At the same time, Haley knew the value of his words and was far from ignorant on the nuances of copyright. While he loved talking about his rural upbringing in Henning, Tennessee, by the time Roots was published he was well versed in the business of publishing. Haley was represented by separate literary and film agents, he had a standing contract with a lecture firm, and he had been paid for the rights to Roots at different points by Doubleday, Reader’s Digest, Columbia Pictures, and television producer David Wolper, among others. Haley’s letters also make it clear that he understood that reproducing copyrighted work without permission was illegal. In one instance, Haley responded to a request to reprint the pictures from The Autobiography of Malcolm X. “Those pictures belonged to Malcolm, and since have become the property of Mrs. Shabazz,” Haley wrote, referring to Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow. “Insofar as I am concerned, you are perfectly welcome to use them, but I think that since she holds the co-copyright, you would also have to have her permission. For this, I think you would best write to her c/o our agent, Paul R. Reynolds, Inc.”40 In response to a separate inquiry about selling copies of his lecture, Haley wrote, “I really can’t give the approval of the sale of transcribed copies of the speech I gave at Austin. The reason for this simply is the rights for the book—of which that speech, or its essence, will be a part—has been sold diversely. Extracts from the speech are generally disseminated, but a full copy of it would be improper, and maybe legally perilous for me. I wish that I could just say great, go ahead—as you know I would be quick to do, but I have had some experience with this before, and the lawyers get very uptight when it is brought to their ears.”41 Haley recognized that copyright laws protected his words and publications, and he guarded this property carefully. Haley did not exercise the same caution in writing Roots. This mistake cost him financially and emotionally.
Ultimately, the pressures of promoting and defending Roots overwhelmed Haley. “When ‘Roots’ first happened, it was like being fired out of a gun into spotlights and applause and limousines and body guards,” he said.42 Haley wrote to the head of the Leigh agency at the end of 1977 to say he needed to take a break from lecturing. “No one else can comprehend the aggregate of the pressures, professional and personal that ‘success’ has generated,” Haley wrote. “No one can sense as deeply as I how sheer physical and psychic survival hang upon how well I alone am able to re-structure my yet-tangled skein of activities into some liveable pattern. The previous urgencies, priorities, are no longer. Money now I don’t need. Public exposure, instead of more, I deliberately diminish. Above all things I need now are all possible oases of committed time . . . within which to recoup being a working writer . . . within which to recoup being the myself whom I will like.”43 Haley apologized to George Sims for not writing for several months, telling his friend that he felt like he had fallen into a “whirlpool.” Haley’s thousands of archived letters make it clear that he loved corresponding with friends, fans, and critics. This stopped after Roots. “It was appalling to realize that I simply humanly no longer could even start to read my mail,” Haley said. Haley told Sims that he felt drained by the Courlander plagiarism case. You “put your heart, soul, blood into something, years on end; if you have the luck that it becomes very successful, it is as if you have stepped amongst predators,” Haley wrote. “Probably you have read of the one suit that finally I settled, having simply grown sick, sick of having by then spent the better part of two years either preparing for court, or being in court, instead of writing. The joy, the romance, the thrill, I fear, is gone for me for writing books.”44 Haley never published another book after Roots. He turned his attention to consulting on television productions based on his family’s history, including Roots: The Next Generations (1979), Palmerstown U.S.A. (1980–81), Roots: The Gift (1988), and Alex Haley’s Queen (1993). When he died in 1992, Alex Haley had achieved his goals of making the Haley name famous and of helping make black history interesting to American audiences.
Eight months after his death, Haley’s extensive manuscript collection was auctioned off in an inauspicious conference center on the campus of the University of Tennessee–Knoxville. Hundreds of boxes of Haley’s letters, drafts, and notes from his years of work on The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Before This Anger/Roots were spread over tables to be perused by prospective buyers. The scene of black history and culture on the auction block horrified scholar Detine Bowers. “Anyone at the manuscripts sale would have thought he was the guest of honor at a theatrical performance as he smiled and laughed at the animations of the auctioneers in search of the highest dollar,” Bowers wrote. “The wild eyes of the auctioneers glared at audience faces while their hands gestured, ‘come on,’ as they stared in an audience member’s eyes saying, ‘Don’t let it go for that. Come on.’”45 This book would not have been possible if the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, and Goodwin College had not acquired and archived the majority of Haley materials from his work on Roots. This was made clear to me when I was flying to New York to view the collection at the Schomburg. Among the archived materials from Knoxville that I reviewed on the plane was the Schomburg’s receipt for the purchase of the materials I was traveling to view.46 The receipt totals $13,557.50, and among the dozens of purchases are materials related to key parts of the story I tell in Making “Roots”:
Lot 213: Roots Background Reportage, $300.00
Lot 354: Roots T.V. Scripts, $300.00
Lot 478: Manuscript for D. Wolper, $175.00
Lot 486: Signed Letters by Alex Haley, $150.00
As a historian, I have never confronted the monetary value of evidence so starkly. I doubt this insight would have surprised Alex Haley. From the first story he sold to Reader’s Digest through the decade-plus that he worked on Roots, Haley understood that his words equaled money.
Roots made Alex Haley rich, but it also made him feel like property. In September 1977, a year after Roots broke publishing records and six months after Roots became the most watched television program of all time, Parents Magazine editor Genevieve Millet Landau traveled to Los Angeles to interview Haley. The profile was meant to be a soft focus piece where Haley would offer advice to parents and kids on starting family genealogy projects. Sitting in his office of Kinte Corporation in Century City, Haley turned introspective about the personal cost of Roots’s success. “Sometimes I get to feel a little like a property or a thing,” Haley said. “I was having a meeting here the other day with a couple of people representing me and some of my projects. They were negotiating various plans, guarding my interests, saying, ‘He’ll do this or he can’t do that,’ and I got up and walked to the window and looked out, and then I turned around, and I realized they didn’t even know I’d gone. They just went on without me.”47
Conclusion
In the fall of 1988, Toni Morrison earned the Melcher Book Award for her haunting novel Beloved. In her acceptance speech Morrison told the audience that a year after she finished Beloved it had become clearer to her why she had to write the book. “There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey and of those who did not make it,” Morrison said. “There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There’s no 300-foot tower. There’s no small bench by the road. There is not even a tree scored, an initial that I can visit or you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence or, better still, on the banks of the Mississippi. And because such a place doesn’t exist (that I know of), the book had to.”1 While Morrison was not the first to highlight the historical erasure of slavery, her remarks became a touchstone for the urgency and difficulty of commemorating the lives and legacies of enslaved people.
Morrison is undoubtedly one of the greatest authors in American history, but what if she overlooked the most influential commemoration of slavery in her lif
etime?
What if Roots was the first national memorial to slavery? This suggestion is probably difficult for many people to accept. As this book has shown, Roots was an explicitly commercial production that appealed to mass audiences. The book and television miniseries told a story of slavery through historical fiction and melodrama, popular genres that are underappreciated by critics. Roots took on a serious subject, but it lacked the air of seriousness and solemnity we usually associate with memorials. For her part, Morrison described Roots as “backward.”2 Still, it matters that Roots encouraged more people to engage seriously with the history of slavery than anything before or since. Alex Haley made trade-offs in order to tell his family story through these commercial venues, but more traditional kinds of memorials—sculptures, plaques, benches, and museums—also require concessions and adjustments to appease different constituencies and sensibilities. Some readers might dismiss out of hand the notion that a story published by Doubleday or broadcast by ABC could be a memorial, but in a country dominated by commercial culture it should not be surprising that historical commemoration could come through mass-market publishing and broadcast television.
I float the idea of Roots as the first national memorial to slavery in order to highlight two reasons why Roots still matters today. First, one of the most important legacies of Roots is that the book and television series have provided a baseline from which to create and appreciate more nuanced and challenging treatments of slavery. For artists and scholars, Roots created space to approach the history of slavery from different angles, often in ways that explored the challenges of representing black history. Watts-based artist Edgar Arceneaux, for example, staged a 2002 installation called Rootlessness that included a copy of Haley’s Roots that Arceneaux had dipped into a sugary solution until the book crystallized.3 Even when artists make these connections less explicit, many gallery visitors, film and television viewers, and readers approach new representations of slavery with Roots in mind. Roots is a sort of lingua franca for representing slavery. This is one of the paramount reasons why mass commercial culture is valuable. For millions of people in the United States and internationally, Roots throws other representations of slavery into sharper relief.
Consider, for example, the allusions to the Middle Passage in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. “I am Beloved and she is mine,” begins a five-page chapter told from the perspective of the character/spirit who haunts the novel. The chapter evokes a slave ship and is written as a prose poem without punctuation. “All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching the man on my face is dead his face is not mine his mouth smells sweet but his eyes are locked.” The passage continues with references to urine (“morning water”) and vermin in the hold of the slave ship. “some who eat nasty themselves I do not eat the men without skin bring us their morning water to drink we have none at night I cannot see the dead man on my face daylight comes through the cracks and I can see his locked eyes I am not big small rats do not wait for us to sleep.”4 Regarding Beloved, Morrison said, “I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population—just as the characters were snatched from one place to another, from any place to any other, without preparation or defense.”5 Nowhere is this disorientation more pronounced than in this chapter of Beloved.
When I teach Beloved, many of my students have never heard of the Middle Passage. Some assume it is referring to the middle chapters of Morrison’s book or referring chronologically to a set of years between the start and end of slavery. These are smart students, they just have not been taught much about the history of slavery. This makes it really difficult for them to follow Beloved or to appreciate how Morrison’s book is also telling a story about the limitations of telling stories about slavery. I wished for these students that their high school history textbooks had discussed slavery in greater detail or that they had read or seen Roots. “Kunta wondered if he had gone mad,” is how Haley opens the slave ship section of his book. “Naked, chained, shackled, he awoke on his back between two other men in a pitch darkness full of steamy heat and sickening stink and a nightmarish bedlam of shrieking, weeping, praying, and vomiting. He could feel and smell his own vomit on his chest and belly. His whole body was one spasm of pain from the beatings he had received in the four days since his capture. But the place where the hot iron had been put between his shoulders hurt the worst.”6 Whether one prefers Haley’s realism or the prose poetry of Beloved, Morrison’s literary craftsmanship resonates more powerfully when compared to a familiar reference point like Roots.
Alex Haley went to great lengths to make his black characters respectable in terms of their sexual behavior. In the first version of the family history that Haley relayed to his agent, Haley’s original African ancestor (whom he later identified as Kunta Kinte) was described as fathering several children on several different plantations. By the time Haley developed the Kunta Kinte character in Roots, Kunta did not have sex until his late thirties, after he had married Belle, and he fathered only one child, Kizzy. For Haley, this revision challenged portrayals that circulated widely during and after slavery of black men as sexually aggressive and of black women as sexually promiscuous. This sexual modesty also reflected Haley’s personal views. “I just probably because of my background, have a private feeling that sex is something concerning two people in a room with the door closed, and so I’ve never cared for it much in literature,” Haley said. “I know when I was writing Roots . . . I wanted a book which would be written without any obscenity at all in it and which would not have a single explicit sex scene in it.”7
Much of Kara Walker’s artwork can be viewed as a rejection of this sentiment. Walker’s cut-paper silhouette murals make visible that which Haley and ABC worked so hard to keep hidden in Roots. Walker’s work is full of psychological perversions, desires, and fears, many of them sexual. In the room-sized panorama Slavery! Slavery! (1997), a white figure bows before a black woman perched on a fountain. Walker describes the scene this way: “A white man—something of a ‘Nigger lover’ bows at the feet of an all-giving black girl fountain. He farts his pleasure. Puffs of perfume and gas resemble speech bubbles. The base of the ‘fountain of you’ has a skull and a monkey. The fountain offers milk, blood, piss, spit or vomit. ‘Coffee, tea or me?’ Or from childhood water fountain games: ‘Coffee, tea, milkshake, pee?’”8 Just to the right of this image is a slave market scene where a trader engages in a sex act with the shackled black man he is buying or selling. Unlike Roots, Walker’s work is not focused on conferring historical personhood to enslaved black ancestors. Whereas Roots was deeply invested in getting audiences to see and appreciate specific black characters (e.g., Kunta Kinte, Kizzy, Chicken George) as noble, hardworking, and resilient, Walker’s work questions what it means to create a “positive” representation of black people.
Walker was eight years old when ABC broadcast Roots. “I don’t remember much of the story, but I know it was very important, we all watched it,” Walker recalled. “Everyone came into school—it was fourth grade—and started making fun of it. So it became just another joke.”9 Curator Hamza Walker (no relation) has described Kara Walker as being part of a generation of black artists who are “post-Roots.”10 While Walker approached Roots across a generation divide, her work finds much of its inspiration in visual and literary works like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone with the Wind, and Roots that have presented the history of slavery, the Civil War, and the South to mass audiences through what she calls “melodramatic” and “outrageous gestures.”11 Walker’s Camptown Ladies (1998) silhouette tableau, for example, alludes to the scene in Roots where Omoro Kinte holds baby Kunta toward the sky and declares, “Behold the only thing greater than yourself.” In Walker’s piece, a naked black woman with a large posterior akin to Sara Baartman (the nineteenth-century “Hottentot Venus”) holds aloft
a baby who urinates into the mouth of a kneeling/praying white woman. “In Walker’s tableau, the ‘Hottentot Venus’ has become the African ancestor figure, signaling how the treatment of Baartman’s body was of a piece with the denigration of the bodies of Africans enslaved in the Americas,” literary scholar Arlene Keizer argues. “The rooted foot of the Hottentot Venus further emphasizes the connection to Haley’s popular representation of American slavery; in contrast to the white woman’s tiny foot, the black woman’s foot is enormous and almost indistinguishable from the earth beneath it. While recognizing the weight ascribed to African ancestry in ‘Roots,’ it is difficult for viewers to escape the playfulness and feeling of parody evoked by the re-imagination of roots and rootedness in Camptown Ladies.”12 Walker’s work asks viewers to think about what it means to create, view, and profit from representations of slavery. Understanding Haley’s romantic family history and the massive promotional campaign that made this story about slavery into a national phenomenon make Walker’s silhouettes stand out more sharply.
Making Roots Page 19