Alex Haley (19 page)

Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin
was the nineteenth century's most famous American novel and Stowe its greatest celebrity among writers. She made a strong statement against slavery, gave a defense of black character, and influenced the sectional crisis of the 1850s.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the United States, in both the North and the South, and perhaps a million in Great Britain. Beaten to the point of death by two black slave drivers, Uncle Tom whispers to a white boy: “I loves every creatur', every whar!—it's nothing
but
love! . . . what a thing 'tis to be a Christian!” It was read by millions of Americans at all ages, including the young, for several generations. “Of course, I read
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
” Malcolm X said.
“In fact, I believe that's the only novel I have ever read since I started serious reading.” Malcolm, like most young black men in the 1960s, rejected the loving, Christian Uncle Tom in favor of the emerging “bad nigger” archetype of which Malcolm was a model. Still, the book had helped shape his understanding of the black past. No one had been more dismissive of the novel than James Baldwin, who detested its self-righteousness and sentimentality. But Fiedler now wrote that Stowe “invented American Blacks for the imagination of the whole world.” She created three black archetypes: Uncle Tom, the long-suffering and ever-forgiving Christian slave; Eliza, the heroic mother who escapes slavery; and Topsy, the foolish slave girl. Added to those was Simon Legree, the evil white slave owner and rapist. Over the next century, the three black characters became, Fiedler thought, “for better or worse, models, archetypal grids through which we perceived the Negroes around us, and they perceive themselves.”
25

The next influential and popular interpretation delivered an opposite message. Thomas Dixon Jr.'s novel
The Leopard's Spots,
published in 1902, sold millions of copies. In 1901 Dixon had seen a stage production of
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
the message of which incensed him, and in sixty days he wrote
Leopard's Spots
and sent it to Doubleday, Page and Company. In the novel, an all-knowing preacher warns a racially naïve young white man: “The beginning of Negro equality as a vital fact is the beginning of the end of this nation's life. There is enough negro blood here to make mulatto the whole Republic.” In 1905 Dixon reprised the message in
The Clansman
—an anti-Negro melodrama of Reconstruction focused on black soldiers' sexual assault of white southern women. Dixon's black archetype is the soldier-rapist Gus, who violates a virginal white maiden and drives her to suicide. The newly formed Ku Klux Klan then lynches Gus. Dixon's book provoked considerable outrage. He was called “the high priest of lawlessness, the prophet of anarchy,” and a provocateur of “enmity between race and race.”
26

Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel
Gone with the Wind
was a publishing phenomenon, selling a million copies within a year and more than twenty million by the time
Roots
appeared. It was the fastest-selling novel in history. The book offered a view of slaves as happy, simple, and mostly harmless. With the exception of Scarlett's nurse, Mammy, the blacks portrayed in it were not complex characters. Fiedler argued that Mammy was really Uncle Tom redone, “the Great Black Mother of us all.” In his autobiography, Malcolm X recalled seeing the film version of
Gone with the Wind
in Mason, Michigan. “I was the only Negro in the theatre,” he said, “and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug.” (As Prissy, McQueen played a character much like Topsy of
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
)
Gone with the Wind
's portrayal of Civil War Atlanta was accurate, whereas its depiction of Reconstruction-era Georgia follows the themes of Dixon's work. The lives of black characters in the book were peripheral to the melodrama, but because
Gone with the Wind
was such a huge event in American popular culture, its interpretation of reality influenced American popular thought for several generations after it appeared.
27

Roots
was a complete revision of the myths inherent in the popular epic up until then. The historian Jack Temple Kirby thought it had turned
Gone With the Wind
“inside out,” by making whites two-dimensional characters, “widgets in a cruel system,” while blacks were “vivid and memorable.” The British scholar Helen Taylor thought
Roots
provided a mythology of heroic blacks so compelling that it would be treated as a kind of “Black Family Bible.” Fiedler thought Haley's greatest contribution to the popular epic was Kunta Kinte, “an unreconstructed Noble African.” Dismissing questions about the authenticity of Kunta, Fiedler said he was “less a portrait of Haley's first American ancestor, legendary or real, than of Malcolm X as Haley perceived him.” Both Kunta and Malcolm were “inverted Racist[s], convinced that all Whites not only invariably do evil to all Blacks, but that they have an offensive odor, and are properly classified not as human but as
toubob,
‘devils,' who must be resisted unto death.” By the time
Roots
appeared,
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
had sold six million copies, and Malcolm was a heroic figure for many Americans. To make Kunta so heroic, Haley had to depart from historical realism. He barely acknowledged the role of black Africans in the slave trade, leaving whites entirely responsible for its brutality. Fiedler scoffed at Haley's handling of the sexual aspects of the popular epic. Haley made no mention of Mandinka polygamy, and he kept Kunta a virgin until he was thirty-nine—choices that strained the credulity of his narrative but were possibly analogous to the life of Malcolm, who claimed to have been celibate for twelve years.
28

Roots
surely recast the popular epic for American whites. Most blacks had already rejected the contributions to it from Stowe, Dixon, and Mitchell, and they overwhelmingly embraced
Roots.
But most of Haley's audience was made up of whites, and he affected millions of them. Ninety-nine percent of the letters Haley received from the
Reader's Digest
condensed version of
Roots
were from whites, nearly all of them testifying to the book's profound effect on their thinking.
29

Roots
opened readers to a broader empathy with the slave's experience. Charles Todd, a folklorist at Hamilton College and the man mainly responsible for bringing Haley on the school's faculty, had assigned
Uncle Tom's Cabin
to students, and during the 1960s and early 1970s, black students dismissed the book. Some refused to turn in papers on it, and one woman threw the book at Todd's feet and stomped from the class. Often, black students refused to speak about the novel at all, and at other times, discussions of it “reached near riot proportions.” But under the influence of
Roots,
students became more understanding of Tom. “One must put the book in the context of its time,” many students now said. “Those who talk of ‘Tomming' have missed the point.” In 1976 one black student compared Uncle Tom to Kunta Kinte, pointing out that his accommodating manner was just a means of survival.
30

The power of the popular epic created by these novels depended on their transference to other cultural media. Fiedler wrote that what distinguished all popular art from high art was its ability to move from one medium to another. Hundreds of theatrical presentations of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
toured the United States and the world for at least two generations after the novel appeared. Thomas Dixon was only one of millions who first acquired an understanding of the popular epic of race from an
Uncle Tom
play; millions were similarly affected by the treatment of
The Clansman
in
The Birth of a Nation.
Even more acquired a view of slavery and race from
Gone with the Wind.
But the biggest crowd yet would have their views shaped by the televised version of
Roots.
31

9

Pop Triumph

The success of
Roots
on television surpassed anything that Alex Haley, or anyone, had imagined. When he decided to produce
Roots,
David Wolper knew that he was taking a big chance. Blacks had hardly been seen in television drama up to that time. In 1976 the most popular black television personalities were the comedians Redd Foxx (
Sanford and Son
), Flip Wilson (
The Flip Wilson Show
), and Sherman Hemsley (
All in the Family
and
The Jeffersons
). A notable and recent exception was the 1972 production of
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,
based on Ernest Gaines's novel. Relatively few cinematic dramas had featured black characters. Most of those had appeared since the late 1950s and starred Sidney Poitier—
The Defiant Ones,
Lilies of the Field,
In the Heat of the Night,
and
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
—all films with realistic racial messages that were not duplicated on television prior to
Roots.
1

In another way, the
Roots
miniseries was part of a new trend in television. It followed
QB VII
(1974), the first miniseries, based on Leon Uris's Nazi-themed courtroom drama, and
Rich Man, Poor Man,
a family saga adapted from Irwin Shaw's novel that had run in 1976 for seven consecutive Monday nights and won a large audience as well as four Emmys. The trend continued with the 1979 series
Holocaust,
which also won high praise and a big audience.
Roots
would follow the miniseries formula—a cast of established stars, suggestions of sex but nothing explicit, ample violence, and characters of unquestionable heroism. Each of the successful 1970s miniseries explored the experience of a group of “others”—Jews, women, or blacks—who had not been examined positively in popular treatments of American society. This revision of American popular history came in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and in the midst of the women's movement and the rising consciousness among many Americans of European immigrant heritage in the 1970s.

Roots
was a departure from past treatments of one of the most disturbing stories of American history, the experience of slavery. Wolper's expectation of a high level of realism set
Roots
well apart from the last screen interpretation of slavery, the 1975 film
Mandingo,
which had dwelt on interracial sex and elicited harsh reviews. Having made that commitment, Wolper worried about how an American audience would tolerate a truly accurate account of the degradation of slaves. He was particularly concerned about scenes in the hold of the slave ship. But he thought the series would be accepted and watched by enough white Americans because it was a family story. The purposeful way that descendants of Kunta Kinte held on to their African heritage and survived slavery intact as a family gave the story the good feeling that offset the inhumanity—the beatings and family break-ups—that was necessary to portray. A master of the genre of documentary film, Wolper thought of himself as a “visual historian.” He insisted that his documentaries were especially effective educational instruments because they were also entertaining, and thus he made no apology for his didactic purposes in
Roots.
Wolper and Stan Margulies, his manager of daily production, had most recently enjoyed success with the cinema comedies
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, If It's Tuesday This Must Be Belgium,
and
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
They had the confidence to try something new and, for the time, daring, by producing
Roots.
2

Wolper approached the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), whose executives were intrigued but also concerned that there had never been a successful black dramatic series on television and doubted that advertisers would support one. ABC agreed to go ahead but set a relatively low production budget—given the length of the series and the size of the cast—of $5 million, later raised to $6 million. The producers' first concern in casting
Roots
for television was how whites would receive the show. Wolper said he was “trying to appeal to whites” since “they make up 90% of the audience,” and thus “to reach and manipulate” whites' minds so they would watch the miniseries and not think of it as a “black” show. He lined up white television stars to win over white audiences. The ABC executive Brandon Stoddard said the network used actors whom white viewers had seen a hundred times before, “so they would feel comfortable.” The most familiar white actors included some who had starred in long-running television series: Lorne Green (
Bonanza
), Sandy Duncan (
Funny Face
), Lloyd Bridges (
Seahunt
), Chuck Connors (
The Rifleman
), Edward Asner (
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
), Ralph Waite (
The Waltons
), Macdonald Carey (
Days of Our Lives
), Doug McLure (
The Virginian
), and Yvonne De Carlo (
The Munsters
). The promotional trailers before the broadcast included many shots of those stars.
3

To create the teleplay, the screenwriter William Blinn used drafts of the unfinished book. Haley had little to do with the writing of the script, although Wolper insisted that Haley controlled the story. He said that Haley never objected to or complained about the changes in character and plot: “He understood that a movie and a book differed and he trusted us.” Haley visited the set and advised on cultural matters: “How does a Gambian child address his mother? What animals are found in the village?”
4

Shooting began in June 1976 in Savannah, Georgia, where replicas of an African village and a slave ship had been built. The ship's hold was so authentic that the extras crammed into it cried during the shooting. One early effort for verisimilitude was to have African women shown naked from the waist up; the women were shown from a distance. Most viewers accepted the scenes without objection or even notice, but the mother of a twelve-year-old extra, who volunteered to appear nude in a scene, sued Wolper. The producers identified her in every frame of film and made sure that she was not exposed.
5

Wolper cast many well-known black actors in the series. John Amos (
Good Times
) played the mature Kinte; Leslie Uggams (
The Leslie Uggams Show
) was Kizzy; Cicely Tyson (
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
) portrayed Kinte's mother, Binta; and Richard Roundtree (
Shaft
) was a carriage driver and Kizzy's lover. Though he had not worked in television, Ben Vereen had just won two Tony Awards for starring roles in
Jesus Christ Superstar
and
Pippin.
If the producers wanted mostly identifiable black actors, they sought an unknown for the role of the young Kunta Kinte. Stoddard said that “from a purely casting standpoint it was essential that Kunta Kinte be seen not as an actor being Kunta Kinta” but as embodying Kunta entirely. They cast LeVar Burton, who had no acting credits, in the role, and he proved to be a great success. Haley's only input on the casting was to encourage the selection of a dark-skinned actor to play Kunta. He had gotten a strong impression in Africa of the blackness of the native people, as compared with the shades of brown found among most African Americans. Haley imagined Kunta to resemble the Gambian student Ebou Manga. For their work in
Roots,
nine black actors were nominated for Emmy Awards, and Olivia Cole (Mathilda) and Louis Gossett Jr. (Fiddler) received awards for, respectively, best supporting actress and actor. Leslie Uggams (Kizzy) won a Golden Globe Award. The large black cast of
Roots
hoped that the series would bring more opportunities for them in Hollywood. But neither
Roots
nor its sequel,
Roots: The Next Generations,
opened many new doors. In 2007 Uggams said the miniseries had very little long-lasting effect: “We all had high expectations and thought the world was going to be everyone's oyster. It didn't happen that way.”
6

Each of the eight episodes of
Roots
followed a separate theme, and most ended on an upbeat note. For example, at the end of the first, when the captives are at the end of the Middle Passage, an African leads a chant by the captives: “We will live!” At the end of the second, when the overseer has beaten Kunta, the Fiddler character tells him, “There's gonna be another day!” At the end of the third, after slave catchers have cut off part of Kunta's foot and the cook Bell is trying to raise his spirits, Kunta says, “I'm gonna do better than walk.
Damnit!
I'm gonna learn to
run!
” In the fourth, Kunta tells Kizzy, “Your name means ‘stay put'—but it don't mean ‘stay a slave.'” Each episode thus reinforced the series' overarching theme of blacks' individual endurance and strength, as well as the persistence of black families. When he chose not to attempt an escape to the North, Kunta affirmed his commitment to his family over the possibility of freedom. But the inhumanity of slavery provided a constant tension throughout the series. The fifth episode ended with Kizzy vowing vengeance against Tom Lea, the man who raped her. The sixth stopped with Chicken George's owner, who has sold George's family away while George fights cocks in Europe, saying that the returning slave will not be able to do anything about such cruelty. “He'll come back a nigger. . . . And what's a nigger to do?” The seventh ended with Tom Murray facing an ominous future for having killed the white man who raped his wife. After he has faced down the brother of the man he killed, Tom's gaze looks fierce and unconquered. The eighth and final episode showed Chicken George and his progeny escaping from peonage and making their long journey to Tennessee, where the last generations of the family enjoy peace and prosperity, and ended with Alex Haley telling of his triumphant twelve-year quest to find his family's history.

The script adaptation made the emphases in the miniseries drastically different from those in the book. Almost the first fourth of the book dwells on the African environment, but the television series devoted only part of the first episodes to it. The rich anthropological material that Haley used in the book was almost entirely lost. Stoddard of ABC explained that “what seems to interest Americans most are Americans. . . . In
Roots,
we got out of Africa as fast as we could.” The characters arrive in America early in the second episode.
Roots
on television hardly challenged the Eurocentric cultural perspective of Africa as the “dark continent.” In the book, Haley made a point of emphasizing the survival of African cultural elements among American slaves. That was lost on television. The script made some white characters “good,” whereas in the book there are almost no admirable white figures. The book said almost nothing about Captain Davies of the slave ship, but he was portrayed on television by Edward Asner as a religious man with a tortured moral character. Davies was paired in the plot with the seasoned slave trader called Slater, a violent, abusive character whose inhumanity makes Davies seem like a good white man in comparison. When Slater thrusts a young African girl on Davies for his sexual pleasure, and Davies accepts her, Davies seems human in his sinfulness and vulnerability. Asner won an Emmy for his performance.

The television interpretation of
Roots
diminished Haley's black characters. Three characters who mentored Kunta were collapsed into one, eliminating the nuances that came from multiple black perspectives in the book. The producers and writers decided that they needed the continuity of a single, strong influence on Kunta, and Fiddler, played by Lou Gossett Jr., performed that function. On the other hand, the television script created a character, the slave woman Fanta, who is forced to have sex with Davies on the slave ship and later, in Virginia, becomes Kunta's first love interest. She seems to have been inserted to titillate viewers. When she argues loudly with Kunta the morning after their night together, her explosion leads to his entrapment. This characterization seems false because a consistent point of
Roots
was that slaves were always careful in keeping their thoughts and emotions from whites.
7

Nonetheless,
Roots,
as both book and the miniseries, was such a departure from previous popular interpretations of slavery that it shifted mass culture to a new understanding of slavery and the black family. More than a decade after
Roots
aired, the cultural historian Donald Bogle, perhaps the most astute critic of African Americans in film and television, thought that the series was rare among television dramas in that neither the black characters nor the actors in the series were “standard, comfy, middle-class, reassuring types” but were instead figures “larger than life with aches, pains, or struggles that filled the viewers with a sense of terror or awe. . . . None pulled back from a moment that might disturb or upset a viewer.” Bogle thought the weakest part of the series was the African portion: Kunta's manhood rites looked like a “frat initiation.” Binta, Kunta's mother, was a richly developed character in the book, but on television she was less fully realized and influential on Kunta, even as portrayed by the talented Cicely Tyson. On the other hand, John Amos as the mature Kunta and Madge Sinclair as Bell played off each other deftly, evoking real humanity. Louis Gossett Jr. took the Fiddler character to a high level, “displaying in turn Uncle-Tomish deference, fatherly care for Kunta, and strutting showmanship as the musician.” Bogle concluded that the black experience was “far wider, far denser, far more complicated, far more unmanageable than
Roots
implied” but that the series still “captured the raw, archetypal, mythic essence of human experience.” Seeing on commercial television the atrocities of American slavery but then “witnessing the victorious spirit of those who survived it all, audiences have been affected in unanticipated ways.” Bogle considered
Roots
a “pop triumph.”
8