Roots: [the saga of an American family]

913 Pages·2007·2.561 MB·English

by  Haley, Alex;Haley family.;Kinte family.;Brooks, Avery

(continued from front flap) $15.95/$19.50 Can.
Haley has talked in Juffure with his own African
sixth cousins. On September 29, 1967, he stood on the “Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of
dock in Annapolis where his great-great-great-great- PULITZER Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of
grandfather was taken ashore on September 29, 1767. PRIZE The Gambia, West Africa, a man-child was
Now he has written the monumental two-century WINNER born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.”
drama of Kunta Kinte and the six generations who So begins Roots, one of the most important and
came after him—slaves and freedmen, farmers and influential books of our time. When originally
blacksmiths, lumber mill workers and Pullman porters, published thirty years ago, it galvanized the
lawyers and architects—and one author. nation and created an extraordinary political,
But Haley has done more than recapture the Alex racial, social, and cultural dialogue that had
Alex
history of his own family. As the first black American “in all of us there is not been seen in this country since the
publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
writer to trace his origins back to their roots, he has told a hunger, marrow deep, HAley
the story of 39 million Americans of African descent. Roots has lost none of its emotional power and
to know our heritage. . . .
He has rediscovered for an entire people a rich cultural HAley drama, and its message for today’s and future
heritage that slavery took away from them, along with Without this enriching The 30Th generations is even more vital and relevant
their names and their identities. Roots speaks, finally, knowledge, there is anniverSary ediTion than it was thirty years ago.
not just to blacks, or to whites, but to all peoples and
a hollow yearning no matter
all races everywhere, for the story it tells is one of
W
what our hen he was a boy in Henning, Tennessee,
the most eloquent testimonials ever written to the
Alex Haley’s grandmother used to tell him
indomitability of the human spirit. attainments in life.”
The 30Th anniverSary ediTion stories about their family—stories that went back to her
grandparents, and their grandparents, down through
Experience ROOTS on DVD from Warner Home Video —alex haley The Saga of
an american the generations all the way to a man she called “the
family African.” She said he had lived across the ocean near
what he called the “Kamby Bolongo” and had been out
in the forest one day chopping wood to make a drum
NATIONAL PULITZER when he was set upon by four men, beaten, chained
PRIZE
BOOK AWARD and dragged aboard a slave ship bound for Colonial
WINNER
WINNER America.
Still vividly remembering the stories after he grew
up and became a writer, Haley began to search for
documentation that might authenticate the narrative.
It took ten years and a half a million miles of travel
across continents to find it, but finally, in an astonishing
feat of genealogical detective work, he discovered not
$15.95/ $19.50 Can.
only the name of “the African”—Kunta Kinte—but
The Saga of an american family
Cover photography: © Warner Bros. Ent. Inc. ISBN-13 978-1-59315-449-3 the precise location of Juffure, the very village in The
ISBN-10 1-59315-449-6
51595 Gambia, West Africa, from which he was abducted
Vanguard Press Special inTroducTion by in 1767 at the age of sixteen and taken on the Lord
Ligonier to Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter.
A Member of the Perseus Books Group 9 781593 154493 michael eric dySon
www.Perseusbooks.com Vanguard Press
(continued on back flap)
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ROOTS
The 30th Anniversary Edition
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ROOTS:
The 30th Anniversary Edition
PUBLISHER’S STATEMENT
One of the most important books and television series ever to appear,
Roots, galvanized the nation, and created an extraordinary political, racial,
social and cultural dialogue that hadn’t been seen since the publication of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book sold over one million copies in the first year,
and the miniseries was watched by an astonishing 130 million people. It
also won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Roots
opened up the minds of Americans of all colors and faiths to one of the
darkest and most painful parts of America’s past.
Over the years, both Roots and Alex Haley have attracted controversy,
which comes with the territory for trailblazing, iconic books, particularly on
the topic of race. Some of the criticism results from whether ROOTSis fact
or fiction and whether Alex Haley confused these two issues, a subject he ad-
dresses directly in the book. There is also the fact that Haley was sued for pla-
giarism when it was discovered that several dozen paragraphs in Roots were
taken directly from a novel, The African, by Harold Courlander, who ulti-
mately received a substantial financial settlement at the end of the case.
But none of the controversy affects the basic issue. Roots fostered a re-
markable dialogue about not just the past, but the then present day 1970s
and how America had fared since the days portrayed in Roots. Vanguard
Press feels that it is important to publish Roots: The 30th Anniversary Edi-
tion to remind the generation that originally read it that there are issues
that still need to be discussed and debated, and to introduce to a new and
younger generation, a book that will help them understand, perhaps for the
first time, the reality of what took place during the time of Roots.
Vanguard Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
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A LEX H A LEY
ROOTS
The 30th Anniversary Edition
THE SAGA
of an
AMERICAN FAMILY
with a Special Introduction by
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON
and
ALEX HALEY
on the writing of Roots
Vanguard Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
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A condensed version of a portion of this work first appeared in Reader’s Digest
in the May and June 1974 issues. Copyright © 1974 by Reader’s Digest
Association. Copyright renewed 2002 by Myran Haley, Cynthia Haley, Lydia
Haley and William Haley.
Copyright © 1974 Alex Haley. Copyright renewed 2004 by Myran Haley,
Cynthia Haley, Lydia Haley and William Haley.
Alex Haley on the writing of Roots. Reprinted by permission from Reader’s Digest.
Special contents of this edition Copyright © 2007 The Roots Venture, c/o
IPW LLC, 2049 Century Park East, Suite 2720, Los Angeles, CA 90067
Published by Vanguard Books
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For
information and inquiries, address Vanguard Books, 387 Park Avenue South,
12th Floor, NYC, NY 10016, or call [phone].
Designed by Brent Wilcox
Set in 11.25 point Adobe Caslon
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haley, Alex.
Roots : the saga of an American family : the 30th anniversary edition /
Alex Haley.
p. cm.
Originally published: Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1976.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59315-449-3
ISBN-10: 1-59315-449-6
1. Haley, Alex. 2. Haley, Alex—Family. 3. Haley family. 4. Kinte family.
5. African Americans—Biography. 6. African American families. I. Title.
E185.97.H24A33 2007
929'.20973—dc22
[B]
2007008822
Vanguard books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S.
by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information,
please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group,
2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800)
810-4145, extension 5000, or e-mail [email protected].
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
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DEDICATION
It wasn’t planned that Roots’ researching and writing finally would
take twelve years. Just by chance it is being published in the Bicentennial
Year of the United States. So I dedicate Roots as a birthday offering to
my country within which most of Rootshappened.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe deep gratitude to so many people for their help with Roots
that pages would be required simply to list them all. The following
are pre-eminent:
George Sims, my lifelong friend from our Henning, Tennessee,
boyhood, is a master researcher who often traveled with me, shar-
ing both the physical and emotional adventures. His dedicated
combing through volumes by the hundreds, and other kinds of
documents by the thousands—particularly in the U. S. Library of
Congress and the U. S. National Archives—supplied much of the
historical and cultural material that I have woven around the lives
of the people in this book.
Murray Fisher had been my editor for years at Playboy maga-
zine when I solicited his clinical expertise to help me structure this
book from a seeming impassable maze of researched materials.
After we had established Roots’ pattern of chapters, next the story
line was developed, which he then shepherded throughout. Fi-
nally, in the book’s pressurized completion phase, he even drafted
some of Roots’ scenes, and his brilliant editing pen steadily tight-
ened the book’s great length.
The Africa section of this book exists in its detail only because
at a crucial time Mrs. DeWitt Wallace and the editors of the
Reader’s Digestshared and supported my intense wish to explore if
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viii — ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
my maternal family’s treasured oral history might possibly be doc-
umented back into Africa where all black Americans began.
Nor would this book exist in its fullness without the help of
those scores of dedicated librarians and archivists in some fifty-
seven different repositories of information on three continents. I
found that if a librarian or archivist becomes excited with your
own fervor of research, they can turn into sleuths to aid your quests.
I owe a great debt to Paul R. Reynolds, doyen of literary
agents—whose client I have the pleasure to be—and to Doubleday
Senior Editors Lisa Drew and Ken McCormick, all of whom have
patiently shared and salved my frustrations across the years of pro-
ducing Roots.
Finally, I acknowledge immense debt to the griots of Africa—
where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a li-
brary has burned to the ground. The griots symbolize how all
human ancestry goes back to some place, and some time, where
there was no writing. Then, the memories and the mouths of an-
cient elders was the only way that early histories of mankind got
passed along ... for all of us today to know who we are.
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HALEY ’S COMET
By Michael Eric Dyson
From the very beginning, Alex Haley’s Roots counted as much
more than a mere book. It tapped deeply into the black American
hunger for an African ancestral home that had been savaged by
centuries of slavery and racial dislocation. More than the sum of
its historical and literary parts—some of which have been rigor-
ously criticized and debunked—Haley’s quest for his roots
changed the way black folk thought about themselves and how
white America viewed them. No longer were we genealogical no-
mads with little hope of learning the names and identities of the
people from whose loins and culture we sprang. Haley wrote black
folk into the book of American heritage and gave us the confi-
dence to believe that we could find our forebears even as he shared
his own. Kunta and Kizzy—and Chicken George too—became
members of our black American family. That’s why no flaw or
shortcoming in Haley’s tome could dim the brilliant light he shed
on the black soul. Haley’s monumental achievement helped con-
vince the nation that the black story is the American story. He also
made it clear that black humanity is a shining beacon that mirac-
ulously endured slavery’s brutal horrors.
I was a seventeen-year-old boarding school student when Haley’s
comet of a book hit the nation’s racial landscape. It immediately
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