Roots: The Saga of an American Family

844 Pages·2007·3.07 MB·English

by  Alex Haley

Table of Contents

ROOTS:
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
HALEY’S COMET

CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66

CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
CHAPTER 79
CHAPTER 80
CHAPTER 81
CHAPTER 82
CHAPTER 83
CHAPTER 84
CHAPTER 85
CHAPTER 86
CHAPTER 87
CHAPTER 88
CHAPTER 89
CHAPTER 90
CHAPTER 91
CHAPTER 92
CHAPTER 93
CHAPTER 94
CHAPTER 95
CHAPTER 96
CHAPTER 97
CHAPTER 98
CHAPTER 99
CHAPTER 100
CHAPTER 101
CHAPTER 102
CHAPTER 103
CHAPTER 104
CHAPTER 105

CHAPTER 106
CHAPTER 107
CHAPTER 108
CHAPTER 109
CHAPTER 110
CHAPTER 111
CHAPTER 112
CHAPTER 113
CHAPTER 114
CHAPTER 115
CHAPTER 116
CHAPTER 117
CHAPTER 118
CHAPTER 119
CHAPTER 120

ALEX HALEY
Copyright Page

ROOTS:

The 30thAnniversary 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 ROOTS is fact
or fiction and whether Alex Haley confused these two
issues, a subject he addresses directly in the book. There
is also the fact that Haley was sued for plagiarism when it
was discovered that several dozen paragraphs in Roots
were taken directly from a novel, The African, by Harold
Courlander, who ultimately received a substantial financial
settlement at the end of the case.

But none of the controversy affects the basic issue.

Roots fostered a remarkable 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 Edition 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

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 Roots happened.

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, sharing 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

magazine 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. Finally, in the book’s
pressurized completion phase, he even drafted some of
Roots’ scenes, and his brilliant editing pen steadily
tightened 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 Digest shared and supported my
intense wish to explore if my maternal family’s treasured
oral history might possibly be documented 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 producing 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 library 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 ancient elders was the
only way that early histories of mankind got passed along ...
for all of us today to know who we are.

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 rigorously 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
nomads 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 confidence 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
convince the nation that the black story is the American
story. He also made it clear that black humanity is a shining
beacon that miraculously 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 changed the course of our
conversations around school and provided a powerful lens
onto a period of history that few of us really understood.
Until Haley’s book, there was little public grappling with the
drama of American slavery. Of course, the epochal
television miniseries that grew from Haley’s text seized us

in its thrilling exploration of chattel slavery’s vast and vicious
evolution. The book and miniseries also sparked the
phenomenon of black self-discovery. For too long, slavery
had been an American terror that left the lives of black folk
scarred by memories of pain and humiliation. Haley’s book
brought black folk out of the shadows of shame and
ignorance. It also spurred many of us for the first time to
speak openly and honestly about the lingering effects of
centuries-old oppression. If the black freedom struggle of
the ’60s had liberated our bodies from the haunting
imperatives of white supremacy, Haley’s book helped free
our minds and spirits from that same force.

Roots also prodded white America to reject the racial

amnesia that fed its moral immaturity and its racial
irresponsibility. As long as there was no book or image that
captured slavery’s disfiguring reach, the nation could
conduct its business as if all racial problems had been
solved when it finally bestowed civil rights on its black
citizens. But Haley helped us to resist that seductive lie with
a tonic splash of colorful truth: that the nation had yet to
successfully negotiate its perilous ties to an institution that
built white prosperity while crushing black opportunity.
Roots was a soulful reminder that unless we grappled with
the past, we would be forever saddled by its deadening
liabilities. Since it was published during the nation’s blithely
romantic celebration of its bicentennial, Haley’s book
provided a touchstone for alternative history. Haley’s book
helped conscientious citizens to challenge the self-image of
America as an unqualified champion of democracy and
freedom.

The true impact of Haley’s book is that it started a

conversation about black roots that continues to this day.
DNA tests to determine black ancestry are more popular
than ever. Scientific advance is part of the explanation, but
the cultural impetus for such an agenda of racial discovery
lies with Haley’s inspiring book. It is also fitting that Roots
appeared the same year that Black History Week was
officially extended to Black History Month. Haley’s crowning
achievement came along at just the right time to prompt the

investigation of black folks’ noble and complex
contributions to national culture. Haley’s Roots sparked
curiosity among ordinary citizens by making the intricate
relations between race, politics and culture eminently
accessible. Long before demands for history from the
bottom up became a rallying cry of progressive historians,
Haley’s book practiced what it preached. And if he made
missteps along the way, he nevertheless put millions of us
on the right path to racial and historical knowledge that
shaped our reckoning with the color line. Few books can
claim such an impressive pedigree of influence.

Alex Haley’s Roots is unquestionably one of the nation’s

seminal texts. It affected events far beyond its pages and
was a literary North Star that guided us through the long
midnight of slavery’s haunting presence. Roots is an
exercise in the skillful telling of a people’s pilgrimage
through the quagmire of lost racial links to the solid ground
of recovered connections. For that reason alone, it is to be
celebrated as a classic of American ambition and black
striving. Each generation must make up its own mind about
how it will navigate the treacherous waters of our nation’s
racial sin. And each generation must overcome our social
ills through greater knowledge and decisive action. Roots
is a stirring reminder that we can achieve these goals only
if we look history squarely in the face.