Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [1]
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