly perceived that their much sought-after stone was a symbol of something that can be found only within the psyche of man … The alchemical stone (the lapsis) symbolizes something … never … lost or dissolved … the mystical experience of God within one's own soul. It usually takes prolonged suffering to burn away all the superfluous psychic elements concealing the stone. But some profound inner experience of the Self does occur to most people at least once in a lifetime.²⁰

Haley's revelation leads him to Juffure where he meets Kebba Kanji Fofana, a griot and word craftsman, who knows about the Kinte clan. Having an air of “somebodiness,” the old man begins his recital, as seventy villagers gather in the form of a horseshoe that reinforces Tom the blacksmith. With his neck cords sticking out, the griot speaks to Haley. From the forefathers' time—“his words seeming almost physical objects”—he recreates the Kintes' ancestral history. His words parallel those inscribed on the Rosetta Stone because these two scenes portray two different modes to sustain human history. The griot adds that the Kinte men were blacksmiths, “those who had conquered fire” (p. 578). Haley listens as if he “were carved of stone.” At first intangible, the old man's words assume the “stone” form of Haley's renewed identity. Fofana ends Haley's quest: “About the time the King's soldiers came the eldest of … four sons, Kunta, went away from his village to chop wood … and he was never seen again” (p. 579). Having indirectly begun and ended with Kunta, Roots comes full circle, but now emphasis falls upon the historical artificer rather than upon the mythical one: “I've [Haley] woven our whole seven generations into this book that is in your hands” (p. 584). The reader's ultimate fall leads from Kunta to Haley, the latter speaking from within the same American mythos that the former exposed. Contrast the perspective two hundred pages earlier when Kunta prepared to drive his Master Waller home from a dance. Kunta

couldn't believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn't live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves; that goodness can come from badness, that it's possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother's milk made possible the life of privilege they led … both of them [Bell and the gardener] had lived here all their lives and couldn't be expected to see it as he did, with the eyes of an outsider—one who had been born free.

(p. 252)

Roots therefore distorts the pattern of the slave narrative. Its course leads not from bondage to freedom but from freedom to assimilation.

Yet the attempt to celebrate the Black artisan ranks Haley well among Afro-American writers, although not preeminently. He lacks the mastery of Christian analogue that Frederick Douglass displays in the Narrative and the ironic tension between White insider and Black outsider that Langston Hughes shows in the Ways of White Folks. Withstanding his more conservative view, Haley resembles the militant Richard Wright who in Native Son creates the communist Max as a surrogate speaker and doubts that the story can stand alone. As with Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, Haley reveals the chasm between the White American Dream and the Black American reality. Yet both he and Ellison emphasize the individual more than the mass, speak finally from within the general American mythos, and leave double-consciousness unresolved. Still, both writers manage deep complexity, and their readers paradoxically achieve catharsis through the heroic failure in art. Haley's fictionalized imperfection works well, and even Vulcan was lame.

Notes

1. See David A. Gerber's review-essay, “Haley's ROOTS and Our own: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Popular Phenomenon,” Journal of Ethnic Studies, 5:3 (fall, 1977), 88. See also Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923; 1975 edition), p. 104.

2. “Our Own Story at Last,” Freedomways, 16 (1976), 253.

3. Larry L. King, “From the Seed of Kunta Kinte,” Saturday Review, 3 (1976), 20-22.

4. See Sir William Smith, Smaller Classical Dictionary (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), p. 314, and especially Edward L. Jones, Black Zeus (Seattle: University of Washington, 1972), pp. 1-22. Jones quotes Godfrey Higgins's Anacalypsis (New York: University Books, 1965), pp. 137-138: “In my search into the origin of ancient Druids, I continually found, at last, that my labours terminated with something black. Thus the oracles at Dodona, and of Apollo at Delphi were founded by black Doves … Osiris and his bull were black, all the gods and goddesses of Greece were black: at least this was the case with Jupiter, Bacchus, Hercules, Apollo, Ammon” (p. 2). It would help if one dated mythology less from written history than from oral history.

5. See James Baldwin, “The Wonderful Artisan,” Old Greek Stories (New York: American Book Co., 1895), pp. 40-45. Ovid, Metamorphoses (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 183-186.

6. Thomas Keightley, The Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy (London: Whitaler and Co., 1854), p. 98.

7. Alex Haley, Roots (New York: Doubleday & Co. 1976), pp. 7-8. Hereafter citations of the primary text come from this edition.

8. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (New York: George Braziller, 1957), p. 88.

9. The Classic Myths in English Literature (New York: Ginn and Co., 1893), p. 59.

10. Keightley, p. 99.

11. See Jessie M. Tatlock, Greek and Roman Mythology (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1917), pp. 49-50.

12. Gerber, p. 90.

13. Gerber, p. 99.

14. “An American Family,” New York Review of Books (November 11, 1976), pp. 3-6.

15. King, p. 21.

16. King, p. 22.

17. Reddick, “Our Story At Last,” p. 254.

18. Thomas Lask, “Success of Search for ‘Roots’ Leaves Alex Haley Surprised,” New York Times (November 23, 1976), p. 140. This is descriptive more than analytical.

19. Gerber, p. 111.

20. M. L. Franz, “The Self: Symbols of Totality,” Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell, 1964), ed. Carl G. Jung, pp. 224-226.