I remember when "Roots: The Mini-Series" came out and the heated dialogue that followed. But I’d never read the book on which it was based. And because it's a historical novel on my reading list, I just read Alex Haley’s groundbreaking work. Roots is based on seven generations spanning two hundred years of his own family history.
The narrative begins in the late 1700s in Africa, where the reader meets a Muslim family whose patriarch tells his children of Mali’s once-great empire.
I was surprised that the story remains on “The Dark Continent” for more than one hundred pages before a seventeen-year-old is kidnapped by slave traders. When he’s abducted, the reader feels both the horrifying familial as well as the deep cultural loss with him.
Then there’s the four-month trip on the boat—probably the most sickening account I've ever read. It would be bad enough to be torn from anyone and anything you’ve ever known and lie chained below deck in the dark. But to be stuffed into a shelf where you soil yourself and lay in your waste?
At the time of its release, the book affected our nation like no story since Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And honestly the combination of these two books has made it impossible for me to hear references to our own nation’s “Christian past” without the knee-jerk need to add some qualifications.
Roots is based on something that happened to millions in our country’s history over a long period; it was not some random blip. And it was here from the beginning. Many who should have been committed to “do justice” and “do unto others” instead used scripture to justify their treachery. And the evil was systemic: People sold slaves; lawmakers protected slave owners; land owners reaped the benefits of backbreaking work; consumers enjoyed the high standard of living brought by low prices. And after more than a hundred years of all this, Southerners laid down their lives fighting to keep it that way.
Roots sold more than a million copies in its first year, and one hundred thirty times that many people watched the TV series. The book also won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Writing it took twelve years of painstaking research on both continents, during which Haley learned the name of his kidnapped ancestor: Kunte Kinte.
The TV series was great; the book is greater. But it definitely afflicts the comfortable. That God has blessed American convinces me once again of the reality not of karma but amazing grace.
