Living with the 'Peculiar Institution'

By LANCE MORROW

In his novel Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy imagines the Lord leading white people to North America and bestowing that Eden on them with only one strange injunction: There are some people in a place called Africa. Be careful that you don't enslave them. Otherwise ... But one day in 1619, a Dutch frigate landed at Jamestown, Va., and traded 20 black Africans for food and supplies. That was the beginning.

If slavery was America's original sin. Roots, for all its soap opera, sex and violence, seems to have had a certain expiatory effect. From the various mythic provinces of TV, which may be the densest core of American imagination now, are gathered a virtuous and likable group of heroes: Pa Cartwright from the Ponderosa, Lou Grant from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, affable Sergeant Enright from MacMillan and Wife and sweet Sandy Duncan from the apartment upstairs. But in Roots, they all turn counterfeit--treacherous, violent and contemptible. Only one white, Old George, is sympathetic. The blacks are noble and enduring, even forbearing when given a chance for revenge (Tom's opportunity to whip one of his white bosses). However unintentional, an apology from white America is contained subliminally in all of this--the blockbuster week-long programming, the parade of villainous white stars. It is a kind of ritual sacrifice of pop heroes, a small but formal self-abasement.

But how accurate is television's Roots as history? Novelist William Styron (The Confessions of Nat Turner) is harsher than most critics. Roots, he says, "is dishonest tripe. It took a crude mass-culture approach. It shows how dismally ignorant blacks and whites still are about slavery." As a number of critics have noted, there were, to start with, some errors of setting. Styron objects that "counties in Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee which are as flat as Ping Pong paddles look as if they were shot on a back set used for horse operas with a background of the San Bernardino Mountains."

Another reviewer pointed out that two white men would hardly have dared to venture near Kunta Kinte's African village to capture him because at that time a war was brewing between the English and a local chief, who would probably have slaughtered any whites he found in the area.

Alex Haley and the TV producers had the Lome Greene character farming cotton in Spotsylvania County, Va.; it should have been tobacco. Harold Cruse, author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, observes: "When you see Leslie Uggams and her long polished nails, you just have to laugh." Although Cruse liked Roots, he thought "the ending was contrived, commercialized and romanticized. For one thing, under those conditions, you don't just tie up a plantation owner to a tree and then get into a wagon and casually drive away as if there weren't bloodhounds and night riders who would track you down."

There are more substantive complaints. Historian James Brewer Stewart says, "The master/slave relationship was ridden with ambiguity. Plantation overseers and owners were not all-powerful. They were tied by a system of reciprocal rights and obligations." Roots often has a flattened, cartoon quality: the whites nearly all villainous, the blacks uniformly heroic. Africa is romanticized to the point that it seems a combination of 3rd century Athens and Club Mediterranee, with peripatetic philosophers afoot and Claude Levi-Strauss expected for dinner.

Yet as a psychological event, if not as history, Roots surely transcends its mistakes. Haley called his saga "faction," and therefore it cannot be evaluated merely as history or merely as an entertainment. As either one of those, it fails. Yet as both, in resonance with the long, complex American experience on the subject, Roots is extremely powerful.

The distinction between cathartic melodrama and historical events needs attention, however, if only because professional historians themselves have so much trouble respecting it. Slavery, so obvious in its lurid immorality, is apt to become especially distorted in the hands of American historians. "What is it about the black experience," asks Author Michael Novak, "that produces in so many good minds, black and white, a positive lust for corruptions of elementary sense?" The answers are probably 1) guilt and 2) ideology.

It is useful, though not extenuating, to point out that Americans did not invent slavery. Their form of chattel slavery, however, was uniquely ugly. Still, slavery has a long, dishonorable history. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia kept slaves before 2000 B.C., and the Code of Hammurabi laid down rules governing the practice. In eight years, Caesar sent back some 500,000 slaves from Gaul to work mines, plantations and public projects; some, of course, became gladiators. The Domesday Book recorded 25,000 slaves in England. Races from the Mayans to the Muslims to, notably, black Africans have kept slaves for many centuries, in varying degrees of misery and servitude. The Malays sometimes paid their debts by giving, say, a child into slavery.

There are even some perversely approving things to be said for slavery: that in its earliest form, it actually marked a humanitarian improvement in the laws of war, since it involved the capture of prisoners instead of their slaughter. Oddly, it was not a primitive practice, in one sense, because it required a stable and settled society in order to take root.

Only by the nimblest sophistry could slavery be countenanced in a "civilized" society like 18th and 19th century America. Slavery has tortured American historians for generations: slavery theses and revisions of them have writhed through the stream of historiography for 150 years or longer.

Writers like Frederick Law Olmsted, a Northerner who traveled through the South in the 1850s and wrote three books about Southern life, emphasized the lurid, brutal and simply inefficient aspects of slavery in order to promote the abolitionist cause. This was a Simon Legree approach to the subject--and there are aspects of such simplism in Roots.

The trends that followed:

> The Magnolias-and-Banjos School. This interpretation, promoted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was elaborated by the Southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips. The premise, which influenced historians well into this century, had it that blacks were innately lazy and incompetent, capable of working only under compulsion. In this view, blacks were childlike innocents, perhaps biologically inferior; slavery, whatever its excesses, was a generally benign means of giving the colored people civilized ways. Gone With the Wind carried that general message.

> Blacks as Devastated Victims. This view predominated from the late '40s through the Kennedy Administration. Historian Stanley Elkins, building on black Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier's work in the 1930s, detailed in Slavery (1959) a view that whites had done to blacks what the Nazis did to the Jews. Blacks were--and are--acted upon; they do not themselves act, because their culture was broken by slavery and its racist aftermath. The view awakened liberal guilt and paralleled the rise of the white civil rights movement. The Moynihan report described the devastation of black family life and asked Government aid to try to invigorate it again.

> Blacks as Strong, Proud, Culturally Cohesive. The trend began with the Lyndon Johnson years and the rise of militant blacks who scorned the devastated-victim theory as unworthy and abject. The Moynihan report was rejected, if not disproved. Historian Herbert Gutman began work on the view of the black family as shrewd, strong, not nearly as weakened as it had seemed. The extended family had resources unsuspected by whites.

Yet if blacks had not indeed been broken by slavery, why did they put up with it? (One answer is that they did not, but responded with thousands of acts of sabotage, from nuisance to insurrection.)

There is a withering crossfire of pedantries in nearly all academic discussions of slavery and American blacks. Two years ago, in a book called Time on the Cross, Economist-Historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman accumulated a mass of data on antebellum life in the South. They fed their statistics into computers and came up with an astonishing portrait of slavery as a highly rational and efficient system that gave the South considerable economic growth and a high standard of living for all Southerners, both black and white. While admitting the immorality of slavery, Fogel and Engerman found that blacks in the South, propelled by self-interest and the work ethic, outfitted with a Victorian code of middle-class behavior learned from their masters, did remarkably well under the "peculiar institution."

The Fogel and Engerman thesis, rather weirdly cheerful, seemed a relapse back to something like the banjo school. It brought a fusillade of rebuttal, most of it convincing. Fogel and Engerman argued that blacks were willing collaborators in an un fair but workable capitalist system: owners got free labor, blacks got economic rewards and family stability if they played along.

This was one attempt to explain how blacks could be strong and cohesive and yet still be slaves.

Gutman, in one of his counterarguments, came up with this formula: family stability among black slaves -- now widely accepted, despite the breakup of many families by sale -- was a strong anti-insurrectionist force. Roots seems to agree with this explanation. When Kunta Kinte plans to run away for a second time, despite his partially amputated foot and love for Bell, she tells him that her first husband was killed for running away and her children sold off, and that now she is pregnant again. If slaves revolt or run away, the family is broken or killed. So Kunta stays. Thus Haley squares with the current theory.

One of the great problems of all this history is thesis mongering, the intertwining of ideology and fashion with academic evidence. The black experience in the U.S., from slavery on ward, has been rich, immensely varied, extremely complicated and often difficult to lay hold of. Blacks in slavery were kept il literate and so left almost exclusively their oral tradition-- which, of course, is what Roots is.

During the '30s, as part of the Federal Writers Project of the New Deal, scores of very elderly blacks who had lived under slavery were interviewed all across the South. Selections of the interviews, collected in Life Under the "Peculiar Institution, " prove that generalizations about slavery are nearly impossible. Some slaves were well fed and happy. Some were beaten to death.

Some slave women were raped and others treated with kindness. A slave named Frank Bell in New Orleans was often kept in chains; his master discovered that Bell had married and, in a drunken rage, cut off the girl's head.

A former slave named Andrew Boone described how runaways were beaten: first with a "cobbin" paddle with 40 holes in it to raise blisters, then with a cat-o'-nine-tails. "When de whippin' wit de paddle was over, dey took de cat-o'-nine-tails and busted the blisters. By dis time de blood sometimes would be runnin' down deir heels. Den de next thing was a wash in salt water strong enough to hold up an egg." Then an ex-slave named Lindsey Faucette reported: "Marse never allowed us to be whipped . . . We worked in de day and had de nights to play games and have singin's."

In a sense, it does not matter whether what Haley has to say in Roots is literally true -- and much of it undoubtedly is. What matters is that, despite a certain mythic stereotyping, Roots is plausible. The only pertinent generalization about slavery may be that it was an immense evil. Roots gives that evil a brutal immediacy. In that process, the years of bondage have assumed a new psychological pertinence for both blacks and whites. Oddly, many whites seem to feel not guilt but an unexpected shock of identification with blacks, while blacks experience a larger shock of pride at glimpsing a complete vision of where they have been and what they have overcome. Neither race has ever seen it quite that way before.

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