Alex Haley (18 page)

The insistence on categorizing
Roots
simply as nonfiction was a mistake. Some passages of the book were based on Haley's guessing about facts and eliding evidence. By the early 1970s, when he had already drafted and edited the African section of
Roots,
abundant historical evidence contradicted his depiction of Juffure as a kind of Eden. He had been advised that his dating of Kunta Kinte's life was based on doubtful information. Bakary Sidibe, the Gambian national archivist, sent Haley a letter on May 30, 1973, expressing his doubts about Fofana's reliability: “His young days were spent more in sowing wild oats than in studying.” He had been a drummer, for which the Mandinka word is
jalli,
which can also mean “griot.” Sidibe said that “by birth and his own views he is not a griot but [an] Imam.” Fofana had learned his stories from other elders, with whom he often sat in the village. Moreover, Sidibe told Haley that Kebba Fofana was now giving a different account of the history of Kunta Kinte, saying that Kunta was imprisoned at James Island for seven years. Sidibe had also interviewed a griot of the Kinte clan and several of its elders and heard different accounts of Kunte Kinte's genealogy, all of which seemed to locate him several generations later in time than Haley had placed him. Haley chose to disregard Sidibe's information.
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When challenged about the veracity of
Roots,
Haley usually responded by talking about his twelve years of research and extensive travel to study archives on three continents. But by admitting that some parts of the book were fictional and using the unfortunate term “faction” to name his genre, he had undermined his claims of historicity. Haley could have defused much later criticism by saying that the village from which Kunta came was the writer's own mythic creation, one that he believed showed the probable character of his ancestor's place of origin. There was ample evidence from the family story to place Kunta in a Mandinka village in the region of the Gambia. The Kinte clan was centered farther up the Gambia River and away from the heavy European presence at Juffure. Indeed, it would have been better to give the village a name other than Juffure. Instead of tying himself precisely to 1767 as the time of Kunta's capture and departure, he could have approximated the dates. The power of
Roots
ultimately lay not in its adherence to historical fact but in its being a new story of blacks' past that included African origins. The book was not competing with empirical studies for the attention of the popular mind but with myths about slavery established by works of pure fiction.

* * *

Roots
came at an opportune moment in American life. The year 1976 was taken up with continuous, public celebrations of the nation's bicentennial. In 1975 President Gerald Ford had appointed Haley to the Bicentennial Advisory Council, and Haley announced to a reporter his intention “to make certain nobody overlooks what blacks did to make this country.” And although he did not say so, he wanted to make sure nobody overlooked his forthcoming book. Haley felt that blacks were not going to be excited about celebrating the anniversary. The typical response might be, “Wow, great, we were slaves in 1776.” A fair rendering of the past would note that the South “was built on the back of slaves' labor,” but popular history of the country had “obscured, and in some cases eliminated the role of blacks.” But Haley diplomatically concluded that “we are marking an historic birthday. In so doing, we're saying who we are. After life and health, the most important thing any living being needs is a sense of security, a sense of pride.” Giving that to blacks was Haley's personal mission. In an effort to place
Roots
firmly within the patriotic spirit of the moment, he wrote this dedication for the book: “Just by chance [
Roots
] is being published in the Bicentennial Year of the United States. So I dedicate
Roots
as a birthday offering to my country within which most of
Roots
happened.” The historian Willie Lee Rose concluded that
Roots
was “the most astounding cultural event of the American Bicentennial.” Almost forty years later, that superlative still seems about right.
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Roots
also appeared in the midst of the 1976 presidential campaign, in which the Democrat Jimmy Carter challenged President Ford. Carter's open embrace of his southern origins brought an outpouring of media attention to the changes in race relations in the South as a result of the civil rights movement. One observer noted that Carter campaigned “consciously in the context of his family, his town, his region, his religion, his past.”
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If that was true for the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, it was doubly so for the author of the other big success from the South in 1976, Alex Haley. The griot from Tennessee spoke in a deliberate, distinctive drawl—different from Carter's but equally identifiable as southern. Each was openly proud of his southern background and appreciative of his southern culture. Each chose to believe that southern human relations were better than they had seemed during the harsh conflicts of the 1960s. The poet James Dickey, recently thrust into national celebrity with the movie production of his southern horror novel
Deliverance,
pronounced that the “southernization” of America would cancel the nation's hypocrisy and impose new simplicity and caring. It was a prophecy that Haley, who had long idealized his Tennessee childhood, could believe.
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Roots
had in fact caught a big wave of Americans' new absorption with their origins. Irving Howe's
World of Our Fathers
had appeared at the same time as
Roots
and was widely celebrated for recovering the history of America's Eastern European Jews.
Newsweek
reported that genealogical research, once the province of aristocrats, had now “turned ethnic,” as new generations looked back on family experience. Marcus Hansen, a historian of American immigration, wrote, “What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember.” Another student of immigrants said that a “destruction of memories” had been part of the American assimilation—“assimilate or perish” had been a virtual command. Responding to the black pride movement, other ethnic groups began to explore their own backgrounds. Movements for ethnic awareness had arisen in the 1970s among Poles, Lithuanians, and Italians.
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Roots
resonated with oppressed peoples outside the United States. Justice V. R. Krishna, judge of the Supreme Court of India, wrote that “the dignity of a race is restored when its roots are known.” Mahatma Gandhi was able to resist British imperialism, Krishna said, on the basis of “knowledge of our strength and sustenance from our roots.” The Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru had been prompted by the same desire to find his origins when he wrote
The Discovery of India,
a book that helped millions of Indians reimagine their past.
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* * *

In September 1976 Haley began a month of promotional events that took him to nineteen major cities. He did scores of interviews, and he was masterful at them. A
Washington Post
reporter described him as leaning back and smoking steadily while he spoke slowly in a soft baritone with a Tennessee accent. “I had always wondered what a million-dollar author was like,” Haley told
Publishers Weekly.
“Now I've met two of them, Arthur Hailey and Harold Robbins, and it seems I'll be one myself. . . . The main thing is to be free, and that's something I've always wanted to be.” The interviewer inevitably asked how much of the book was verifiable fact and how much was made up, and in his response Haley wandered a bit. “All the major incidents are true, the details are as accurate as very heavy research can make them, the names and dates are real, but obviously when it comes to dialogue, and people's emotions and thoughts, I had to make things up. It's heightened history, or fiction based on real people's lives.”
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Roots
appeared in a season of strong nonfiction works. There were several books about Watergate and John Toland's biography
Hitler,
also a Doubleday book, which at more than a thousand pages was even longer than
Roots.
Book prices were rising, going up by almost 12 percent in 1975. At $12.50,
Roots
was one of the most expensive—as well as one of the longest—books on the
New York Times
best-seller list.
Roots
began at number five on the general nonfiction list in early October. It was second on the list by November 14, 1976, and the following week, it surpassed Gail Sheehy's self-help book
Passages
to become number one.
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Many of the reviews of
Roots
were ecstatic. The
Los Angeles Times
echoed the
Roots
jacket copy in calling the book a “fascinating detective story.” James Baldwin's review in the
New York Times
found no fault and much significance to attach to his old friend's book. Baldwin's constant theme had always been the depravity of American race relations, and he thought
Roots
helped address it. “Alex Haley's taking us back through time to the village of his ancestors is an act of faith and courage, but this book is also an act of love, and it is this which makes it haunting.” Baldwin identified in
Roots
the stark contrast between the African dream and the American nightmare. “The density of the African social setting eventually gives way to the shrill incoherence of the American one.” The book, for Baldwin, was a study of “how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one.”
Christopher Lehman-Haupt's review in the
Times
declared that the book read like “very conventional fiction” but that Haley's extraordinary tracing of his family heritage more than compensated for the ordinariness of the prose. Lehman-Haupt speculated that the main achievement of
Roots
was that its author had created a metaphor “for the vague awareness felt by most American blacks that they are somehow descended from people who were abducted from Africa. . . . It is as if he were saying that he knew he was real but didn't really believe it until he discovered corroborating evidence.”
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Newsweek
's reviewer, P. D. Zimmerman, offered the first criticism. He liked “the passion of Haley's narrative, the sweep of its concept and its wealth of largely neglected material,” but he was emphatic that Haley and the publisher were not acknowledging the extent of the book's fictional elements: “Even a cursory reading of the book makes clear the invention of countless incidents.” Still, despite a “pulpy style,” the book gave “a valuable sense of what the black community lost in its acculturation to a slave society.”
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Willie Lee Rose of Johns Hopkins University, writing in the
New York Review of Books,
thought Haley's opening, with its emphasis on African life, was “beautifully realized,” an artistic rendering of an idealized place that reflected the author's mastery of African anthropology. But she insisted that the account was historically incorrect, especially in the pastoral character it gave to Juffure. Rose's colleague Philip Curtin had just published a book on the slave trade in Africa that revealed the ways that European traders had drastically altered the environment and social relations of Juffure. (In 1967 Jan Vansina had consulted Curtin about the African words that Haley had heard growing up, but Haley did not interact directly with Curtin.) In the eighteenth century Juffure was a trading center inhabited by three thousand people, and it was the seat of Ndanco Sono, king of Niumi, who controlled access to the upper Gambia River and in 1767 was at war with British and French traders. Rose surmised that “it is inconceivable at any time, but particularly under these circumstances, that two white men should have dared to come ashore in the vicinity of Juffure to capture Kunta Kinte, even in the company of two Africans, as Haley describes it.” Rose conceded that placing Kunta Kinte in a Garden of Eden could suggest a larger truth about African origins that “outdistances any historical fact,” for “myth pursues its truth largely outside the realm of reality.” A historian of slavery and the American South, Rose found other errors that she said “chip away at the verisimilitude of central matters in which it is important to have full faith.” There were anachronisms: cotton was not grown in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, when Kunta Kinte was supposed to have lived there; wire fencing did not exist for another century; and the terms for poor whites, “cracker” and “red-neck,” came much later.
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Rose's review was the most critical so far, and Haley called her. “Why are you being so hard on me, Willie Lee?” he asked. Then he made a plea, perhaps suggested by the review. “I was just trying to give my people a myth to live by.”
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* * *

Roots
fell into a tradition of treatments of American race and slavery that worked together to form what the literary critic Leslie Fiedler called a “popular epic,” a tradition that had gone unperceived among intellectuals until Haley's work appeared. The other books were Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
Thomas Dixon's
The Leopard's Spots
(and its thematic echo,
The Clansman
), and Margaret Mitchell's
Gone with the Wind.
In 1979 Fiedler defined this “popular epic” as being “rooted in demonic dreams of race, sex and violence which have long haunted us Americans,” and that determined the people's historical understandings of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, emancipation, and the Ku Klux Klan. Like all leading critics of American letters, Fiedler had earlier dismissed the first three books of the popular epic, but now he said that, with
Roots,
these books advanced a historical myth “unequalled in scope or resonance by any work of High Literature.” At exactly the same time, and apparently not influenced by Fiedler, Willie Lee Rose concurred. These four books had given “a vocabulary to American mythologies and demonologies that is generally understood at home and abroad.” Each of the four books had clear didactic purposes: Stowe taught the evil of slavery, Dixon illustrated what he saw as the mistakes of emancipation and Reconstruction, Mitchell portrayed the degradation of southerners in the Civil War. All four were success stories. Haley's family was “victorious over slavery,” Stowe's Uncle Tom won a spiritual victory over his oppressors, and Dixon and Mitchell had seen to southern whites' successful recapture of their region from carpetbaggers and evil blacks. Haley wanted blacks to have “a Garden of Eden and Innocence to look back upon,” and he imagined one in Juffure.
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