Figure 13. Haley signing copies of Roots at mall in Los Angeles, 1977. Bettmann/Corbis/AP Images.
Haley’s plentiful notes, letters, and drafts offer tantalizing hints of the people, incidents, and themes that did not fit his orderly vision for Roots. In his unpublished manuscript “My Search for Roots,” Haley described a woman, Old Sister Dinti, whom he had known as a boy in Henning, Tennessee. “She had actually been a slave, and to prove it she would let anybody, including us boys, push their hands up her bare back under her blouse to feel for themselves the hard raised welts that still remained from the beatings she had gotten as a young slave girl,” Haley wrote.
Old Sister Dinti liked having us feel her back as much as we were thrilled by the mystery of it, for it opened the door to her talking about what the slaves ate, what they wore, and how they were mistreated and in return would play tricks on their massas, mistresses, and overseers. I remember a kind of wonder at her presence. As I worked on Roots I began to feel on my own back the welts of her youth as the tactile memory of them returned to my fingers when I read of whipping after whipping and saw the early photographs of the skin of slaves, pictures where in brutal clarity I saw the criss-crossed scars raised as high above the smooth flesh as the whips had cut deep into it.52
This story is a more compelling meditation on the embodied nature of history and memory than anything that appears in Roots. Haley describes touching Old Sister Dinti’s scars as a sensuous gateway to learning about slavery, both in terms of the physical brutality enslaved people endured and the everyday lives they led. This story paints an intimate image of history being written on, and told through, a woman’s body. Haley’s memory of Old Sister Dinti makes it even more frustrating that the female characters in Roots are so woefully underdeveloped.
Haley also recounted feeling haunted as he wrote Roots. “Sometimes I would feel as if I was going crazy or something,” he wrote. “Not really ghosts, they seemed fleshed in some ephemeral way, but translucent.” When he reached the later generations in his story, Haley recalled, “I began to experience the most eerie sensation that I was about to be born. Prior to this when I got to those whom I actually had known I had the feeling they were right there in the room with me, sitting in chairs watching, with no eye or face movements.”53 In public, Haley presented his journeys into the past as emotionally uplifting, but his private notes suggest that writing Roots was also emotionally troubling. James Baldwin sent Haley a letter in the late 1960s that noted, cryptically, “You and I have very different [writing] styles: mine has hysteria which can’t be hidden, yours is the species of hysteria which must be hidden.”54 What I think Baldwin meant is that Haley, in his public persona and writing style, studiously avoided going off message or delving into the darker and more unsettling aspects of his story. Haley presented genealogy and history as sources of uplift and nourishment for black people and all Americans. He knew that the past could also be a scary place, but he kept these unnerving aspects hidden.
Other traces in Haley’s archives talk of death, murder, and suicide in ways that are not represented in Roots. “Sometimes my Grandma would stand my hair on end, telling in a hushed voice of the revenge that angry slaves would take on their masters,” Haley wrote in “My Search for Roots.” “I learned how embittered old black mammy nurses stuck long darning needles into the heads of massa’s infants, and then wailed louder than anyone else beside the small graves during the funerals.” Haley retold a lot of stories from his grandmother in his lectures and interviews, but never this one. His notes include a quotation from slave ship captain Thomas Phillips about slaves jumping overboard into the ocean and a page labeled “Suicidal Slaves” that cited a story from a plantation overseer about slaves who, “setting their faces toward Africa, would march down into the water, singing as they marched, till recalled to their senses only by the drowning of some of the party.”55 The theme of Roots was the strength of Haley’s ancestors to survive in America, but the lives and deaths of other enslaved people haunt the margins of Roots. What happened to the other 139 Africans who unwillingly boarded the Lord Ligonier at Fort James en route to America? The shipping records showed Haley that forty-two enslaved people died on the voyage, but what were their stories? And what were the stories of those who survived?
If Haley were a different kind of writer he could have made these numerous gaps, erasures, and hauntings part of his story. This probably would have improved the long-term critical reputation of Roots and made it easier to take the work seriously alongside books like Kindred (1979), Beloved (1987), and Middle Passage (1990) that told stories about slavery while also reflecting on the challenges and implications of telling such stories. One can lament that Haley did not possess the literary talent and imagination of Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, or Charles Johnson (few, of course, do), but we should not underestimate how difficult it was to write a book that millions of people wanted to buy and read, especially a book about slavery. Haley’s sense of the mass market was as keen as any writer’s, and this, combined with his own desire to fashion a neat and linear narrative, determined the composition of Roots.
Two great figures in American and African American letters, Maya Angelou and James Baldwin, viewed Roots as more of an open-ended and challenging story. “The book and television dramatization of it clarify how America’s largest minority came to these shores,” Angelou wrote. “In the face of today’s racial and class strife, I don’t believe that any modern black writer would work 12 years only to answer the perennial questions ‘Why am I here?’ and ‘How did I come so lonely to this place?’ I believe, rather, that Haley has given us the subsequent question: ‘Admitting all that has gone before, admitting our duplicity, our complicity and our greed, what do we, all Americans, do next?’”56 Baldwin also saw Roots as a story whose ending had yet to be written. After Kunta Kinte is kidnapped and brought to America, Baldwin wrote, “It can be said that we know the rest of the story—how it turned out, so to speak, but frankly, I don’t think that we do know the rest of the story. It hasn’t turned out yet, which is the rage and pain and danger of this country. Alex Haley’s taking us back through time to the village of his ancestors is an act of faith and courage, but this book is also an act of love, and it is this which makes it haunting.”57
CHAPTER SEVEN
Watching Roots
Roots started with a birthing mother’s cry. After months of promotion by ABC, millions of Americans tuned in to watch the opening night of the television adaptation of Alex Haley’s best-selling family story. The first thing television viewers heard and saw after the opening credits was Binta Kinte giving birth to a baby boy. Binta can be heard moaning from inside of a thatched hut in Savannah, Georgia, on a film set designed to stand in for eighteenth-century Gambia. Binta is squatting and holding onto the large wooden pole at the center of the dwelling. Binta, shown from the shoulders up, is assisted by two midwives, while her husband Omoro paces anxiously outside. An infant’s cry punctuates the birthing scene, and moments later the audience learns the baby’s name. Holding the baby up toward a star-filled sky, Omoro says, “Kunta Kinte, behold the only thing greater than yourself.”
Opening the series with this birthing scene was strategic. Part of the strategy was to foreground some of the series’ prominent actors. Cicely Tyson, who played Binta, was an award-winning actress and, along with Ed Asner, the most famous and highest-paid actor in the cast. (Tyson had enough clout to request and receive a credit for her hairdresser, Omar.) Maya Angelou, an actress and author well known for her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), played one of the midwives, while Thalmus Rasulala, recognizable from blaxploitation films and various television roles, played Omoro. The scene was also was strategic because the producers hoped starting with a birth would help the series appeal to viewers across demographic lines. Haley described a similar motivation for starting his book with Kunta’s birth and childhood. “I hope,” Haley noted, the audience will be “intrigued with a dis
arming baby—for babies are universal.”1 While they wanted to start with a baby, the producers approached this scene cautiously. “The birth sequence should be beautiful, and we should be very careful of groans and seeing Binta squat to give birth,” Stan Margulies wrote to David Wolper. “It is not a question of being authentic—but simply that too graphic a depiction of a birth in the first few minutes of the show might destroy everything that is to come.”2 The televised birthing scene closely resembled the opening of Haley’s book. “Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte,” Haley wrote to open Roots. “Forcing forth from Binta’s strong young body, he was as black as she was, flecked and slippery with Binta’s blood, and he was bawling. The two wrinkled midwives, old Nyo Boto and the baby’s Grandmother Yaisa, saw that it was a boy and laughed with joy.”3 David Greene, who directed the first episode of Roots, described the first page of Haley’s Roots as “poetry” and remembers thinking, “How can I live up to that?”4
Despite Greene’s concerns, the twelve-hour television series lived up to and productively transformed Haley’s Roots. The televised Roots made the events described in the book visible to millions of viewers and aligned the book’s characters with flesh-and-blood actors. While similar claims can be made for almost all screen adaptations, the stakes for Roots, as a popular history of slavery, were higher. Roots televised scenes of brutality, such as captured Africans being transported across the ocean on a slave ship, Kunta Kinte being whipped on the Waller plantation, and sexual violence against enslaved women. But Roots also broadcast scenes of caring among black families and enslaved people. Roots mixed the emotional pull of a melodrama, the seriousness and scope of a historical drama, and some of the violence, sex, and humor of an exploitation film. This combination of genre characteristics made some critics and viewers uneasy. Writing in Time, for example, Richard Schickel criticized Roots as “Middlebrow Mandingo,” referring to the 1975 film Mandingo, an antebellum melodrama that titillated viewers with interracial sex. Schickel compared Roots unfavorably to a BBC series, The Fight against Slavery (1975, syndicated in the United States on PBS in 1976–77), that he found to be a “more subtle and mature work.”5 David Wolper and ABC, however, proudly designed Roots as middlebrow entertainment to tell a story about slavery that would appeal to a large mass audience. This mass audience, Los Angeles Times critic Mary Beth Crain argued, was crucial to Roots’s place in US culture and to the series’ impact on the popular history of slavery. “The mass catharsis of ‘Roots,’” Crain suggested, “has at last formulated a weapon equal in power to Birth of a Nation.”6 For eight nights in the winter of 1977, Roots walked a tightrope, appealing to universal themes of family and resilience while asking television audiences to identify with the lives, emotions, and struggles of a host of free and enslaved black characters. Over a hundred million Americans (and, later, millions more globally) were enthralled, horrified, and entertained by what they saw.
Figure 14. Binta Kinte (Cicely Tyson) and midwife Nyo Boto (Maya Angelou) show baby Kunta to Omoro and viewers.
Figure 15. Omoro Kinte (Thalmus Rasulala) holds baby Kunta skyward.
The television adaptation of Roots differed from the book in several key respects. Most controversially, the television production gave white characters much larger roles than in Haley’s book. In Haley’s book, the white slave catchers and slave ship crew are called toubob, and a white character with a proper name does not appear until Kunta learns the name of “Massa William Waller” at the end of chapter 51, over two hundred pages into the book. (Haley’s archives include the draft of a chapter written from the perspective of Captain Davies, but the author decided it was not needed.)7 In contrast, after opening with Kunta Kinte’s birth in 1750 the television series jumps ahead fifteen years to a scene set in an Annapolis, Maryland, port where Captain Thomas Davies is preparing to sail the Lord Ligonier to the coast of the Gambia. The slave ship captain in Haley’s book was unnamed and was described only from Kunta’s perspective. The captain’s personal history, motivations, and emotions were irrelevant for Haley’s story. Ed Asner, famous for his role as Lou Grant on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, played Captain Davies in the televised version of Roots, and promotional material for the series featured Asner prominently. The Davies character, established by the screenwriters and embodied by Asner, was a religious man who was morally conflicted about taking part in his first slaving voyage. “The captain,” Asner said, “created the good German, the person who goes along with evil.”8 Asner’s Captain Davies looked virtuous in comparison to his first mate Mr. Slater, portrayed by Ralph Waite. Waite, also a familiar television star from his role as the father on The Waltons, played a veteran slave ship crew member who enjoyed brutalizing slaves.
Figure 16. Ed Asner received top billing in ABC’s promotion of Roots. Asner’s character, the slave ship captain Thomas Davies, played a much larger role in the television version of Roots than in Alex Haley’s book. ABC Photo Archives/Getty Images.
The first episode of Roots cuts between Kunta’s life as a young man in the Edenic village of Juffure and the Lord Ligonier steadily approaching the Gambian coast. Head screenwriter Bill Blinn said that he had struggled for months to figure out how to structure the opening episode of Roots. At one point, Blinn planned to start with the assassination of Malcolm X and feature Haley as a narrator. After deciding that Kunta Kinte needed to be the story’s focal point, Blinn looked for a way to build narrative tension and to get white characters on screen early. Blinn found inspiration in the form of a 1962 Kirk Douglas star vehicle called Lonely Are the Brave. Blinn recalled that Lonely Are the Brave opened with the characters played by Douglas and Carroll O’Conner on a collision course. “You know they’re going to meet,” Blinn said. “You don’t know why, you don’t know how, you don’t know what the connection is, but the storytelling has told us these two are gonna [connect].” This gave Blinn an idea for Roots. “Let’s just start with the captain of the slave ship getting this assignment,” Blinn said. “We could keep cutting back to that slave ship, and seeing what was going on with Ed Asner . . . Because we know that over the horizon there was trouble. Once we got that construction we had a very solid footing to start the picture.”9
While the series rushed to get Kunta out of Africa, Roots did not shy away from Kunta’s traumatic voyage to America in the hold of a slave ship. The Middle Passage scene in Roots was crucial to depicting the transition between freedom in Africa and slavery in the new world. Roots was a story about coming to America, but it was not an immigrant story. The horrors of the Middle Passage cannot be adequately represented in any medium, and before Roots the journey had been depicted rarely in films and never on television.
In a warehouse on the outskirts of Savannah, production designer Jan Scott and her team designed and built the set for the first televised representation of the Middle Passage. Scott navigated several technical challenges in creating a realistic cargo hold film set on dry land. Scott monitored the color value of the wood to ensure that the black actors could be lit properly. She measured the walkway between the racks to make it small enough to appear cramped but large enough to accommodate a film camera. And she rigged lights to swing above the cargo hold, creating the impression that the ship was rocking with the ocean’s waves. When Stan Margulies objected that the aisle planking looked too clean, Scott prepared a mixture of cornflakes, shredded wheat, and bran. She moistened the concoction, let it sit overnight, and applied it the next day so the floor of the set looked like it was covered in urine and feces. Scott recalled that director David Greene walked onto the set and “stood at the bow looking down the aisle and all of the sudden he started to cry. . . . So he liked the set. I’ve never had a director walk in on a set and cry before.”10
Figure 17. The Middle Passage scene in Roots was crucial to depicting the transition between freedom in Africa and slavery in the new world.
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The human component of the Middle Passage scene was more complicated. LeVar Burton and Ji-Tu Cumbuka, who played a character called the Wrestler, were the only Hollywood actors in the cargo hold for the Middle Passage scene. All of the other enslaved characters were young black extras recruited from Savannah. The local casting consultants stopped young people at gas stations, shopping centers, and on their way to and from school. Each prospective extra was photographed and described on an index card in terms of sex, height, weight, and age (many were students from Savannah State University). The index cards also included a section where the casting consultants described the young people’s skin complexion in a variety of terms, such as “Negro,” “black,” “dark,” “pecan,” “mahogany,” “dark brown,” medium dark brown,” and “medium brown.” This array calls to mind artists like Nella Larsen who were keenly aware of the tremendous diversity of black people. “For the hundredth time she marveled at the gradations within this oppressed race of hers,” Larsen wrote of Helga Crane, the protagonist in her novel Quicksand (1928), watching a “swirling mass” of black dancers. “A dozen shades slid by. There was sooty black, shiny black, taupe, mahogany, bronze, copper, gold, orange, yellow, peach, ivory, pinky white, pastry white.”11 Larsen made it clear that these gradations of blackness told their own stories about history and genealogy, pointing to “Africa, Europe, perhaps with a pinch of Asia.” The casting consultants used language similar to Larsen’s, but their task was more narrowly defined. They were looking for extras to portray recently captured Africans, so the note “may be too light” meant the person was unlikely to be hired. This logic was in contrast to the preference Hollywood usually showed for light-skinned black actors.
Making Roots Page 15