Gregory McNamee: Getting Back to Roots: Alex Haley’s Epochal Novel Roots Turns 33
[Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor for Encyclopædia Britannica, for which he writes regularly on world geography, culture, and other topics. An editor, publishing consultant, and photographer, he is also the author of 30 books, most recently Moveable Feasts: The History, Science, and Lore of Food (Praeger, 2006).]
If you are of a certain age and were anywhere near the United States in early 1977, you probably remember the phenomenon that was the first airing of the television miniseries Roots. For a week in late January of that year, across the country, Roots parties were the rage, while sales of newfangled videocassette recorders spiked so that tech-savvy viewers could archive the show.
Across all media, meanwhile, a national conversation began on the always uncomfortable question of slavery and its contribution to America’s course and character. That conversation continues to this day, though, of course, the nation looks much different—with, for one thing, an African American man holding the office of the president, a possibility that would have seemed quite remote to most viewers of the original series.
At the same time, Roots, the book, continued to fly off the shelves, a best-seller with more substance than most. Published on September 12, 1976, and nicely timed for the bicentennial year, Roots had already touched off a genealogy craze that had readers of all ethnicities exploring their families’ pasts...
... Roots, billed as a “genealogical novel,” was an earthy book. It was also unsparing in its depictions of slavery. The 30th-anniversary edition (apparently commemorating the show, not the original book) published in May 2007 by Vanguard Press carries a talk given by Haley to his Reader’s Digest colleagues in which he describes crossing the Atlantic by freighter. “I couldn’t tell the captain, who was such a nice man, nor [the] mate what I wanted to do because they wouldn’t allow me to do it,” he recalls, the project in question being to spend nights down to the hold lying atop a board to approximate Kunta Kinte’s journey across the Middle Passage, one that, Haley was careful to specify, lasted “two months, three weeks, two days.” The experiment didn’t last long—but long enough for Haley to feel suicidal, to say nothing of doubtful about writing his book in the first place....
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If you are of a certain age and were anywhere near the United States in early 1977, you probably remember the phenomenon that was the first airing of the television miniseries Roots. For a week in late January of that year, across the country, Roots parties were the rage, while sales of newfangled videocassette recorders spiked so that tech-savvy viewers could archive the show.
Across all media, meanwhile, a national conversation began on the always uncomfortable question of slavery and its contribution to America’s course and character. That conversation continues to this day, though, of course, the nation looks much different—with, for one thing, an African American man holding the office of the president, a possibility that would have seemed quite remote to most viewers of the original series.
At the same time, Roots, the book, continued to fly off the shelves, a best-seller with more substance than most. Published on September 12, 1976, and nicely timed for the bicentennial year, Roots had already touched off a genealogy craze that had readers of all ethnicities exploring their families’ pasts...
... Roots, billed as a “genealogical novel,” was an earthy book. It was also unsparing in its depictions of slavery. The 30th-anniversary edition (apparently commemorating the show, not the original book) published in May 2007 by Vanguard Press carries a talk given by Haley to his Reader’s Digest colleagues in which he describes crossing the Atlantic by freighter. “I couldn’t tell the captain, who was such a nice man, nor [the] mate what I wanted to do because they wouldn’t allow me to do it,” he recalls, the project in question being to spend nights down to the hold lying atop a board to approximate Kunta Kinte’s journey across the Middle Passage, one that, Haley was careful to specify, lasted “two months, three weeks, two days.” The experiment didn’t last long—but long enough for Haley to feel suicidal, to say nothing of doubtful about writing his book in the first place....