Roots: The Saga of an American Family

“Then suddenly, in the darkness, he heard the shrieks of some forest creature caught by some ferocious animal, and he thought about people catching other people. In the distance he could also hear the howling of hyenas—but rainy season or dry, hungry or harvest, every night of his life, he had heard hyenas howling somewhere. Tonight he found their familiar cry almost comforting as he finally drifted off to sleep.”

At age eight, Kunta listens to the sounds of animals in the forest and compares them to hypothetical sounds of toubob kidnappers. The cries of hyenas, though threatening, appear comforting in comparison, because Kunta is already starting to view Africa as an interconnected ecosystem, in which hyenas, like humans, are only one part. The toubob, however, are not a part of this ecosystem, marking them as a threat the fabric of African societies.

“‘There is something you need to know,’ said Omoro. ‘All men make mistakes. I lost a goat to a lion when I was of your rains.’ Pulling at his tunic, Omoro bared his left hip. The pale, deeply scarred place there shocked Kunta. ‘I learned, and you must learn. Never run toward any dangerous animal!’”

This is a crucial moment between Omoro and Kunta, as people in Mandinka society do not reveal such intimate information about themselves casually. By revealing that all people make mistakes, Omoro is essentially breaking the appearance of perfect stoicism that everyone maintains in Juffure. The scar is a physical mark of a lesson Omoro learned as a child, and he breaks these social walls to save his son from the same fate, showing that some aspects of life are too important to be ignored for the sake of maintaining social norms.

“In his hut after the moro had gone that night, Kunta lay awake thinking how so many things—indeed, nearly everything they had learned—all tied together. The past seemed with the present, the present with the future; the dead with the living and those yet to be born; he himself with his family, his mates, his village, his tribe, his Africa; the world of man with the world of animals and growing things—they all lived with Allah. Kunta felt very small, yet very large. Perhaps, he thought, this is what is means to become a man.”

The importance of oral history and culture are encapsulated in Kunta’s feelings after hearing the moro. All the stories about African empires, the Kinte clan, and his own nuclear family and village combine with his lived experiences in The Gambia to form a sense of self and identity in relation to the world around him. Kunta is not just a free-floating individual, but he is a part of a greater whole that is Africa. This passage is crucial in understanding, ultimately, the loss that Kunta suffers and that the European slave trade perpetuated.

“This place in the early morning would always fill Kinta with a greater sense of calm, and wonder, than anywhere else he knew of. Even more than in the village mosque, he felt here how totally were everyone and everything in the hands of Allah; and how everything he could see and hear and smell from the top of this tree had been here for longer than men’s memories, and would be here long after he and his sons and his sons’ sons had joined their ancestors.”

As with Kunta’s reflection after hearing the moro, this passage, occurring moments before Kunta is kidnapped, shows Kunta’s feeling of connectedness with his environment. Distinct from the cultural and social elements of his ethnic group and country, Kunta is in tune with nature, feeling the ecosystem in which he is a part. Kunta acknowledges here how nature and the specific environment of Africa are beyond the control and scope of humanity, let alone his own life.

“Kunta realized from the low murmuring that spread gradually throughout the hold that once the men had actually been able to see each other up in the daylight, he and his own shacklemate weren’t the only ones trying now to communicate with one another. The murmuring kept spreading. The hold would fall silent now only when the toubob came with the food tub, or with the brushes to clean the filth from the shelves. And there was a new quality to the quietness that would fall at these times; for the first time since they had been captured and thrown in chains, it was as if there was among the men a sense of being together.”

The advent of communication on the ship, including both this passage’s exploration of different languages and cultures among the men in the hold and the women singing on deck, cements the novel’s foundation of resilience among the African peoples brought to America against their will. The inclusion of the silence while white men come to the hold and provide food and clean up filth illustrates that the circumstances are dire, but the retention of communication and familial bonding maintains a sense of hope or optimism.

“He saw a black one moving forward behind the toubob to whom the shouter had handed his chain. Kunta’s eyes entreated this black one, who had distinctly Wolof features, My Brother, you come from my country…But the black one seemed not even to see Kunta as, jerking hard on the chain so that Kunta came stumbling after him, they began moving through the crowd.”

In direct contrast to the camaraderie that occurred on the ship, Kunta’s experience in America is punctuated by various instances of betrayal by other Black people. Kunta would probably think of these other Black people, like Samson, as slatees, but that is a reduction in the complex series of factors guiding these events. Samson is no more in control of his actions than Kunta, as the toubob behind Samson would likely beat or kill both him and Kunta if Samson acted against his orders. While Kunta sees himself and Samson as enemies, they are both oppressed by the same system.

“But these heathen blacks wouldn’t understand drumtalk any better than the toubob. Kunta was forced to concede, though—if only with great reluctance—that these pagan blacks might not be totally irredeemable. Ignorant as they were, some of the things they did were purely African, and he could tell that they were totally unaware of it themselves. For one thing, he had heard all his life the very same sounds of exclamation, accompanied by the very same hand gestures and facial expressions. And the way these blacks moved their bodies was also identical. No less so was the way these blacks laughed when they were among themselves—with their whole bodies, just like the people of Juffure.”

Though the African American culture developing around Kunta is not identical to the African culture from which he was taken, he is beginning to see how the resilience of African culture and identity has carried through generations, enduring hardships without losing the critical elements of community. Performative elements like hand gestures, dancing, and exclamations have all been passed from African parent to African American child, and so on, leading to an amalgamation of different African cultural trends in America. Specific elements like drumtalk have been removed not by choice, but by white people’s laws.

“Kunta had bided his time and minded his own business, waiting for his keepers to grow careless and take their eyes off him once again. But he had the feeling that even the other blacks were still keeping an eye on him, even when the ‘oberseer’ and the other toubob weren’t around. He had to find some way not to be so closely watched. Perhaps he could take advantage of the fact that the toubob didn’t look at blacks as people but as things. Since the toubob’s reactions to these black things seemed to depend on how those things acted, he decided to act as inconspicuous as possible.”

Kunta’s realization that the toubob do not see Black people as humans, but as objects they own, reflects the realization that each of the other Black people he has met are also trying to “act as inconspicuous as possible.” The grinning and dancing that Kunta despises are the same tactics that keep a lot of his companions from being beaten or maimed. Kunta’s realization is a critical element of understanding how The Brutality of the Slave Trade and Its Enduring Legacy is not just in the sadism of white perpetrators, but in the sheer disregard for the humanity of an entire race of people.

“[F]ew would have been there to notice if Kunta had tried to run away again—but he knew that even though he had learned to get around all right and make himself fairly useful, he would never be able to get very far […] Though it shamed him to admit it, he had begun to prefer life as he was allowed to live it here on this plantation to the certainty of being captured and probably killed if he tried to escape again. Deep in his heart, he knew he would never see his home again, and he could feel something precious and irretrievable dying inside of him forever. But hope remained alive; though he might never see his family again, perhaps someday he might be able to have one of his own.”

Kunta feels the defiance and pride he brought with him from Juffure dying inside him, but he also sees the hope in continuing to live the life he has been forced into. His thoughts drift toward family, which relies on the choice he made previously between his foot and genitals. Because he lost his foot, he cannot flee effectively, but he retained his genitals, allowing him to potentially have children as he always wanted.

“‘We should never have let them bear arms against white men during the war,’ said his companion. ‘Now we witness the result!’ He went on to tell how, at a large plantation near Fredericksburg, some former slave soldiers had been caught just before a planned revolt […] ‘They had muskets, scythe blades, pitchforks, they had even made spears,’ said the massa’s friend. […] ‘One of their ringleaders said they expected to die, but not before they had done what the war had showed them they could do to white people.’”

This passage highlights the disconnect between state-sanctioned violence and rebellion, as the white men did not complain about winning the Revolutionary War with the help of Black Americans, but they now lament that Black Americans learned elements of warfare from that experience. Although white people are perpetually enacting violence on Black people in America at this time, violence in the opposite direction, perpetrated by Black people on white people, is seen as inhuman or evil. The presupposition of this passage is that Black people never thought about violence before the war, which is inherently incorrect.

“He couldn’t believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn’t live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it’s possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother’s milk made possible the life of privilege they led.”

Kunta realizes how the displays of white wealth he sees on his trips with Waller represent more of a fantasy than reality. The delicate structure of southern “aristocracy” is built and maintained by slavery, which immediately puts the foundation of such a lifestyle in question. As white fear increases over the course of the novel, the explanation can be found in this passage, as any disruption in the flow of labor could jeopardize the entire social and economic system of the southern states.

“Though they never showed it except to those they loved, and sometimes not even then, he realized at last that they felt—and hated—no less than he the oppressiveness under which they all lived. He wished he could find a way to tell her how sorry he was, how he felt her pain, how grateful he was to feel her love, how strong he felt the bond between them growing deep within himself. Quietly he got up, went into the bedroom, took off his clothes, got into bed, took her in his arms, and made love to her—and she to him—with a kind of desperate intensity.”

Two critical elements in this passage are the realization that all Black Americans feel the oppression that Kunta previously thought was unique to himself and that love and relationships function as a means of escape from that oppression. There is a fundamental barrier between Black people at this time, as they are limited in how much they can express to one another, but the “desperate intensity” of Bell and Kunta’s lovemaking displays how furiously they try to create and sustain normative lives with one another despite those limitations.

“But then, staring at the doll, he thought of the black mother he’d heard about who had bashed out her infant’s brains against the auction block, screaming, ‘Ain’t gon’ do to her what you done to me!’ And he raised the doll over his head to dash it against the wall; then he lowered it. No, he could never do that to her. But what about escape? Bell herself had mentioned it once. Would she really go? And if she would, could they ever make it—at their age, with his half foot, with a child barely old enough to walk?”

Kunta’s recollection of an enslaved woman killing her child to save it from a life of enslavement is emblematic of the struggle to reconcile normative desires and severe oppression. The desire for children is expected, but it comes with the inevitable consequence, for enslaved Black people, that their children are doomed to the same lives they have lived. Kunta’s decision to keep the doll represents his desire to give Kizzy a better life, accepting that her friendship with Anne is the best course toward that improvement.

“If she did marry Noah, though, he thought, at least their child would be black and not one of those pale sasso borro babies, products of the mothers having been raped by listing massas or overseers. Kunta thanks Allah that neither his Kizzy nor any other slave-row women ever had faced that horrifying experience, or at least not since he had been there, for countless times he had hear Massa Waller strongly expressing among friends his convictions against white and black bloods being mixed.”

There is a duality in racial tension, here, as Kunta, like Waller, opposes interracial relationships, but for different reasons. The assumption that any multiracial child would be the product of sexual assault perpetrated by white men with authority correctly asserts the hierarchical dynamic of slavery, in which enslaved people cannot truly consent to sexual relationships with those who own or oversee them. Waller’s reasoning is the more discriminatory position that Black genes would “damage” the white gene pool, reflecting a distinctly racist perception of interracial contact.

“The massa set down his cup, frowning. ‘Where is he, then? Are you trying to tell me he’s off drunk or tomcatting somewhere, and you think he’ll slip back today, or are you saying you think he’s trying to run?’ ‘All us sayin’, Massa,’ Bell quavered, ‘is seem like he ain’t here, an’ us done searched eve’ywheres.’ Massa Waller studied his coffee cup. ‘I’ll give him until tonight—no, tomorrow morning—before I take action.’ Massa, he a good boy, born and bred right here on yo’ place, an’ work good all his life, ain’t never give you or nobody a minute’s trouble—’ He looked levelly at Bell. ‘If he’s trying to run, he’ll be sorry.’”

Bell’s conversation with Waller is resolved in an assertion of dominance, in which Waller’s supposed good nature is shown to be false. Bell assumes that Waller would listen to reason and even show mercy, but Waller’s response that “he’ll be sorry” shows how he views enslaved people as property, or even pets, rather than human beings.

“Kizzy said, ‘My pappy real name Kunta Kinte. He a African.’

‘You don’t say!’ Miss Malizy appeared taken aback.

‘I’se heared my great-gran’daddy was one dem African, too! My mammy say her mammy told her he was blacker’n tar, wid scars zigzaggin’ down both cheeks. But my mammy never said his name—’

Miss Malizy paused. ‘You know yo’ mammy, too?’

‘’Co’se I does. My mammy name Bell. She a big-house cook like you is. An’ my pappy drive de massa’s buggy—leas’ he did’

‘You je’s come from bein’ wid you’ mammy an’ pappy both?’ Miss Malizy couldn’t believe it. ‘Lawd, ain’t many us gits to know both our folks ‘fo’ somebody git sol’ away!’”

Malizy’s shock that Kizzy knew both of her parents illustrates how the slave trade breaks apart families, preventing the conventional transfer of familial wisdom and knowledge. Malizy’s limited knowledge of her great-grandfather reveals the distance between many enslaved Black Americans and their heritage, layering with the fact that Malizy’s knowledge seems entirely matrilineal, implying that the men in her family are more likely to be sold than the women.

“The wagon rolled on in silence for a while, but Chicken George could feel the massa’s anger rising. Finally the massa exclaimed, ‘Boy, let me tell you somethin’! You been all your life on my place with your belly full. You don’t know nothin’ about what it’s like to grow up scufflin’ and half-starvin’ with ten brothers and sisters and your mama and papa all sleeping in two hot, leaky rooms!’ Chicken George was astonished at such an admission from the massa, who went on heatedly as if he had to get the painful memories out of his system.”

Lea’s perception of his own life contrasts with the expectations of a racially divided society, but it also reveals how white people do not understand the specific oppression of slavery. Though Lea grew up in a poor household, he did not live in fear of being sold, kidnapped, or beaten to death. In Lea’s mind, the fact that he keeps George’s “belly full” makes him a better “parent” than his own, and he does not understand how existing as property can be worse than lacking property.

“‘Pappy, I knows de story, too!’ Virgil broke in. Making a face at his younger brothers, he went ahead and told it himself—including even the African words.

‘He done heared it three times from you, and gran’mammy don’t cross de do’sill widout tellin’ it again!’ said Matilda with a laugh. George thought: How long had it been since he last heard his wife laughing?”

The strength of oral histories lies in the fact that children can hear stories from their parents, which they can then relay to their own children endlessly. Virgil stepping forward to relay Kunta’s story shows that he will one day be able to repeat the story to his children. Though the direct link back to Africa that Kunta provided Kizzy is broken, Kizzy has kept Kunta’s spirit alive in the Kinte family.

“[T]he magnificent gamecock that burst from the underbrush in response to his call stood beating its wings explosively against its body for almost half a minute before its crow seemed to shatter the autumn afternoon. […] Every ounce, every inch of it symbolized its boldness, spirit, and freedom so dramatically that Chicken George left vowing this bird must never be caught and trained and trimmed. It must remain there with its hens among the pines—untouched and free!”

There is a representative relationship between chicken-fighting and slavery in this passage, as the rooster George calls is emblematic of the strength of Black Americans. Though the roosters are bought and pitted against one another, they retain a dignity and pride that cannot be quashed. The act of leaving the rooster in the rangewalk with the hens is parallel to George’s own desire to be free with his family.

“Wanly she smiled at him, at them all. ‘Nother thing,’ GRAN’MAMMY Kizzy went on, ‘any y’all gits mo’ chilluns ‘fo’ I sees you ag’in, don’t forgit to tell ‘em ‘bout my folks, my mammy Bell, an’ my African pappy name Kunta Kinte, what be yo’ chillun’s great-great-gran’pappy! Hear me, now! Tell ‘em ‘bout me, ‘bout my George, ‘bout yo’selves, too! An’ ‘bout what we been through ‘midst differen’ massas. Tell de chilluns all de res’ about who we is!’”

As the family leaves Lea’s plantation, Kizzy’s last reminder is to continue telling Kunta’s story, but she adds that they need to continue the story through to the present, including themselves. The maintenance of the oral history of the Kinte family is more than just remembering Kunta as an ancestral figure, as it includes the same children who are told Kunta’s story. As the novel progresses, more characters and family members are added to an endless chain, linking each generation with all previous generations.

“For one thing, deep within, Tom neither completely liked, nor completely trusted any white person, his own Massa and Missis Murray included. It seriously bothered him that Irene seemed actually to adore if not worship the whites who owned her; it strongly suggested that they would never see eye to eye on a vital matter.”

Tom’s issue with Irene is the same as Kunta’s former issue with Bell, and this passage establishes Tom as an analog to Kunta in terms of personality and perception. Tom’s distrust of white people is understandable, as the narrative itself shows how trusting white people often leads to betrayal. Irene’s seeming adoration for the Holts and Murrays, like Bell’s for the Wallers, is a reflection of their desire to be proud of anything they could associate themselves with, considering that they are not allowed to make or own things of their own.

“It took a moment to sink in. Chicken George stared disbelievingly at Massa Murray. He couldn’t speak. ‘I’m really sorry, boy. I know it don’t seem fair to you.’

‘Do it seem fair to you, Massa Murray?’

The massa hesitated. ‘No, to tell you the truth. But the law is the law.’ He paused. ‘But if you would want to choose to stay here, I’ll guarantee you’ll be treated well. You have my word on that.’

‘Yo’ word, Massa Murray?’ George’s eyes were impassive.”

Much like with Lea, George’s encounter with Murray involves the specific disconnect between white people and their own rules. Murray’s initial statement that it must seem unfair “to you,” implies that the law forcing George to leave the state is fair in his own eyes. In the end, Murray’s word, like Lea’s, is useless, as it is still the oppressive nature of ownership that George is trying to escape with his family.

“The time would be just about as the dusk was deepening into the night, with the lightning bugs flickering on and off around the honeysuckle vines, and every evening I can remember, unless there was some local priority gossip, always they would talk about the same things—snatches and patches of what later I’d learn was the long, cumulative family narrative that had been passed down across the generations.”

Haley’s recollection of the family narrative, which is the novel itself, centers the entire work as a patchwork of stories and memories arranged in linear order and conjured for the reader, much as they were conjured for Haley as a child. The setting in this passage adds to the dreamlike quality of such memories, and it serves to emphasize the later note of “across the generations,” as Haley forms the seventh generation in the novel.