Roots: The Saga of an American Family

Roots: The Saga of an American Family is a novel written by Alex Haley and first published in 1976. It was adapted into a very successful television miniseries, also called Roots.

Lengthly Summary of First Half of Book

The following is in extremely poor format-it needs to be cleaned up.

Kunta Kinte is arguably the most important character in this tale. He has been given half of the book, and is also given an extensive history. Kunta Kinte was born in Africa in 1750. He lived in a tiny Sub-Saharan Muslim community that had hardly any contact with white people.

This first part of the book could just as well be a book about Africa in the mid-1700’s as it could about Kunta Kinte. In the beginning, Alex Haley covers everything that Kunta is alleged to have done in Africa. He starts with Kunta being of the age of three or four, and wishing he would grow up and assume an important role in the community.

At the age of six, Kunta gets his first job-scaring birds away from crops. At the age of seven and a half, Kunta is taken out into the fields by older boys to help watch over the pastoral animals. There is an omnipresent fear of lions. Kunta is teased by the older boys due to his age. At the age of eleven his taro was taken for manhood training. This is one of Kunta’s most dramatic moments of his life. He is kidnapped in the middle of the night by a warrior, a hood forced over his head, and made to march for several hours to the place where his taro will be prepared for manhood.

At the camp where Kunta’s taro is to be trained for manhood, Kunta feels both pride and dismay. His pride comes from the knowledge that he is enduring what his father endured. His father is the person who he respects the most. The manhood camp is run like a boot camp. The children learn lessons the hard way. For instance, when, on a hunting trip, a boy trips and falls in the undergrowth, making a loud noise, and thus causing the guineafowl he was hunting to flutter and run away, he is not allowed to come back to camp without its dead body. Three days later he returns, victorious and half dead. Kunta endures this for two months. After two months of camp, there is the circumcision ritual. This is a highly painful thing, considering the boys are 11 years old when this happens. Being the oldest boy in the group, Kunta must go first, and honor forbids him from crying, although he shouts, screams, and rages. Things are made worse by the sudden discovery in the middle of the ritual that the knife is rusty, and the ritual proceeds with the rusty knife while one of the men at the camp hasten to find a new knife.

After the completion of manhood camp, Alex Haley glosses over ten years in two chapters, giving an overview of life in a Muslim-African village from the perspective of Kunta. This is generic information, and has a low amount of dialogue. The next part of the book that goes into detail tells about Kunta’s guard experience. One day, Kunta is on lookout duty for his village. He is ambushed by slave traders and taken to a ship, where he is whipped to show him his captors are in control, branded as a slave, and brought aboard the ship. The ship is Kunta’s most miserable experience ever. He is crammed in the slave hold, which is normally in pitch darkness. He is chained by another slave on a narrow bunk bed meant for one person. These bunks are stacked two high. Slaves are not provided with a toilet or bucket. The floor suffices. Once or twice a week the whites would come down to move the slaves up to the deck of the ship and clean the slave hold. On one such occasion, seven slaves break free, and begin to attack the white sailors. The white sailors retaliate by shooting the offenders, then randomly shooting other slaves in their panic, and finally whipping all the male slaves on the ship because they didn’t alert the whites to the conspiracy. A week after this, water supplies run low, and slaves are rationed to two pints of water a day. The next day, there is an outbreak of a disease the Kunta described as flux. It was vomiting, fever, and diarrhea. It wiped out two thirds of the slaves and half of the white sailors. It caused such a problem that pretty soon the slaves were given their own bunks, plenty of air time, and cleaning supplies and buckets for waste. Strangely, the flux also alleviated all food problems due to all the deaths. This was absolutely miserable, as the human slaves were treated worse than pigs at factory farms. When Kunta gets to the colonies or the United States (the exact year of arrival is uncertain. It is between 1775 and 1778.), he is immediately assaulted by the strange sensations of Western clothing, smells, and culture. He is auctioned off to a Master Waller. Kunta is fresh from Africa, and thus fetches a high price on the slave market. He is assumed to be dumb because he is unable to communicate in English.

Kunta is brought to Massa Waller’s plantation, where he becomes a field laborer. He labors for four years before speaking fluent English. While laboring, he escapes four times from the plantation. The first time is a week after he arrives. He is taken back with no punishment, thanks to his merciful overseer. The second time he is beaten a few times with a club, and then dragged back. The third time he runs, he escapes for two days before the dogs catch him, maul him, and he taken to a tree, tied up, and whipped unconscious. The fourth time he runs away, his fourth year at the plantation, it is snowing. He runs for a week before realizing that the whites could just follow his footprints. Two days after that he is found, tied to a tree, and whipped to an inch of his life. He then has half of his right foot chopped off as punishment. After this maiming, he is taken care of by a kitchen worker named Bell. When he recovers, he begins to be a gardener, taking the place of the ailing current gardener. Kunta also meets a man who is simply called the fiddler. Kunta works for seven more years before he gets up the courage to engage to Bell. When he does, she responds with an enthusiastic yes. She also is responsible for upgrading Kunta’s right shoe so that his stump of a right foot has padding and does not jostle around so much. When Kunta marries Bell, the whole plantation gets a day off (except for the cooks, who cater the event). They all watch Kunta and Bell jump the broom, a traditional Christian event that signifies bonding. Kunta and Bell are formally engaged. Bell and Kunta immediately get permission from Massa Waller to build a new hut for the two of them. As tradition goes, they sleep together the day they finish the hut. Kunta confides to Bell that he has kept a jar with rocks in it to signify how many days he has lived at the plantation. Bell is horrified at this apparently African act of Voodoo, Shamanistic Black Magic. This is nothing of the sort, yet it shows that “native” blacks still had problems dealing with “imported” blacks. Despite all this, Kunta and Bell have a baby, named at Kunta’s vehement request Kizzy, and African name, rather than Mary, then name Bell would have preferred. Another conflict that Kunta and Bell had over the years was an extremely important one-that of religion. Kunta was a devout Muslim, having been raised under Islam rule since the age of four. He could read, write, and speak fluent Arabic, this being the one cultured thing they learned in African schools. He also was given an extremely structured lifestyle using “traditional” values. Bell was what one could call the opposite. She could read some, could write some, only knew one language, grew up in a culture of “us vs. them”, that is, slaves vs. masters, rather than a tribal form of living that was more a hybrid of communism and theocracy than anything else. Kunta had behind him a life full of experiences, while Bell had behind her a life full of oppression. It is astounding that the two had ever managed to get together. Kunta attributed it to Bell’s great looks and shy personality, while there is no testimony in the book of why Bell came to Kunta.

Kizzy is born when Kunta is in his mid-thirties, which is quite a late age for your typical African American slave to be bearing a child. Kizzy receives an exquisite amount of attention for a child of her caste, and was lucky to have such a devoted father as Kunta. However, Kunta tended to be extremely protective of her. He wanted to make sure she thought as badly of the average white person as he did and that she admired Africa as much as he did. Bell nursed Kizzy while she worked in the kitchen and Kunta was a gardener. With Bell and Kunta working full time, Bell got the natural job of looking after Kizzy after she was done with the nursing stage. Kizzy spent most of her time around the house. By the age of four she was already helping her mother greatly by clearing away waste materials while cooking. At the age of six, Kizzy begins to interact with Massa Waller’s daughter, Missy. Kizzy and Missy are good friends, to the dismay of Kunta. He believes that Kizzy should not interact with his owner’s daughter. However, they grow to be very good friends. As time goes on, Kizzy grows less close to her parents. She takes wagon rides with Missy and Massa Waller when Massa is called for medical services. By being with Missy, Kizzy also learns how to read. This will prove to be a vital element in the story later on. Kizzy tells this to Kunta, and he tells her she must never let anybody outside of the family know. Kizzy does this faithfully.

At the age of 12, Kizzy alienates herself from Kunta rather severely. She makes the mistake of telling Missy about Kunta’s collection of pebbles in order to keep track of his age. Kizzy tells Missus Waller, and Missus calls Massa right away. Massa Waller walks straight to Kunta’s family cabin, enters, sees the container of pebbles, takes it outside, and throws them all over the ground. He then goes back into the cabin and trashes everything in there, under the belief that Kunta is “Practicing heretical African witchcraft in secret”. Kunta is devastated, and emotionally shuts Kizzy out for a long time. He even refuses to talk to her for five months due to his anger. It is as if he lost a part of himself. Kizzy responds to this by beginning to have an affair with a male cook at a neighboring plantation. They have this affair for three years, until Kizzy breaks to him that she is able to read and write. The cook replies that he wants her to forge papers for him, and they can both escape to Canada. Kizzy does this in short order. One night, while Kizzy is at the neighbor’s plantation, the cook runs away. Kizzy returns to the Waller plantation as if nothing happened. The following day, the militia comes to Massa Waller’s plantation, demanding to see Kizzy. He drags her out of the house, and she is interrogated roughly by the militia. She admits in bits and fragments that she did forge papers for the cook, and that he did run away. The news is then broken to her that the militia captured, tortured, and then killed him for having false papers (in reality, Alex Haley says, the militia probably captured and tortured him for fun; that he actually was using forged papers was purely coincidental. This was apparently a semi-common occurrence in the South.) Kizzy is then dragged away to a slave auction on request of the police. At the auction, Kizzy is humiliated as is every other girl. She is forced to bare her chest, open her mouth to be inspected like a horse’s mouth, and turn around while half naked in order to show her viability as a “breeder”. A slave baby could fetch 250-300 dollars at an auction, and a young girl like herself would go for 1200-1300 dollars. She is auctioned off to a piece of white trash named Massa Lea, who only owns three slaves. On Kizzy’s first night there Massa Lea, while drunk, makes crude sexual advances on her. When she refuses to cooperate having sex with him, he brutally rapes her on a haystack in the barn. He then brings her back to her bed and drops a quarter in a jar next to it as thanks for her services. He does this two to four times a week, giving her a quarter every night, until she is five months into pregnancy. He then stops using her until she bears a child. When she does, she is assisted by “Auntie Ann”, one of Massa Lea’s slaves. When she does this Massa Lea insists on giving him a proper name, not African. She then, on the behest of the other slaves, names him “George”. When George is born, Kizzy, only 17, is horrified to see that he is only pecan-colored, and not deep black like herself. Her shame at this is extreme. She can’t fathom how fate has led her down such a path, to bear a baby to a man old enough to be her father. The other slaves at the Lea plantation tell her to forget about his father, and to act as if he is unknown- Massa Lea frequently beats slaves if he is drunk and they have given him a reason. Despite having a baby, Kizzy is still raped by Massa Lea, though she now relents in order to avoid being beaten. Kizzy is worried at night while Massa Lea is raping her that he will wake up the baby. The constant abuse eventually drives Kizzy into depression. However, Massa Lea eventually stops, after two years or so. This, combined with heightened support from the other slaves of the Lea Plantation’s slave row, gives Kizzy another reason to live again.

Thus, Kizzy forgets the father, and raises George as lovingly as she would someone born to her out of love, not pure lust.

Chicken George has the most intriguing story of all the people in this book. His story is one of an oppressed person rising to fame and glory, then blowing it all away in a heartbeat. If you were to pick up Roots and read only one character’s saga, I would universally recommend you read “Chicken” George’s.

George is raised up until the age of seven or eight like your typical field hand kid. He starts by helping clear debris and cuttings, and then begins picking. Massa Lea is pleased at George’s work, though he is always pushing the slaves to do more. Massa Lea has an insatiable need to be the best of the white trash. He is relentless in pushing his slaves to doing as much work as they can without injuring them.

The one thing that makes George different is that he spends his spare time, mostly nights and Sunday afternoons, hanging around the cocks and Uncle Mingo, the cock raiser. For you see, Massa Lea has a certain hobby of fighting cocks, and reels in a profit every season off of hackfighting his roosters. George instantly takes an attraction to the roosters because of their great and noble stature. He first begins to help Uncle Mingo by sneaking through the grass to catch insects for the roosters to eat.

George’s first job is not chicken farmer, however. It is comedian. When George was little, 8 or 9, he began imitating Massa Lea ranting and raving at his slaves. The slaves found this humor to be truly funny, and not just in a cute way. Around a year later, a traveling preacher comes to Massa Lea’s plantation during a party and preaches Christianity. By all accounts, this was a rather boring sermon. A week later, Massa Lea is checking up on the slaves to see how they are working. He overhears George talking, and the other slaves laughing hard. He inquires what George is doing, and George responds he is preaching. Massa Lea, being in one of his better moods that day, tells George very nicely to stop distracting the other workers, and to resume working. George does this, and Massa Lea sees no more of this for a couple of months. The next time this preacher comes, Massa Lea has another party for him to preach at. However, while the preacher is delivering his lecture, Massa Lea sees the other slaves are more enthralled by George. He demands to know what George is doing, and why he is so bad to talk while the preacher is here. George responds he is just preaching. Massa Lea then tells George, in hearing range of all the people there, that if he thinks he is so good a preaching, why doesn’t he come up to the podium and give it a try. Despite rather obvious gestures from Kizzy and Auntie Ann to the contrary, George steps up to the stand and begins delivering an outrageous parody of the preacher, including all the things the preacher had said to the slaves: “All you niggers are too spoiled… I'd be workin’ y’all 14 hours a day with no breaks, lord have mercy on you…” and his sermons on Catholicism: “The Good Lord, he knows what good for ya… won’t be lettin’ slaves rebel like that [in reference to Bacon’s rebellion]”. This is an astounding hit-at the end of his “preachin’”, George gets a little over $5 thrown at him in the form of coins by the hysterical audience. This thrills him, for good reason, and he struts like a peacock for the next few weeks. He makes seven such performances for white audiences while he is ten and eleven.

While he is doing this, George is also becoming apprenticed to Uncle Mingo, the chicken trainer. Uncle Mingo is a pretty good trainer, and George is a pretty good learner. Uncle Mingo shows George how to feed, capture, clean, and fight cocks. George eventually spends no time working in the field, devoting all of his time to training cocks with Uncle Mingo. After George starts full-time rooster duty there is by all accounts a noticeable rise in Massa Lea’s fighting record. Being only 12 though, George is not yet fully qualified to go to cockfighting tournaments. Instead, he stays at the plantation to look after the roosters, while Uncle Mingo and Massa Lea go on to the fights.

George takes on more and more of Uncle Mingo’s duties. Uncle Mingo-already a venerable 60 years old when George begins caring for the roosters-slowly grows less capable of handling everything himself. George is brought to his first cock battle at the age of 15. He is given $5 by Uncle Mingo to spend as he pleases in bets using his own fighting roosters. His first fight ever he looses. The opposing rooster gets punctured by his rooster’s gaff first, but then it comes back and slits his rooster’s throat. George runs, picks up the rooster, and carries it off the field in tears. Uncle Mingo reprimands him for crying, then tells him to get out there and try again with a different rooster. George wins with his second and third roosters, but refuses to let go of his one loss. Throughout his career, George will be known for his exuberant displays of emotion whenever he loses a rooster. As Massa Lea said to George in his glory years, “You are a great trainer, but you are just too attached to your roosters.”

As the time goes on, George continues going to tournaments and backyard fights, wins money, and saves it in order to buy freedom for his family. He and Massa Lea become extremely close. Much of the time, Massa treats George like a partner, not as a slave. This view is justified: George transformed Massa’s cocks from above-average into astonishingly great. George reports a win rate of over 70% for the year when he was 17.

When George is 18, he comes across a girl in the woods while he is looking for wild cocks. They talk a little while, and she tells him the plantation at which she lives, Massa Elliot’s. George is awestruck by her beauty, but doesn’t say anything about it to her. However, when they meet again in the woods, George professes his love for her and catches her name, Matilda. At this time, they begin to have a long affair. A few months into the affair, however, Massa Lea catches Massa Elliot asking him how much George would cost. When Massa Lea asks Massa Elliot how he came by the information of how good George is at raising and training cocks, Massa Elliot discloses the relationship between George and Matilda, and how Matilda came to him with information. Massa Lea stomps away from Massa Elliot, goes to the rooster pens, and confronts George. When George admits that indeed he was having an affair with Matilda, Massa Lea flies into a rage, grabs George by the collar, and begins backhanding him. George runs away at first opportunity. Massa Lea is 60 and thus too old to catch George, so he begins to curse at George from a distance. He then goes to George’s cabin, trashes a few things, then leaves. In four days, Massa Lea apologizes, tells George he would have done the same thing in that situation, and offers to buy Matilda. George is so overcome with gratitude that he can hardly speak.

At the age of 19, George and Matilda, age 18, marry. Matilda gets pregnant three times in three years. However, for the sake of flow, I won’t go on to the next ancestor until George’s tragedy is done.

George, at the age of 30, has been so successful that he has bought a grandfather clock for Matilda, various small trinkets, and has saved $2,000 behind the cabin-enough to buy himself and two of his children from Massa Lea. However, he refuses to buy his family from Massa Lea until he gets enough money to spend on all of them. This will end up being his undoing. Matilda, however, is extremely satisfied with his success, and urges him to stop buying things for them, and instead save the money. George figures it will take twenty-five years to earn enough money to buy freedom for the family, going at his current rates. In 1855, when George has saved up 6,000 of his required 7500 dollars, there is news of a great tournament in Tennessee. The leading breeder of Britain is coming to America, to challenge the South’s best. George, who is extremely gifted in every aspect of cockfighting, notes that the majority of his losses are due to the other rooster outmaneuvering his own in the air. Thus, George, very carefully, introduces his method for a new sort of training to Massa Lea. George’s idea is that if he threw cocks up in the air as hard as he could, it would strengthen their wings as they fluttered downwards. Massa Lea first dissents, but George finally persuades him to do it. That off-season, their entire time is spent with the roosters, training, culling, and training some more. Matilda and George’s eight offspring complain that he isn’t spending enough time with them. He shrugs off their comments, and continues to train the birds.

Finally, the big day comes. Massa Lea and George pack up five of the cream of the crop, the best roosters of Lea’s 70 or so stock. Uncle Mingo by now is dead, passed away due to repeated respiratory problems. Lea and George argue about which of the seven “finalist” roosters should be taken. George takes five light and two dark stones, closes his eyes, and puts one stone in front of each cage. The two cages with the dark stones stay home. George’s son, Tom, feeds the roosters while he and Lea are at the tournament. As George and Lea get ready to depart, Lea tells George that he is aware of George’s stash of money. If George would get all that money, bring it to the competition, Lea would bring all his $10,000 in disposable savings. Both wives were adamantly opposed to the idea. George dug his up in the dead of night without his wife’s knowledge, Lea convinced his wife to let him do it. Lea also made a contract that stipulated if George and Lea beat the Englishman, George and his family would be set free in return for whatever the profits from that fight would be. George would keep his original savings. Faced with this deal, George had no choice but to take the money he had saved. Upon arriving at the tournament, three days away by wagon, Lea was pleased to discover all his old white trash friends, from before he was rich, had come to cheer him on. This was the ultimate matchup- Tom Lea, the poor white farmer who struggled and bit his way to the top against an extremely rich Englishman, who had inherited his stock from his parents(this does not imply lack of skill, however). George and Massa Lea cavort for the night and then sleep. The whole of the next morning, George is massaging the rooster Lea and him have chosen to fight with—an ultra-aggressive cock appropriately nicknamed copperhead. He is fitted with the finest Swedish-made stainless steel gaffs. George puts his mouth to the cock’s mouth and sucks up and spits out any mucus that might be in its throat. George and Massa Lea walk towards the ring, where Lea and the Englishman begin to make official bets. The Englishman is verbally harassed so much walking up to the ring by Lea’s old friends that the referee has to yell at them to quiet down or else face eviction. The Englishman starts by making a bid- $10,000. Lea is astonished at the casual way he throws such large sums of money around like that. As soon as the Englishman proposes his bid, Lea is immediately cheered on by his supporters. Lea, unwilling to be passive at all, replies by saying “I’ll double your bet”. This is met by raucous shouts and cheers by his supporters, and the referee yells at them to quiet down again. Both men agree on their bid, and the referee bids both trainers to come to the ring. George, experiencing the biggest moment of his life, walks up to the ring with his superbly preened mix, while the Englishman has a purebred red English rooster. They both weigh the chickens. Englishman’s is 2.9 lbs, and Lea’s is 3.0. This is apparently enough for the crowd, who get going again, as if a tenth of a pound will mean victory. They quiet down soon afterwards. The referee bids both trainers to bring their cocks to the ring. He blows the whistle, and George lets his cock go a split second after the Englishman does. However, his cock dodges the Englishman’s, and makes a first strike to the edge of its wing. The Englishman’s is superbly trained as well, and both of them dodge, parry, flutter, and beat on each other for several minutes. Suddenly, Copperhead trips the Englishman’s, and gives it a spur deep into its chest. The Englishman is devastated. Lea and George have a heyday. The Englishman then requests a second battle, for triple the bid of the first one. Massa Lea gulps-$60,000 is the approximate value of all his investments and liquid assets. If he loses, he will have to sell his house, slaves, rooster stock, and plantation. However, the white trash are cheering him on like no end. Massa Lea accepts, and chooses for this fight a rooster named “hawk”, so called because it had a tendency during training to flutter extremely high and slash with the spurs from above. This second round is just as intense as the first one. Both birds weigh 2.8 pounds. For this battle, the Englishman has an exotic breed with some blue feathers mingled with standard, while Lea has a red-brown mongrel. At the start, both cocks are released at the exact same moment. They flutter up to each other, slash, dodge, and land on the ground. This happens for a few times until Hawk is sliced in the wing muscles by a spur. He falls to the ground, and the Englishman’s other cock advances upon him. However, he manages to drive a spur in the enemy cock’s stomach, then peck an eye half-blind. However, Hawk is then sliced by an aerial shot to the neck. He bleeds to death in the ring. George runs up into the ring, crying in shame, pity for the chicken, and horror at losing all his savings. He grasps it tightly, and weeps over its dieing corpse. The Englishman remarks that Massa Lea has some darn good chickens, why don’t they talk it out tomorrow over lunch-no man carries $40k around him during cockfights. Upon the loss of Hawk, the crowd begins fighting the security officers in their frenzy. Lea is lost beyond hope, and he is returned to being poor white trash. George is sold within three days to the Englishman under a six year contract, under the condition that at the end of those six years he be freed and paid a proper salary for his services. Thus, it happens. George is sold to the Englishman, Matilda and Auntie Ann are kept with Massa Waller, for the Englishman takes pity on his plight. Tom and two of his sisters are sold to a farm in North Carolina. The rest of the family members are brought to an auction and never heard from again.

Thus ends the most tragic portion of Roots. From nothing to glory and back to nothing, there is something to be said about quitting while you are ahead. Chicken George and Massa Lea took the risk and lost. Chicken George was the most successful ancestor Alex Haley had. Several external sources today have cited Chicken George as being the leading American cockfighter of the 1850’s. His second match to the Englishman was truly a tragedy more than any other stories’.

And a some small bits of information about some other characters

Missy Missy is the daughter of Massa Waller. She is very independent minded and is also very spoiled. She has a private tutor, a black nanny, and the ability to roam free around the plantation when she isn’t being taught. She and Kizzy, being only a few years apart, take a liking to each other. Kunta is especially offended at this because the Wallers have instilled an idea upon Missie that Kizzy is something like a doll. When Kizzy is born, Kunta and Bell are forced to watch as, only a day old, Kizzy is picked up and held lovingly by four-year old Missie. Missy has a habit of making the slaves either like her or be punished-doing what she asks while not doing it gladly is reason to have Massa Waller talk to you-possible punch you around a little. Despite this quirk, Missie is always very nice to Kizzy, inviting her to do everything. They go together to Missie’s aunt’s house, where Massa Waller goes biweekly to check up on his sister, who is very frail and chronically sick. Kunta and Bell are both concerned that Kizzy may grow up to like whites and not act with pride proper to blacks.

Important Names of Juffure

Juffure-The town Kunta lived in Omoro-Kunta’s father Binta- Kunta’s mother Yaisa- Kunta’s Grandmother Lamin- Kunta’s younger brother Madi- Kunta’s younger brother Jinna M’Baki- Kunta’s lover Toubob- The African term for white people Kintango- Kunta’s chief during manhood training Brimma Casey- The local religious teacher Taro- A term used to describe boys of the same age

The Fiddler

The fiddler is a very interesting character in the Kunta part of the book. He is saving up his money in order to buy his freedom from Massa Waller. He gets one dollar plus whatever coins white people throw at him every time he plays. It takes him twenty two years to save up 800 dollars. By the time he does this, Kunta is 50. He is over the edge of joy when he presents this money to Massa Waller. He then finds out, to his horror, that 800 dollars is not enough for a fiddler and now he would have to increase that half over again. This is the epitome of despair, and the fiddler feels as bad as it is humanly possible to feel. He takes the money, which he buried near a tree, and throws it all in a river. He dies of pneumonia a year later. This is one of the most tragic parts of the story Roots. To see a man’s dreams thrown away like a child’s cheap toy shows truly how bad life at a plantation could be. Not only would masters whip slaves to death, they would unwittingly quash the remainder of their souls.

Haley's fame was marred by plagiarism charges and, after a trial, he was permitted to settle out-of-court for $650,000, having admitted that he copied large passages of Roots from The African by Harold Courlander. In 1988 Margaret Walker also sued him, claiming Roots violated the copyright for her novel Jubilee. The case was dismissed by the court.