Roots 3: Two Mindsets, Adopting a Heritage, Clinging to a Dream

Ordinarily, I write my Black History Month thoughts after I've finished my academic readings. But, today, I'm taking a different course of action, for I want to communicate my thoughts while they're fresh in my mind.

I just watched the third episode of Roots. This episode is noteworthy because it highlights two themes that will appear continuously in the rest of the series. The second theme will also appear in Roots: The Next Generation.

1. The first theme involves a conflict between two mentalities. In one mentality, the African slave holds on to his heritage. He looks back on his African background as a time when he was important, and, despite attempts by his white captors to break his spirit and to make him feel inferior, he tries to see himself in light of his African roots. And he desires freedom.

In the other mentality, the slave tries to adapt to slavery. She's seen that the white man can hurt her and her people, so she doesn't strive for freedom. Rather, she seeks to make a good life for herself within the confines of slavery. Freedom looks unattainable, or at least difficult to achieve, so she sticks with slavery, as much as she may hate it.

In Episode 3, Kunta exemplifies the first mentality: he clings to his African heritage and wants to be free. Even when he finally abandons his dream of freedom so that he can stay with his wife, Belle, he tries to teach his daughter, Kizzy, not to regard herself as a slave, but to see herself in light of her noble African roots.

Kunta's wife, Belle, exemplifies the second mentality: she experienced pain when she helped her previous husband escape, so, by now, she has abandoned all hope for freedom. Although she admires the pride and tenacity that Kunta gets from his African heritage, she wishes that he'd forget about that "African talk." She hopes to make a better life for herself and her loved ones within the confines of slavery. In Episode 4, however, we will see that hope shattered, when her daughter, Kizzy, is taken away from her parents.

One would be tempted to think that Belle has her attitude because she herself was not an immigrant from Africa (as far as I know); rather, her roots were in America, so she identified more with American culture than that of Africa. There's probably a lot of truth to that, but it's not a universal explanation for why slaves adopted the second mentality. Before Kunta married Belle, he was in love with Fanta, who was also from Africa. She came with Kunta on the same slave ship. When Kunta tries to convince her to run away with him so they can go to the North and get freedom, she refuses. She wants to make the most of her life as a slave. While Kunta still has not embraced his English name of "Toby," Fanta has resigned herself to being "Maggie" for the rest of her life.

For the rest of the Roots miniseries (except, perhaps, the very last episode), we will encounter these two attitudes. Kizzy will be like her father, embracing her African heritage and desiring freedom. That will be why she can't be in a relationship with the slave, Sam Bennett (played by Richard Roundtree): he grovels to the white man to get whatever scraps he can. He views freedom as unrealistic, so he doesn't dream that big. Sam has the second mindset, whereas Kizzy has the first. As Kizzy says to her son about Sam, "He's not like us."

Kizzy's son, Chicken George (played by Ben Vereen), sometimes has the second mindset, but he's mostly inclined to the first one. He loves his father, his white slave master who raped his mother, Kizzy. Chicken George and his father bond over their common interest in chicken-fighting. But, even though he feels that he can have a reasonably good life on the plantation, he wants freedom.

I'm not sure how these mindsets will play out among Chicken George's children, if they even do. In Roots: The Next Generation, slavery is gone, so the desire for freedom from slavery is a non-issue (even though the African-Americans still contend with racism and discrimination). But I have an interesting observation, which brings me to the second theme.

2. Episode 3 of Roots is the first one that ends with an adult telling a child or infant about her African heritage. Kunta talks to baby Kizzy about her African heritage and family so that she won't regard herself as a slave. On subsequent episodes of Roots, and especially in Roots: The Next Generation, we will see this over and over again: the adult will tell the child or infant that he or she is a descendant of Kunta Kinte, the African.

What's interesting is this: even people who aren't descended from Kunta Kinte will give the speech tracing the child's ancestry back to him! When Alex Haley is a baby, his grandfather takes him outside to lift him up to the moon, declaring that God is the only one greater than him. This is an African custom, one that Kunta's father performed for Kunta when he was a baby. What's ironic is that the grandfather was not descended from Kunta, yet he especially feels a need to honor Kunta.

When Alex Haley is an adult, his father, Simon, tries to remind him that he's a descendant of Chicken George, Kizzy, and Kunta Kinte. "I can't carry these people!", Alex exclaims to his father. But Simon himself is not a descendant of Kunta. Alex's mother was, and she has died by that episode of Roots: The Next Generation, and Simon has since remarried. By Roots: The Next Generation, there's no longer a dichotomy between the African-Americans who cling to the African heritage of Kunta Kinte, and those who do not. Rather, all of them preserve Kunta Kinte in their memory, even those not descended from him, who marry into his family.

Some may say that Alex Haley was being sloppy: The entire miniseries was about Kunta Kinte and his descendants, so Alex tried to make everything about them, even when that didn't make much sense. But I'd like to think that something deeper is going on, that there's something profound about people embracing a heritage that is not their own and passing it on to their children and grandchildren.

I have one more point. Kunta and Kizzy all dreamed of freedom, but they never attained it. They were like the saints of Hebrews 11, who had faith in a promise, yet never actually experienced its fulfillment in their lives. Yet, Kunta and Kizzy kept on fighting, and, if they couldn't be free themselves, then they committed themselves to teaching their offspring not to view themselves as slaves. Ultimately, their work paid off, for Chicken George obtained his freedom. And, even if Kunta's attempts to run away failed, his descendants still regarded him highly for his tenacious desire to be free.

There are times when tenacity pays off, as we see in the movie, Men of Honor: Carl Brashear desired to be a Navy diver, and he clung to his dream, regardless of the obstacles he faced (i.e., racism, a jerk instructor, an amputated leg). And his dream was realized. But there are times when people cling to their dreams with nothing to show for it. Or is that entirely the case, for at least Kunta and Kizzie passed on the same tenacity and self-esteem to their offspring, and that bore fruit at various points in time.