ROOTS by Alex Haley

ISBN-10: 030682485X

ISBN-13: 978-0306824852

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

• Look, I just have to say it, I think Haley’s writing is mediocre. He’s not Toni Morrison. There’s a lot of telling instead of showing, a lot of sufficient but bland similes. There’s a lot of head-hopping that could’ve been edited out. That being said, it’s not like I want to stop reading. I’m genuinely curious about the story, so the writing not being “better” isn’t the end of the world.  
• I do appreciate the time being taken to describe Kunta’s home life. The original TV series pretty quickly takes us into enslavement, so that not a whole lot is learned about Juffure. I wonder if this is because a good portion of the Black American audience would object to the depiction of Islam??  
• While I think it’s immoral for a 30+ year-old man to marry a 14-year-old girl, I don’t really understand why Kunta is grossed out?? Like, besides him not having hit puberty yet and thinking girls are stupid lol I feel like we don’t need Kunta to be 100% moral (especially since he’s 8 here).   
• They call White men “toubob” and that is hilarious to me.  
• Kunta and Lamin want to know what slavery means. There’s discussion about how their own homegrown slavery is significantly different than what’s been observed of the toubob enslaving people from their lands. While we must understand the brutality of American slave trading, I think it’s important not to become complacent with any slavery. All slavery is immoral, end of discussion.   
• This 2014-2015 edition has some typographical errors…like a comma will be aligned in the middle of a line as though something has pushed it upward LOL  
• I had to look up the wuolo dog breed because Haley really only gives generic dog details. They look like greyhounds. Slim body, fine hair.  
• Kunta and his peers go through “manhood training”, which in their culture, consist of learning how to hunt as well as total obedience. Failure is rewarded with ass-whoopings. Toward the end, they’re circumcised. Constant ass whooping and male circumcision has unfortunately remained prevalent in modern Black communities.   
• It was interesting to see their exposure to Christian literature–it is an instruction in Islam to study the Old Testament and selections of The Gospel, but this isn’t often discussed.   
• Additionally, the Mandinkas adhere to strict stoicism, which seems burdensome. It mostly applies to the men because “women can’t help themselves” or whatever.  
• The Mandinkas are a patriarchal and highly sexist society, no doubt because of their adherence to the Quran. It would have been nice to follow a matriarchal tribe or a pagan tribe, though I understand that Haley’s research informed these decisions.   
• Kunta has a wet dream lol  
• Juffure is increasingly worried about how toubob are kidnapping natives  
• The Mandinkas are low context, never saying directly what they mean. Neurodivergent’s nightmare.   
• So men in society generally marry in their 30s and “women” in their mid-teens. How old is Binta? Some widows in their 30s get this legal approval to bang these boys that are Kunta’s age (~17), which is also highly immoral for the difference in maturity. What happens to the children? Are they considered legitimate or bastards or?? Additionally, husband’s can partake in non-consensual polygamy (the wives have no say), and Kunta worries that Omoro will do this. Perhaps for the sake of our moral sensibilities, it isn’t seen to happen.  
• If a woman irritates her husband, he can petition to have her publicly beaten. Women only get to complain about sexual incompetence in their husbands, which doesn’t result in court ordered physical violence…  
• Note that some of my criticisms aren’t of the story but Mandinka society (as reported here).   
• So far, I feel like I’ve been constantly jump-scared because we all know that Kunta is going to be captured. And then it happens.  
• Despite their barbarous conditions on the ship, the captives manage to kill one of the “slatees”, one of their own who had been working for the toubob up until his own betrayal.   
• There’s something to say about how at no point do they allow themselves to blame Allah. They always take the blame, though there’s nothing anyone could do that would warrant the treatment they’re enduring. I’m curious, but also somewhat familiar, about what they’ll do when they find that their captors worship the same god. (Future note: Kunta never makes the association that both Christians and Moslems are worshiping YHWH.)  
• Religious snobbery is a fatal error in us. Kunta learns about his shackle-mate, who is from a renowned tribe of warriors, but the moment he casts doubts about Allah for the very obvious reason of their peril, Kunta refuses to engage him ever again. Is this really the place where you want to deny yourself positive human interaction because of differences in religious thought??   
• Kunta Kinte and the others on the ship are treated so miserably, it’s a wonder not only how any of them survived but how human beings could be lacking so much morality. The cruelty seems otherworldly or like it must have occurred during prehistoric times.  
• The toubob’s penises are described as small and I don’t know if Haley is repeating a stereotype or if because of selective breeding, white men’s penises were actually smaller on average. We should remember that in some societies (Ancient Greek?), big penises were considered a reflection of brutish stupidity.  
• Kunta notices that the toubob smell different and unpleasant, but I wish some additional detail was given here. Is it a musk? Is like rotten food or garbage?   
• Kunta is informed that his new name is Toby and he’s having none of that. One slave is named Nicodemus, like, give him a name like that, man…(I’m joking. The process of renaming a person without their consent is immoral.)  
• Like any reasonable person, Kunta makes several escape attempts, but he’s got no idea how big North America is. There’s no amount of living off the land he can adhere to when he doesn’t understand English nor the landscape.  
• Some bounty hunters lop part of Kunta’s foot off, forever ending his dream of escaping. This misfortune works somewhat in his favor, as he’s purchased by Dr. William Waller, who is a sort of pacifist. We also find out that Kunta’s first master was John Waller, the doctor’s brother.  
• Kunta is tended to by Bell, the house slave. Even though she nurses him to health, he hates her because she speaks English and seems content to stay a slave. He makes this same observation of the rest of the Blacks on the doctor’s plantation and can’t understand why they don’t run off. He thinks this despite the injuries he’s sustained failing to get away. If death is preferable to slavery, then lead by example.   
• Kunta is given the more simple task of tending to the garden alongside “the Gardener”. He makes no effort to be friendly to any of the Blacks.   
• It’s Kunta against the world, and he’s continuously disturbed that the Blacks don’t adhere to Islam. Little does he know that Christianity is its predecessor and they’re worshiping different versions of the same god (YHWH). At no point does he recognize that he’s been taught about Christianity, but it’s probably because he isn’t taught to read English–those texts were originally recounted to him in his native tongue.  
• It’s the battle of conservatives with Kunta vs toubob. While American life is certainly repressive, somehow Kunta finds the slaves behaving too liberally for his Moslem sensibilities.   
• He starts opening up when another slave nicknamed the Fiddler appears. Kunta is still apprehensive about his differences from these American-born Blacks, but establishes some camaraderie in their shared disdain for their circumstances.   
• Woo wee, the most challenging part of this is reading the local color in the dialog. I wouldn’t recommend using Haley’s method.  
• I had no idea what time period this was taking place until they finally mention the thirteen colonies and the American Revolution.   
• One minute Kunta is 19 then he turns around and he’s 32. That’s mad depressing.   
• We’re reminded that there’s no such thing as a good slave owner when Dr. Waller sells Luther for trying to assist a slave in escaping and when he tells Bell that he’d sell her in the blink of an eye.  
• There’s gossip about how Quakers and leaders like Thomas Jefferson want to abolish slavery despite owning slaves, and how certain Christian denominations are speaking up against slavery. Actions speak louder than words.   
• The Blacks hear story after story of slave revolts, some even happening far away in Haiti, but while freedom couldn’t be more desirable, the risk of losing mild life with Dr. Waller is a weighty argument. Kunta starts to understand why they’ve stayed.  
• Kunta meets a Ghanian man who rekindles his appreciation for Africa. Unfortunately, he also suggests that Kunta have children, which in this climate, I think is a BAD MOVE. I do think it’s unrealistic to say “don’t have kids” for a myriad of reasons, the biggest being, ironically, the climate.  
• Kunta remarks how Bell isn’t pretty, and I realize more than ever that character descriptions are seriously lacking. I mean, what does Kunta look like besides seriously scarred up at this point? Some passages suggest that Dr. Waller is handsome, but that doesn’t give me a lot. I find myself depending on my broken memory of the original miniseries.   
• Despite Kunta’s rampant misogyny, he can’t make himself attracted to young teen girls as is the custom of the Mandinkas, and honestly I’m “proud” of him for realizing that they’re just girls.  
• Kunta does not know how to flirt, but he makes Bell a cooking pestle which is honestly very cute.  
• After marrying comes the couple’s quarreling, though in this case their disagreements are about survival. Kunta just doesn’t want to see his culture die, but Bell knows that their relatively peaceful life under Dr. Waller could be shattered at any moment due to increased concerns of collected identity leading to intelligence.   
• Despite Kunta being renamed “Toby”, the narration refers to him as Kunta and even Bell calls him this in private, which I appreciate.   
• Bell has a baby, but Kunta is such a misogynist, he doesn’t figure his baby might be a GIRL. Luckily, he happily accepts this and names her Kizzy.  
• Missy Anne, John Waller’s toddler, wants to play with Kizzy. It’s partially innocent and partially predatory. Anne is obviously being raised to carry the tradition of being a superior White and Kizzy is doomed to be a slave. While Anne’s interest in Kizzy saves her from field work, there’s something depressing in the juxtaposition of another Black boy named Noah, who must labor over crops and doesn’t get playtime with any peers.  
• So it’s fine for boys to get circumcised but Kunta freaks the fuck out when he thinks Kizzy is going to get dunked for a baptism?? Kunta…please…  
• Kunta carves Kizzy a wooden doll, but his heart is broken when she shows rudimentary preference for a White doll that Missy Anne gives her. This is an unfortunate reality that has followed us into the 21st century, despite mainstream manufacturers like Mattel creating racially and physically diverse models.  
• There’s discussion about blood purity and how it effects slavery. Racists like to conveniently ignore that lack of genetic diversity increases the susceptibility to disease and population extinction.   
• I like that the Fiddler states that intelligence doesn’t come from whiteness, and Kunta shows Bell that he’d learned to read and write Arabic in Africa.  
• Fiddler raises $700 dollars to buy his freedom just for Dr. Waller to postulate about inflation, further proving that he’s a piece of shit. Even people living in the 2020s, the time period at which I’m writing this, would say that $700 would make or break them. Capitalism sucks.  
• As Missy Anne becomes a teenager, she cares less and less about Kizzy. The final nail in the coffin is at her sweet 16, when she utilizes Kizzy as no more than a slave. While our childhood friendships often drift apart as we age, this situation is obviously racially motivated. Can’t be seen with the girl friends having platonic love for a nigger girl!  
• Kunta starts having intrusive thoughts about how Kizzy is biologically maturing. I guess the inappropriate thoughts of one’s child interloping pass through any parents’ minds briefly, as a fear or hope. Idk I’m not a parent.  
• Now that Missy Anne is out of the picture, there’s mild evidence that Noah and Kizzy have been paying some mind to each other, which I suppose is bound to happen considering that he’s the only boy her age around. Their affection ends violently when Noah runs away and it is revealed that Kizzy was pressured into forging traveling papers. Despite Noah’s promise to Kunta that he wouldn’t involve Kizzy, this betrayal uproots their entire family, and after an anguishing physical altercation, Dr. Waller has Kizzy sold. This is entirely to be expected of a people who are ideologically convinced that only they have meaning.   
• Lea, Kizzy’s new master, immediately sexually assaults her and tosses her a coin each times he comes to do so. Later her son remarks how she has a jar brimming with coins. There can be no harm done to an animal without rights, no matter how human their shape appears.  
• Lea is certainly an irredeemable rapist and racist, but we should acknowledge how the rich use racism as a tool to prevent class solidarity between poor Whites and people of color.   
• Kizzy gives birth to Lea’s son, who he never acknowledges as such. The boy is named George, and despite Lea’s malevolent nature, gets on his good side through humor. This is much like how the Fiddler escaped certain peril at the hands of patrollers by playing a song they liked and making them laugh. It is unfortunate that when these moments of comedy end, you (and everyone who looks like you) are still a nigger even if you’ve escaped with your life.  
• Today we called Black-White mixed race people, “light-skinned”, but here we see the term “high-yaller” the most often.  
• Kizzy has decided to tell about Kunta to George and her descendants no matter what.  
• It’s interesting to note the change from “toubob” to “cracker” as Kunta disappears from the story.   
• To Kizzy’s chagrin, George starts training with Uncle Mingo to raise roosters for Lea’s cockfighting addiction. As he becomes more adept, his favor with Lea increases until news of a massive uprising again shows Lea’s disregard for their humanity and forever position as talking objects.  
• George is two timing two girls but then gets mad when one of the girls is two timing him  
• Kizzy is extremely irritable. To an extent, this can be understood due the trauma she’s endured and on account of her being a slave, but sometimes she gets pissy with George and it’s like…you know he has to do what Lea demands, are you just taking your anger out on your son because that’s all you can do?? I think there’s also something to be said about Haley’s own misogyny. Women don’t need to be screaming and crying about stuff all the time.   
• Haley uses CAPSLOCK for when characters scream and I desperately wish he didn’t.   
• I don’t want to keep throwing stones at Haley’s writing. There are things he does well, like creating believable characters who have their own thoughts, and I think it’s important that he’s made the slave owners fully dimensional. He’s best at describing emotion and the struggle for survival. His descriptions of the cockfights are also well-done.   
• Lea confides in George about his upbringing. It’s a typical “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” tale, made more distasteful by Lea’s inability to understand slavery as morally wrong. It’s greed that ruins Lea’s otherwise reasonable desires of not wanting to go to bed hungry anymore. What do you need with a multi-columned house or acres of land? If this can’t be obtained without necessarily harming people in the process, then you don’t need it, bud.  
• George highly approves of Matilda, a girl on another plantation who is fervently religious and opposes his advances. Lea arranges for their marriage. I don’t really know what George sees in her because she’s adverse to all the things he likes and he regularly cheats on her. I’d say this is the tradwife dilemma, as her piety makes her an easy object to control.  
• Before George says that Matilda is highly religious, I thought maybe she was a lesbian or asexual. Not mutually exclusive, of course, but the addition of the time period makes it less likely.   
• However, Matilda’s arrival finally calms Kizzy the fuck down, and they bond over Kunta’s history and Maltida’s babies. It’s somewhat disheartening that a woman’s interest must be contained to matters of child-rearing and domestics.   
• Matilda organizes church service in slave row. Pompey objects to Christianity’s usefulness on account of Blacks’ continued suffering. Matilda offers what I find to be a weak retort, the Bible story of Joseph being sold into slavery. Of course, no one can raise a counter-argument as they’ve not been exposed to philosophy of outside thought. What about the Bible detailing stipulations for Isrealites regarding slavery? Freedom for the chosen, slavery for the gentiles. With source material like the Torah, Bible, Quran, etc. y’all’ll never agree on what’s what. Addendum, retraction, rinse, repeat.  
• Some of the Native American tribes have been noted to hate Blacks. No reason is given, but I wonder if they harbor the same resentment that Kunta did when he first arrived.  
• Uncle Mingo dies and even the severe-hearted Lea seems upset. Lea has been such a nuisance to his wife, that she first starts screaming about the well-being of the chickens.  
• Nat Turner does his murder rampage thing and Lea has another public freak out caught in 4k on slave row. So you act like this at the drop of a pen and then can’t figure out why Nat Turners happen lol The cognitive dissonance.   
• Also, it’s common colonizer/imperialist-apologetics to condemn Nat Turner, but I’m not so foolish. Burn that shit to the ground. Your slave masters don’t want to talk peacefully and the women and children aren’t innocent by default. Failure to realize this is why Nat Turner wasn’t more successful.   
• It’s not until George is preparing to capture another rooster that he reflects on the state of freedom. Much like enslaved Blacks, the gamecocks are driven to death as they work to make somebody another dollar. He never reaches the ultimate conclusion that fighting animals is immoral. As a potential pathway to gain money to buy himself from freedom, I’m willing to overlook what is otherwise a failure in duty to the animals around us. First humankind failed George, and then George necessarily had to fail the animals.  
• HOW MANY CHILDREN IS GEORGE GUNNA HAVE  
• George, Matilda, and Kizzy discuss buying everyone on Lea’s slave row, which is why, like…friends, please slow down on the baby-making.  
• So Lea is seventy-eight now, which is crazy to think about.  
• George and Lea bet more than all of their money on a cockfight, and lose it all and more when Lea is goaded into another match. Lea sells George to the winner, who lives in fucking England. Call him Sir Chicken George.  
• A strange emphasis is placed on George Jr. being fat. Like oo ooo there’s a fat boy and all he cares about it eating!!! The physiques of other people are hardly described.  
• Ashford is a 19th century emo. Prove me wrong.   
• All of Lea’s acquaintances pretend like they don’t know him now that he’s a broke boy. Serves the racist rapist right. Continuous validation that the capitalist race to the top is a farce.  
• Lea sells everyone except Kizzy, Miss Malizy, Sister Sarah, and Pompey. Pompey is so grieved that it sucks out the last of his soul, and on the day of their departure, he’s discovered deceased.  
• Apparently Missus Lea convinced her husband to at least sell the others together, which is surprising given her existence mostly in the shadows as an hysterical wife.  
• While Tom is highly reserved, I also suspected that his disinterest in women was because he’s gay or asexual. I knew this could not have been the case, remembering no such thing in the original television series, but it could have introduced more discussion about what it means to be a family. Alas, Tom’s just conservative in discussing or showing affection to women.   
• Besides describing the White people’s hair as stringy, flaxen, etc. there’s been little memorable discussion of Black people’s hair, though I was wondering at length about it. Finally Haley describes some of the girls’ hair as being in short braids, though I still find this vague.   
• George returns from England to an ailing Miss Malizy and sot Lea. Lea’s spirit rises when he sees George and he starts waxing poetically about how they’re going to get up in the world again, haphazardly revealing that George is his son while “forgetting” the promise he made to free him upon his return. George has to get him wasted so that he can run off with the pre-prepared note of freedom. Imagine finally announcing that you’re someone’s parent but then choosing to keep them enslaved. Moral failure.  
• George finds his family, but an indignant ex-Sheriff informs the Murrays that free Blacks will be forced back into slavery if they stay in the state more than 60 days. Again he’s separated from his loved ones.  
• Virgil’s young son, Uriah, is continuously described as odd. His mannerisms make it seem like he’s on the spectrum, language neither people during the 19th nor 20th century had.  
• The Civil War starts and to ease the Murrays’ apprehension, Matilda says that all of slave row is just terrified to their toenails of the Yankees. The Murrays are like, “Don’t you worry, everything’s going to be alright! We’re a family!!” Reminds me of corporate slop parroted by HR.  
• The ex-Sheriff employs Tom’s assistance to mend horseshoes for the Confederate Army. It only takes one misunderstanding for him to whip Tom. Mr. Murray isn’t nearly as upset as he should be, but we can’t expect genuine compassion from someone who OWNS SLAVES.   
• Slave row makes the acquaintance of George Johnson, a 16-year-old poor White who’s been wandering about, begging for food. They feed him and nickname him Ol’ George. Mr. Murray employs him as an overseer, but Ol’ George is too fond of slave row to be cruel, and they teach him how to put up a front so that Mr. Murray thinks he’s doing a good job. He eventually brings his wife to live there as well. They have the first discussions about how not all Whites must be bad, even though they’ve faced particular violence at the hands of poor ones. Ol’ George is accepted as one of their own.  
• The Confederates lose, but it’s forever before they relinquish their slaves. I want to draw attention to Mr. Murray’s comment that they’re willing to split up the land and pay for services. This was never about slave owners not having the money to pay for work on their properties, it was entirely about greed.   
• Tom and several other newly freed Blacks form a caravan to travel to Tennessee. Ol’ George begs to go with them because he considers them family.  
• Once they arrive, they realize that being free doesn’t mean they’re seen as equals. A better discussion of this can be seen in James Baldwin’s works, where he and his characters suffer at the hands of police brutality, Jim Crow laws, and segregation into Ghettos. Tom and his family get off more easily, as Tom’s skill with blacksmithing earns him respect.  
• Tom is a colorist, though not in the way we’re used to seeing. Instead of complaining that someone is too dark, he prevents his daughters from pursuing relationships with men who are too light. I think the original miniseries does a better job addressing this misjudgement. There, one of Tom’s children says that he hates White people, after Tom has been whipped. It’s Ol’ George’s wife, Martha, who asks if that includes them. More nuance is given as the characters reflect about racism and cruelty.   
• While I realize the subtitle of this work is “The Saga of an American Family”, it’s somewhat exhausting to read about the continuous marriages and childbirths.  
• These last few chapters feel like Wikipedia articles as we’re told rather matter-of-factly how life proceeds. It’s telling, telling, telling, rather than an effort to make me feel like I’m with the characters.  
• The last sentence of chapter 117 marks a change from third person to first person as Haley enters his own story. I actually don’t know why chapters 118-120 aren’t at the beginning of the book as a preface. They summarize the plot and explain Haley’s research efforts.  
• Ugh, one of his aunts gets a college education and then chides her parents for having a dialect. White people can speak “improper” English all day long, but the second someone PoC does, it requires correction.  
• I am immensely jealous that Haley was given a pension to pursue his creative efforts. What I wouldn’t give!