Frank's Reviews > Roots: The Saga of an American Family

If you were alive in January 1977, you probably were glued to your TV set for eight consecutive nights watching the miniseries Roots with Lavar Burton starring as a young Kunta Kinte, who was kidnapped from his home in The Gambia and sold into slavery. Kunta was also supposedly the ancestor of Alex Haley who wrote ROOTS: THE SAGA OF AN AMERICAN FAMILY which was the basis for the TV series. I know I and my family were engrossed by the miniseries and ever since then I have been meaning to read the book. Well after almost 50 years, I finally got around to it! I think I had been putting it off because of its length at over 700 pages and because I pretty much knew the story based on the TV show. But I'm glad I finally read it. The book really provides a lot of depth missing from the series.

Of course this tells the story of Kunta Kinte, the young 17-year-old Mandinka taken from The Gambia and sold into slavery. The book goes into a lot of detail of Kunta's life in the Gambia before he was captured and how he and his tribe's people lived subsisting mostly on farming. The climate was sometimes harsh resulting in drought and a lack of food. Then the next section of the book after Kunta is taken described some of the most brutal and harsh conditions I have ever encountered. Kunta and other captives are stripped naked and placed in the brig of a ship, naked and chained. Conditions are nightmarish with the captives vomiting and relieving themselves as they lay chained with no cleanup of the vomit and feces. The novel goes on to tell of Kunta's descendants down through the years to Alex Haley.

I thought that for the most part this was very compelling reading. It took me a little longer than usual to read this book given its length and because I was distracted by some personal issues at home but I was always glad to get back to it. I did find some of the dialogue a little over the top. Haley used black slave vernacular throughout the story which sometimes sounded almost like portrayals of blacks in early motion pictures. Use of the N-word is also prevalent throughout. Here's a short example: "All white folks scairt us n*****s sometime gwine organize an' rise up together— But n*****s ain't gwine never do nothin' together... "

So how much of the book is true? "Haley called his novel "faction" and acknowledged that most of the dialogue and incidents were fictional. But, he claimed to have traced his family lineage back to Kunta Kinte, a West African taken from the village of Juffure in what is now The Gambia. Haley also suggested his portrayal of life and figures among the slaves and masters in Virginia and North Carolina were based on facts which he had confirmed through historical documents." However, "some historians and genealogists suggested Haley did not rely on factual evidence as closely as he represented. They said that there are serious errors with Haley's family history and historical descriptions of the period preceding the Civil War. . .Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. was a friend of Haley's. Years after Haley's death, Gates acknowledged his own doubts about the author's claims:
'Most of us feel it's highly unlikely that Alex found the village whence his ancestors sprang. Roots is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone's imagination.'"

And then there were also allegations of plagiarism:
"In spring 1977, Haley was sued for plagiarism in separate lawsuits by Harold Courlander and Margaret Walker Alexander. Courlander, an anthropologist, claimed that Roots was copied from his novel The African (1967). Walker claimed Haley had plagiarized from her Civil War-era novel Jubilee (1966). Legal proceedings in each case were concluded late in 1978. Courlander's suit was settled out of court for $650,000 (equivalent to $3 million in 2023) and an acknowledgment from Haley that certain passages within Roots were copied from The African. The court dismissed Walker's case."

OK, well overall it appears there are some definite problems with the accuracy of Haley's history of his family. But it is still a very engrossing and compelling read and provides a very heart-wrenching story of slavery in America. I would still recommend this to anyone interested in this ugly part of our history.