In presenting [the story of Roots] as a novel, Haley has maximized its popular appeal and captured the spirit of its oral tradition. In fact Roots may be regarded as the first serious challenge to existing popular mythology on the black man's past—that blacks are without a past, without a culture of their own and therefore, an inferior and unworthy people. If Haley had chosen to provide a factual report of his family's history, it might have had no greater impact than as a quaint and incidental reference in the historiography of American slavery. Instead, with characters drawn from real people, woven into a drama of major events and day-to-day activities, conversations and interrelationships, Roots lays hold of our imagination and begins to restructure popular belief about the black experience. (p. 211)

Haley is at his best when recreating Kunta's boyhood in the Gambia…. This part of the...