Rooting for a New America

In discussing his controversial film JFK, director Oliver Stone often says that he hopes it will replace the Warren Commission as the prevailing public myth about the Kennedy assassination.

When he talks about "myths," Stone doesn't mean falsehoods. Myths in this sense are the stories we tell--individually or collectively--in order to make sense of our lives. To explain this point Stone refers to the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe became the prevailing myth, or paradigmatic story, about slavery, only to be displaced by Gone With the Wind, which was in turn displaced by Roots.

That is the measure of the late Alex Haley's achievement--that he could, and should, be mentioned in the same sentence with Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe wrote the "little book that started the big war." And Haley wrote a book-turned-mini-series that restored the African heritage to the children of the black diaspora.

The night that, during the first episode of Roots, the infant Kunta Kinte's father held him up to the stars of the West African sky can be named as the night that blacks in America started becoming African Americans. In the evenings that followed, the mass of white Americans too, most of whom have no ancestral link to slavery, came face-to-face with that real-life monstrosity which still runs screaming through our nightmare history.

Roots changed the world. Setting aside, for now, the trans-ethnic passion for genealogy that it aroused, Haley's family saga changed the way we think about our national identity and our common story. In lit-crit terms, Roots was derivative (to the point of plagiarism, it was claimed) and cheap melodrama, with lots of stereotypical characters, emotional manipulation, and simplistic morals.

All this is, of course, true. Haley was no Tolstoy; and neither was Harriet Beecher Stowe. But whatever its highbrow aesthetic shortcomings, Roots worked, and worked brilliantly, as mass entertainment which also made massive meaning. Roots was and is, as Stone's analysis suggests, a textbook case in the way that popular artworks make social change, and in the way our ideologies and self-conceptions are shaped and defined by the stories we tell and the songs we sing.

ON ITS RAMPAGE THROUGH the American mythos, Roots also hammered the last nail into the moonlight-and-magnolias myth of benevolent bondage in the genteel Old South. And it did so in the same year that a post-civil rights Southern white liberal moved into the White House, on a margin of victory guaranteed by Southern black votes. This conjunction of events helped open the way for a New South which could someday become the anchor of a multiracial, class-based, majoritarian progressive coalition in America.

Haley's own allegiance to the South is worth noting in this connection. Roots brought Haley the kind of wealth and acclaim that usually pull children of the provinces irrevocably into the orbit of the coastal media capitals. But Haley kept his home base firmly planted, with his roots, in Tennessee.

Haley sometimes joined with Southern Baptist preacher Will Campbell, and country singer-songwriter Tom T. Hall, as a sort of Southern biracial ACLU truth squad traveling together to Southern racial troublespots in Hall's tour bus. Haley believed that African America's future lay, with its roots, in the South and on the land. Census figures suggest that Haley may have been a trendsetter in this regard as well, as in the last decade blacks in the Northern cities have begun moving back to the South in measurable numbers.

Haley's historic legacy as the Roots-man almost obscures in public memory his earlier contribution as the co-author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. This volume, which still stands as a definitive statement about black life in America, serves as the basis for Spike Lee's upcoming bio-flick Malcolm X, starring Denzel Washington.

These two landmarks of Haley's career are not unrelated. It was his work with Malcolm X, who sought to restore black America's political and cultural links to Africa, which led Haley to start looking at his own family heritage. And while the Autobiography was certainly Malcolm's story and Malcolm's life, it was Haley's writing, and he deserves considerable credit for the durability of that book's reworking of the tradition of black autobiographical testimony.

Haley the journalist also deserves credit for cajoling Malcolm X into talking freely about the life and times of Detroit Red. As time has passed, the Autobiography's depiction of the pre-Muslim Malcolm Little, with his echoes of that folkloric "bad dude" Stagger Lee, has given resonance and humanity to the man's subsequent rebirth, and hope to millions of African-American young people trying to survive the nation's mean streets.

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.