This year, my mother and I did something for Memorial Day that actually brought back memories: we watched Roots. The DVD set came out last Tuesday and I went to the store and copped it Saturday, as I had been planning to do. Roots came on TV One last month, but being that I’m without television the first, I could only catch parts of episodes when I was visiting someone else. Now, I have the whole series myself.
My first observations were fairly personal. The “Grits, dummy!” scene took me right back to my young childhood, when “Grits, dummy” was a running joke between my mother and me. For whatever reason, I thought that was just the funniest line on television. Then, in a later episode, there was the point when Kizzy told Chicken George, “I may not be much older than you, but I’m your mama and you gon’ obey me.” I’m not really clear on the memory, whether my mother actually said that to me when we weren’t watching the movie, or whether she said those words in an unrelated occurrence, but I do know that she said that almost verbatim. For some reason, I remember it being attached to Roots, though.
Unfortunately, I had to be the one to introduce her to the plagiarism controversy (detailed by Duane at Black Informant). My 11th grade English teacher hipped me to it after I wrote my final book report for the year on Roots. Being an English teacher and all, I have strong feelings about plagiarism, but in this case, I’m not really concerned. The story’s importance goes beyond its historical veracity. It is weak, however, that something we were told is true turned out to be a lie. A big lie. I’m talkin’ about, when I was at the flea market a couple weeks ago, I saw an ALBUM where Alex Haley is talking about the 12-year journey of research and writing. Obviously, I knew the album was full of nonsense, so I still haven’t listened to it, but I did cop it on the strength of it being a fairly significant document, I think. I was really looking for the Roots soundtrack, which we used to have, but I got that instead.
Watching Roots as a parent is powerful too. It’s unimagineable to me what it must have been like to watch your children being sold. Or watching them being beaten. Or having a daughter and knowing that there is no way to protect her from being raped. In certain parts, until now, I had only identified with the characters. Now I identify just as much with the parents. That’s scary. I mean, on the one hand, I’m thankful that we don’t live in those times now, but the mere thought is harrowing.
Maybe because I’m very conscious of the way I “read” films so that I can teach the kids, I was acutely aware of the text-to-text connections I was making as I watched. In one scene, where the adult Kunta grins wide and attempts to curry the favor of the massa by being overly obsequious, the first thought that popped into my head was “We Wear The Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I don’t think I’ll be teaching poetry next year, so I can’t show that scene as an example, but showing that scene along with that poem would be a powerful visual representation.
One question I had, that I’m not gonna get into right now, is this: what’s the deal with Black nudity? At the beginning, when they were in Juffre, before Kunta was born, there were shots of women walking around bare-breasted. I’m supposing that that was for the sake of “authenticity.” However, there was no consistency to it - or at least no explanation of why those women weren’t wearing tops while others were. But that’s not even the question I’m asking. What I’m really trying to get at is this: I think there’s a double standard where Black nudity is concerned; even if it were being done for the sake of historical accuracy, there wouldn’t have been a bunch of bare-breasted white women on broadcast television in 1977. It’s kinda like you always see the people from the “uninterrupted” cultures in National Geographic bare-breasted, but that’s not even treated as if it has the possibility of being erotic. It’s anthropological. Now, in 2007, I don’t know if this is still the case, but I don’t think those types of things were unintentional. It didn’t “just happen,” and it wasn’t by coincidence. I’m still trying to sort out my thoughts on it, though.
Oh. And to this day, I can still not understand how or why any Black American names their child Toby.
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