It was February 2001. Three years earlier, President Bill Clinton had appointed my father, George W. Haley, U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Gambia. Like an act of poetic atonement, America sent the great-great-great-great-grandson of a slave back, as a diplomat, to the country whence his ancestor had been kidnapped. From my first breath of Gambian air, every step felt like an introduction to my whole self. But the most extraordinary moment was when I walked into Juffure, as my uncle, Alex Haley, had done 33 years earlier on his journey to writing Roots: The Saga of an American Family, and discovered our beginning.
How does a single book at once condemn and captivate a nation? Fifty years ago this August, Roots did just that. In 1976, the bicentennial of the United States of America, Alexander Murray Palmer Haley saw the story he had carried since childhood, then researched and written over 12 years, sit atop the New York Times best-seller list for 46 weeks, spending 22 at No. 1. A U.S. Coast Guard veteran and freelance writer had dispelled any notion of it having been born the land of the free that its anthem professed, and the entire country, it seemed, was now on notice.
And now, all of those conversations around the Thanksgiving table had finally come to fruition. At 14, I innocently felt that his accomplishment was mine too. I had been raised on this story that was now the world’s to know. This was my family. And this is my love letter to him.
The author, center, on a trip to Juffure in the GambiaBut none of this had been Uncle Alex’s wildest dream. All he had set out to do was to find out for himself who the African was. Uncle Alex and his brothers spent most summers on their maternal grandparents’ front porch. There, they would sit rapt, listening to the stories their grandmother Cynthia and her sister friends told late into the night. One such story told of a man brought to America on a boat from Africa that had landed in “’Naplis.” The African’s name was “Kinte.”
The stories became livelier at this point, and more rich with detail, as these were characters the women had known personally—Chicken George was Cynthia’s grandfather—and they stayed with Uncle Alex. Haunted him, really. Who was this Kinte? Where had he come from? There was no 23andMe then, but there were reams of microfiche at the Library of Congress and ample records in basements of the Churches of Latter-day Saints. There was also, and first, Cousin Georgia.
Her recounting, alongside his research, enabled Uncle Alex to learn that these cherished words were of the Mandinka language, spoken primarily in the Republic of Gambia. He made multiple trips on his meager budget, traipsing around a country the size of Connecticut. Had he too much audacity in believing he could reverse the Middle Passage?
Uncle Alex’s arrival in Juffure was a feat of ancestral home revealed and personal mystery solved. James Earl Jones made that moment his own in the Roots miniseries. In his portrayal of Alex Haley there in Juffure, Jones exclaims with bass-toned exuberance: “You old African! I found you, Kunta Kinte!” I always smile at this scene. Knowing Uncle Alex, I imagine that his reaction would have been no less dramatically felt, but more understated. I see him sitting there, knee to knee with the griot. Upon hearing the name Kinte and then calculating the data, I envision him folding in on himself, a gut punch quietly and gratefully received; a recognition of origin, a recompense for every African American back home, a proof of life: before.
The cover of TIME, Feb. 14, 1977But there is another way to read it. One that reveals that before this anger—before this truncated knowledge that people of African ancestry had been enslaved for 400 years, stripped of their culture, their liberty, and their personhood, then denied civil rights—there was another place across the waters where their forebears were not property but kings and queens. Before this anger was a place where the culture of these people was wholly intact, centuries old, with a foundation so deep that when stripped from its shores, a man had carried it with him and remembered it to those in the place where he landed.
Anne and Alex Haley
Before Roots, most every depiction of our origin had begun with enslavement, as if we had sprung up spontaneously on this soil with sun-kissed skin and woolen hair. Both captor and captive knew that all had not begun here. But the captor would not have been inclined to tell that story, and the captive was not allowed, being not permitted to learn to read or write.
It was a game of generational telephone that allowed the world to know the history of the African American before slavery. Uncle Alex always said Roots was not just the story of the Haley family, but of every African American: “In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning.” Roots gave Americans of African descent an origin that began not in servitude but in freedom.
That the TV deal was struck almost before the ink on the manuscript was dry speaks to the inevitability that Roots would be an economic powerhouse, though the book’s immediate popularity surprised even the publishers, selling out an initial print run of 200,000 copies, with Doubleday forced to push out 14 more printings.
The author speaking about the legacy of Roots
Since Roots was published our country has seen vast increases in Black businesses and Black academia, a Black superhero and a Black President, even as we continue to fight the battles of institutional racism. A 2022 Pew study reported that of the Black Americans who have delved into genealogical research, 77% did so by speaking to their families. I like to think of that as a nod to Kunta, Kizzy, and the art of oral history.
History may depend on it. Earlier this spring, Knox County, Tennessee—the county where Uncle Alex spent his final years, the home of the university where he would donate the majority of his papers and where a public park holds a 13-ft., 4,200-lb. bronze statue of him, in the state that cradles the porch that birthed the book—banned Roots, requiring that copies be removed from school libraries. Ten days later, following swift backlash, the county reversed its decision. The work of the ancestors, or just better minds prevailing? Either way, the lesson is clear. The surest way to preserve one’s story is to keep telling it.
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