"If I had been taking hashish, I could not have dreamed of this." In the fashionable Los Angeles community of Cheviot Hills, every mail brings bulging sacks of letters to Alex Haley—all of it evidence of the astonishing impact produced by his saga of a black family's tortuous trail to freedom. Haley thinks he knows why Roots touched all America. In an interview last week with TIME Correspondent William Marmon, he explained his own theory of the Roots phenomenon and told how he came to write the book.
"In this country," says Alex Haley, "we are young, brash and technologically oriented. We are all trying to build machines so that we can push a button and get things done a millisecond faster. But as a consequence, we are drawing away from one of the most priceless things we have—where we came from and how we got to be where we are. The young are drawing away from older people."
Haley quickly grants that television can be "a positive social influence" —how could he not?—but then goes on to castigate the tube for widening the generation gap. "TV has contributed to killing off the old form of entertainment where the family sat around listening to older people. TV has alienated youth from its elders, and this has cost us culturally and socially."
So has the trend toward divided family units that isolate the aged, he says. "Just look at the scores of thousands of housing tracts in this country, where only parents and children live. Think of the impact on these children who will grow up without close proximity to grandparents. There are certain things that a grandmammy or a granddaddy can do for a child that no one else can. It's sort of like Stardust—the relationship between grandparents and children. The lack of this for many children has to have a negative impact on society. The edges of these children are a little sharper for the lack of it." The universal appeal of Roots, he concludes, is based on the average American's longing for a sense of heritage.
Magic Bond. Haley even goes so far as to advocate an antidote to this trend toward rootlessness. Young people can "revolutionize" their own role within their families, he says, and he offers them a three-point prescription. "I tell young people to go to the oldest members of their family and get as much oral history as possible. Many grandparents carry three or four generations of history in their heads but don't talk about it because they have been ignored. And when the young person starts doing this, the old are warmed to the cockles of their souls and will tell a grandchild everything they can muster."