Looking Back at the Roots Phenomenon - Critical Essay

Black Issues Book Review, July, 2001 by A'Lelia Bundles

In a September 1976 review of the novel Roots, Newsweek sneered at Haley's "pulpy style" and "the excesses of [his] flamboyant Gothic fiction." He was criticized for turning Juffure into a paradise and for taking too many liberties with history. In his own defense, he called his writing "faction" to acknowledge the mix of fact and fiction. "Every one of us goes back ancestrally to someone who lived in one of those African villages, was caught, brought across the ocean and worked on a plantation, went through the Civil War" Haley told Newsweek. "That's the saga of the whole race"

He knew that a dry, scholarly work would alter the thinking of far fewer people and have less social impact than a sweeping, near mythological epic that placed African Americans' struggles and victories within the constellation of all of America's ethnic groups. His goal, he said, was to "touch the pulse of how alike we human beings are when you get down to the bottom, beneath these man-imposed differences."

The telling of Haley's family tale awakened an interest in oral history, spawned enthusiasm for family reunions and created a hunger in all Americans for more information about their ancestors. What had been the domain of Mayflower families and European descendants with coats of arms, now fell within the purview of those families whose grandparents had arrived in steerage and on slave ships. Roots also created a climate that made the publishing industry more receptive to books like the current crop of multi-generational sagas that includes Alice Randall's just released novel The Wind Done Gone, Lalita Tademy's Cane River, Tony Burroughs' instructive nonfiction genealogy guide Black Roots, Neil Henry's family memoir Pearl's Secret, and family histories of the last decade and a half like James P. Comer's Maggie's American Dream, Adele Logan Alexander's Homelands and Waterways, Shirlee Taylor Haizlip's The Sweeter the Juice and Stephen Ball's Slaves in the Family (see below "Alex Haley's Literary Children" for more information on these titles).

Haley had broken the barriers for many writers and spent a great deal of time--surely time when he could have been completing his own projects--generously mentoring those writers. Sadly, after Roots, he published only one more book, A Different Kind of Christmas, before his death in February 1992. Posthumously his estate commissioned author David Stevens to complete two other novels, Queen and Mama Flora's Family.

Perhaps his writing stalled because he had experienced a crisis of confidence after certified genealogists found discrepancies in his research. Certainly during the last decade of his life, his diabetes and high blood pressure were taking their toll. And sometimes he was just plain tired from all the demands that others made of him. But perhaps more than anything, his muse had been bruised by two lawsuits that accused him of plagiarism. He was able to disprove the copyright infringement claim brought by Margaret Walker charging that he had lifted from her 1966 novel, Jubilee. But Haley's lawyers settled the second lawsuit for $500,000 after conceding that "given his extensive and unannotated notetaking" he had unintentionally taken material from Harold Courtlander's The African, a novel that had been published in 1968.