I finally watched the mini-series "Roots"

I was a month short of 9 years of age when Roots was first broadcast on TV. Til only recently I had never ever seen it. I heard a lot about it but never actually sat down to watch it. I was recently at our town library and decided to take volume 1 home. I was somewhat excited about it as I sat down to watch.

In the first volume I found the idealization of Kunta Kinte's tribe and, except for the Ed Asner character, most white characters were 1 dimensional, to be a little too difficult to swallow.
However I continue to watch.

In the subsequent volumes as Kunta grew up, married and raised Kizzy, the writing of the characters began to show some depth. Frankly in those episodes I was pleased that not all white people were evil masochists. I liked Robert Reed's character. He was fair, deep and introspective. Even when he sold Kizzy away it was not done for no reason.

The final volume was where I started to feel like I was watching a cartoon again. I thought the Lloyd Bridges character had little depth and was completely one dimensional. His character's relationship with Tom was the most one dimensional relationship in the whole series in my opinion. I found other slave owners and white characters like Mr. Ames, Tom Moore and even John and William Reynolds having multi-dimensional, more realistic relationships with their slaves. This helped draw me in to the miniseries - of course until the end when all the white people were either wimps (George Johnson), overt racists (Evan Brent(Bridges)) or corrupt Senators (Burl Ives' character).

I was deeply moved by the plight of the slaves, especially Kizzy. When she visited her father's grave and all that was written on it was "TOBY", I was profoundly affected. I was affected primarily because I felt like I knew Kunta from his youth and how he was a valued human being as a young person only to end up in a grave with a cheap stone scrawled with "TOBY". It was a very powerful moment when Kizzy wrote "Kunta Kinte" on the stone.

There are two things apart from the specifics with certain characters that I would have done differently in making this mini-series. First I would have had the people in Africa speak a native African tongue with subtitles (a la The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto). This would have made it more believable especially when Kunta comes to the US and suddenly can't speak or understand English. Yes as I watched it I could get beyond that and make pretend he wasn't speaking English when he was in Africa, but it would have been better if they spoke their native language in Africa.

The second thing is as a Christian, I would like to have seen someone introduce Christianity to Kunta and at some point give his life to Christ or at least see one of his progeny do it.

I highly recommend this mini-series to anyone. I am not a black person but I can empathize with people who sincerely want to know the truth about their lineage.