Haley never explicitly discussed the Moynihan Report, but in his lectures and interviews before and after the publication of Roots Haley argued that American families of all races were not as strong as they once had been. “It seems that this country today is afflicted by rootlessness,” Haley said. “We are a young country, brash, we have all this technology and it seems we are rapidly drawing away from our sense of heritage. We’re drawing away from old people. Since the ’60s, it has come to be fashionable to be irreverent toward older people.”23 Haley blamed television and other media for much of this detachment, even as he was busy consulting on the television adaptation of Roots. “It used to be, before television and radio, families’ entertainment tended to be gathering in the home and listening to the old people talk,” Haley said. “Now kids don’t have time to listen to old people say ‘boo.’ . . . Television came along and there was no more talking.”24 While Haley had lived in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles and traveled broadly, Henning, Tennessee, remained his frame of reference for the golden age of family and community life. “In the 40 or so years since I grew up in Henning, the family has been shrinking and drifting apart,” Haley said in an interview with Playboy. “As America has moved from the country to the city, from huge, messy old homes echoing with the noise of three generations to closet-sized, $400-a-month apartments for swinging singles eating TV dinners alone in 600-unit high-rises; from sitting on front porches, listening to grandmothers tell family stories like the ones I heard, to sitting in suburban rec rooms with baby sitters while Mom and Dad go out.” Haley said he did not want to “run down” urban and suburban America or “romanticize” the rural past but argued that “there’s no question that somewhere along the way between then and now, we’ve lost something very precious: a sense of community, which is nothing more than a congregation of families.”25 Haley advocated a traditional view of family that would have resonated with supporters of the Moynihan Report. Like Gutman’s book, though, Haley’s Roots looked to the era of slavery to find an example of a stable black family.
In the process of celebrating the strength and resilience of black families, Roots also unsettled long-held myths about benevolent plantation “families” where slave masters supposedly cared for their slaves like children. Among the thousands of letters Haley received, some came from whites who tried to reconcile their own family histories and views of slavery with Roots. “I think we all needed to be told what the slaves suffered during these inhuman years,” a white reader from suburban Seattle wrote. “I am 41 years old and just a year ago, I found, in tracing my own roots that my great, great, great grandfather, Nathaniel Owens of Green Co., Kentucky, had slaves on his plantation. In the year 1830, he had 29 slaves. I discussed this with my father, and was told Nathaniel Owens was good to his slaves, and when they were freed, they didn’t want to leave him.” After asking Haley if the sprinter and Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens was a descendant of Nathaniel Owens, the reader confessed that she was still trying to come to terms with slavery as part of her family’s history. “Mr. Haley, I want to tell you I was shocked that any ancestors of mine had slaves,” she wrote. “None of your ancestors were involved with mine, but the slaves belonging to Nathaniel must’ve suffered the same things before he bought them. I hope he was good to them, as I’ve been told. Just the same I would humbly like to apologize to those people for whatever they suffered. So to those people, I now, 148 years later say, I am sorry.”26 Many reviewers attributed the success of Roots to “white guilt,” but this and similar letters speak to more interesting and complicated feelings. If Roots gave black Americans a vision of a black family’s history they could find empowering and inspiring, the book encouraged some white Americans to see slavery as part of their own family’s history. These engagements were messy, though they could be productive. Nathaniel Owens’s descendant, for example, clung to the idea of a benevolent slave master even as she apologized.
Haley understood that most white Americans held distorted views of slavery shaped by a powerful mix of popular culture fables like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, history textbooks that downplayed slavery or romanticized the antebellum South, and family stories. A reader from Shreveport, for example, wrote to Haley to say that she and her husband felt “real compassion with the slaves” in his book but were “deeply disturbed” that all the slave owners were depicted “as cruel and viewing their slaves as little more than cattle.” In contrast, she wrote, “Our family owned a plantation in Florien, Louisiana from the 1700’s through the time of the Civil War. In the cemetery is the grave of the original owner. At his feet is the grave of a negro slave. The slave requested to be buried at his master’s feet.”27 Haley encountered these anecdotes rationalizing slavery over and over again. “People had such a mythological view of slavery and what it involved,” Haley said. “Those who offer that argument seek to defend the long-prevailing image of benevolent masters. But no matter how good the master may have been it did not change the status of his slaves.”28 More than just upsetting the view of benevolent plantation families, Haley made it clear that slave owners populate the family trees of many white Americans. Roots, more than other books during the 1970s genealogy renaissance, made it clear that family histories are not always celebratory.
Roots attacked the mythological view of slavery with “faction” rather than footnotes. “Since I wasn’t yet around when most of the story occurred,” Haley wrote in Roots, “by far most of the dialogue and most of the incidents are of necessity a novelized amalgam of what I know took place together with what my researching led me to plausibly feel took place.”29 Elsewhere Haley said, “Call it ‘faction,’ if you like, or heightened history, or fiction based on the lives of real people.”30
Haley’s approach to writing “faction” made many critics uneasy. “Roots is a hybrid work,” literary critic Arnold Rampersad wrote. “It links the detective skills of a superior investigative reporter to the powers of a would-be fiction writer, and the product is a work of extremely uneven texture but unquestionable final success.” Rampersad argued that Haley simply did not possess the creative writing skills to do justice to the fictional potential of Roots. “The solemnity of the basic theme of Roots also cannot obscure the fact that the Afro-American novel is too accomplished in its basic skills for Roots to pass as a well wrought novel or romance,” Rampersad argued. “Technically, the work is so innocent of fictive ingenuity that it seldom surpasses the standards of the most popular of historical romances.”31 Historian Willie Lee Rose raised similar concerns from a different disciplinary perspective. “The problem of characterizing the individual people of so many generations, of making more than a score of persons come alive in the special circumstances of two vastly different cultures, and over a span of two centuries, challenges Haley the artist, and taxes Haley the historian,” Rose wrote. “There are long sections in the book that will cause the historian to call Roots fiction, when literary critics may prefer to call it history rather than judge it as art. For Roots is long and ambitious, and all of its parts are not as good as the best parts.”32 New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt argued that despite Haley’s attempt to mix fact and fiction, Roots “all reads like fiction, and very conventional fiction at that.”33 Lehmann-Haupt described the last section of Roots, where Haley details his search for his ancestors, as the book’s most remarkable passage. “It is here that we are finally convinced that the dramatic family-chronicle Mr. Haley has told is not the novel that it appears, but actual history,” Lehmann-Haupt wrote, before suggesting that Haley would have been better served by writing an autobiography about his search rather than a novelized history. “By writing ‘Roots’ Mr. Haley has done something merely ordinary,” Lehmann-Haupt argued, “whereas by laying the groundwork to write it—by tracing his heritage back to its African roots and thereby providing a concrete example to those millions of American blacks whose true names remain unknown—he has done something extraordinary.”34
> Haley’s blend of fact and fiction received more attention after the London Times published a story in April 1977 by travel journalist Mark Ottaway raising questions about Haley’s research in the Gambia. Ottaway visited the Gambia, spoke with Gambian archivist and historian Bakari Sidibe, and wrote that “the vital link in Haley’s claim to have traced his ancestry to Kunta Kinte and Juffure was provided by a man of notorious unreliability who knew in advance what Haley wanted to hear and who subsequently gave a totally different version of the tale.”35 Ottaway noted several other inconsistencies with Haley’s research, and his story received international attention.
The New York Times asked a number of prominent historians to weigh in on the Roots controversy. Many were unmoved by the issues with Haley’s research but were careful to note that Roots was not the work of a professional historian. “It’s a work of fiction,” Harvard historian Bernard Baylin said. “And its importance is as a work of fiction and a very powerful one. I don’t think its importance rests on whether or not such and such a ship was in such and such a place. I don’t give a damn if they don’t find the ship he names. It’s a powerful book for other reasons altogether. This account is the author’s perception of the meaning of slavery, and the account is one of sensibility. I don’t think it turns on details. It turns on a state of mind, and there’s no documentation of that.” Yale’s Edmund Morgan, whose 1975 book American Slavery, American Freedom influenced a generation of scholarship, argued that “errors about the location of the village are not very important—nobody will deny there was a slave trade.” Ultimately, Morgan suggested, Roots is “a statement of someone’s search for an identity. It would seem to me to retain a good deal of impact no matter how many mistakes the man has made. In any genealogy there are bound to be a number of mistakes. . . . If they can prove willful mistakes, I guess I wouldn’t draw very many conclusions, because I don’t think the book will have a great impact on historians anyway.” Robert Fogel, author of Time on the Cross, a controversial economic history of slavery, also offered qualified praise of Haley. “I thought Roots was the best historical novel ever written on slavery, and I say that not to demean it, because a first-rate historical novel can frequently give you a better sense of historical knowledge than carefully researched history,” Fogel said. “I never applied to it the standards I would have if it had been written by C. Vann Woodward or Oscar Handlin.” Harvard’s Oscar Handlin thought his fellow historians were being too easy on Haley and Roots. “A fraud’s a fraud,” Handlin said. “Most historians are cowardly about reviewing history books. The whole idea of being factual about material has gone out the window. Historians are reluctant—cowardly—about calling attention to factual errors when the general theme is in the right direction. That goes for foreign policy, for race and for this book. I think it’s a disgrace.”36
Other scholars argued that myth had always been a part of historical storytelling. “The problem is we all need certain myths about the past, and one must remember how much in the myths about the Pilgrims or the immigrants coming here has been reversed,” Yale’s David Davis said.37 Warren Roberts, director of the Museum of African Art, was more vociferous in his defense of Haley, comparing Roots favorably to Arnold Toynbee’s twelve-volume A Study of History (1934–61). “If Haley’s source for the African part of his history ‘was,’ as Ottaway writes, ‘a man of notorious unreliability who probably knew beforehand what Haley wanted to hear,’ the result is far less inaccurate than Toynbee’s with his gigantic omissions of entire eras and civilizations,” Roberts wrote. “If some of Haley’s roots are myths (‘working hypotheses’), they are far more valuable for purposes of achieving human understanding at this transient stage of history-writing than the myths they are supplanting.”38
C. Eric Lincoln, a black scholar and friend of Haley, said he had heard other academics put down Roots “because it’s not history” but suggested that Haley’s skill was in capturing a larger “cultural truth.” Haley was “a genius in having the imagination which enabled him to create characters that make the truth live,” Lincoln argued. “Here you have this vast expanse of history, this vast experience that nobody thought important enough to record, and Alex is able to take the outlines, which is all that is available to him, and to give those outlines meaning by the creation of characters . . . by the creation of situations which makes of a blank period of American history a living experience.”39 Washington Post reviewer Robert Maynard agreed that Roots had to be evaluated as a story told to a mass commercial readership rather than by typical academic criteria. “I picked [Roots] up in suspicion and put it down so overcome by the power of the narrative that my first reaction was to wonder how much it mattered whether every detail of Haley’s lineage had been precisely established,” Maynard wrote. “I would have preferred a book loaded with footnotes and other documentation, but that is not this book. . . . What is surprising to me now is how much less important that documentation became as I moved through the story of seven generations of a family.”40 Thomas Lask, writing in the New York Times, concurred. “For those unnumbered readers who never touch a historical monograph or peruse the charts and statistics of an article in an abstruse journal,” Lask wrote, “‘Roots’ will remain the most meaningful account of the black experience in America.”41 Roots reached hundreds of thousands more readers than academic treatments of slavery or black history, and C. Eric Lincoln suspected that academic critics of Roots were jealous of the book’s success. “I don’t care what the academics say,” Lincoln concluded. “I challenge the academics to go out and to do as well.”42
Award committees were also unsure how to categorize Haley’s book. Both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award gave Roots special awards rather than putting the book in the fiction or nonfiction categories. “We didn’t care whether it was history or fiction, or a personal confession,” said Richard Baker, the head of the Pulitzer Prize Board. “It deserved a special award.”43 Ken McCormick, one of Haley’s editors at Doubleday, wrote to congratulate the author on the National Book Award. McCormick described the award as “a very nice tribute to you” but noted, “I think there is something pretty sad in a set of categories that can’t adjust itself to your extraordinary book.”44
For his part, Haley spoke frequently about how he created his particular brand of “faction.” “I wrote ‘Roots’ as a novel from the point of view of the characters,” Haley said.45 As Haley and his research assistant George Sims amassed boxes of research material on different historical periods and subjects, Haley tried to keep in mind that “there was so much that [the characters] couldn’t know” about the eras in which they were living or how the nation’s and family’s histories would unfold. Haley liked to tell a story about jazz musician Miles Davis to illustrate what it meant to become engrossed in creative work. “Miles said he got so full of music that when he was on the subway to go from Julliard to downtown to play with [Charlie Parker], when the subway door would . . . squeak, his mind involuntarily would catch the key, whatever note it squeaked in,” Haley said. “And then his fingers would just involuntary twitch into that trumpet-key position, and all this would happen unconsciously with him.” Haley said he felt a similar sense of creative embodiment with Roots. “I got that way with this book, in phases of it. Where I was writing parts, I WAS the people, I wasn’t me, I WAS THEM.”46 As with so much of Roots, Haley also traced his storytelling techniques back to conversations with his family elders. Cousin Georgia “talked of the people on the porch as if they weren’t dead, but just had gone off-stage behind the curtains,” Haley said. “It was ambiguous and vague, yet supremely charging.”47
Haley came to embrace the idea that history was a set of competing interpretations. In notes prepared in response to the Ottaway controversy, Haley’s wrote, “There is no set, fixed history. History is—what A writes; what B writes; and what really happened—which will never be known.”48 Elsewhere, Haley jotted notes to remind interviewers and audiences that the Western canon was
full of mythical characters created from real historical figures. “There was a real Hamlet, there was a real Johann Faust,” Haley wrote in his notebook, “but the world knows Shakespeare’s mythological Hamlet, Goethe’s Faust.”49 Haley elaborated on his conception of history in a 1979 interview. “The popular concept is if a book is labeled history, it is supposed to be true solid substance material of what was,” Haley said. “That’s not true. It can’t be true. How does somebody know what happened all that time. . . . You can go in any great library you want to go to and pick out five different books on the subject of the Battle of Manassas, the first battle of the Civil War, and you will get five variations or versions about that same battle. All this is saying is that history is not constant. How can it be?”50
Despite all of the hand-wringing over Roots as “faction,” Haley’s book was shaped less by his sense of how to write historical fiction than by his desire to make all the stories he gathered and created fit together neatly. While it is not always clear in Roots where Haley is drawing from archival documents, oral traditions, published secondary sources, or his imagination, the book never veers from the straight line it draws from Kunta Kinte’s birth in 1750s’ Gambia to Haley’s researching of Roots in the 1970s. If Haley toyed with the boundaries between fact and fiction and came to see all history as interpretive, he was dogmatic about keeping the story going as steady as a heartbeat from generation to generation. Many readers loved the steadiness of Haley’s narrative and found it moving, even when they knew in advance how the story would turn out. “I was deeply involved with your narrative,” a reader from Arkansas wrote. “I remained dry-eyed throughout, until . . . well, it was silly, really. I knew it was coming. I’ve read several of your interviews, and knew why I had bought the book, so you tell me why it happened. . . . Page 564, end of Chapter 117: ‘The baby boy, six weeks old, was me.’ I started to cry. He’s done it! I practically shouted. He’s really, actually gone and done it!”51 Few authors have moved hundreds of thousands of readers to tears, and this emotional impact, more than a complex narrative or literary masterpiece, was what Haley sought to produce.
Making Roots Page 14