"Roots"

Paper Summary:

The paper presents Alex Haley's "Roots" as a brilliant piece of anthropological detective work. Haley traces the roots of his ancestors back eight generations to his great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather Kunta Kinte. The paper shows that, in creating "Roots", he traces his ancestors back to the original town that Kunta Kinte was abducted from in Africa. The paper concludes that Haley's characters are rich and full of life and that he does an excellent job of re-enacting the past to give us a true feeling of the African-American experience from abduction, to slavery, to freedom, and redemption.

From the Paper:

"While pregnant, Bell dreams that "at a white folks' party game, they had announced that the first prize would be the next black baby boy to be born on that massa's plantation" (P. 337). Kunta calmed Bell down by assuring her massa would never do anything like that, but he was scared because "he had heard of such things being done--of unborn black babies being given as presents, wagered as gambling bets at card tables and cockfights" (P. 338). They name the child Kizzy, and Kunta proceeds to teach her several of the words from the language of his tribe, the Mandinka."

More papers on "Roots":

• Essay # 71217 : "Roots"
• Book Review # 116174 : "The Roots of American Order"
• Essay # 37254 : "The Need for Roots"."

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