All in the Family

“The end of the American artist’s pilgrimage to Europe is the discovery of America,” Leslie Fiedler writes. So, too, the American artist’s pilgrimage (if he is black) to Africa: after 12 years of research and half a million miles of travel, Alex Haley has discovered an America that is feasting on his book and has devoured a television adaptation as well. Haley thus finds himself an Instant Celebrity, that most American form of notoriety and one which, I suspect, leaves him feeling most ambivalent. For the mission—there is no other word—he undertook over a decade ago was an intensely personal one, so personal in fact that his closeness to the subject accounts for the strength of Roots—a work of decidedly mixed parts—as well as for its weakness.

This astonishingly resourceful account of the “lost tribe of a great black family” (Haley’s own) opens with the birth and young manhood of Kunta Kinte, who in the year 1676 was abducted while chopping wood in his native West Africa and shipped on the Lord Ligonier to “ ’Naplis,” Maryland where he was sold into slavery for $850 at the age of seventeen.

About the Author

Alan Pell Crawford

Mr. Crawford is the author of Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson.

“The end of the American artist’s pilgrimage to Europe is the discovery of America,” Leslie Fiedler writes. So, too, the American artist’s pilgrimage (if he is black) to Africa: after 12 years of research and half a million miles of travel, Alex Haley has discovered an America that is feasting on his book and has devoured a television adaptation as well. Haley thus finds himself an Instant Celebrity, that most American form of notoriety and one which, I suspect, leaves him feeling most ambivalent. For the mission—there is no other word—he undertook over a decade ago was an intensely personal one, so personal in fact that his closeness to the subject accounts for the strength of Roots—a work of decidedly mixed parts—as well as for its weakness.

This astonishingly resourceful account of the “lost tribe of a great black family” (Haley’s own) opens with the birth and young manhood of Kunta Kinte, who in the year 1676 was abducted while chopping wood in his native West Africa and shipped on the Lord Ligonier to “ ’Naplis,” Maryland where he was sold into slavery for $850 at the age of seventeen.