Uggams’s best scenes come opposite Sandy Duncan, who played Missy Anne Reynolds, the niece of Dr. William Reynolds, who owned Kizzy and Kunta. In one scene, Kizzy helps Missy Anne select clothes for dinner and Missy Anne confides in Kizzy about her romantic involvement with a distant cousin. The characters talk almost as friends, and viewers learn that Missy Anne taught Kizzy to read, a secret they need to keep from Dr. Reynolds. “You keep my secrets and I’ll keep yours,” Missy Anne tells Kizzy. “I’ll protect you, Kizzy, I’ll always protect you.”35 Moments later, over a picnic in a meadow, Missy Anne tells Kizzy that her uncle is planning to gift Kizzy to her. “You’ll be my slave, Kizzy, we’ll be together for ever. And you’ll never have to be afraid again, because I’ll protect you, Kizzy.” Kizzy gently protests, “There seems just so much happening all of the sudden.” The exchange that follows is one of the most didactic moments in the series.
MISSY ANNE: It will be better than ever for you and me, Kizzy. And it will be legal. You hear me, Kizzy? Legal.
KIZZY: Don’t know nothing about legal.
MISSY ANNE: Well, legal is . . . it’s just the law. Black people are slaves and white people own them. That’s just the way it is.
KIZZY: I know. Just don’t understand it, I guess.
MISSY ANNE: Well, think of it this way, Kizzy. It’s the natural way of things. I suppose it’s because white folks are just naturally smarter than niggers. Like men are smarter than women. Now, everyone knows that for heaven’s sake.
KIZZY: You mean that’s the way God made it?
MISSY ANNE: Exactly. So if it wasn’t right, now he’d change it wouldn’t he?36
Producer Stan Margulies described this episode as the “one out-and-out woman’s show in the series,” and as in a melodramatic soap opera, this scene works because Uggams and Duncan wring additional emotion and meaning out of the script.37 Duncan is upbeat as she delivers her lines, giggling and smiling while explaining the naturalness of slavery and patriarchy. Uggams’s face registers confusion, but also a sort of wiliness as Kizzy draws Missy Anne out. Missy Anne is repeating rationales for slavery that outlived the peculiar institution and propped up romantic visions of plantation life. Roots undermines these views by pushing the idea of childhood friendship between slaves and masters to a ludicrous extreme. “Kizzy, don’t you want to be my slave?” Missy Anne says near the end of their conversation, slightly offended. “Aren’t you my friend?”38
In the television series Kizzy has a character arc, and a chance for a small measure of revenge, that she is denied in the book. Decades after she is sold way from the Reynolds plantation, a horse-drawn carriage arrives at the Lea plantation with a familiar passenger, Missy Anne. Kizzy recognizes Missy Anne, but Missy Anne pretends not to remember her old “friend.” When Kizzy goes to get Missy Anne water, she spits in the cup before delivering it to her. This was not initially in the script, but Uggams and director Gilbert Moses talked about how to conclude Kizzy’s storyline. “Something had to happen to put a button on this relationship,” Uggams said.39 It was a small victory. Kizzy remained the property of the man who had raped her and fathered her son, Chicken George. Still, Roots asked viewers to see Kizzy as more than just a bridge connecting the male members in Haley’s family history.
Figure 20. Kizzy Kinte (Leslie Uggams) talks with Missy Anne Reynolds (Sandy Duncan).
The eight episodes of Roots are uneven. The producers spent much of the budget on filming in Savannah, hoping the opening episodes would hook the audience. Back in Hollywood, Roots filmed at the Hunter film ranch near where Planet of the Apes and dozens of others films and television shows were filmed. The plantation house was just a facade created by the production designer, and the producers were constantly asking ABC for more money to hire “extra extras” so that the plantation scenes did not look too sparsely populated.40 Writer Bill Blinn lamented the lack of budget for the later episodes, which he described as looking “like Bonanza with a lot of black actors.”41
Television audiences did not seem to mind. When the ratings came after the last episode aired on January 30, 1977, Roots was the most watched television series of all time, displacing Gone with the Wind. Over one hundred million people saw the final episode, and Roots held seven of the top ten spots on the list of the most viewed shows of all time.
In letters and newspaper accounts, viewers described the experience of watching Roots in vivid detail. Watching Roots “hurt at physical and psychic levels in [the] most excruciating ways,” civil rights activist and FCC commissioner Benjamin Hooks said. “It gagged at the throat, throbbed at the temples, burned behind the eyeballs, ripped at the gut, tugged at the chest. At times, I would have to shut off the set and walk out of the room, ears burning, knees wobbly. But back I would come for more, enthralled at the television rendering of this emotionally searing drama.”42 A black public relations director in Nashville said, “My children and I just sat there, crying. We couldn’t talk. We just cried.” A white secretary in New York responded similarly: “It’s so powerful, it’s so distressful, I just feel awful, but I’m glad my children are watching.”43 For black artist James William Donaldson, Roots also resonated with his present-day family. “I was watching ‘Roots,’ the episode where Kizzy is taken from her parents . . . and all of a sudden I felt this welling up of emotion,” Donaldson said. “I went to my daughter’s bedroom and kissed her, thankful that she was with me and could not be taken away like Kizzy.”44 Other viewers interpreted Roots in the context of US race relations in the late 1970s, seeing the show offering support for policies like affirmative action or busing. For many viewers Roots was both intensely personal and very public, with audiences gathering to watch Roots at bars, community centers, and libraries and talking about Roots at offices, schools, and churches.
Figure 21. Patrons watching Roots at a bar in Harlem. John Sotomayor/The New York Times/Redux.
Everyone had an opinion on Roots. Ronald Reagan, former governor of California and future president of the United States, was not a fan of the show. “Very frankly, I thought the bias of all the good people being one color and all the bad people being another was rather destructive,” Reagan argued.45 The opinions of people less famous than Reagan were published as letters to the editors of newspapers across the country. These letters make it clear that viewers found very different meanings in the miniseries. Many saw the series as casting new light on black identity. “After viewing the movie and reading the novel, I shall never be the same,” a woman wrote to the Los Angeles Sentinel. “It gave me a sense of pride and dignity. I cried with the characters, I laughed with them, I felt their lashes, understood their agony. The outstanding thing about ‘Roots’ is that it was written by a black man, about a black man and his courage and determination to hold onto his true identity.”46 A viewer in South Carolina wrote, “I viewed the movie ‘Roots’ in its entirety and can truly say it has opened my eyes and the eyes of many others to our black ancestry. I have been told and have read many versions of the past from which the black race descended but could never actually visualize how our ancestors struggled for freedom, therefore, the past has been meaningless.”47 Dozens of other letter writers approached Roots in terms of white guilt and innocence with regards to slavery. “Should we be punished for the sins of our fathers?” a viewer from Seattle asked. “I feel that what happened wasn’t something the white race did to the black race. Not all black people were involved and not all white people were involved. I don’t feel we should look at it today as ‘something I did to you,’ because ‘we’ did not exist then.”48 A viewer from Indiana was more direct: “Inasmuch as my own foreign born granddaddy didn’t have lots of spare time for oppressing black folks while struggling with a new language and working in Chicago’s stockyards; my own personal guilt is rather low.”49 In Pasadena, a “Seething Southerner” wrote a letter describing her worries about what children might learn from Roots. “My family and I have just sat in front of our TV screen watching ‘Roots,’” she wro
te. “I’m seething. . . . If there was ever a distorted piece of propaganda ‘Roots’ is it. I’m not saying any of that didn’t happen: what I am saying is that anything which pictures every white as vicious and heartless, and every black as sweet, good and a helpless victim, is an out-and-out lie. The thing I hate in this is that children are going to believe the lie.”50 This opinion prompted a reply by a writer who signed her letter “Kizzy”: “Why doesn’t ‘Seething Southerner’ read books on slavery. Why not come to Northwest Pasadena or Altadena and talk to old people who came out of the South, whose mothers were the ‘Massa’s’ children, like my mother.”51 In newspapers across the United States viewers debated, praised, and criticized Roots, making connections among the television miniseries, what they believed about slavery, and their own family histories. All of this amounted to one of the first national conversations on race, with all of the hope, ambiguity, and futility that this Clinton-era phrase evokes.
Critics wrestled with what it meant that millions of Americans had read and watched Roots and were suddenly talking about race and slavery. “The essence of the racial struggle in America has not been physical, or legal, or even spiritual,” Roger Wilkins wrote in the New York Times. “It has been existential, about truth and falsehood, reality and illusion. The ABC television series offered one black man’s vision of historical reality—more or less shared by millions of his black countrymen—and spread it large before the American people. In that sense, ‘Roots’ may have been the most significant civil rights event since the Selma to Montgomery march of 1965.”52 Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan argued that Roots benefited from a quieter period in race relations. “Everything converged—the right time, the right story and the right form,” Jordan said. “The country, I feel, was ready for it. At some other time I don’t feel it would have had that kind of widespread acceptance and attention—specifically in the ’60s. Then it might have spawned resentments and apprehensions the country couldn’t have taken.” Jordan’s Congressional Black Congress colleagues Charles Rangel and John Conyers noted both that Roots could be enlightening and that it would not change the social and economic standing of black Americans. Rangel stated, “It helps people identify and gets conversations started, but I can’t see any lasting effect.” Conyers argued, “It doesn’t cure unemployment or take people out of the ghetto. But it’s a democratic statement as eloquent as any that’s ever been devised.”53
Television stations in over fifty nations broadcast Roots during the next two years, including stations in West Germany, Japan, and Nigeria. These global viewers watched the show in varied local and national contexts. In West Germany, Roots provoked some of the first discussions of the Holocaust in German broadcasting.54 In Japan, Asahi National Broadcasting Company director Naohiro Nakamura admitted, “Japanese audiences usually prefer something about white people [in foreign films], and we were not very interested at first.” Asahi eventually bought rights to show Roots from Warner Brothers after deciding the series was “high quality” drama that was “not too artists, not too high-brow” for Japanese audiences.”55 In Nigeria, Roots prompted public discussions on slavery and fueled government demands for reparations a decade later. Broadcasters and political interests in South Africa and Brazil, in contrast, refused to import Roots for fear it would support black freedom struggles in those nations, while US diplomats in each country organized private screenings of the series. Warner Brothers, in selling Roots to global broadcasters, billed the series as “the world’s most-watched television drama.”56
If Roots had a critical flaw, it was that it made the history of slavery about people and their feelings rather than about systems of power and capital. In Time’s cover story “Why ‘Roots’ Hit Home,” the magazine noted that Roots had “sensitized” people to black history but wondered, “Sensitized in what way? How long do white Americans need to feel guilty about the evils committed by their ancestors? Is there a statute of limitations on guilt?” Roots’s emotional appeal reached millions of people, but it also invited viewers to make the series about their own emotional needs. Black journalist Chuck Stone described Roots as “an electronic orgy in white guilt successfully hustled by white TV literary minstrels.”57 Producer David Wolper probably would have objected to being called a “white TV literary minstrel,” but he would have agreed that Roots catered to the desires of white viewers. “Remember, the television audience is only 10 percent black and 90 percent white,” Wolper said after Roots’s record-breaking run. “So if we do the show for blacks and every black in America watches, it is a disaster—a total disaster.”58
Roots was pitched to white audiences, but so was nearly every other show in US television history. What made Roots unique was that it asked television audiences to identify with the lives, emotions, and struggles of a host of free and enslaved black characters. This was groundbreaking in 1977, and the four decades since Roots have underscored how uncommon it is to have black actors, culture, and history featured in a mass commercial production.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A Troublesome Property
“A Troublesome Property” is the title of a chapter in Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956) and the subtitle of Charles Burnett’s PBS film Nat Turner (2003). Stampp’s book challenged the view of benevolent slaveholders and described how enslaved blacks actively resisted slavery. Burnett’s film mixes documentary and dramatization to explore the different versions of the story of slave revolt leader Nat Turner and the various emotional and economic investments motivating these divergent takes on history. These themes are at play in Roots, but Alex Haley’s family story became a different sort of “troublesome property.” In the decade he spent writing and speaking about Roots, Haley consistently promised his agents, editors, and himself that Roots would be a commercial success. The publication and broadcast of Roots in 1976–77 proved Haley correct, but the months after were consumed by struggles over who should reap these rewards. Haley sued Doubleday in a royalty dispute, while other authors brought plagiarism lawsuits against Haley claiming that Roots had copied from previously published works. The lawsuits over Roots were unseemly because, on some level, they were about who could profit from the history of slavery. Haley worked tirelessly to sell his family history, to transform his search for roots into property. Roots’s massive success was more troublesome than Haley could have imagined.
Roots made Haley a lot of money. A New Times article featured a cartoon illustration of Haley dressed like a farmer, holding a hoe and wearing denim overalls, a red and white checked shirt, and a straw hat. Haley is grinning as he pulls a fistful of dollars from a green field of money.1 Other newspaper and magazine articles with headlines like “The Making of a Millionaire,” “Alex Haley Finds ‘Roots’ Means Bucks,” and “Writer Alex Haley’s Slave Ancestors Help Him Make It Rich” marveled at the money Haley made from his family history.2 “With the money he will make from the book and TV production, Haley would be able to purchase all the slaves in the country during that period, including Kunta,” the Cleveland Call and Post suggested. “Grandpa Kunta would be proud of him now.”3
Other commentators worried that Roots was becoming overly commercialized. The Oakland Tribune illustrated a story about Roots’s success with a picture of Haley on a US twenty-dollar bill. “The price for financial success,” columnist Mary Ellen Ferry wrote, “is that both Haley and the story of his African ancestors are being fed into the maw of the insatiable American information and entertainment machine to be spit back out in records and films, in books, magazines and newspapers.”4 None of this should have surprised anyone who had been following the development of Roots. Since the 1960s Haley had been touting the commercial potential of his story, and two years before Roots was published he had already been anticipating the market for “‘Roots’ or ‘Kinte’ oriented products, such as sweatshirts, jigsaw puzzles of African villages, sundry models of applicable things.”5
Among the licensing deals Haley signed after Roots was fi
nished was a deal with Schlitz beer for a calendar featuring artistic renderings of scenes from the television series. The agreement paid Haley and David Wolper $25,000 each but proved challenging because the deal was signed before the actors gave permission to use their likenesses.6 Two weeks after Roots broadcast, Wolper wrote to a dozen actors to belatedly ask for rights to their images. “The unprecedented success of Roots has overwhelmed us all,” Wolper wrote. “Dozens of requests have already been received for licenses for many products based upon the programs. We are most concerned about preserving the important identity and stature of Roots, however, we also believe that we can continue to protect its social, educational, and humanitarian importance by granting carefully selected licenses. . . . I hope you will join with us in these activities.”7 Wolper continued to chase down permissions several months later, appealing to Georg Stanford Brown, who represented several other cast members in negotiations with the producer. “Taste and value—value to society—and to the people who watched Roots are the bench marks before we approve any item,” Wolper said, without mentioning what value the Schlitz calendar might serve. “Everything done in Roots merchandising has an educational connection and all Roots merchandising such as records, et cetera has Alex Haley’s personal approval—who I think should be the true protector of the Roots property.”8
Making Roots Page 17