Alex Haley’s 1976 classic: Roots: The Saga of an American Family
When I wrote my book about the U.S. adoption system and experience, I felt I had an almost moral duty to acknowledge the profound wisdom shared by the great African American writer Alex Haley.
Haley’s two great works, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Roots: The Saga of American Family (1976), stand out in the pantheon of American letters. I connected to both for different reasons, but I was more personally drawn to his family story in what most people today call Roots. For an entire generation of Americans and people like me who came of age when it was published, it helped to shed light on the U.S. slavery system that erased the past identities of millions.
For me, Roots is also deeply universal.
Haley’s family’s story from west Africa to the horror of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery and then to freedom is one of the most important historical and creative works in our collective American experience. It also speaks to me because he captures the essential truth of finding life’s meaning: answering the siren call to our most important question: “Who am I?”
Haley explored this life question in the boldest of fashions, weaving together a story of American violence and the history of enslaved Africans who were Haley’s ancestors, brought to what became the United States in the New World. Telling this story, however, was not easy. It nearly killed the author.
Haley described to NPR in an interview in February 1977 how he also communed with his ancestors on a cargo vessel, traveling from Liberia to the Florida. He almost committed suicide on that trip, coming close to jumping off the ship’s bridge amid a wave of depression and uncertainty. Instead he found a way to make a personal connection to the horrific Middle Passage, which describes the slave trade and its human cargo from West Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean. Haley heard the voices of his family ghosts, and he broke down in tears when he made that breakthrough.
All of us can thank those ancestors who visited with Haley that painful night in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, when he hit the pit of his own despair and cried from his soul. What he left all of us has touched generations of readers, including me.
Paying homage to Haley in my memoir
In 2018 I published my own “family” saga, searching for my hidden past, in my memoir and public health history of adoption called You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. In chapter six on my book, under the chapter title “Blood is Thicker than Water,” I wrote:
Photographer Mickey Adair, used under a CC 3.0 license
“Haley achieved international fame for documenting his long and successful family search that stretched back to his ancestral villages in Gambia, in West Africa. Haley eloquently describes why his own search mattered, particularly for many African Americans whose histories and families were cruelly severed by slavery. It was an institution that separated them from their homeland and then children from their families in the Americas. ‘In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we have come from,’ writes Haley. “Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.’”
I have clear and sharp memories watching the TV series Roots. It made me confront many ugly truths about my country and also my hidden past as an adoptee. I never talked publicly about my thoughts then. But the seed grew and matured. I never, ever doubted the truth of what this inner voice was saying—exactly the way Haley described it.
I am not the only one to have been touched by Haley’s work and his universal story of what it means to be a human being. Today, Roots has been published in 37 languages.
And like Haley, my journey in life as an adoptee robbed of his past and kin connections demanded that I confront that vacuum and disquieting loneliness, if it took all my life to do that.
Each chapter of my life has had different ways of confronting this feeling, and soon I will be taking a much-anticipated and long-awaited journey. It is time.
Reminders of Haley’s universal truths today
As I have drawn closer to my more than two-decades delayed trip one of my ancestral home countries, Finland, I was reminded about what Haley shared in his work and in his many interviews about his family’s story.
After some failed starts using a biological family tree of my U.S. biological relatives and good old Google, I finally connected with very distal biological kin in Finland.
It was part luck, part detective work, and part “sisu,” which means stoic determination and grit to overcome adversity in the Finnish language. With my new-found Finnish kin, our shared bloodlines and history can be traced back to small villages in the Finnish administrative regions of Ostrobothnia and South Ostrobothnia, when Finland was under the control of the Swedish Empire in the late 1700s.
My ancestors and those of my Finnish relatives trace back to the village of Kortesjärvi, in South Ostrobothnia, Finland.
Since the first “family email” arrived from Finland this month, I have connected with a couple of my distant relatives. We are now planning to meet for an impromptu gathering with other relatives spread out around the country when I arrive there. (Details are still being worked out.)
One of my relatives wrote me that I even resembled two sons they have: “This is such an exciting possibility to learn more of our family history. It is also heartwarming to think that it may be possible to see you.” Even before reading this line, some of my Finnish-American biological relatives told me that many of my biological relatives always thought I resembled my great grandmother, who was born in Finland and emigrated to the United States to northern Michigan in the early 1900s. (Two of my biological relatives told me that: a biological cousin, and only recently, as well as another more distant family relative who I just connected with for the first time ever this year.)
None of this is a surprise, and yet it is profoundly visceral. It is hard to describe this to others, except for me to repeat what Haley shared so absolutely perfectly.
After my Finnish relatives and I connected, I have been sharing regularly a line on social media that I have been sharing for years: “Blood is thicker than water.” I have never, ever doubted this truth. My trip, literally “going home” to the old ancestral villages of Finland, is nothing more than proof of this knowledge of what it means to be connected and to be human.