African Genesis

By R.Z. Sheppard

ROOTS by AtEX HALEY 587 pages. Doubleday. $12.50.

On Sept. 29,1967, Alex Haley quietly celebrated a private bicentennial He stood on a wharf at Annapolis Md exactly 200 years to the day after his great-great-great-great grandfather stumbled off the deck of the slave ship Lord Ligonier at the same spot. His ancestor was Kunta Kinte, one of 98 "Negroes" who managed to survive the three-month trip from West Africa. The original consignment, "packed like spoons in a drawer " included 140 Africans. The one-third loss, Haley notes drily, was about average for an 18th century slave voyage.

TV Series. Haley, a 55-year-old retired Coast Guardsman who is best known as the co-author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, may be the only black American to possess such precise details about his ancestry. Roots: The Saga of an American Family is Haley's memorial to that past. After twelve years of research and writing, delays and financial crises, the book is finally out. Yet it moves like a deep, slow-moving river that has always been there. For those who are unable or unwilling to read its 587 pages, Roots has been made a twelve-part TV series scheduled to begin next January. As America's answer to Britain's Upstairs, Downstairs, the TV version of Roots, like the book, will cover not only the family's origins in Africa but also generations of race relations in the New World. Also, Haley's chronicle opportunely overlaps the publication of Herbert Gutman's Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750-1925 (Pantheon), a revisionist study that persuasively disputes the notion that slavery destroyed the black family structure.

Roots most closely resembles a historical novel, a form that Haley does not seem to have studied too carefully. His narrative is a blend of dramatic and melodramatic fiction and fact that wells from a profound need to nourish himself with a comprehensible past. Haley recreates the Old South of mansions and slave shacks, fully aware that chains and blood ties were at times indistinguishable. The book dramatically details slave family life--birth, courtship, marriage ("jumping the broom"), death and the ever present fear of being sold off and having to leave your kin.

Haley's genealogical search took him back to West Africa. In Gambia he encountered an aged griot--a, tribal oral historian--who traced Haley's lineage back centuries before Kunta Kinte was snatched by slavers in 1767. The emotional impact of hearing his forebears named cannot be overestimated. Roots' opening section, a fictionalization of Kunta's birth, Moslem upbringing and manhood rites, have a vividness of detail that only the impassioned imagination can provide. Consider this for example:

"In rage, Kunta snatched and kicked against the shackles that bound his wrists and ankles. Instantly, angry exclamations and jerking came back from whomever he was shackled to."

The horrors of Kunta's ocean crossing are based on familiar scholarship But while returning from Africa on a modern freighter, Haley also forced himself to sleep half naked on a rough plank in the ship's airless hold. It was his way of trying to dissolve time and the cultural insulation that can prevent a writer from telling his story. What a story it turns out to be. The 17-year-old Kunta Kinte is sold to a Spotsylvania County, Va., planter for $850 and renamed Toby. But Kunta does not tame easily. Following his fourth escape attempt, half his right foot is cut off by professional slave catchers. He eventually becomes the buggy driver for a physician. In 1789 Kunta marries a slave woman named Bell, who bears their daughter Kizzy. At 15, Kizzy is sold to a North Carolina planter who promptly rapes her.

Kizzy bears a mulatto son whom she calls George. But she also whispers into the infant's ear the African name of his grandfather, Kunta Kinte. The passing on of the name becomes a refrain throughout the book. It binds George, who becomes trainer of Massa's fighting cocks, to his own past. In turn, he passes on "Kunta Kinte" to his son Tom, who is emancipated after the Civil War. Tom is a master blacksmith who, as a freed slave, moves his family to Henning, Tenn. The whites welcome his skills but will not allow a black to have his own shop. Rather than work for anyone but himself, Tom rigs a wagon with forge and bellows and begins a successful career as an itinerant blacksmith.

The next generation finds Kinte blood mingled with that of an ambitious black man named Will Palmer, who in 1894 becomes the prosperous owner of a Henning lumber company. Haley him self was born in Ithaca, N. Y., son of Bertha and Simon Haley, both college educated, teachers, and solid members of the black bourgeoisie.

In general, the more verified facts that Haley has to work with, the more wooden and cluttered his narrative. Yet the story of the Americanization of the Kinte clan strikes enough human chords to sustain the book's cumulative power.

Haley's keen sense of separation and loss, and his ability to forge a return in language, override Roots' considerable structural and stylistic flaws. The book should find a permanent home in a century teeming with physical and spiritual exiles.

R.Z. Sheppard

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