by Cicely Tyson
I was studying and didn’t know it. The Dahomean women wore their bushels of hair in elaborate braided styles, each parted to perfection and often signaling their tribal affiliations. The Bantu knots I donned in Roots are like those I spotted during my travels (and on set with my hairdresser, Omar, I insisted the style be precisely replicated). So much of great acting is about paying attention to the passing world, and every morning while in Africa, I homed in on the details of their grooming habits. The people there never used soap and water on their skin. Rather, they washed their faces with the juice they’d squeezed from leaves. I don’t know what was in those leaves, but I hardly ever saw anyone with a pimple. At sunup before the women began their daily work, they’d clean their teeth using bark they’d stripped from a tree—and by the way, they had perfect teeth. When I returned home to New York and walked along 125th Street in Harlem, I chuckled when I spotted African immigrants, street salesmen, doing the same thing: sitting on boxes alongside their wares, using a piece of bark as a homemade toothbrush. Like a great many traditions our ancestors brought to America, they carried that practice with them. I brought those memories with me onto the set of Roots.
A few years later, I returned to Africa, this time as part of a tour with the United Nations. On our journey to the remote villages of Senegal, I had the privilege of being present alongside an impoverished woman as she gave birth in a makeshift ward, on the springs of a tattered iron bed with a thin sheet draped over her. She’d lost a baby during childbirth the year before. I was asked to come see her, as a way to ease the anxiety that might clasp shut one’s womb following such a tragedy. Between her fluent French and my broken version, we greeted each other as I took a seat near her. She was sweating profusely in a sweltering room with no air conditioner or fan. I pulled out a packet of wipes from my pocketbook and wiped her forehead. She commented on the scent of its perfume. I smiled and nodded, and then folded her hand into mine. I told the few corny French jokes I knew, attempting to distract her from the labor pains. Never once did she scream or cry, not a single sound. I kept thinking, They gave her something. But the nurse said she hadn’t had an epidural, or any of the other anesthetics we take for granted in the United States. Other than the sweat, I could hardly even tell this woman was having a child.
Next thing I knew, the nurse was shouting, “I see the head!” As doctors directed the woman to push, there wasn’t an ounce of strain on her face. Moments later, her baby boy, swaddled and wailing, lay pressed against her bosom. Little did I know I’d one day be called upon to portray the birthing experience of an African woman. On the first day of filming, I asked the director, “Do you want a silent birth?” I told him about the one I’d witnessed in Senegal. The director, it turned out, wanted a conventional labor, complete with moaning and screaming—and I gave him precisely what he requested.
Binta’s birthing scene opens the film, just as it does the book. Wrote Haley: “Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a man-child was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte. Forcing forth from Binta’s strong young body, he was Black as she was, flecked and slippery with Binta’s blood, and he was bawling.” Maya Angelou the almighty, who played my mother, Nyo Boto, joined me in moving that passage from page to screen on our film set in Savannah, Georgia (a location chosen, in part, because the vegetation there resembles that of the Gambia). My character, during that scene, served as my salve. What a blessing it was to just fold myself into Binta, to forget my mourning for a time. My mother, by then, had been gone for two years, but the ache lingered. Stepping into Binta’s labor was how I divorced myself from my own grief. Binta’s birthing scene was of course imaginary: there I lay, legs open, with a sheet pulled over my lower half and the camera aimed only at the agony on my face. And yet the anguish behind those primal wails could not have been more real. Binta, for me, was more than a character. She was my catharsis.
Portraying Binta also gave me a scorching back. Perched above me on set stood a row of bright lights, as well as some kind of heating instrument, for only God knows what purpose. That equipment set my entire back on fire, from the shoulders down. Initially, I thought the Georgia sun, unforgiving as it is hot, had lit me ablaze. But even once shooting was done, I kept on burning. I finally showed my blistering shoulders to one of the producers and said, “You’d better get me a nurse.” The nurse administered a topical treatment that eased the pain well enough for me to continue. Back to shooting we went during eighteen-hour days, with me grunting and screaming while giving birth. We shot that opening scene so many times I’d nearly lost my voice by the end of filming.
As my newborn makes his grand entrance, my mother stands proudly at my rear, wiping sweat from my brow. My husband, Omoro (played by Thalmus Rasulala), dashes into the villa upon hearing the first cries of our son. “We will give him a very good life,” I whisper, to which Omoro replies, “We’ve given him life, Binta—good or not good. That is for Allah to say.” Eight days later, Omoro, in keeping with the African tradition, bestows upon his son a name that will be echoed through the centuries. Soon after, the father cradles his swaddled newborn in the crease of his elbow as he strides into a dark forest. He kneels to the ground, gently unwraps his treasure, and lifts him toward the Maker of the heavens. “Kunta Kinte,” he proclaims as he holds the squirming child beneath the starry firmament. “Behold, the only thing greater than yourself.” That scene, in all of its rhetorical potency and visual splendor, would come to define Roots in the hearts of millions.
* * *
Roots felt like a gamble for ABC. The executives there had a gripping historical drama on their hands, based on a book that had already riveted the masses—that much they knew. But above that certainty hung a pair of questions: Would white folks tune in for a generational slave narrative featuring a mostly Black cast? And if they did tune in, would they turn away in guilt, denial, or grief over their foreparents’ savage treatment of Blacks? Perhaps with those questions in mind, the series’ writers created a white slave captain with a moral compass: Thomas Davies, portrayed by Ed Asner. Such a sympathetic character did not appear in Haley’s volume. His inclusion would make the plotline more palatable for Caucasians, or so went the thinking. Still, even after the story line had been softened, there was a whole lot of hand-wringing leading up to airtime. To increase the series’ chance of success, ABC had filled the cast with a slew of familiar Black faces, including John Amos, O. J. Simpson, and Louis Gossett Jr.
Ahead of Roots’ release in January 1977, the studio screened all eight hours of the series for a mostly white Los Angeles audience. The theater was jammed to the rafters. I was in attendance, and when the film ended, you could’ve heard a hair hit the floor. No one moved or said a word for several minutes. In my mind, viewers’ silence likely meant the film’s message had reverberated, but it scared the daylights out of the already-nervous network heads. Not only were they not sure how Middle America would respond to the story, but talk soon swirled of what they secretly feared—that Blacks, gazing anew upon the barbarism we’ve endured in this nation, would riot. The ABC team’s initial plan, I heard, had been to roll out the film over eight weeks, with an hour for each episode. And yet doing so would have extended the series into “sweeps,” the period when Nielsen surveys television viewership habits and sets advertising rates. The bigger a network’s audience during sweeps, the more it can charge advertisers for commercial spots. Some of the ABC heads were terrified they’d lose sweeps by airing Roots—which is why they chose to get it on and get it off quick, during eight straight nights.
I’m sure those executives later wished they’d had a crystal ball, because from the opening night to the final credits, Americans were mesmerized by the series. The ratings reached beyond the stunning to the stratospheric: approximately 130 million viewers tuned in to some part of Roots, more than half of the US population then (and 85 percent of those with televisions tuned in). With each installment,
the viewership rose as people of all stripes canceled plans to huddle in their living rooms. Bars and bistros, theaters and casinos emptied out as folks raced home to witness our fraught history unfold on the small screen. The final episode, which aired on January 30, 1977, catapulted Roots into the record books. That episode, at the time, was the most-watched in television history. Even now, it is still the fifth-most-watched non–Super Bowl show of all time (Roots was eventually bested only by the last episode of M*A*S*H in 1983, the final episode of Cheers in 1993, the “Who Done It?” episode of Dallas in 1980, and the Seinfeld finale in 1998). It even drew more viewers than the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, which was telecast across all networks. Roots was more than a prime-time phenomenon set to a soul-stirring soundtrack by the masterful Quincy Jones. It was a national meeting around the village well, the start of a reckoning that bears a resemblance to the one of our current times.
Roots’ ratings were eclipsed only by its cultural impact. In the summer of 1976, six months before the series aired, the nation had celebrated the Bicentennial—America’s two-hundredth birthday, in which the African-American perspective felt glaringly absent. Haley’s tale became a counterpoint. With the airing of Roots, the historical record had at last been rendered more complete, with the testimony of the persecuted featured right alongside that of the captors. The bestiality of the slave trade was no longer buried. Roots brought slavery’s cruelty to life in vivid and searing color, with images capable of haunting even the most coldhearted. ABC had feared that whites might cringe, and some may have. But millions also leaned in to a new social consciousness. Seldom had there been so many kitchen-table conversations about our nation’s original sin and our place, as descendants, in that legacy. For whites, the series prompted an awakening to the horrors of a not-so-distant past. Perhaps surprisingly to some, Roots also served that purpose for Blacks, many of whom did not know, and still don’t, the full extent to which our ancestors were dehumanized. Everyone, it seemed, had been moved by some on-screen moment in Roots—whether it was the day Kunta was captured and herded onto the Lord Ligonier ship for the voyage to America, or the time, amid lashings from his slave master, he at last relented and took the name Toby. Even the few who hadn’t watched the series got swept up in the national obsession, as Roots crawled under our collective skin and stayed. The television community acknowledged as much by awarding the series a record-setting thirty-seven Emmy nominations and six wins.
As I see it, Roots resonated because it touched a nerve that runs far deeper than race—family identity. The human desire to know where we’ve come from, and who our foreparents were, is a universal longing that transcends ethnicity. When you know your history, you know your value. You know the price that has been paid for you to be here. You recognize what those who came before you built and sacrificed for you to inhabit the space in which you dwell. In sharing the story of his one tribe, Haley precipitated a curiosity and a question for millions: What is my own family history? Like never before, people of all backgrounds began researching their ancestries, wondering how their pasts had given birth to their present lives. Looking into one’s heritage became, and still is, a national fascination. Judging by the scores of folks who approached me with tears in their eyes as they spoke of the series, I felt like I’d been part of educating the entire world.
Decades before I portrayed Binta, I’d longed to discover more about my own ancestry. Roots deepened that yearning. I knew the few stories my mother and father had passed on to me, the tales of resilience and survival that I’ve recounted in these pages. But sadly, I never met any of my grandparents in Nevis, never had the opportunity to ask them about their lives or those of their parents and grandparents. For African Americans in particular, genealogical research can be frustrating, with dead-ends around every corner. Records don’t often exist for the enslaved, who, when they were even counted, were frequently numbered as chattel rather than as human. When our ancestors were sold away from their homelands, their voices were silenced beneath the crack of their masters’ whips. That is why it is so meaningful when we manage, through documentation, to unearth even the tiniest bread crumbs of our past. Knowing your generational story firms the ground upon which you stand. It makes your life, your struggles and triumphs, bigger than your lone existence. It connects you to a grand plotline.
While I was writing this book, I called up Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, and host of the award-winning PBS documentary series Finding Your Roots. Dr. Gates and I have known each other for years, and each time I saw him, I’d mention eventually wanting to uncover my family tree. He was of course eager to do so as soon as I gave him the word. Finally, in the fall of 2019, I rang him and said, “I’m ready.” He and his team began the process of researching my full ancestry, but weeks into their exploration, they encountered a heartbreaking impasse: in Nevis, most of my family’s critical records had been lost during a fire, the remnants of my ancestry gone up in flames. I will never know why my mother’s mother, Mary Jane Sargent, who was born in Barbados, left there on her own to settle in Nevis, or why she and Charles, my mother’s father, never married. I will also never know from where in Africa my ancestors descended.
Perhaps Roots’ most enduring legacy is that it sparked a conversation around two powerful questions: How will we, as a nation of immigrants, heal the wounds of our painful history? And what personal responsibility does each of us bear in attempting to do so? Whatever our contribution is, you and I are unlikely to see the full picture of that healing during our lifetimes. Social transformation is not measured in weeks or months, but in generations. Our children, and their children and grandchildren, may witness the conclusion of a story that began hundreds of years before they were even conceived.
James Baldwin, in a 1976 piece for the New York Times, wrote this of Kunta Kinte and Roots: “We are in his skin, and in his darkness, and, presently, we are shackled with him, in his terror, rage, and pain, his stink, and the stink of others, on the ship which brings him here. It can be said that we know the rest of the story—how it turned out, so to speak, but frankly, I don’t think that we do know the rest of the story. It hasn’t turned out yet, which is the rage and pain and danger of this country.” The story, stretching back for centuries and extending to this very moment, is for us to continue writing.
* * *
Miles had a way of showing up in my world each time my career reached a new pinnacle. He’d done so after the success of Sounder, on that day he’d crawled his stoned self into my hotel room, pleading for my hand in marriage. He’d done so again following Jane Pittman, when the question over his whereabouts made its way to me. Then in 1978, while still basking in Roots’ afterglow, I played the formidable abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman in the NBC miniseries A Woman Called Moses—a role that, on the heels of Rebecca, Jane Pittman, Coretta, and Binta, fulfilled my mission of portraying the best of who we are as Black women. While I was completing work on that series over the summer, Miles showed up once more. He again had his hand on death’s doorknob.
I was in California when Miles called me. In the months leading up to our reconnection, I’d taken two significant wellness strides, both of which helped me restore my balance after losing my mom. Sometime in 1976, I went to a health spa, where patrons were served only whole organic foods, all fruits and vegetables and natural grains, no animal products. When I left there after a week of following that program, the world looked different to me. My head was clear. Colors, smells, and sounds felt more pronounced. My memory improved. I felt energized. So on my own at home, I continued eating that way. I’d begin the day with a cup of fresh celery juice (before any solid food, as a way to cleanse my system), followed by a serving of oatmeal (I enjoy mine whipped, in a blender, like a soufflé) and fruit. For lunch and dinner, I’d make myself some collards and yams, or else I’d fill an enormous wooden salad bowl with every vege
table in the rainbow, topping it off with lentils. Sometimes I’d just climb up into my bed with that bowl and eat my vegetables raw, no dressing to speak of. I eat this way now, four decades later, and these days, I also sometimes have fish and egg whites. The change has agreed with me, it seems. At age ninety-six, I’m still kicking.
Following the alteration in my diet came an addition to my spiritual practice. I began meditating and chanting daily, after connecting with some followers of Nichiren Buddhism (the same form of Buddhism adopted by Tina Turner after she left Ike). The group was just forming a chapter in Los Angeles when I became involved. The leaders and parishioners were walking around the city barefoot, trying to get people to join. I’ve never been a joiner. Also, my spiritual identity is anchored by my Christian faith, so I was concerned about how this group’s beliefs would fit with mine, if at all. That is why, when I was asked to become part of the sect, I declined. And yet I remained open to the meditation practices I learned from the leaders, and as I implemented them, I felt more awake, more in tune with myself. All these years later, I still follow my morning prayer and Bible reading (I love Psalm 91) with the chant Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō and a time of stillness. It centers me. My Christian faith and my meditation practice are not conflicting, but rather complementary. Mindfulness is simply about paying attention in a world overflowing with distractions, whereas Christianity is about acknowledging my utter dependence on the Creator of that world. To him alone I bow.
Miles was sober when he rang me. I don’t know to what degree he was still using cocaine then, if at all, but the damage he’d inflicted on his body over so many years was clear. His kidneys were shutting down, he told me. His lungs were in horrible shape. He was coughing all the time and could hardly stand up straight. He had trouble keeping any food down. “I’m tired of how I’m living, Cic,” he said, wheezing as he spoke. “I don’t want to do this no more. Please come back to me. I need you.”
