Roots: The Saga of an American Family (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Roots: The Saga of an American Family. By Alex Haley. (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1976. Pp. viii, 587. $12.50.) This runaway bestseller bears a remarkable resemblance to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Both appeared after the public had read, argued, and agonized over the race question for many years. Both drew widely on the historical and sociological knowledge of their times, and on a broad tradition of narrative fiction. Haley, like Mrs. Stowe, knows how to tell a story. There are other, more striking similarities, but now it is appropriate to mention the differences. While Mrs. Stowe based most of her characters on real people she had met or heard of, Haley has composed his fictional episodes and dialogues about his own ancestors, reaching seven generations back to the eighteenth century, and the Gambia River region of West Africa. As his story approaches the present, the portion of invention dwindles until, by the end of the nineteenth century, we have purely factual family chronicles. The form may be hybrid, but it is remarkably effective: the lineage of Kunta Kinte in America takes on the double reality that comes from effective realistic fiction and from concrete historic facts. Every major theme and episode in the story (with one exception ) illustrates in detail a portion of basic Afro-American history, including the rich cultural heritage of black Africa, the horrors of the slave trade, the problems of acculturation, the vulnerability of slaves, the achievement of blacks in slavery and freedom, and so on. But here it all becomes vivid, meaningful, and convincing because Haley has invented (or enlarged upon) a group of colorful characters. The particular always stirs our imagination and feelings more than the general: witness the agony we feel on hearing of a single child trapped in a well, compared with our relative indifference to the news of five hundred more traffic fatalities. Having created a believable character in Kunta Kinte, Haley conveys to his readers all the fear, rage, wonder, and pain of enslavement and travel to another world. Further, by giving Kunta a distinct and consistent African point of view Haley illustrates both the difficulty the "new Negro" encountered in America, and many things about American civilization that only an educated outsider would notice. Kunta's point of view is sometimes racist or at least ethnocentric. For instance, "He shrank away whenever a toubob [white man] came into the room during the night; their smell was strange and overpowering (p. 163)." "Once . . . Kunta had 259 260CIVIL WAR HISTORY glimpsed her, [the plantation mistress] a bony creature the color of a toad's underbelly ... (p. 187)." Haley's technique allows something else that modern history texts, with their dual preoccupation with the factual and the typical , must deny us: the fascinating and eccentric character who makes you wonder, "What will he do next? How will he get out of this scrape?" Perhaps his most interesting character is Chicken George, grandson of Kunta Kinte and great-great-grandfather of Alex Haley, and also gambler, toper, womanizer, and professional gamecock-fighter. This does not mean that either the author or his readers approve of his errant ways; it is quite clear that the enduring strength of the family derives from Ceorge's pious wife Matilda, and their sober, industrious, and artistic son, the blacksmith Tom. Just as Haley achieves a striking and convincing variety in his black characters, he also presents an interesting collection of white men and women. A few are as gracious and dignified as if they had walked out of a book by Thomas Nelson Page. At the other extreme are the savage and sickly brutes trading for slaves in Africa. Most interesting of them is Tom Lea, Chicken George's owner and father, an upstart yearning for the character and security of the gentry, who ends his life as it began, in squalid poverty. Tom Lea is far from lovable, but like the villains in Shakespeare, he stirs a surprising amount of sympathy. Roots succeeds, we may conclude, because it tells a powerful story about a subject we now realize is immensely important. It is too bad that a number...