The producers needed dozens of extras to fill the cargo hold set, and those that were selected were paid about thirty dollars a day.12 “I had the problem of teaching them to be actors, Africans, they had no idea,” director David Greene said. “I’m giving these young men a lecture about their history, then chained their ankles, then put oatmeal on their bodies.”13 Screenwriter Bill Blinn described being moved by the realism of the Middle Passage scene. “All of the stuff in the slave ship was as good as we could have imagined,” Blinn said. “The [film] dailies were difficult to watch, because the reality of being in that hold was horrific. . . . All of [the actors and extras] knew it was true. Between the lines I think most of them knew that someone with whom they had a blood relationship went through this dreadful, awful life. And that they owed it to them to portray it as well as they could.”14 In the Washington Post, Sander Vanocur singled out the Middle Passage scene in praising Roots. “The scenes on the ship, with the slaves chained together, stacked alongside one another, lying in their vomit and excrement, . . . are something we have never seen before,” Vanocur wrote. “We have read about slavery. But we have never seen it, never in such painstaking detail and never being experienced with such excruciating pain.” Vanocur described Roots as reintroducing a “sense of wonder” to television. “Television, when it sets out to portray reality, usually distorts it or just nibbles at it,” Vanocur argued. “I am at a loss for the proper word to use to describe what television has done with Alex Haley’s imagined reality. . . . All you know is that what you have seen leaves you with a terrible and transcending anguish.”15 Newsweek reviewer Harry Waters agreed: “The scenes in the hold, where 140 shackled slaves writhe in anguish, may be the most harrowing ever to enter our living rooms.”16 Many audience letters also pointed to this scene, including a viewer from Skokie, Illinois. “When I was fourteen years old and in the eighth grade, I learned about the history of the Black people,” he wrote. “All the text book reading in the world, though, could not have made the same impression on me as did scenes from Roots (e.g. the episodes which took place on the slave ship).”17
Figure 18. The local casting consultant for Roots looked for young black people around Savannah, like these two students from Savannah State University, to serve as extras during the Middle Passage scene.
While everyone agreed that the recreation of the slave ship’s voyage made for frighteningly realistic television, none of the Roots production team gave much thought to what shooting this scene would mean for the black performers involved. After lying on wooden planks for several hours, being shackled to the person next to them, and being covered with simulated vomit and excrement, most of the extras did not return for a second day of filming. Recreating the conditions by which their ancestors came to the United States was difficult and traumatic work, especially at an extra’s daily pay rate.
The case of Rebecca Bess is the most glaring example in this regard. Credited as “girl on ship,” Bess appears near the end of the first episode as an enslaved woman delivered to Captain Davies’s room as a “bellywarmer.” In the scene the sixteen-year-old Bess, who had never acted professionally, stares with terror at Asner’s character, her arms covering her bare breasts. While Captain Davies says he “does not approve of fornication,” it is implied that he rapes the young girl, signaling that this Christian character has too been debased by the slave trade. The next day (at the start of the second episode of the series), the young girl (still topless) climbs the rigging of the ship and jumps into the ocean to drown. In a series structured around the will of Haley’s ancestors to survive, Bess’s “girl on ship” stands out as the only character to choose death over the horrors of slavery.
Bess came to Roots via Eddie Smith, a local black stunt coordinator in Savannah. She received $187 for diving from the ship into the ocean, which she had to do twice because the camera failed on the first shot. Bess did not know how to swim, so the stunt coordinator gave her lessons in the pool at the Ramada Inn where the cast was staying. Director David Greene recalled that Bess was eager to earn the money to help her parents because her mother was in the hospital. “She was a very quiet girl and she did that dive,” Greene said. “Oh we had people in wet suits, we had crews on the ship to jump overboard and save her. We had a boat right off the end. . . . She touched all our hearts and there she was topless, climbing up on the rigging and jumping over and that was only one of many occasions when we stood there and looked and just saw history and knew that it had happened and it is just astonishing.” Greene described shooting the scenes with Bess as a “deeply moving experience.” “How do you think I felt when a genuine sixteen-year-old southern girl jumped off the rigging of that ship and committed suicide? You can hardly bear to watch it, and I could hardly bear to say ‘action.’”18 Greene’s slippage here between Bess (a “genuine sixteen-year-old southern girl”) and the historical character and incident she portrayed is revealing. Greene and the Roots production team wanted audiences to see this television drama in similarly realistic terms. Audiences described watching Roots as a physically and emotionally wrenching experience, but creating these realistic representations of slavery often came at the expense of black performers.
Rebecca Bess, for example, told a different and less celebratory story about her work on Roots. She filed a lawsuit against David Wolper in 1984, claiming that she had been promised a screen actors’ guild stunt contract. While it is not clear how Bess’s case was resolved, the terms in which she described her teenage role in Roots are telling. “During the filming I was required to go topless which I was not told I would have to do until we were on the set and getting ready to film,” Bess wrote. “I was required to drop my top approximately ten times. . . . I would be required to go topless once more as I would be taken to Ed Asner as a belly warmer by Ralph Waite. It would appear as though Ed Asner had sex with me that night and the next day I would run up on the deck trying to escape, climb up the mast, and jump overboard into the ocean. . . . During the filming I was required to jump off the ship twice. The reason being that during the first jump there was camera failure.”19 In all of the discussions among Roots producers and ABC’s Standards and Practices officials about how bare breasts could be shown on television, these white men never considered what it would mean for young black women to play these roles. For most of these performers, like Bess, Roots would be their first and only time appearing on television. While reviewers and audiences praised the harrowing realism of the slave ship scenes, the young black performers deserve much of the credit.
Even Burton, Roots’s breakout star, was overwhelmed with emotion during the filming of this Middle Passage scene. “I don’t remember very much [about the Middle Passage shooting] till this day,” Burton said later. “It’s as if I was transported. We shot that sequence in two or three days, and I have vague memories of the morning of day one. . . . I feel like I completely disappeared and something else came forward, someone else.”20 Burton described the Middle Passage shooting as “brutal.” “All of my ancestors, those people that I am spiritually and genetically connected to, came forward and really held me up during that day,” Burton said. “LeVar left and somebody else came in. . . . That’s how I survived it.”21 ABC’s official press release for Burton glossed this experience differently: “It’s a long and unlikely trip from the stately halls of the University of Southern California to the sadistic hell of a slaveship hold, but LeVar Burton, not yet out of his teens, made that trip for his role as Kunta Kinta.”22 For ABC Burton’s experience playing an enslaved person was promotional fodder, but for Burton and other black actors and extras it was an experience freighted with trauma and history.
Roots’s most iconic scene forced Burton to work through similar emotions. After Kunta Kinte arrives in Annapolis, Maryland, he is purchased by John Waller and transported to the Waller plantation in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. The plantation overseer, played by Vic Morrow, tasks Fiddler, played by Louis Gossett Jr., with teaching Kunta how to
be a slave. Kunta refuses to accept this unfreedom or to answer to his assigned slave name, Toby. He runs away but is captured and returned to the plantation. In the climatic scene, the overseer commands a black man to whip Kunta, over and over again, in front of the other enslaved people. “When the master gives something, you take,” the overseer says. “He gave you a name. It’s a nice name. It’s Toby. And it’s going to be yours until the day you die. Now I know you understand me and I want to hear it.” Every time Kunta repeats his birth name he is whipped again. The beating continues until Kunta finally says, “My name is Toby.”23
“They were beating LeVar Burton and Kunta Kinte as one,” Burton later said of the scene.24 “I was really uncomfortable with the idea of being whipped,” Burton remembered. While makeup artists created the appearance of lacerations on his back, the whip was real. Burton had to stand, with his hands tied to scaffolding above his head, while a bullwhip struck him. On the first day of shooting the scene, Burton flinched every time the whipped cracked, so director John Erman postponed the scene for a couple of days. The young actor spent a day with the stunt expert who handled the bullwhip. Burton watched the stunt expert do tricks with the whip until Burton was comfortable that the expert could control the tip of the whip (traveling up to 120 miles an hour) so that it would wrap around the actor’s body without breaking the skin. The second shooting was successful, and Burton considered the scene one of the most powerful in the series. “Kunta was a warrior,” Burton said, “and he maintained that aspect of his identity throughout his entire life, he never surrendered who he was. . . . It was the indomitability of his human spirit, his warrior spirit, that prevented him from accepting that name, and that’s what that scene is about. I control who I am.”25
Figure 19. Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) is whipped until he accepts his slave name, “Toby.”
John Erman, who directed the episode, described it as a “devastating scene.” “The whole episode is about the fact that somebody is trying to break this young man’s spirit, and that’s what slavery was all about,” Erman said. Erman remembered that ABC sent the producers a note warning against scenes with whipping or blood. “The welts on the back is not the power of the scene,” Erman argued. “The power of the scene is what’s on that boy’s face and how he struggles to hold on to his identity and finally, finally, says, ‘My name is Toby.’ That’s the thing you react to, not the whip.”26
Burton, Morrow, Asner, and other cast members appeared on television talk shows like Good Morning America and Dinah! to promote Roots and to show that the black and white actors held no animosity toward each other, despite the racism and brutality they had depicted on screen. These interviews helped persuade at least one viewer that she could watch the series. “I could not watch Roots until the final episode,” she wrote to Haley. “I had seen you on TV before Roots and realized I could not watch it. Too horrible. My family did watch. But for me, it was like the movie Jaws . . . I had to read all the background into the filming of Jaws before seeing it. This is the same. Now that I have heard that they called in a whip expert (a whip—expert???) and that LeVar and Vic are friends and that Vic did not handle the whip, etc. Then I can see Roots.”27 Like this elementary school teacher from Fairfax, Virginia, many viewers interpreted Roots in relation to the vast array of promotional material and interviews about the series that circulated across different print and broadcast media. Knowing “how the scenes were filmed and that it’s not really happening,” as this viewer put it, gave audiences more to think about and talk in relation to Roots. Viewers had different levels of investment in seeing Roots as real or fictional, and these personal interpretations and the discussions and debates that often followed helped Roots become a cultural phenomenon.
While the whipping of Kunta Kinte/Toby is the series’ most iconic and referenced moment, the scene was only five minutes of a twelve-hour series and is a misleading way to remember Roots. Roots did not linger on whippings and physical brutality but instead featured a range of relationships and emotions. The series, for example, features several scenes of the enslaved characters interacting in their own spaces, out of sight of the white characters. These scenes gave viewers a sense of the interior lives of the black characters. Haley’s Roots devoted dozens of pages to these slave quarters’ conversations. Haley said he was inspired by interviews with formerly enslaved people conducted by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. “The fact is that most slaves were innately as smart as their masters,” Haley said. “There wasn’t a single slave who wasn’t smart enough to lull white folks into thinking he was ignorant. . . . What whites seldom realized was that through a highly effective grapevine, nearly every slave out in the cotton fields learned in minutes just about everything that went on in the ‘big house,’ even behind closed doors. . . . Yet their masters knew next to nothing about them.”28 The scenes were important to showing enslaved characters experience emotions beyond pain and suffering. Describing a courting scene between Kunta and Belle, John Amos said the scene “gave us a chance to refute, not just stereotypes about men and women who were in the institution as slaves, but it also made the audiences appreciate this relationship and the pressures of it, which this man and woman tried to have some sense of normalcy in their lives.”29
These scenes in the slave quarters also offered some moments of wry humor. Viewers heard about American colonists defeating the British through a dinner conversation among Belle, Fiddler, and Kunta:
BELLE: I’ve never seen white folks carrying on so. They all so happy, they can’t believe it. They keep saying over and over, “The British have surrendered. The war is over, the war is over. Freedom is won.”
FIDDLER: Ain’t that just fine, though? White folks be free. I’ve been worrying and tossing at night about them getting their freedom, been the mostest thing on my mind. Sure is one happy nigger now. Don’t have to worry about them poor white folks no more.30
This brief exchange unsettles the usual chronology of American history, marking the nation’s independence day as just one of the thousands of days before and after the Revolutionary War that black people were held in bondage. This scene calls to mind Frederick Douglass’s “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” where Douglass told an audience of New York abolitionists in 1852, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice. I must mourn.”31 Roots is an American story, but it is organized around the dates that are important for Haley’s generational story, not the usual dates found in US history textbooks.
Director David Greene described Roots as a soap opera, and like any good melodrama, Roots involved a lot of talking. Some of the best lines came from Kunta’s daughter Kizzy. In Haley’s Roots, Kizzy and the other female characters were underdeveloped. Haley tried to inhabit the characters in his book, but he admitted this creative process worked better for the male characters. “If you feel the emotions of the characters as you are writing about them you can better deal with them, you can sort of sense what they are, what makes them tick,” Haley said. “When I was writing Kunta Kinte, I was Kunta Kinte during the various stages of his life. There were times when I was Chicken George and so forth. . . . I didn’t tell myself to identify. I simply identified on the basis of what I was writing.” Reflecting on characters like Binta, Belle, and Kizzy, Haley said, “I found more difficulty trying to feel what the women felt who were characterized in my book. Obviously, I identify more with male characters because I am a man, and for that reason I guess it was more difficult for me to feel the emotions of the female characters.”32 Haley also viewed his genealogical story in decidedly patriarchal terms, despite the important role his Cousin Georgia and other female elders played in passing down the family history. In Haley’s typed notes, for example, he described envisioning the millions of Africans who endured the Middle Passage, and “among them, one human grain of sand, my own great-great-great-great-grandfather, Kunta Kinty [sic]; his testes containing the rest of us.”33 Indeed, Kizzy does not appear in Haley’s earl
y versions of his family history, and when she does show up in later drafts she is little more than a generational bridge to get from Kunta Kinte to Chicken George.
There were no women writers or directors on the Roots television series, and the male production team was not necessarily more attuned than Haley to creating credible female characters. What the television series had on its side were several talented black actresses, such as Cicely Tyson, Madge Sinclair, and Leslie Uggams. Uggams, who played Kizzy, had the largest and most demanding role. Whereas LeVar Burton and John Amos shared the role of Kunta Kinte, the producers used makeup and state-of-the-art prosthetics to allow the thirty-three-year-old Uggams to play Kizzy from a teenager into her seventies. Uggams also had to portray a wider range of emotions than any other character. Over the course of three episodes, Kizzy learns the family history from her father, Kunta; is sold away and separated from her family; is raped by her new master, Tom Lea; gives birth to the son produced by this rape, Chicken George; and becomes the matriarch for a community of enslaved people. Uggams, who was best known for performing in musicals and variety shows, said, “A lot of people were shocked, they didn’t expect that I was capable of portraying something that heavy.” Like her black cast mates, Uggams found Roots rewarding but emotionally challenging. “I would come home [after filming] very, very angry,” Uggams recalled. “I made a lot of phone calls to my mother and father and talking about my grandmother and great-grandmother and how could they put up with this.”34
Making Roots Page 16